Category Archives: 2016 presidential campaign
Kasich Fantasy
Ohio governor John Kasich is trying to position himself as the grownup in the Republican free-for-all. He has solid credentials. He’s a two term governor of a swing state with a 2 billion budget surplus. He was chairman of the House Budget Committee when the federal budget was last balanced in 1997.
It’s an impressive resume, and he’s impressed by it.
Kasich Fantasy
Kasich does not take The Donald or The Doctor (Ben Carson) seriously. They annoy him.
In Wednesday’s debate he called the various Trump and Carson immigration and tithing tax plans a fantasy. Given the hostility of the CNBC moderators you’d think someone might have picked up on the theme. Instead they asked about fantasy football.
Speaking of fantasy, this morning’s Real Clear Politics poll average has Trump at 27, Carson at 22.2, and Kasich at 2.2.
CNBC Cage Match
The candidates bit back at the moderators during the CNBC debate. For good reason.
John Harwood got things started by asking Donald Trump if he’s a comic book presidential candidate. Chris Christie didn’t like being asked about fantasy football while ISIS is chopping off heads in the real world.
Cage Match
Ted Cruz told the moderators the debate was not a “cage match“.
Think Progress called the debate “a total train wreck”.
LLoyd Grove writing for the Daily Beast, said it was pretty clear who the loser was – the mainstream media:
The mainstream media—as represented by the business cable network’s principal moderators, Carl Quintanilla, Becky Quick, and especially John Harwood—took it on the chin as candidate after candidate, to hearty applause from the partisan audience at the University of Colorado, pointed out that their questions were inaccurate, unfair, or otherwise plain silly.
Hillary and Trump on 9/11
Hillary told Chelsea, via email on the night of 9/11 2012, that the Benghazi attack was a planned terrorist attack. Yet two days later Suzan Rice appeared on 5 Sunday talk shows claiming it was an angry reaction to a movie. Hillary then promised parents of the dead she would hunt down the movie maker.
9/11
Dr. Krauthammer says, “We’re living in an age where what you say and its relation to the facts are completely irrelevant.”
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is driving Dan Henninger up a wall at the WSJ by implying George W. Bush was responsible for the original 9/11:
Just as Mr. Trump suggested responsibility for 9/11 lies somehow with former President Bush, Mrs. Clinton’s view has been that responsibility for the failure in Benghazi is so diffuse that no one is responsible, that asking questions about what happened is a political attempt to “come after me. ” …
What a spectacle it would be to have America’s highest office contested next year between these two.
Socialism for Democrats
Obama’s 60 Minutes interview wasn’t the only thing I missed last week. The Democrats had a debate.
Thanks to Bernie Sanders, socialism is chic in the party these days.
Socialism
Sanders wants to offer free college to the middle class and he’s going to make the “greedy rich” pay for it. Problem is, even if he took all the income of the top 1%, which pays 40%, of all federal income tax it wouldn’t be enough.
Meanwhile, capitalist war hero candidate Jim Webb got treated like a returning vet 40 years ago. His son, a current war hero, sticks up for him here.
House Republicans
A group of House Republicans conspired in the demise of Speaker John Boehner. They thought he was ineffective. Unfortunately their replacement Speaker, Kevin McCarthy, was even more ineffective. He committed a gaffe that fit the Democrat’s narrative that the Benghazi hearings were all about destroying Hillary.
House Republicans
So they had to whack him too.
