Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Investigators said Tuesday they will release no information on the shooting death of Oregon standoff spokesman Robert "LaVoy" Finicum until their work is complete – probably not for another four to six weeks.
The FBI have confirmed that Oregon State Police troopers shot Finicum a week ago at a roadblock along U.S. 395 about 20 miles north of Burns while he and other key figures in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge were traveling to another county for a community meeting.
Finicum reached at least twice toward a jacket pocket that later was found to contain a 9mm handgun, the FBI said in a statement last week. The agency released aerial video of the shooting, but the grainy long-distance images and lack of audio have fueled debate about what it shows.
The Deschutes County Sheriff's Office is leading the investigation into the shooting with help from Bend and Redmond police and state police stationed in Deschutes County.
And stay with the interview all the way to the end. Sharp says that "If I lose my life for the future of America, it's worth it."
(CNN) Victoria Sharp says she is certain LaVoy Finicum was unjustly gunned down by state police after they and the FBI pursued his vehicle in southern Oregon.
"I was just a few feet away in the truck," she insisted to CNN. "I know what I saw."
Sharp, 18, claims she was one of three people in the back seat of a white truck driven by Finicum, one of the armed occupiers at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Sharp says she and seven siblings went to the occupation site recently to sing Christian songs and provide "moral support for the protest of the federal government."
They left the refuge near Burns last Tuesday for a community meeting in another town. The FBI said it had information that Finicum and the others in two vehicles were armed.
Finicum pulled away from an attempt to arrest him and Ammon Bundy, the leader of the nearly four-week occupation. A dramatic chase down tree-lined U.S. 395 ensued. As shown on an FBI video taken from a pursuing helicopter, it ends when Finicum swerves to miss a roadblock, nearly hitting an officer and plowing into deep snow.
The driver quickly exits the video with hands in the air....
Sharp said Thursday that as soon as the vehicle hit the snow bank, she heard shots hit the truck. It's not clear on the video whether any rounds were hitting the vehicle.
"He had his hands up," Sharp said. "He was shouting that if they were going to shoot, then just shoot him. I remember him saying that if they shoot him, it's an innocent man's blood on their hands."
As seen on the FBI video, Finicum reaches twice toward a jacket pocket. Officers fire. Finicum falls to the ground. The FBI said it recovered a loaded 9mm semiautomatic handgun in that left side pocket of his jacket.
Sharp said she heard three shots and saw Finicum fall. "He wasn't doing anything aggressive, anything," she insisted. "He was just walking with his hands up."
When asked whether Finicum reached for a weapon, Sharp said, "He was not showing any signs of aggression."
I was tired on Sunday night from my continuous blog coverage of all the political developments, and I fell asleep around 9:00pm. When I woke up around 1:00 on Monday morning is was caucus day and I got up and made some coffee. I took my son to school at the regular time and was going to come home and fall back asleep for awhile. I shut my eyes and muted the television, but never really dozed off. So I got back up and started back up with my blog coverage.
Call me crazy.
Blogging's the best way for me to keep up with all the news, which is good for my teaching, which is actually my day job, lol. In fact, the spring semester starts back up next Monday, and I'm excited and ready to go. I love teaching the most during campaign time, because each day brings lots of new stories and developments. It makes for a lot of fun and engagement in the classroom, and it helps me motivate these young people --- sometimes derided as the "Dumbest Generation," not without good cause --- into voting citizens who take their rights and responsibilities seriously. It's actually an honor to do so. It's important work although the feedback is often long in coming. I don't care about that too much. I get to have the dream job of teaching politics, which is more than any political junkie could ask for.
I don't put out a shingle asking for donations. I do this for fun. But if you'd like to support me you can always do your books shopping through my Amazon links (or any other shopping for that matter).
Thanks for reading.
I had on CNN mostly yesterday, only because I've always thought they have the best election coverage. But Fox News is good too. I don't even know what MSNBC's doing, other than when I check out their YouTube page.
BURNS -- The final occupiers of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge are still holding out for a miracle and taking all the prayers they can get.
FBI officials confirmed the armed occupation continued Tuesday, its 32nd day.
Jailed occupation leader Ammon Bundy issued another statement asking the four holdouts to "go home now so their lives are not taken."
He signaled what he wants to happen next: Have the FBI and Oregon State Police leave Harney County so the county sheriff can "cordon off the refuge" as local residents decide what to do with the land, he said.
Local leaders have responded in the past to similar demands by Bundy with silence or an oft-repeated request for him to abandon the standoff and return home.
In the meantime, the remaining occupiers are staying warm by gathering around a fire and eating hamburgers and vegetables...
Watch the Outnumbered analysis featuring Rich Lowry and Andrea Tantaros.
Toward the end of the clip Melissa Frances jumps in with some numbers, comparing the Cruz campaign's big expenditures to the billionaire's tight-fisted failures in the Hawkeye State.
(CNN)Ammon Bundy, the rancher who led an armed occupation of a federal wildlife refuge in Oregon, abruptly reversed course Tuesday and withdrew a request to be released from custody as he awaits trial on a felony conspiracy charge, court papers showed.
Bundy had initially been scheduled Tuesday to ask a federal judge in Oregon to release him on electronic GPS surveillance, his attorney Mike Arnold said.
But now Bundy will resubmit that request at a later time, his attorneys said in court papers. He will stay incarcerated "to gather further evidence of his statements and actions encouraging a peaceful protest and civil disobedience," court documents said.
Bundy eventually plans to challenge U.S. Magistrate Judge Stacie Beckerman's order to keep him in custody pending the trial, according to court documents.
Bundy's attorneys have indicated they ultimately plan to argue in U.S. District Court that their client should be permitted to stay at his home in Idaho and only return to Oregon for court appearances. The federal court system's pretrial services earlier recommended Bundy's conditional release, according to court papers filed by Bundy's attorneys...
Of all the results last night, I got the biggest kick out of Bernie Sanders.
I'd never vote for him. But I love --- and I mean I just love --- how he's taking it to Hillary Clinton like a brick upside her head.
Pat Caddell was on Sean Hannity's earlier and he claimed that Sanders most likely won the popular vote in Iowa --- the 49.9 to 49.6 percent vote totals being reported are based on the shares of the delegate counts --- but that the Democrat National Committee won't release popular vote data, lest they give Sanders added momentum and legitimacy headed into New Hampshire.
One thing you might have noticed is that Sanders is an extremely disciplined campaigner. He doesn't deviate much from his standard stump speech, but nevertheless captivates voters at every stop. He's hammering on the issues of economic insecurity and economic inequality like no other candidate, and he's shameless in his robust embrace of hard-left ideological attacks on the corporate rich, the billionaires, and the "1 percent." These themes are the more focused priorities that far-left progressives have hoped the Obama administration would push for, and they want the next Democrat administration to be even more radical in seeking to level the playing field in the American economy and dismantle the free-market infrastructure. In plain language, they see Sanders as their agent of "more free stuff." I can see why young, idealistic Millennials have placed so much stock in him.
In any case, I hate the politics, but his populist appeal and cornered-bull tenacity are extremely compelling. Hillary Clinton is looking at a repeat of 2008, and it's gotta be ugly from her perspective. Once again, she got taken to the cleaners by a far-left candidate that came virtually out of nowhere. Yeah, she "breathed a sigh of relief" that she tied and wasn't blown out of the water, but Sanders beat expectations, big time.
The man behind Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign on Monday night said he expects "a tremendous bounce" out of Iowa after the Vermont senator found himself locked in a race there with Hillary Clinton that was too close to call.
“An early success gives your candidate and your campaign credibility to future voters," said Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver. He said he was looking forward to taking the campaign to New Hampshire "where the senator is very, very popular." Sanders is ahead in many polls there.
Although the Iowa race was virtually tied Monday night, Sanders and his supporters looked and sounded like they were celebrating a victory.
In a speech to a jubilant crowd in the ballroom of a Des Moines hotel, Sanders said the Iowa results signaled the beginning of "a political revolution.”
"Nine months ago we came to this beautiful state," Sanders said. "We had no political organization, we had no money, no name recognition. And we were taking on the most powerful political organization in the United States of America."
Sanders, who had to catch a plane to New Hampshire, stuck close to his stump speech, vowing to fight for more equality and to create "an economy that works for working families, not just the billionaire class."
Be sure to stay with the entire Charles Krauthammer segment at the clip. I only disagree with him on Hillary Clinton, who I think took a shellacking by coming in a virtual tie with Bernie Sanders (and where Dr. K claims she won the state, only to be corrected by Megyn Kelly).
CONCORD, N.H. — Sen. Ted Cruz defeated Donald Trump in Iowa on Monday night, but he faces a strikingly different set of challenges in trying to replicate that victory in New Hampshire’s primary next week. He has a lesser organization here, has spent less time here, and can’t count on such a large evangelical electorate.
History provides a clear warning. In 2008 and 2012, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum won the Iowa Republican caucuses with heavy support from evangelicals. Both then arrived here lacking a strong organization, lost this state, and failed to become the GOP nominees.
With the Republican Party’s focus on Iowa now complete, the spotlight on ethanol and evangelicals is out. Now begins an eight-day sprint that in many ways will be entirely different because New Hampshire’s voters reflect a very different side of the GOP. They’re socially moderate and fiscally frugal, and use a primary voting system that allows greater participation by independent-minded voters who revel in upsetting the conventional wisdom.
It’s why a handful of GOP “establishment” candidates who did poorly in Iowa think they’ll perform better here.
“New Hampshire voters reset elections. That’s what you all do. … The reset starts here tonight,” former Florida governor Jeb Bush defiantly told about 300 supporters at Manchester’s Alpine Club on Monday night.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told a crowd in Hopkinton Monday night that Iowa “has passed the ball to you.” The field would soon be thinned. “You all,” he said, “are going to decide it.”
Ohio Gov. John Kasich told an audience of about 200 at the Bow Elementary School on Sunday that “You come here, and you look and you poke, once in a while you smell and you try to decide, is this our leader? Whether I win or not, I believe in this process. I believe that folks in New Hampshire are the best screeners that America can have to recommend to the country.”
Wayne Lesperance, a professor of political science at New England College in Henniker, N.H., said that “New Hampshire has gone differently than Iowa in six of the last nine elections on the Republican side, so the idea that one follows the other’s lead just doesn’t bear out.”
And yet, Iowa and New Hampshire share more in common this cycle, thanks to Donald Trump. He has held a double-digit lead over his GOP opponents here for more than 30 weeks and dominates the headlines — just as he did in Iowa before losing to Cruz there on Monday...
Trump's up 25 points in the recent Franklin-Pierce/Boston Globe poll, and we'll see new surveys out this week, perhaps as soon as later today. Both Cruz and Rubio will get a boost in the Granite state coming out of Iowa, but not that much and Trump can mitigate any potential decline by doing what he always does: making some news.
Most of all, though, he needs to keep up with the gracious tone he displayed in his Iowa concession, and he needs to talk policy. And importantly, Trump can't blow off the voters. He can't take them for granted, acting with epic hubris and skipping debates, or what not.
John McCain didn't even contest Iowa in 2008, and he won New Hampshire after a long slog through the state on a shoestring. Keep your eyes on Trump and Rubio this week. For some reason I don't expect Cruz's longhorn Texas style to play as well up in the Northeast.
Yeah, well, I said as much earlier, although the campaign's just beginning now.
And frankly, he gave a classy concession speech, which I'm just now seeing, since CNN was running with somebody, I think Hillary, at the time.
As far as expectations go, he's definitely taken a beating. The sign of a winner, though, is how well they take defeat, with sportsmanship or bitterness. The Donald's gonna be fine. He needs to be on the ground campaigning in New Hampshire first thing in the morning.
The day has arrived. GOP front-runner Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed consummate winner, is now officially a loser, placing second in the Iowa caucuses behind Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas.
Trump lost despite polling nearly five points ahead of Cruz and the other GOP candidates. He could taste the victory. "Unless I win," Trump said Sunday, "I would consider this a big, fat, beautiful – and, by the way, a very expensive – waste of time. … If I don't win, maybe bad things will happen."
In contrast, a noticeably subdued Trump whitewashed his loss when he took the stage after the caucus, simply encouraging supporters to look forward to the future. "New Hampshire – we love New Hampshire. We love South Carolina." Rather than castigating the people of Iowa, as many expected (and as he's done before), Trump spun the loss as beating expectations: "I absolutely love the people of Iowa. … I was told by everybody, 'Do not go to Iowa. You cannot finish even in the top 10.' "
But overall, Trump's entire campaign has been predicated on his being a winner. And as Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall summarized, "If you're a 'winner', if you're the alpha, you have to win."
It was a big night in Iowa Monday for anti-establishment candidates — just not always the one who expected it.
A Republican race that seemed to be heading toward a romp to the nomination by billionaire businessman Donald Trump suddenly has turned into a fierce and more extended battle: Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won the opening contest of the 2016 campaign, and Trump only narrowly managed to finish ahead of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio.
In the Democratic race, a hairs-breadth divided former secretary of State Hillary Clinton and challenger Bernie Sanders, a stronger showing by the Vermont senator than seemed possible just a few weeks ago. While Clinton did better than her humiliating third-place showing here in 2008, it means that she once again heads to the New Hampshire primary with something to prove.
In speeches to supporters as the results came in, Clinton declared that she was "breathing a big sigh of relief" but acknowledged that she now faced "really getting into the debate" with Sanders about the country's best course forward. Sanders said to cheers that he had taken on "the most powerful political organization in America" and fought them to "a virtual tie." Trump, speaking with unusual brevity, insisted that he "loved" Iowa and might be back one day to buy a farm.
And Cruz, like Trump a candidate viewed with suspicion by the Republican establishment, declared to cheers, "God bless the great state of Iowa."
The polls were proven wrong: Trump had led in the last dozen statewide surveys.
The vibe at Jeb Bush’s downtown Des Moines caucus “briefing” Monday afternoon is upbeat and upscale — but it's taking place under the shadow of reports circulating in the right-wing media that the campaign is paying an army of “seat fillers” $25 an hour to make this rally look full. Paid or unpaid, the attendees are more Young Republican than the Baptist-camp-meeting look that prevailed at the Mike Huckabee rally I attended Sunday.
From Philip Bump and Scott Clement , at the Washington Post, "How Ted Cruz won Iowa":
Powered by enormous support from very conservative voters, Ted Cruz surged past expectations to capture a victory in the Iowa caucuses on Monday night.
Cruz earned the support of 4 in 10 “very conservative” voters in the state, a group which made up 40 percent of the electorate according to preliminary entrance poll data. Cruz was also backed by 1 out of every 3 evangelical voters -- an important victory in a group that was nearly two-thirds of the electorate.
Donald Trump may have been hampered by two unexpected factors: Weaker than expected performance among new voters and a late surge by Marco Rubio. In the last Des Moines Register/Bloomberg poll in Iowa, Trump led Cruz among first-time caucus-goers by 16 points. On Monday night, Trump’s margin among this group was closer to half that.
Rubio earned about as much support from new voters as did Cruz. and was the preferred candidate of about 3 in 10 Iowa Republicans who made up their minds in the last week.
TRUMP FADES WHILE RUBIO CLOSES STRONG
Nearly half of Republican caucus-goers report making their final decision in the week before the caucuses, and the entrance poll shows Rubio performed best among this group. Nearly 3 in 10 of final-week deciders supported Rubio; he garnered about as much support among those deciding in January, but only about 1 in 10 of those who decided earlier than that backed Rubio.
Equally stark was Trump’s weakness among late-deciding voters. Just 14 percent of Republicans who decided in the final week supported Trump, compared with 23 percent of those who decided earlier in January and 40 percent who made their decision in December or earlier.
LARGE EVANGELICAL TURNOUT
Cruz leads among evangelical Christians, who made up over 6 in 10 Republican caucus-goers, their largest share of the vote in recent cycles. Cruz garnered about one-third of the evangelical vote, compared with just over 2 in 10 each for Rubio and Trump. Trump’s margin was similar among non-evangelical Republicans, though they made up fewer than 4 in 10 caucus-goers, lower than 2012 or 2008...
Yes, Rubio did do extremely well, and sucked the air out of Trump's momentum.
But the night really does belong to Ted Cruz. It's impressive, especially considering how he's been taking it from all sides all week, and then proved 'em all wrong.
Donald Trump's a big loser, but he's far from out. This is fantastic because it makes New Hampshire a week from tomorrow a real decision-making and game-changing contest.
I had on CNN, which had Marco Rubio making a victory speech for his surging 3rd place finish (which is hella impressive). But I missed Donald Trump's concession speech (gonna have to find it on YouTube in a little bit).
Meanwhile, I've got Fox News on now, and we're awaiting Ted Cruz's victory speech. It's really major.
Mogul connects with frustrated middle class as GOP Establishment lashes out in desperation.
DES MOINES, Iowa — “I think they’re delusional,” said Sam Clovis, Donald Trump’s chief policy adviser and Iowa native, regarding his candidate’s persistent critics at National Review.
“This is absolutely a panic on the part of the Establishment of the Republican Party,” Clovis said.
Indeed, as it looks increasingly likely that the Trump train will steam through Iowa, straight through New Hampshire, South Carolina and on to the GOP nomination, “big government Republicans” are scrambling for relevancy.
Most of them simply refuse to recognize what has happened inside the Republican Party — a total disconnect with the concerns and desires of average Americans.
The main reason for the rise of the insurgent candidates in 2016 isn’t what many of the “experts” believe. It’s not that voters are just drawn to his celebrity or enjoy his insults to the high and mighty. It’s not just that they love his politically incorrect approach to the issues. It’s not just that they enjoy the “fun factor” at his rallies where kids are invited to run around his plane or get free helicopter rides.
The narrative of the GOP presidential primary is best understood by focusing on this one fact: For middle-wage earners in the U.S., the median income in 2014 was 4 percent lower than in 2000.
Pew Research released a report in December that painted a bleak, depressing picture of life for America’s working class. Both political parties — Republicans under George W. Bush, Democrats under Barack Obama — have presided over economies that have left them behind. Worse than that, both Bush and Obama advocated policies that made their economic lives worse in almost every way. And you bet they’re angry.
The rich have done fine. Not surprisingly, they weathered the past two recessions better than any other income group, says Pew. But the subset that suffered the most are some of Trump’s core supporters. Pew found that “adults with no more than a high school diploma lost the most ground economically.”
In other words, Bushism and Obamaism have failed them. The Establishment has failed them. And it was never clear how former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush would govern in a markedly different manner than his brother, given his support for more massive trade deals, more immigration, more wars. That formula has been poisonous to our native-born, middle-income workers.
Whether fair or not, Florida Sen. Marco Rubio is seen by most of these same voters as a younger, more politically talented version of Jeb. And they aren’t willing to grant him amnesty for his 2013 immigration push with U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
According to a Gallup analysis of Republican and GOP-leaning independents late last year, Trump had a net favorable score of 36 points among men with no college education, compared to a score of 26 among college graduates. A report from the Public Religion Research Institute released in November also found that a majority — 55 percent — of white Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who support Trump identify as working class. In contrast, self-identified working-class whites only account for roughly a third of other candidates’ supporters.
“We’ve been waiting 30 years for somebody to come along and carry on the legacy of Ronald Reagan, and it hasn’t happened,” Clovis said emphatically.
Batting away his boss’s media assailers, he predicts major Trump victories...
BURNS, Ore. — Remote Western towns, in midwinter’s grip, definitely have some romance to them. But this one has become a circus tent: A giddy but tense crush of humanity has descended here in rural eastern Oregon, benefiting businesses and swamping them, filling bars, and making motel rooms unattainable amid a bizarre tide of guns, police, reporters and ideologues quoting (at length) from the United States Constitution.
That’s Burns.
There is no question things have been rough here. The armed occupation that began on Jan. 2 at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside town has dragged on, and tensions heightened last week with the fatal shooting of one of the most visible occupiers, LaVoy Finicum, by Oregon State Police troopers in an arrest that went bad.
The place is just crazily overrun. Every motel room within 70 miles is taken. Barstools are packed at the Central Pastime Tavern, with journalists and armed antigovernment protesters elbow to elbow, tucking down I.P.A.s and perhaps — for braver souls — the bull testicles on the bar menu. Hard to know, but there are probably also undercover F.B.I. agents now and then playing pool in the back, trying to appear like locals in boots and jeans under the mounted bighorn sheep and buffalo heads.
Residents have argued with each other over what to think about the occupiers and their goals, and they have wounded one another in the process.
Anxieties could ratchet up again this week, with a protest planned for Monday at the Harney County courthouse by self-styled patriot groups angry about Mr. Finicum’s death. The United States Marshals Office also said Sunday that one of the 11 people arrested in the standoff — Shawna Cox — had been released, though the authorities would not provide other details. A judge had previously said Ms. Cox could not leave custody until the occupation had ended.
But here’s the thing: For the most part, Burns has not stopped being warm and welcoming to outsiders, even as that has become harder to do. If you were going to spend nearly the entire month of January in a town of about 2,000 people — isolated by distance in the high eastern Oregon desert, and often with bad weather to boot — you could do a lot worse.
“We just decided to be kind,” said Leah Planinz, who owns Glory Days Pizza with her husband, Nick. She was perhaps talking partly about her philosophy, but more specifically about the restaurant’s overstuffed brown leather couch in the back near the arcade room...
There's a huge protest going on outside the Harney County Courthouse right now in Burns. I'll have more on that later today, along with all the regular Iowa blogging.
HAMPTON, Ia. — This presidential campaign seethes with the anger and frustration of voters who seem to be sick of whatever they consider to be the corrupt, broken “establishment.”
But not here in this quiet, friendly coffee shop where Rick Santorum emphasizes what has become something of a dirty word: experience.
“I’m sort of making the case that, look, I understand your anger,” said the former Pennsylvania senator and winner of the 2012 Iowa Republican caucuses who now languishes at the bottom of the polls. “I was the anti-establishment candidate last time, and that anger was channeled through me.”
But, he insisted, “Channel your anger in a positive direction.”
“I didn’t sell I was going to blow up Washington four years ago.”
The national front-runner and acknowledged beneficiary of unrest on the right this cycle is Donald Trump, the brash billionaire developer who didn’t formally enter the race until June. He boasts that he has made so much money that self-funding his campaign inoculates him from the influence that big donors wage over candidates.
On the left, 74-year-old Bernie Sanders has electrified millennials as their favorite radical grandfather. He embraces what had been assumed to be the politically lethal adjective "socialist" and proclaims a Woodstock-era distrust of Wall Street.
At least one political expert in Iowa says that he has seen this anger brewing for decades as the caucuses have mushroomed into an international reality TV show: Candidates long have promised relief for the economically disadvantaged, but quickly forget caucusgoers once the circus moves on.
Trump had flirted with Iowa for months in early 2015 as the Republican side of the preseason race churned with the typical series of cattle-call events.
Larry Sailer, a stalwart Santorum supporter from rural Hampton, has been irritated by Trump’s rise.
“It’s the same thing that elected Obama eight years ago,” he shook his head. “The popularity deal.”
Conflating Obama and Trump? It’s as if the outsider allure and celebrity mystique now factoring into these caucuses have scrambled everybody’s political calculus.
'There's a lot of angst out there'
This isn’t how the race was supposed to go. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, with a super PAC tailwind of more than $100 million, was expected to dominate the national race and duel in Iowa with whoever emerged as this cycle's darling of the evangelical right. Hillary Clinton, made wiser by her cabinet experience and the 2008 Obama upset, was expected to wow Iowans on her easy waltz to the nomination.
But here we are in February, with Bush's campaign in single digits, a nail-biter race on either side and a path littered with bad predictions.
Celebrity Caucuses, Season 1, has its big finale Monday night in Iowa.
“We’ll all know the answer to Mr. Trump’s question, ‘How stupid are the people of Iowa?’” said longtime Iowa Republican activist Richard Rogers. “That answer will depend upon our individual perspective on the relative merits of the candidates.”
The contest in Iowa on the GOP side is down to Donald Trump, the entertainment entrepreneur whose presidential bid was widely ridiculed until he proved his staying power with voters, and Texas U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, a conservative superstar famous for his government shutdown tactics.
Still in the spotlight, but in a distant third and fourth place, according to the new Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll, are Marco Rubio, the Florida U.S. senator referred to three years ago in Time magazine as “The Republican Savior” who could sell the GOP on a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants; and Ben Carson, a brain surgeon whose skills were featured in a movie called “Gifted Hands.”
The Democrats are down to a duel between one of the best-known women in America, former first lady and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the upstart liberal rock star Bernie Sanders, a Vermont U.S. senator whose call for a political revolution has inspired unexpectedly strong support.
The Iowa caucuses are just the first round of voting in the 2016 presidential race, but they’re disproportionately influential — and the whole political world is waiting for the results.
Here are some of the questions that will be answered Monday night...
So, the RNC cancelled NBC's initially-scheduled debate for February 26 in Houston, Texas. And now the DNC's going with MSNBC for its Thursday night debate at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. That's a weird --- even freaky --- kind of partisan symmetry.
And Kasie Hunt reports below, for the least popular cable network, with Steve Kornacki.
It's scheduled for Thursday at 9:00pm Eastern, and will be just the second of the Democrat debates that's been in held during a prime time weeknight slot (four have been held so far, and two were held on October 13 and November 14, a Saturday and a Sunday, respectively, on the weekends).
The Sanders campaign was really upset, thinking the DNC was putting its weight on the scales for Clinton, and apparently negotiations over the additional four debates got testy.
Jake Tapper asked him about his personal security detail on the campaign trail, indicating that he's been receiving death threats, which was something the "democratic socialist" thought it was better not to talk about.
Man, this is getting serious folks.
Watch, via CNN (the email comments come toward the end of the interview, after 7:30 minutes):
I don't think the millions of white working-class voters providing (most of) the enormous surge of support for Donald Trump's campaign are on the "ideological edge."
On the other hand, 43 percent of Democrats self-identify in recentpolling as "socialists," an ideological stance that's by definition to the far-left of the ideological spectrum.
But if you're a leftist, being in favor of secure borders and free markets makes you on "the fringe," or so we're told at the New York Times.
And it's not "may set the tone." Fringe leftists are definitely setting the tone, and the Trump campaign is frankly a push back against that monstrous ideological tendency.
DES MOINES — Iowa, widely derided for being unlike the rest of the United States, was supposed to be irrelevant this year as the presidential race became nationalized — thanks to widely viewed televised debates and the rise of social media.
But as the Iowa caucuses loom on Monday — the first votes after 1,500 candidate rallies, 60,000 TV ads and a nail-biting tightening of the polls here — the state’s voters are poised to play perhaps their most significant role ever in both parties’ nominating contests. And their embrace of candidates on the ideological fringes has amplified a national grass-roots rebellion against establishment politicians.
Both Democrats and Republicans have seen their presumptive nominees of a year ago — deeply experienced, proven political leaders — brushed aside by Iowans in favor of idol-smashing outsiders.
“There’s a tremendous amount of anti-establishment, anti-Washington sentiment here, and I would not be surprised if an outsider on both sides wins,” said Gov. Terry E. Branstad, a Republican, who has exerted himself in an unheard-of effort to derail one of his own party’s front-runners, Senator Ted Cruz.
Voters on the ideological edges, who dominate both parties in Iowa, have made Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, and Donald J. Trump and Mr. Cruz, whose views are anathema to Republican leadership, the standard-bearers of the left and the right.
The embrace of Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump, visible nationally in huge rallies, has stirred Iowa’s latent Midwest populism, with voters angry about the hollowing out of the middle class, Wall Street greed and the corrupting influence of money in politics. It has created two insurgents who in some ways are opposite sides of the same coin.
The policies of President Obama have added accelerant to the fire, with the far left unhappy he did not go far enough, and the right convinced he radically changed the United States.
“There’s a very disaffected segment of Republican voters and Democratic voters who just want to throw ’em all out,” said David Redlawsk, a political scientist at Rutgers University who wrote a book about the Iowa caucuses. “These particular voters have been told for several cycles, ‘All you have to do is vote for me, and it will be 100 percent different.’ It never is. Sanders and Trump are both benefiting.”
The results of Monday’s caucuses, which will take place in 1,681 precincts across Iowa, ride on such concrete factors as candidates’ get-out-the-vote efforts — but also on intangibles like voters’ perception of who is catching fire at the last minute, and even on the weather. Campaigns were anxiously checking forecasts amid reports of a snowstorm arriving late Monday, but expected that the weather would hold enough to encourage turnout, which could give an edge to the two candidates with large support from first-time voters, Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders. A victory for Mr. Trump, who has drawn thousands to his rallies here, would devastate Mr. Cruz. The senator has deployed waves of volunteers and sought to visit all 99 counties in Iowa to mobilize evangelical Christians, the core of a conservative coalition that he has built along with Tea Partiers and libertarians...
Even Ted Cruz is not on the "ideological fringe." One of the most interesting things at that GOP debate on Thursday was Megyn Kelly hammering Cruz for his past prodigious support for immigration amnesty. But, again, if you're to the right of center, you're on the "ideological fringe," according to the idiot mandarins of our collectivist press.
You remember the "America's a center-right nation" argument the left was pushing back against so hard when Obama came to office? I think it's going to be back in vogue this year.
Well, it's coming up in two weeks, although it's the last thing I've been thinking about, which is not to say it isn't important.
I used to take candy and flowers to my wife at work when I was in grad school. My wife worked the fragrance counter at Robinson's department store back then, and having the husband drop of the Valentine's presents like that gained my wife some high creds with her female colleagues, heh.
With hours to go until his boss faces voters for the first time in eight years, Robby Mook was doing the same, knocking on doors in a small corner of a Des Moines suburb.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager could’ve spent Saturday afternoon holed up in headquarters, shuttling around the state with the candidate or schmoozing politicos in the lobby of the Marriott. Instead, he was making his way through a solidly middle class Urbandale neighborhood, checking in with committed supporters.
“Hey! My name’s Robby. I’m here with Hillary Clinton’s campaign,” he says once it's clear that the person answering the door is the person on the list of confirmed supporters that he picked up from a nearby field office, just as any volunteer would. “I was just coming by to remind you about the caucus on Monday.”
Though two Bloomberg journalists spent about 45 minutes watching Mook visit 15 houses on a gray but warm-for-January afternoon, it wasn’t just a photo-op. He would’ve been doing this without reporters watching him and planned to do it again on Sunday and Monday, schedule permitting. In all, people at eight houses answered their doors, five of whom said they would be caucusing for Clinton. At one door, a man supporting former Florida Governor Jeb Bush said that his wife—who was out of the house when Mook visited—was the Clinton supporter. At another, a man identified as a Clinton supporter seemed to be engaged in a tense moment with his son. A woman said she and her husband were Clinton supporters but that she had a doctor's appointment and may not be able to make it.
Mook has built his career on field work—the collection and analysis of meticulous data. He proved himself as her 2008 state director in Nevada, Ohio and Indiana. And when it was time to build her 2016 team, the lessons of being out-organized by Barack Obama in Iowa and beyond made Mook, a 36-year-old Vermont native, Clinton’s choice for the job.
Clinton had a slim three-point lead over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, 45 percent to 42 percent, in the final Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa Democratic caucus-goers, conducted Jan. 26-29. With the race so tight, both campaigns are determined to get their low-hanging fruit – committed supporters – to caucus sites. The Sanders campaign said its volunteers knocked on close to 77,000 doors on Friday and Saturday, while the Clinton campaign knocked on more than 125,000 doors over the weekend.
“Part of this is just simply having a human interaction where we remind them," Mook says while walking along a winding residential street that changed names three times in the span of a few dozen houses. “But a really important part of this is actively making a plan with them. So if I get someone in person, I want to make sure that they’ve made sure they’ve thought about where they’re gonna leave from to go to the caucus, how they’re getting there and if they’re bringing anyone with them. We know that if they have a plan in place, they’re more likely to show up.”
The Iowa caucuses have never been more important, which is amazing, considering it's the most intense style of retail politics you could have, and we live in an era of the highest electronic technology we've ever seen. But with the campaigns on both sides too close to call, the ground game is the be all end all of 2016.
Back in September 2012, I was with my wife and kids in Las Vegas, taking a break from blogging, if I recall, and reading all kinds of hard-copy newspapers. I remember reading this incredible article on the nuts and bolts of the modern presidential campaigns in the New York Times, but then later lost track of where I put the paper. It turns out the piece was by Sasha Issenberg, who had the awesome piece at Bloomberg yesterday, blogged here, "In Iowa, Hillary Clinton Looking to Avoid Mistakes of the Past."
The publisher's pitched this book to me a few times in professional newsletters at work, although I've yet to read it. School's starting back up on Febuary 8th, and my reading output's declined this last week or so as the caucuses have neared. But this Issenberg book's going to the top of my political science reading list.
The Marines and the Navy have flown the flag since 1775, although it seems like BLM's exactly the opposite of what that flag stands for: "Don’t Tread On Me"
In an event that may very well be the spark to the outbreak of Europe’s civil war, a young, beautiful social worker, Alexandra Mezher, 22, was brutally stabbed to death by Muslim migrants at the child migrant centre where she worked.
Swedish police warn that Stockholm’s main train station has become unsafe after being “taken over.” A mob of Swedes took matters into their own hands.
As I predicted for months, the Europeans will either go quietly into the dark, destructive night, or they will fight back. The weak, the scared are hiding in their homes, and then there are the fighters.
Swedish towns have become terror hubs. Lawlessness is rampant, violent crimes skyrocket. There is this now constant state of violence, terror and fear.
It begins, appropriately enough, at a major train station. I say appropriately, because it was at scores of railway stations in Europe that the New Year’s Eve terror attacks took place. Mass sexual attacks, raping and robbing of non-Muslim women. Christians in Sweden have been warned, in blood-chilling messages, “convert or die,” with beheadings threatened; “We will bomb your rotten corpses afterwards.”
Swedish police warn that Stockholm’s main train station is now overrun by migrant teen gangs “stealing and groping girls.” Hundreds of Muslim migrant youth are living on the streets in Stockholm. They attack security guards at the main station. Police say they sexually assault girls and “slap them in the face when they protest.”
“Gangs of young, male refugees over-powered women and children at a train station in Stockholm, Sweden in recent days, and then robbed and groped them. Some of the migrants, who may be as young as 9, roam the streets day and night, according to Daily Mail. They have been offered help from Swedish Authorities, but have refused it, living in the streets instead.”
Former MSNBC schlock jock Ed Schultz (now working for the Putin propaganda channel Russia Today) can seen in the background, right before Kessler interviews Islamic congressman Keith Ellison, who's apparently campaigning for Bernie Sanders. Naturally, they'd be out campaigning for the hardline communist.
A fierce Pacific storm brought heavy rain and wild winds to San Diego Sunday, causing power outages, interrupting -- then delaying -- the final round of the Farmers Insurance Open golf tournament at Torrey Pines, and toppling trees including one that killed a motorist in Pacific Beach.
Winds gusted to about 50 mph along the coast, and were strong enough to uproot the 80-foot-tall tree in Pacific Beach that crushed three parked cars and one passing by on Ingraham Street near Fortuna Avenue, causing fatal injuries to a person inside.
San Diego Fire-Rescue Department Capt. Joe Amador called the incident “unimaginable,” noting that the car could have been easily missed by the falling tree.
“Even five seconds one way or the other and this wouldn't have happened,” Amador said. “Our thoughts and hearts are with the family. We're in the life-saving business and it's hard when it doesn’t turn out that way.”
The fatal accident was just one of the instances that had emergency crews scrambling across the county. Falling trees damaged cars and homes, roadways were flooded or littered with debris and crashes clogged busy thoroughfares.
The storm arrived in on-again off-again waves that had golfers at Torrey Pines seeking shelter from 40 mph winds and rain one moment, then returning to the squishy course the next to play under blue skies. But the winds wouldn't relent. The media tent eventually had to be evacuated because it appeared on the verge of taking flight. At 3:30 p.m., tournament organizers postponed all play, saying they'd finish the competition Monday...
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