Category Archives: political news

national news, political news

Name-calling becomes a hit

4 Comments

insult

Republicans are becoming the party of name-callers.

Let’s run a little tabulation.

Sen. Lindsey Graham called Donald Trump a “jackass.”

Trump has called Graham, former Govs. Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney “losers.”

Trump also has said that every official in the U.S. government is “stupid.”

House Speaker John Boehner has chimed in with a “jackass” epithet hurled at Sen. Ted Cruz.

I know I’ve missed some, maybe a lot. But these come to mind immediately.

What’s up here? Are the candidates for the presidency getting under each other’s skin?

I’ve lost count of the bad names Sen. John McCain has tossed at folks who disagree with him. Then again, he’s not running for president this time around.

I’ll give the current GOP bunch this much credit: At least they aren’t tossing out f-bombs, at least not publicly.

It was then-Vice President Dick Cheney’s dubious honor to reveal his potty mouth when, during a Senate floor debate years ago, he told Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy to go f*** himself.

Hey, just think: The presidential campaign is just getting warmed up.

 

legal news, local news, national news, political news

Read your oath of office, Mme. Clerk

same-sex-marriage

Kim Davis took an oath when she became a county clerk in Kentucky to uphold the constitutions of her state and her nation.

The oath, I’m quite willing to suggest, didn’t include any exemptions for her religious faith.

Thus, it becomes imperative that she fulfill all the terms of the oath she took.

But she’s refusing to do that.

Instead, she’s refusing to grant marriage certificates to gay couples. She cites her religious belief opposing gay marriage and the U.S. Constitution’s protection of religious liberty.

I get that Kim Davis’s Christian faith is important to her. Mine is important to me as well.

But she took an oath to uphold the law. What’s more, the U.S. Supreme Court this year has ruled that gay marriage is legal in all 50 states. That includes Kentucky.

To their credit, Potter County Clerk Julie Smith and Randall County Clerk Renee Calhoun declared they would issue marriage certificates to same-sex couples who request them. I also would have applauded either or both of them had they resigned if their religious faith interfered with their public oath.

Davis should resign from her office, as some county clerks have done around the country. She cannot serve in an elected public office without carrying out all the duties that the office requires.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/kim-davis-kentucky-clerk-again-denies-license?utm_content=buffercaf60&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

 

 

national news, political news

Stop the presses! Cantor endorses Bush

cantor

I feel like dealing with two unrelated subjects in this blog post.

Except that they both deal with Jeb Bush.

First, the former Republican Florida governor today earned the endorsement of Eric Cantor.

You remember Eric Cantor. He is the former U.S. House of Representatives majority leader who, in the Republican primary of 2014, lost to TEA Party favorite David Brat.

What was the knock on Cantor in Virginia, which he represented in the House? It was that he was too wedded to being part of the GOP congressional power structure and that he cared too little about the home folks’ concerns. He was an out-of-touch Washington pol.

So, his congressional district primary voters turned on him, tossed him out of office.

I believe his endorsement of Gov. Bush will mean, well, not a thing.

***

Second, I am considering referring to Jeb Bush in the future by putting his first name in all capital leaders, just as I have done with the TEA Party.

Why? Well, “TEA” as in TEA Party is an acronym, meaning “Taxed Enough Already.” So, I’ve declared it appropriate to refer to this wing of the GOP with an all-cap reference.

The same principle applies to Jeb Bush. His first name also is an acronym. “Jeb” stands for “John Ellis Bush.”

Should I refer to him as “JEB” Bush, the way Confederate Gen. James Ewell Brown (aka J.E.B.) Stuart is identified?

national news, political news

Isn’t America still ‘great’?

ballcap trump

Tod Robberson, writing a blog for the Dallas Morning News, poses a question that’s been nagging at me since I first heard Donald Trump make a certain proclamation.

Trump has promised to “make America great again.” He’s been wearing a gimme cap at campaign rally with the words written across the front of it.

My thought always has been that the United States is a great nation. It’s a superpower with unprecedented military capability. It’s economy remains — for now, at least — No. 1 in the world.

And people from other nations are flocking here — yes, even legally — to start new lives. As Robberson pointed out: “In fact, the very immigration issue that Trump has made the focal point of his campaign belies the assertion that America isn’t great. Why would millions of people risk their lives to come to this country, legally or illegally, if there weren’t something of overwhelming value drawing them specifically here? It’s actually a lot easier to migrate to Canada, Europe, Costa Rica or Brazil. But for some reason, people want to come to America. That’s because we are still the greatest nation on earth.”

Trump, though, is suggesting that the United States no longer is “exceptional,” to borrow a popular Republican mantra of past campaigns against the current Democratic president.

Robberson also shoots down the notion that during the Ronald Reagan years in the White House that the United States stood as the model for greatness that today’s GOP seeks to emulate.

It’s worth a look: http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/2015/08/make-america-great-again-trump-needs-to-rethink-his-rhetoric.html/

I’m just wondering how Trump gets away with asserting the United States of America isn’t still the greatest nation on the planet.

 

 

national news, political news

‘The Hispanics’ won’t love this media spat

jorge ramos

Donald Trump keeps harping on what he believes is a love affair between himself and “the Hispanics.”

They’ll love me, Trump proclaims, because he employs so many of them to work in his business empire. The anti-illegal immigrant rhetoric that labels Mexican immigrants coming into this country — albeit illegally — as “rapists, drug dealers, murderers” … along with “some good people, too” — well, that doesn’t matter, according to Trump.

Then he got into this highly visible spat this week with Jorge Ramos, a new anchor and reporter for the Spanish-language network Univision.

Trump was taking questions from reporters in Dubuque, Iowa, when Ramos interrupted him. Trump got agitated at Ramos’s persistent questioning of how Trump intended to build a 1,900-mile wall across the country’s southern border.

To be fair, Ramos did barge into another reporter’s question. He shouldn’t have been so rude to his colleague.

Then again, Trump could have answered Ramos’s question and gone on to the next questioner. He didn’t do that.

He waved a bodyguard over, and then the bodyguard forcibly removed Ramos from the meeting room.

Outside the room, a man wearing a Trump lapel badge, told Ramos to “got back to your country,” to which the Mexico-born Ramos replied that he is an American citizen.

Ramos came back into the interview room later and got to ask his question. He sparred with Trump a bit more.

I just wonder how Trump actually believes — if he truly does believe it — that Hispanic voters are going to continue lovin’ on the candidate when he treats individuals such as Jorge Ramos so rudely.

The word “delusional” keeps coming to mind.

 

political news

David Duke endorses Trump

duke_ap

Former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke has declared his support for Donald Trump.

I should just let that statement stand on its own.

But I cannot.

This’ll be brief.

Duke’s past is as reprehensible as it gets. He’s now thrown in with Trump, the current Republican Party presidential front runner.

“So although we can’t trust him to do what he says, the other Republican candidates won’t even say what he says. So he’s certainly the best of the lot. And he’s certainly somebody that we should get behind in terms, you know, raising the image of this thing.”

I’m not for a nanosecond going to suggest that Trump share’s Duke’s KKK dogma. I am going to suggest that Duke — no matter what he says about himself or the organization to which he belonged — cannot shed his past.

Duke’s obituary is going to include a KKK reference. And we all know about the murder, misery and mayhem that it has committed against other Americans.

There. Now I’m done.

 

national news, political news

GOP ‘horse race’ turning into match race

candidate

Some of us have lamented the horse-race emphasis on the media’s political coverage.

The media become much too focused on polls and on who’s up and who’s down.

Donald Trump is clearly “up” in the Republican presidential primary campaign. All 16 of the other GOP candidates are “down.”

But as in an actual horse race, the GOP campaign is turning suddenly into a match race — featuring just two candidates.

They are Trump and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

The rest of them include some serious and intelligent individuals. I would rate Gov. Bush in that serious and intelligent category. Trump? He’s in another category altogether. He’s intelligent. He’s also inarticulate and doesn’t possess an ounce of nuance, decorum — or an understanding that the presidency is not an oligarchy, that it contains far less power than Trump seems to suggest it does.

The two of them are resorting to some serious character attacks. Trump calls Bush a “low-energy candidate.” Bush counters that Trump isn’t a “true conservative.”

Indeed, it fascinates me that conservative Republicans are taking the gloves against Trump, accusing him of being a RINO, aka Republican in Name Only. As Jeb Bush said, according to the Texas Tribune, of Trump’s proposal to build a wall along our nation’s southern border: “Mr. Trump’s plans are not grounded in conservative principles,” Bush said. “The simple fact is his proposal is unrealistic, it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, it will violate people’s civil liberties, it will create friction with our third largest trading partner, it’s non-necessary, and I think he’s wrong about this.”

It’s also interesting to me that Democrats have been oddly silent as Trump goes after Bush, and Bush returns fire against Trump. They’re leaving the anti-Trump rhetoric to the rest of that increasingly anonymous Republican field.

I remain amazed that this year’s GOP campaign has become so entertaining. I thought the 2012 Republican field set the entertainment bar so high that no future primary campaign in either party would reach it.

Silly me. The 2016 GOP field has exceeded my expectation.

However, right now it’s just the two “leaders” — Donald Trump and Jeb Bush — providing the entertainment.

 

national news, political news

Biden may be channeling RFK

RFK

While continuing to ponder the idea that Vice President Joe Biden might jump into the 2016 presidential race, my mind keeps turning to another prominent Democrat from a distant era.

About two generations ago, U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy straddled the fence on whether he should seek the 1968 Democratic Party presidential nomination, just as the vice president is considering it today.

In 1968, an incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, was going to seek re-election to a second full term. He already had a challenge from Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

RFK remained on the sidelines.

Today’s front runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton, also is facing a serious challenge, from Sen. Bernie Sanders. She also is facing a possible problem of her own making, those e-mails she sent out while serving as secretary of state.

LBJ had his own headache. It was the Vietnam War.

President Johnson then ran in the New Hampshire primary and finished first — but barely. McCarthy nearly beat him.

It was then that Sen. Kennedy joined the race. LBJ dropped out. Kennedy mounted a furious and frantic campaign against McCarthy and then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

He won the California primary on June 5, 1968, declared “on to Chicago and let’s win there.” Then he walked into the hotel kitchen, where the assassin was waiting.

It was over in burst of gunfire.

There’s a curious parallel between then and now.

I keep wondering if Biden is waiting for Clinton to make a politically critical misstep. What if something emerges from this e-mail probe that inflicts a mortal wound on the party’s front runner?

Would he then seek the party nomination to “rescue” it from someone who cannot win the election, just as RFK sought to rescue the party from McCarthy’s insurgency and HHH’s damage caused by his support for the Vietnam War?

The vice president seems be leaning toward running. If Hillary Clinton makes a mistake that dooms her candidacy, it had better occur quickly.

The difference between 1968 and 2016 shows itself in the preparation that’s now required to get one of these campaigns off the ground.

media news, national news, political news

Trump to apologize for dissing Kelly? Yeah, right

Donald Trump arrives to his Comedy Central Roast in New York, Wednesday, March 9, 2011. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes)

Fox News Channel boss Roger Ailes is demanding an apology from Donald Trump for his gratuitous criticism of network anchor Megyn Kelly.

Good luck with that, Roger.

Or, to paraphrase a hackneyed film line from the 1970 film “Love Story”: Arrogance means you never lower yourself to say you’re sorry.

Trump dissed Kelly upon her return to the air after taking a brief break. Kelly had the temerity during the initial Republican primary presidential joint appearance to ask Trump about comments he’d made about women that many had considered to be misogynistic and sexist.

Trump then ripped into Kelly for asking the question. The Trump vs. Fox feud has been boiling over ever since.

Ailes is right to demand an apology. He won’t get one.

It’s not Trump’s style.

As Trump himself keeps telling us: Why should he change a thing? Those polls give him all the affirmation he needs.

 

national news, political news

Unraveling has begun in Perry campaign

Texas Governor Rick Perry made his final appearance (in office) at a Texas GOP convention on Thursday, June 6,2014 in Fort Worth, Texas. (David Woo/The Dallas Morning News)

Maybe it’s just me, but the resignation of former Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s Iowa campaign chairman has the appearance of the beginning of the end of Perry’s second bid for the White House.

Sam Clovis, a popular Iowa radio talk show host, has resigned as Perry’s state campaign chair. It’s a pretty deal in a campaign that’s struggling to get traction as the Iowa caucuses are approaching.

The Perry camp continues to talk bravely about the Texan’s commitment to campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination.

But it’s just talk.

Perry has quit paying his campaign staff because his fundraising has dried up. He languishes far behind the front runners in the polls.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way for the former governor, who entered this campaign far better prepared than he was for the 2012 GOP nomination fight which, shall we say, ended badly.

Can the Pride of Paint Creek pull it together? Well, only if every other Republican in the race starts drooling or commits some serious verbal gaffe.

Then again, Donald Trump is showing that even crass stump rhetoric doesn’t do any damage.