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!
Remember the Vanity Fair piece about Tinder last year? Totally salacious and bizarre, frankly. Robert Stacy McCain blogged it, "‘Hit-It-and-Quit-It on Tinder’."
So now some Sanders supporters are banned from the app after campaigning for the geezer Vermont senator and democratic socialist?
Stumping for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Tinder is getting some women banned from the online dating app after sending campaign messages to prospective matches.
Two women - one from Iowa and the other from New Jersey - confirmed to Reuters on Friday that they received notices from Tinder in the previous 24 hours that their accounts were locked because they had been reported too many times for peppering men on the site with messages promoting Sanders' candidacy.
Robyn Gedrich, 23, said she sent messages to 60 people a day for the past two weeks trying to convince them to support the U.S. senator from Vermont in his race for the Democratic nomination against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
"Do you feel the bern?" her message to other Tinder users read, parroting a Sanders campaign slogan. "Please text WORK to 82623 for me. Thanks."
Gedrich, an assistant store manager at retailer Elie Tahari who lives in Brick, New Jersey, said a text would prompt people to start receiving updates from the Sanders campaign, as well as a link where they could sign up and volunteer. She has been unable to sign back into Tinder since logging off on Thursday.
Haley Lent, 22, a photographer from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, told Reuters in a Twitter message that she also got locked out of the app on Thursday night after sending messages trying to convince people to vote for Sanders the previous night.
Lent, who is married, said she talked to 50 to 100 people on the app. She had even bought a Tinder premium membership, which allows users to change their location, for a month so that she could reach people in New Hampshire and promote Sanders.
"I would ask them if they were going to vote in their upcoming primaries," she said. "If they said no or were on the fence, I would try to talk to them and persuade them to vote."
A spokeswoman for Tinder, which is part of Match Group Inc, owned by IAC/InterActiveCorp IAC.O, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
There's no odds on Jeb dropping out, although he's not highly favored to win the GOP nomination, heh:
ODDS TO WIN THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION
Marco Rubio: 3/2
Donald Trump: 4/1
Ted Cruz: 5/1
Jeb Bush: 10/1
John Kasich: 12/1
Chris Christie: 12/1
Ben Carson: 25/1
Carly Fiorina: 40/1
Jim Gilmore, Paul Ryan, Michael Bloomberg, Mitt Romney and Clint Eastwood (field bet): 50/1
Barbara Bush is mobilizing the WWII generation to get out their walkers and vote for Jebbie! #Jeb!
In 2008, Hillary Clinton ran on a relatively genderless platform of competence and pragmatism. She was going to be the one ready to step into the chief executive role and pick up the "red phone."
This year I'm not sure what she's trying to do. Bernie Sanders is accurately hammering her on her flip flops between being a moderate and progressive. You can't be both, although Clinton would like to have that way.
In any case, she's playing the gender card to the hilt this year, including in last night's debate.
But 87 percent of young people were going for Sanders in Iowa, so obviously that leaves a lot of other young women going for the Vermont senator.
Why?
Well, according to Catherine Rampell, at the Washington Post, it's because of Sanders' socialism, which is "a feature, not a bug" of his campaign. It's also because Sanders is totally authentic. He's like a social media star who tweets "#IWokeUpLikeThis." With his loose fitting suits, mussed up gray hair, and odd Brooklyn accent, it's like he "woke up just like this," and that endears him to young hipsters.
Yeah, he's pretty cool, I gotta admit, but mostly because it's amazing to watch him take on not just the Clinton machine, but the entire Democrat Party mainstream establishment. It's pretty fascinating.
(Oh, the double-standard is that professional women like Clinton can't get away with the all mussed up look. They've gotta be tight and pretty and all-together all the time. That a old guy like Sanders doesn't is totally sexist, man.)
Donald Trump still leads the GOP presidential pack among Republican voters nationwide, with 31 percent, followed by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas with 22 percent and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida with 19 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University National poll released today. Dr. Ben Carson has 6 percent, with 9 percent undecided and no other candidate above 3 percent.
In the Democratic race nationwide, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has 44 percent, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont at 42 percent, and 11 percent undecided. This compares to a 61 - 30 percent Clinton lead in a December 22 survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll.
Sanders and Rubio are the strongest candidates in general election matchups. If former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg runs, he hurts Sanders more than he hurts any of the top Republican contenders.
Among Republicans, 30 percent say they "would definitely not support" Trump, while 15 percent say no to Cruz and 7 percent say no to Rubio.
Sanders has the highest favorability rating among top candidates, while Trump has the lowest.
"Democrats nationwide are feeling the Bern as Sen. Bernie Sanders closes a 31-point gap to tie Secretary Hillary Clinton," said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Poll.
"And despite the Iowa setback, Donald Trump is way ahead of his GOP opponents."
"But that's not the whole story nine months before Election Day. In mano a mano, or mano a womano, face-offs with all contenders, Sanders and Rubio would be the candidates left standing," Malloy added.
"Although he is characterized as the New York counterpunch to Trump, Mayor Mike Bloomberg is more the nemesis of Bernie than he is of Donald."
There has never been a more tainted victory in the Iowa caucuses,” a spokesman for Ben Carson’s campaign said on Tuesday. He was referring to what he called Ted Cruz’s “abject lies” and, particularly, to what appears to have been a concerted effort on the part of the Cruz campaign to persuade voters at caucuses that Carson had dropped out. Carson himself told Fox News that his wife had had to personally refute that rumor at one caucus site—and once she had, he said, he won there. “Isn’t this the exact kind of thing that the American people are tired of? Why would we want to continue that kind of, you know, shenanigans?” Donald Trump put the charge in his own terms in a tweet: “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!”
That was only part of what Trump had to say. He threatened to sue Cruz; he made himself the champion of the honor of Ben Carson, a man who Trump has suggested is “pathological.” He tweeted that “the State of Iowa should disqualify Ted Cruz from the most recent election on the basis that he cheated—a total fraud!” Cruz had also sent out a mailer marked “Voter Violation,” which purported to contain information about voters and their neighbors, and was printed on yellow paper to look like a real ticket—which, as Ryan Lizza noted, was just the beginning of its problems. It was a “disgrace,” Trump said, adding what was, for a New York real-estate developer, the ultimate insult: “It looks right out of municipal government.” Cruz tried to dismiss it all as a “Trumpertantrum.” The problem was that, in the whirlwind of Trump’s rage, there were some hard objects swirling around and banging into Cruz’s story.
Cruz has said that he won Iowa by being uncompromising and clever, with all those data-driven, micro-targeted canvassing runs—part of what his campaign reportedly called the Oorlog Project. According to Sasha Issenberg, of Bloomberg News, it was “named by a Cruz data scientist who searched online for ‘war’ translated into different languages and thought the Afrikaner word looked coolest.” (“War” is cool; “war” with a hint of an illiberal siege mentality in its orthography is, apparently, coolest.) And it was, by all accounts, a get-out-the-vote drive like none other—even better than Barack Obama’s, in 2008, which had set the standard...
What's going to be weird is if Hillary succeeds to forcing Sanders off his Wall Street attacks because of her allegations of "smears." What really are those smears? Is she claiming he's attacking her ties to the Israel Lobby? Now that's innuendo.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Hillary Clinton appeared frustrated.
Dozens of prominent economists and academic experts have endorsed her plans to regulate the financial sector. Her policies would “try to prevent the problems of the future,” she explained in Thursday’s debate, in addition to reining in “the excesses of Wall Street.”
So why do so many voters not believe it?
“I have a broader view,” Mrs. Clinton said, contrasting her plan to that of Mr. Sanders, whose anti-Wall Street message has turned him from a long-shot candidate to a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.
“If all we are going to talk about is one part of our economy, and indeed one street in our economy, we’re missing the big oil companies, we’re missing the other big energy companies,” Mrs. Clinton said. “We’re missing the big picture.”
The response provided a perfect opening for her populist opponent. “Madam Secretary, it is not one street,” Mr. Sanders said. “Wall Street is an entity of unbelievable economic and political power.”
In an election year fueled by the anger over the growing gap between rich and poor, Mrs. Clinton, who is widely viewed as too close to the financial sector, seems an imperfect messenger for change. She has developed sophisticated policy proposals that many economists agree would aggressively regulate the financial sector, but they have collided with the image that Sanders supporters and other political rivals have painted of her: Wall Street’s friend and defender...
Women love football. Will we see women quarterbacks and head coaches? Er, maybe, and that's not the point. It's about making the sport welcoming to both women and men, and opening up opportunities all around.
Hmm, is she trying to accuse Sanders of something nefarious, like she's in bed with a Jewish cabal, or something?
I've never heard of anything like that, especially since I think Sanders' attack on her Wall Street ties is completely legitimate. Let's see how this plays out today in all the talking-head commentary.
DURHAM, N.H. — Escalating the brawl that's defined the Democratic primary, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders viciously attacked each other’s progressive credentials at Thursday night’s debate, with Clinton accusing Sanders of smearing her record and treating her differently because she’s a woman.
An uncomfortable Sanders was taken aback, responding, “Whoa, whoa, whoa...wow.”
"If you've got something to say, say it, directly," said Clinton of Sanders' repeated insinuations that she is beholden to her big money donors. "It's time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out."
Those explosive exchanges — which continued throughout the MSNBC debate — typified the fight between the two candidates who each regularly bristle when confronted with the other's definition of progressivism, or even their Democratic bona fides. The nasty tone showed that Democrats have a heated race on their hands, and that any idea of a Clinton coronation has vaporized.
"A progressive is someone who makes progress," a clearly unhappy Clinton said of Sanders' attempts to paint her as a moderate. "That's what I intend to do." She continued, "I'm a progressive who gets things done. Cherry-picking a quote here or there doesn't change my record."
When Sanders freshly accused Clinton of being part of the “establishment” that he’s railing against, Clinton had a ready response, one that invoked her gender.
“Honestly, Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment,” she said. “It’s really quite amusing to me. People support me because they know me, they know my life’s work. They have worked with me, and many have also worked with Senator Sanders and at the end of the day they endorse me because they know I can get things done.”
Clinton’s accusation came after her campaign has been floating the idea that Sanders and his allies have been engaging in implicitly sexist attacks. With just four days before the New Hampshire primary, Clinton has been ramping up her gender-based appeal and calling out a “Bernie Bro” phenomenon raging online...
After a string of debates where Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders discussed (and occasionally disagreed about) the fine points of progressive policy, the two finally had a full-fledged throwdown Thursday night.
Clinton accused Sanders of going negative on the campaign trail, telling the Vermont Senator at the Democratic debate that his campaign was smearing her name.
"I think it's time to end the very artful smear that you and your campaign have been carrying out in recent week," Clinton said after Sanders talked about getting money out of politics...
David Brock's going to have a field day. The "artful smear," heh.
Robert "LaVoy" Finicum was shot to death by the side of a remote Oregon road. Few were there to see him die, but hundreds of people around the country have indicated they will attend rallies and vigils in his memory this weekend.
Finicum was a prominent figure in the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. He was fatally shot by Oregon State Police on the 25th day of the occupation during a traffic stop that ended with the arrest of key leaders of the occupation.
The funeral is Friday, Feb. 5, in Kanab, Utah, Finicum's family said. More than 30 memorials, candlelight vigils and rallies in at least 17 states are planned for Feb. 5, Feb. 6 and Feb. 7.
Though the FBI said Finicum was reaching for a gun before he was shot, some rally organizers said he should not have died.
"If he was breaking laws, they should have arrested him. He didn't have that chance," said Krista Etter, who has scheduled a rally in front of the federal courthouse in West Palm Beach, Florida. "He didn't get to be heard to prove he was guilty of anything."
One Facebook event scheduled for Sunday is called "Rally Protest Of The MURDER of LaVoy Finicum."
It's amazing that the modern Democrat Party has jettisoned the old-fashioned "liberal" label worn so proudly by folks like Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy. It's no longer your father's Democrat Party.
Once again the world is laughing at Iowa. Late-night comedians and social media mavens are having a field day with jokes about missing caucusgoers and coin flips.
That’s fine. We can take ribbing over our quirky process. But what we can’t stomach is even the whiff of impropriety or error.
What happened Monday night at the Democratic caucuses was a debacle, period. Democracy, particularly at the local party level, can be slow, messy and obscure. But the refusal to undergo scrutiny or allow for an appeal reeks of autocracy.
The Iowa Democratic Party must act quickly to assure the accuracy of the caucus results, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
First of all, the results were too close not to do a complete audit of results. Two-tenths of 1 percent separated Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. A caucus should not be confused with an election, but it’s worth noting that much larger margins trigger automatic recounts in other states.
Second, too many questions have been raised. Too many accounts have arisen of inconsistent counts, untrained and overwhelmed volunteers, confused voters, cramped precinct locations, a lack of voter registration forms and other problems. Too many of us, including members of the Register editorial board who were observing caucuses, saw opportunities for error amid Monday night’s chaos.
The Sanders campaign is rechecking results on its own, going precinct by precinct, and is already finding inconsistencies, said Rania Batrice, a Sanders spokeswoman. The campaign seeks the math sheets or other paperwork that precinct chairs filled out and were supposed to return to the state party. They want to compare those documents to the results entered into a Microsoft app and sent to the party.
“Let’s compare notes. Let’s see if they match,” Batrice said Wednesday.
Dr. Andy McGuire, chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party, dug in her heels and said no. She said the three campaigns had representatives in a room in the hours after the caucuses and went over the discrepancies.
McGuire knows what’s at stake. Her actions only confirm the suspicions, wild as they might be, of Sanders supporters. Their candidate, after all, is opposed by the party establishment — and wasn’t even a Democrat a few months ago.
So her path forward is clear: Work with all the campaigns to audit results...
[inaudible]…from the Ted Cruz campaign, calling to get to a precinct captain, and it has just been announced that Ben Carson is taking a leave of absence from the campaign trail, so it is very important that you tell any Ben Carson voters that for tonight, uh, that they not waste a vote on Ben Carson, and vote for Ted Cruz. He is taking a leave of absence from his campaign. All right? Thank you. Bye.
Hello, this is the Cruz campaign with breaking news: Dr. Ben Carson will be [garbled] suspending campaigning following tonight’s caucuses. Please inform any Carson caucus goers of this news and urge them to caucus for Ted instead. Thank you. Good night.
PORTSMOUTH, New Hampshire – Bernie Sanders maintains a significant double-digit lead over Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, according to an NBC News/Wall Street/Marist poll conducted after Clinton’s narrow apparent win in Monday’s Iowa caucuses.
Sanders gets the support of 58 percent of likely Democratic primary voters, while Clinton gets 38 percent – essentially unchanged from a last week’s NBC/WSJ/Marist poll, which showed Sanders ahead by a 57 percent-to-38 percent margin in the Granite State...
Ammon Bundy and 15 others accused in the armed takeover of a federal wildlife refuge -- including four people who remain at the bird sanctuary -- have been indicted on charges of conspiracy to impede federal officers through intimidation, threats or force.
A federal grand jury returned the indictments Wednesday and they were unsealed Thursday morning.
It accuses Ammon Bundy, the leader of the monthlong armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge outside Burns, and the other key players of conspiring to prevent employees of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service from working at the refuge, taking over the property armed with firearms and intimidating the people of Harney County.
The alleged offenses began Oct. 5, when two of the defendants met with the Harney County sheriff to warn of "extreme civil unrest'' if their demands were unmet, according to the indictments.
The accused co-conspirators are charged with occupying the federal property "while using and carrying firearms,'' threatening violence against anybody who attempted to remove them from the refuge and using social media and other means of communication to recruit and encourage others to join them.
The indictments also alleged the group carried firearms on the federal property and refused repeated federal orders to leave. It contends the conspiracy lasted through the date of the indictments.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Bernie Sanders is 74. He grew up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn and watching a black-and-white television.
Yet this child of the 1940s, who says Franklin D. Roosevelt is his favorite president, has inspired a potent political movement among young people today. College students wear shaggy white “Bernie” wigs on campus, carry iPhones with his image as their screen saver, and flock to his events by the thousands.
And armies of young voters are turning what seemed like a long-shot presidential candidacy into a surprisingly competitive campaign.
“He may seem like some old geezer who doesn’t care about stuff,” said Caroline Buddin, 24, a sales associate in Charleston, S.C. “But if you actually give him the time of day, and listen to what he has to say, he has a lot of good ideas.”
In interviews, young supporters of the Vermont senator’s presidential bid almost all offer some version of the same response when asked why they like him: He seems sincere.
For the generation that researchers say has been the most bombarded with marketing slogans and advertising pitches, Mr. Sanders, the former mayor of Burlington, Vt., has a certain unpolished appeal.
The first group of students working to elect Bernie Sanders president sprang up at Middlebury College in Vermont. There are now similar chapters at over 220 campuses across the country, with the biggest one at the University of California at Berkeley.
The movement, at least initially, was not so much the result of an organized effort by the Sanders campaign, but more of a visceral response to the candidate.
“It seems like he is at the point in his life when he is really saying what he is thinking,” said Olivia Sauer, 18, a college freshman who returned to her hometown, Ames, Iowa, to caucus for Mr. Sanders.
Young voters’ support for Mr. Sanders has created a quandary in Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, where millennial staff members have tried to persuade their peers to back the former first lady, using social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. On Monday in Iowa, Mr. Sanders defeated Mrs. Clinton among voters ages 17 to 29 by 70 percentage points, greater than the 43-percentage-point margin Barack Obama won in the same age group in Iowa in 2008.
That is true among both men and women, and even Mrs. Clinton called the gap “amazing” during an appearance on CNN on Wednesday...
Look, eight years with a stealth socialist candidate who's been stymied in realizing the revolution, youth voters want to complete it with a candidate who loudly proclaims his collective agenda, and tries to sugar coat it by calling it " democratic socialism."
Heh, Bernie honeymooned in Soviet Russia. We're in for one snooker of ride.
"The federal government is broken. And while there is plenty of blame to go around, only Congress can fix it.
We don’t mean this as an indictment of any one leader or party, because the dysfunction in Washington today has accreted over decades, under Houses, Senates, and presidents of every partisan combination, as well as the many different justices of the Supreme Court. . . .
The stability and moral legitimacy of America’s governing institutions depend on a representative, transparent, and accountable Congress to make its laws. For years, however, Congress has delegated too much of its legislative authority to the executive branch, skirting the thankless work and ruthless accountability that Article 1 demands and taking up a new position as backseat drivers of the republic.
So today, Americans’ laws are increasingly written by people other than their representatives in the House and Senate, and via processes specifically designed to exclude public scrutiny and input. This arrangement benefits well-connected insiders who thrive in less-accountable modes of policymaking, but it does so at the expense of the American people — for whose freedom our system of separated powers was devised in the first place.
In short, we have moved from a nation governed by the rule of law to one governed by the rule of rulers and unelected, unaccountable regulators. Congress’s abdication, unsurprisingly, has led to a proliferation of bad policy and to the erosion of public trust in the institutions of government. Distrust, also unsurprisingly, is now the defining theme of American politics. . .
Ted Cruz and Donald Trump may herald an historic working-class Republican revolt against the party establishment.
A few days before the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, Brad Martsching was barreling down a Pennsylvania highway, hoping to unload his eighteen-wheeler in time to get back home to Indianola, south of Des Moines, and participate for the very first time in the opening ritual of the presidential primary process. Martsching, 46, had settled on Ted Cruz over Donald Trump, but was mostly nursing his disgust at Republican leaders. “I’m a conservative. I want the Constitution to be our law, not political correctness,” he said. “I want a smaller government with less control of our personal lives and more control of our border, our finances, and our safety as a nation.” Republican lawmakers kept frustrating him by ignoring their campaign promises. “We get people that run as conservative and even get Tea Party support—they wear that lapel pin proudly,” he said. “But when they leave for Washington, they leave it on their dresser at home.”
Martsching was fed up. A lot of other Iowans were, too. So they handed a victory to Cruz, who infuriated Republican leaders by engineering the 2013 government shutdown. And they made Trump, who’s equally unpopular in Washington, a close second. Add Cruz’s 28 percent to Trump’s 24 percent, and more than half of caucusgoers supported an outsider openly despised by the GOP establishment. Voters had heeded party elders for decades by nominating establishment figures such as Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney. The Iowa result was nothing less than a revolt, and the message to Republican leaders unmistakable: Drop dead!
It’s easy to view this year’s Republican primary as a cult of personality and no more—the rise and fall of a colorful billionaire who stars in the greatest reality show on television. But what’s happening is much broader than Trump and Cruz. It’s an extension of a shift in Republican politics that’s been under way for several years. Although the media is portraying the outcome in Iowa as a repudiation of Trump, it’s better understood as a repudiation of the party establishment—just the latest in a series of uprisings dating to the 2010 election. At the congressional level, the GOP has already realigned itself to reflect this anger. Almost 60 percent of House Republicans were elected in 2010 or after. They’ve radicalized their party in Congress and driven out its establishment-minded speaker, John Boehner...
Seriously, I'm getting old, but hilariously, not nearly as old as Hillary Clinton, but for this woman, Courtney Enlow, Grandma's the be-all-end-all of her FUCKING EXISTENCE ON THIS GREAT GREEN FUCKING EARTH!
Donald Trump’s moment of humility didn’t last long. The billionaire businessman, still licking his wounds after a decisive loss in Iowa on Monday, is now crying foul, accusing Ted Cruz of stealing the election and calling for a do-over.
After congratulating Cruz during his concession speech on Monday night, Trump took to Twitter on Wednesday morning to make the case for why his loss was a crock.
"Ted Cruz didn't win Iowa, he illegally stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong any [sic] why he got more votes than anticipated. Bad!" Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. The tweet disappeared within minutes of posting and was replaced by another that no longer included the word “illegally.”
He followed up with an ultimatum: “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” he tweeted. Trump said later Wednesday that he'll likely sue. "I probably will; what he did is unthinkable," he said during an interview with Boston Herald Radio.
Trump, the master of reinvention, is trying to flip the script from loser to wronged winner, after the outcome of Iowa pierced the bubble of invincibility around the real estate mogul. Trump had sailed through the first eight months of his presidential run, defying critics who predicted that his incendiary statements would surely sink him. He went into Iowa with a roughly 5-point lead but failed to close the deal, losing to Cruz, 24 percent to 28 percent.
Temporarily bowed, a somber Trump accepted the defeat Monday night and vowed to win New Hampshire. "We finished second, and I want to tell you something, I'm just honored. I'm really honored. And I want to congratulate Ted, and I want to congratulate all of the incredible candidates,” Trump said during his concession speech, flanked by his wife, Melania...
Keep in mind, there's a debate scheduled for tomorrow night as well, which I'll probably watch. And then the Republicans have a debate on Saturday night, which should be a riot.
Probably the coolest thing is that we've got the Super Bowl on Sunday to take our minds off all of the campaigning, heh.
I stayed up early into the morning reading and blogging, as I always do, but then I had to get going at 7:00am to get my kid ready and take him to school. I feel back asleep after I came back home. I saw folks mocking today's Donald Trump Twitter tirade before I dozed off, and now waking back up I see the campaign's blown apart on all sides.
Though there's only one confirmed case of Zika virus in Los Angeles County, several more people who might be infected are being tested for the illness, public health officials said Wednesday.
The L.A. County Department of Public Health has received numerous reports from physicians of possible Zika cases, and officials have sent a number of patient specimens to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing, said Dr. Jeffrey Gunzenhauser, the county's interim health officer. He said that fewer than 20 samples had been sent to the CDC.
So far, there have been no cases of Zika virus — a mosquito-borne illness that is linked to serious brain defects in newborns — that were acquired through mosquitoes in the United States.
The single confirmed L.A. County case was in a young girl who traveled to El Salvador in November. California officials said earlier this week that there have been six cases of Zika infections in the last three years, all in people who visited countries with outbreaks.
Zika is transmitted when a mosquito bites someone who has been recently infected, and then bites another person. The infection doesn't have symptoms in as many as 80% of people.
But public health officials became worried about the virus when cases of microcephaly, a condition in which a baby's head is unusually small, skyrocketed in Brazil after a Zika outbreak began there last year. The virus has been rapidly spreading, and cases have since been reported in more than 20 countries in the Americas...
Chris Matthews has the Hillary Clinton interview at the clip, and Bernie Sanders is the topic du jour, you might say. If you want, scroll forward, to about 8:00 minutes or so, and listen to Matthews say to Clinton, "Now, you're offering a lesson in civics, I wonder if you could do that in that in a couple of weeks ... I could look at the history of the Democratic Party, your party, not Bernie Sanders', he's not a Democrat Party member. Your party has produced the New Deal, it produced the progressive income tax, came from Wilson, and Social Security came from your party, the party of Roosevelt, and Harry Truman started the fight for health care, civil rights, and all these good things that led to the Affordable Care Act, and it's always been Republicans voting against it to the last person ..."
Oh boy. Where to begin? Just note that Matthews is clearing the deck, doing ideological battlespace preparations for Clinton, to inoculate her from charges of socialism, from charges that she's no different from Bernie Sanders, who honeymooned in the Soviet Union. Matthews, more of a Democrat Party operative with a journalist's byline than almost anyone in the corrupt leftist media complex, knows full well that he's got to whitewash Hillary's radicalism. This is a woman who's come out for every leftist development under the sun. She backed the Houston city ballot measure to allow grown men dressed as women to use restrooms with your pre-teen daughters. She's been trying to coopt the crypto-communist Black Lives Matter movement forever, and may still do so, with her formidable black support in the Southern states. Remember, the Clintons are Southern Democrats, and they'll milk the black vote, pretending to be "black" to keep that constituency down on the leftist plantation. Matthews knows they've got to come across, in the end, as centrist, and thus he mainstreams the left's stealth 20th-century socialism through the institutional Democrat Party machinery as American as apple pie. The Founders of this nation would be shocked at the transmogrification of our political regime into the collectivist dependency monstrosity it's become.
(I didn't even get to Matthews' lies about the Republican Party, who had more votes in Congress for civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s than the Democrats ever did, to say nothing of the filibusters from white supremacists like Strom Thurmond and so forth. They're racist Dixiecrats, the lot of them. These people are rank, despicable partisan liars and crooks.)
Man, we're completely screwed if the American public falls for this again. Hillary wants to complete the Radical-in-Chief Barack Hussein's "fundamental transformation," and she's got the collective media to lie and sugar coat for her. It's so bad that even Orwell would be flabbergasted.
After winning the Iowa caucuses by a margin so slender that her underdog challenger appeared stronger as a result, Hillary Clinton is trying to figure out if Bernie Sanders remains a contender for weeks, or for months.
New Hampshire could be the high point of Sanders’ presidential bid, considering the hefty lead he has racked up in Granite State polls, or it could put revolutionary fever on ice as the Democratic contest moves past the tiny, liberal and overwhelmingly white New England state to venture into more diverse, populous territory.
Clinton and the Vermont senator flew to New Hampshire, determined to press ahead to that state’s Feb. 9 contest, then to Nevada’s caucus Feb. 20 and the regionally important South Carolina primary Feb. 27.
“I have to really get out there, make my case, which I intend to do this week,” Clinton said Tuesday during an MSNBC interview. “I feel really good about my campaign in New Hampshire … We're not leaving anything on the ground. We're moving forward. And I think we'll do well.”
Sanders currently enjoys an 18-point lead over the former secretary of state in New Hampshire, where Clinton won in 2008 following her memorable burst of teary-eyed candor following a loss days earlier to Barack Obama and John Edwards in Iowa.
With expectations of a Sanders victory there, the two foes are mulling three challenges.
First, do they have the right messages for New Hampshire?
Clearly, Sanders’ rallying cries to think “big” and triumph over a rigged political system and an economy tilted to advantage the “billionaire class” drew young liberals, first-time participants, and the less affluent during the Iowa caucusing. The senator channels the angst of fed-up idealists and reflects the aspirations of struggling families. His message will not change in New Hampshire.
Clinton’s campaign pitch, on the other hand, could get retooled. Her message is often perceived to be about herself, more than about the electorate. And the former first lady is arguing she is steeped in policy, tough enough to trounce a GOP nominee, and seasoned on the world stage.
Her counter arguments to Sanders’ aspirations for free college tuition, a Medicare-for-all health system, and higher taxes on the wealthy are intended to be pragmatic and deliverable. Some Democrats pointed to the Iowa results to wonder if Clinton’s rationale for the presidency comes off as pale beige in a wild-paisley kind of race.
“I just want them to understand what I'm offering, what I believe we can do,” Clinton told MSNBC about New Hampshire voters. “You know, ideas that sound good on paper but can't create results for people are just that -- good ideas on paper. I have a track record of producing results.”
When New Hampshire Sen. Jean Shaheen was asked Tuesday if Clinton needed to alter her campaign message, the senator fell back on talking points about experience often used by the former secretary of state’s political advisers.
“This is a long campaign. People are just beginning to pay attention. And I think when those young people hear the differences between Hillary and her opponents, that she's going to come out on top,” Shaheen said.
Second, how are the two candidates playing the expectations game?
Campaigning in New Hampshire after her Iowa squeaker, Clinton lowered expectations for victory, while Sanders behaved as if he has the home-field advantage. Anything Clinton can do to readjust expectations may help ease the vapors among her Democratic base of supporters, as well as with voters in the contests that follow New Hampshire, and among the media (up to a point).
Having represented nearby New York, won the New Hampshire primary once and watched her husband declare himself the “comeback kid” there in 1992, Clinton is not exactly a stranger to the Granite State. But she’s begun to define it as Sanders’ turf...
Simendinger's quoting Hillary from the very same Chris Matthews interview seen above. Notice how it's all of a piece? Paint Hillary as the pragmatic one, the one who can get things done, when the facts are she can't get things done (hello Benghazi). She's a rank partisan operative who'll bend her political image to the goals of the ideological program. She wrote her senior thesis at Wellesley, entitled "There Is Only the Fight," on Saul Alinsky. She knows as well as anyone that you've got to play sneaky and underhanded to keep pushing the revolution from within, to keep marching through the institutions to achieve that fundamental change that Barack Hussein wasn't shy about proclaiming just days before election 2008.
People have really got to pay attention to how this all plays out through the spring. Remember Mother Jones' secret videos of Mitt Romney and the 47 percent? If the Republicans aren't ready to play hardball like that, to go toe-to-toe on down-and-dirty politics, they're going to lose again. Chris Matthews is devious. He's a devious mofo, and as Hillary warms up to his ideological subterfuge-signaling the video, she plays the moderate card to the hilt.
I just don't see Clinton winning in the Granite State. Sanders holds a 63-to-30 percent lead in that UMass Lowell poll I blogged last night.
And Bernie is so on point and message-disciplined, it's going to be a matter of just how big a blowout New Hampshire's going to be for him. If Hillary can keep the damage minimal, beating expectations, then she'll fly out of there with something of a win.
More rain's expected up that way later today, and if the snowpack gets up to around 150 percent of normal, we'll almost be ready to declare an end to the drought.
Not sure how valuable these endorsements are. Sarah Palin's endorsement in Iowa didn't seem to help Trump too much, although there's no discounting the earned media, so there's that.
They held a joint press conference together, but almost all of the questions were about Iowa.
"Everybody wanted his endorsement and I'm very honored that he's giving it to me,” said Trump.
A lot of the national media tried to provoke Trump into being more expressive about what happened, but Trump did his best to just kind of brush off the loss.
From what he told the crowd, it was clear that the way this is being portrayed is getting under his skin.
"I think that we did very well. I did not expect to do so well. I guess what did happen is one poll came out that said I'm four or five points ahead and that maybe built up a false expectation for some people,” said Trump.
While he kept his cool with the media, Trump let a little New York slip into his vocabulary in his stump speech, swearing twice -- once talking about Russia...
Now, if Trump could get Brown's daughter Ayla out on the stump, I'm sure he'd pick up an even larger chunk of youth demographic, young male youth in particular, heh.
Amazon.com Inc is planning to open hundreds of brick-and-mortar bookstores, the head of a major U.S. mall operator said.
Such an expansion, which Amazon itself has not confirmed, would position the world’s No. 1 online retailer as a competitor to booksellers such as Barnes & Noble Inc. At present, Amazon operates a single bookstore in its home city, Seattle.
“You’ve got Amazon opening brick-and-mortar bookstores and their goal is to open, as I understand, 300 to 400 bookstores,” Sandeep Mathrani, chief executive of General Growth Properties Inc, said on Tuesday.
He was responding to question about mall traffic during a conference call with analysts, a day after the No. 2 U.S. mall operator reported quarterly earnings.
Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman declined to comment...
Bezos has big plans. He's freakin' out to take over the entire U.S. economy!
I joke, but not by much. He already owns the Washington Post, one of the most important newspaper properties in the U.S., and he's seeking to open his own parcel shipping business on a scale to rival both UPS and the U.S. Postal Service. He's like a 21st-century robber baron, although no one looks at all these new tech giant moguls like that.
Bernie Sanders answered two important questions with his strong showing in Iowa. But, despite his impressive finish, he’ll need to answer two more to truly threaten Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The most powerful lesson from the Iowa caucus results is that Democrats are facing not just a generation gap, but a Grand Canyon-sized chasm. As I wrote this week, age has emerged as the single most important dividing line in the struggle between Sanders and Clinton.
In the Iowa entrance poll (which questions voters on the way into a caucus, rather than on their way out the door, like “exit polls” in primaries) Sanders amassed astounding margins among young people. He crushed Clinton by an almost unimaginable six to one—84 percent to 14 percent—among voters younger than 30. For those tempted to dismiss that as just a campus craze, he also routed her by 58 percent to 37 percent among those aged 30 to 44.
But Clinton’s margins were almost as impressive among older voters: she beat Sanders 58 percent to 35 percent among those aged 45-64, and by 69 percent to 26 percent among seniors.
That’s an even wider age gap than Iowa produced in the 2008 contest between Clinton and Barack Obama. In that Iowa caucus, Clinton also was routed among younger voters, but Obama stayed more competitive than Sanders did among those older than 45. On both sides, John Edwards, as a strong third contender, also somewhat muted the contrasts. In 2008, Clinton ran 34 percentage points better among seniors than with those under 30; this week, the gap was 55 points.
Obama beat Clinton by 20 percentage points among voters younger than 30, while she beat him by 25 points among voters older than 65, according to a cumulative analysis of the results of all the exit polls in the 2008 Democratic primary conducted by ABC pollster Gary Langer. Voters in the middle-aged groups divided more narrowly: Obama carried those aged 30-44 by 11 points, and Clinton carried the near retirement generation (45 to 64) by seven, according to Langer’s analysis.
But when it comes to piling up votes, one of these demographic advantages is much more useful than the other. Across all of the 2008 contests, according to Langer’s calculations, voters older than 45 cast fully 61 percent of Democratic votes, while those younger than 45 cast 39 percent. That’s an advantage for Clinton. And it’s a slightly worrisome note for Sanders—a cloud passing on an otherwise sunny day—that young voters cast a slightly smaller share of the total Iowa Democratic vote in 2016 than 2008.
Still, Sanders’s overwhelming margins among Iowa’s younger voters—which exceeded even Obama’s 2008 showing—affirmatively answered the first critical question for the Vermont senator’s campaign: Would the connection with young voters evident at his rallies translate to the ballot box?
An interesting hypothesis emerges: when young voters turn out, especially at record levels, far-left radicalism prevails in the outcomes.
As always, I expect Hillary to win the nomination, but it's an extremely much more interesting contest than it was looking to be in mid-2015, when most people --- once again --- expected Clinton to waltz to the nomination.
It's interesting. Trump lost two percentage points to Cruz overnight following the Iowa caucuses, but still hold a huge double-digit lead. And as I reported earlier, he's back in vintage form along the campaign trail.
Donald Trump, at 38 percent support among likely voters, continues to lead all candidates in the Republican primary, but 44 percent of Republicans polled reported that they could still change their mind before Feb. 9. Voters who support Trump remain the most sure of their choice at 69 percent, but this is down from 72 percent in yesterday’s tracking poll results. Support for other GOP candidates is less firm with half or more of voters who favor candidates including Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie and Rand Paul saying they could change their minds.
The GOP field also saw some movement since yesterday, with Trump’s nearest rivals Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio each gaining two points among likely Republican primary voters polled. Cruz, who won yesterday’s Iowa caucus, is at 14 percent and Rubio is at 10 percent. John Kasich and Jeb Bush are tied at 9 percent, Chris Christie is at 5 percent, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina at 3 percent and Rand Paul at 2 percent. Mike Huckabee, who has suspended his campaign, had zero percent among voters polled...
Trump is the frontrunner in a race without a clear challenger. Cruz takes 12% of the vote, while former governors John Kasich and Jeb Bush take 9% each, Senator Marco Rubio takes 8%, while former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie gets the support of 7% of likely voters. No other candidate is above 3% and former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee did not receive support (zero) from any Republican likely voters surveyed. Trump’s voters are the most certain, with 72% saying that their votes are definite, while 28% say that they “could change their mind.” For candidates like Bush and Rubio, majorities (59% and 57%, respectively) say they could change their mind.
Trump’s support is strongest among men and those with lower levels of education. Those whose highest level of education is a high school diploma (and below) support Trump at 46%,compared to those with a post graduate degree who support Trump at only 18%. Interestingly, Trump’s support is consistent across income levels, between Independents and Republicans and between Moderates and Conservatives. In fact, the only demographic category in which another candidate is preferred to Trump is among those who we identified as being very religious (attend church at least once a week and view scriptures as without any flaws). The most religious voters apparently prefer Ted Cruz to Trump, albeit by a narrow and not statistically significant margin, 7% to 24%.
MILFORD, N.H. — Donald Trump returned to New Hampshire on Tuesday night with the stakes as high as ever for his presidential campaign, determined to showcase his political resilience after his second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses and rouse his supporters with a rally that was a raucous return to form.
There was swagger, curses and confidence, and thousands of people packed into an athletic center, all bundled up in winter coats and many toting signs.
Speaking for more than 55 minutes, Trump revived the talking points that have defined his campaign: He slammed former Florida governor Jeb Bush. He promised to crack down on illegal immigration, build a wall on the border and bring back jobs from overseas. He criticized career politicians and accused them of selling their influence.
And the crowd roared when he cursed as he pledged to aggressively target Islamic State terrorists. "If we are attacked, somebody attacks us, wouldn't you rather have Trump as president if we're attacked?" he asked. "We'll beat the [expletive] out of them."
But first came a little reflection — and a few digs at the pundits who have described the Iowa victory by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) as a humbling and disappointing moment for the mogul...
He was completely magnanimous in yesterday's concession speech, but we're seeing a new tone today. Trump was off Twitter for much longer than usual, which I hope is a sign that he was getting some good, professional campaign advice.
He's moaning about how "self-funding" a campaign is extremely expensive, which it is, although most would argue that he went the cheapskate route in Iowa, at least in terms of voter mobilization. (I don't know if he ran much advertising over the local airwaves, but he's been hammered for skimping on data-driven ground mobilizing efforts from many quarters.)
It's Iowa's nightmare scenario revisited: An extraordinarily close count in the Iowa caucuses — and reports of chaos in precincts, website glitches and coin flips to decide county delegates — are raising questions about accuracy of the count and winner.
This time it's the Democrats, not the Republicans.
Even as Hillary Clinton trumpeted her Iowa win in New Hampshire on Tuesday, aides for Bernie Sanders said the eyelash-thin margin raised questions and called for a review. The chairwoman of the Iowa Democratic Party rejected that notion, saying the results are final.
The situation echoes the events on the Republican side in the 2012 caucuses, when one winner (Mitt Romney, by eight votes) was named on caucus night, but a closer examination of the paperwork that reflected the head counts showed someone else pulled in more votes (Rick Santorum, by 34 votes). But some precincts were still missing entirely.
Like Republican Party officials in 2012, Democratic Party officials worked into the early morning on caucus night trying to account for results from a handful of tardy precincts.
At 2:30 a.m. Tuesday, Iowa Democratic Party Chairwoman Andy McGuire announced that Clinton had eked out a slim victory, based on results from 1,682 of 1,683 precincts.
Voters from the final missing Democratic precinct tracked down party officials Tuesday morning to report their results. Sanders won that precinct, Des Moines precinct No. 42, by two delegate equivalents over Clinton.
The Iowa Democratic Party said the updated final tally of delegate equivalents for all the precincts statewide was:
Clinton: 700.59
Sanders: 696.82.
That's a 3.77-count margin between Clinton, the powerful establishment favorite who early on in the Democratic race was expected to win in a virtual coronation, and Sanders, a democratic socialist who few in Iowa knew much about a year ago.
Sanders campaign aides told the Register they've found some discrepancies between tallies at the precinct level and numbers that were reported to the state party. The Iowa Democratic Party determines its winner based not on a head count, like in the Republican caucuses, but on state delegate equivalents, tied to a math formula. And there was enough confusion, and untrained volunteers on Monday night, that errors may have been made...
Remember, Pat Caddell warned that the Democrats will never release the raw vote totals, because they'd show the Bernie won the popular voted. The system is rigged!
Plus, more from Ms. Jacobs:
Results from the 1 missing Dem precinct: Sanders won by 2. But voters can't find any party officials to report to. https://t.co/jB0sDxd3oZ
To listen to a number of folks in the media, Marco Rubio’s third place finish in Iowa is just as good as finishing first. But bronze, no matter how you polish and spin it, ain’t never gonna be gold.
Rubio was always expected to come in third, as evidenced by the fact that his own campaign was promoting their “3-2-1” strategy to the media only a few weeks ago. Meaning they hoped to place third in Iowa, second in New Hampshire, and first in South Carolina.
No matter. The real story isn’t the brainwashing prowess of Rubio’s communications team; the real story is that Cruz beat him with record turnout, something that was supposed to favor Donald Trump, and Rubio is nipping at Trump’s heels having finished one percent behind him. And it’s worth repeating: Cruz won more Iowa votes than any other Republican in history. In history.
And this isn’t your daddy’s Iowa caucus, either...
