Thursday, January 21, 2016
Will Trump, Cruz battle alienate their mutual supporters?
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz are now attacking each other in what has become a two-man race in Iowa – the first test in the long battle for the Republican nomination.
But unlike earlier scraps involving so-called establishment candidates, Trump and Cruz’s jabs are part of a fight for the party’s most conservative wing -- and the war of words carries the risk of alienating those same voters.
“Ted’s not a person that’s liked. He’s a nasty guy,” Trump said Wednesday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends,” essentially repeating what he’s said for days about the Texas senator.
Several polls suggest Cruz and Trump indeed are competing for the same voting bloc, considering many likely Cruz voters see Trump as their second choice, and vice-versa. A recent Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register survey, for example, found that 47 percent of Trump supporters picked Cruz as their second choice in Iowa. And 25 percent of Cruz supporters had Trump as their No. 2.
Below them in the polls, the wide field of GOP candidates is competing for the rest, with Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson composing the second tier nationally.
Political analysts have mixed views on whether the Trump-Cruz attacks will hurt or help either candidate.
David Payne, a Republican strategist and senior vice president for Vox Global, thinks neither will benefit from personal attacks, but suggests Cruz has the most to lose.
“It certainly has gotten really nasty, really quick,” he said.
But analysts essentially agree the truth will be revealed after the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, dominated by conservative voters.
“It remains to be seen,” Julianne Thompson, founder of the Free America Project and a former co-chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party, said. “There’s a competition for evangelical voters. And we’ll see whether they respond to Ted Cruz’s message and if he gets the campaign energy that Trump now has.”
Still, Thompson thinks Cruz vs. Trump is good overall for conservatives, whom she thinks have been “disenfranchised” by Republican politics.
“They felt betrayed,” she said. “But they’ve stormed back in 2016 because of these candidates. … I don’t believe the evangelical base will be divided. But a lot will be decided in Iowa.”
In the early months of the campaign, Cruz and Trump appeared to have an unspoken agreement not to attack each other, even appearing together at a Tea Party rally on Capitol Hill. But signs of the inevitable emerged just minutes after the rally -- when Cruz suggested he attended because any event featuring Trump would bring TV cameras and free media.
Then, Cruz in November started his double-digit surge in Iowa.
As Cruz scooped up potential votes left by the slipping campaign of evangelical favorite Carson, Trump started his attacks by suggesting the Canada-born Cruz might not be a “natural-born citizen,” a situation Democrats, he said, could use to invalidate a Cruz presidency.
He also repeated the details of a news story about Cruz failing to disclose on federal campaign-finance papers a Goldman Sachs loan in his 2012 Senate run.
But in roughly the past week, Trump’s attacks, as they have with other candidates, turned personal.
“He was so nice to me,” Trump said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “But he's a nasty guy. Nobody likes him. Nobody in Congress likes him.”
Cruz has also attacked Trump, arguing he’s “nowhere to be found” in meaningful debates about the roughly 11 million people living illegally in the United States.
“As voters you have reasons to doubt the credibility of the promises of a political candidate who discovers the issue after he announces for president,” Cruz said Monday at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire.
He’s also questioned Trump’s conservative credentials -- pointing out donations to Democrats, including $50,000 in 2010 to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, a former chief of staff for President Obama.
And during the Fox Business Network debate last week, Cruz tried to connect the billionaire businessman to “New York values,” which he characterized as “socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro–gay marriage, focusing around money and the media.”
His apparent attempt to appeal to Iowa conservatives essentially backfired when Trump reminded the audience how New Yorkers responded after 9/11. Cruz responded the next day with a tongue-in-cheek apology “to the millions of New Yorkers who've been let down by liberal politicians in that state.”
Payne called that response a mistake.
“It didn’t help him in any meaningful way. It didn’t make him look transcendental and presidential," he said. "You don’t win that way.”
As Hillary fends off bad news, the press finally discovers the Sanders surge
There was a moment in the Democratic debate, as
Bernie Sanders explained that ObamaCare isn’t enough and he wants to
raise taxes on everyone to pay for government-run health care, I
wondered if Hillary Clinton was thinking of that Jon Lovitz line from an
old “SNL” skit:
“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
Sanders is out there as an unabashed socialist, railing against millionaires and billionaires, and many prognosticators thought he won the NBC debate in South Carolina. I found her steady as usual, speaking more to a general-election audience, putting Sanders on the defensive over gun control and displaying far greater depth on foreign policy. Sanders, on the other hand, always dials it up to a 10, Larry David style.
And yet it’s Bernie who brings the passion, who’s gotten the party’s base excited, and who is now crowing that the inevitable nominee is no longer quite so inevitable. And with polls showing Sanders with a big lead in New Hampshire—60 to 33 percent in a CNN poll?--and a modest lead in Iowa, the press is taking a second look.
What took so long? I just loved this New York Times headline the other day: “Clinton Campaign Underestimated Sanders Strengths, Allies Say.”
You got that? It’s not that every pundit on the planet has insisted for a year that Bernie had no chance, none, zero, nada, of stopping Hillary’s coronation. It’s her dumb campaign that didn’t see this coming.
The journalistic consensus—and I’m not exempting myself here—is that a 74-year-old Vermont senator who wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party didn’t have a prayer of knocking off a former first lady, senator and secretary of State who is, after all, a Clinton.
But now the email scandal, which was dormant for so long, could be coming back to haunt her. An inspector general has told congressional leaders in a letter that her home server contained information on some of the government’s most secret programs. Clinton told NPR this was merely a “leak” designed to damage her.
And yesterday, after weeks of a media debate over whether Bill Clinton’s sex scandals are relevant to the campaign, the New York Times certified them as fair game—which matters because of its agenda-setting role. A piece saying that young women are troubled by her role in the 1990s scandals led off with Lena Dunham, the HBO star who’s already conducted a gushing interview with the former first lady, telling an Upper East Side dinner party that she too is concerned about whatever role Hillary played in going after Bill’s accusers.
This, says the Times, “captures the deeper debate unfolding among liberal-leaning women about how to reconcile Mrs. Clinton’s leadership on women’s issues with her past involvement in her husband’s efforts to fend off accusations of sexual misconduct…
“Even some Democrats who participated in the effort to discredit the women acknowledge privately that today, when Mrs. Clinton and other women have pleaded with the authorities on college campuses and in workplaces to take any allegation of sexual assault and sexual harassment seriously, such a campaign to attack the women’s character would be unacceptable.”
Other than that, it’s been a great week.
I’m going to take a deep breath here and remind everyone that Clinton is still the overwhelming favorite in this race, even if the previously unthinkable happens and she loses the first two contests.
But did the press fall into the same trap as in 2008, convinced that Hillary’s celebrity, money, gender and huge lead would make the race into a cakewalk? Once Joe Biden decided against running, Sanders declined to press on her “damn emails” and her polls stabilized, journalists concluded that she was a lock.
What they missed—and this was on a par with misreading the Trump phenomenon—is the deep anger and frustration among voters fed up with the political and media establishment.
Now, says the Times, “the Clintons are particularly concerned that her ‘rational message,’ in the words of an aide, is not a fit with a restless Democratic primary electorate.”
The paper also reports that the Clinton camp is preparing for a “long slog” against Sanders: “The campaign boasted last June, when Mrs. Clinton held her kickoff event on Roosevelt Island in New York, that it had at least one paid staff member in all 50 states. But the effort did not last, and the staff members were soon let go or reassigned.”
Even Hillary supporters, such as Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, says she talks too much about her one- and two- and three-points plans:
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn about her plans. I sort of already know what they are anyway. After being first lady, senator from New York, secretary of state and, going all the way back, the 1969 commencement speaker at Wellesley College, she can’t possibly have any surprises up her sleeve. When it comes to policies and plans, she is a known commodity. The rest of her is encased in an emotional burka.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but Hillary is using a factual approach to make the case that Sanders is out of the mainstream. The plan that he released just before Sunday’s debate shows he would slap a 52 percent tax rate on people earning more than $10 million. And obviously he’s been pulling Clinton to the left, since first she has to win the nomination.
Even nationally, a Monmouth poll has Sanders cutting Clinton’s lead to 52 to 37 percent.
The press clearly didn’t expect a competitive race, but hey, this hasn’t been a great year for campaign coverage.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.
“I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy.”
Sanders is out there as an unabashed socialist, railing against millionaires and billionaires, and many prognosticators thought he won the NBC debate in South Carolina. I found her steady as usual, speaking more to a general-election audience, putting Sanders on the defensive over gun control and displaying far greater depth on foreign policy. Sanders, on the other hand, always dials it up to a 10, Larry David style.
And yet it’s Bernie who brings the passion, who’s gotten the party’s base excited, and who is now crowing that the inevitable nominee is no longer quite so inevitable. And with polls showing Sanders with a big lead in New Hampshire—60 to 33 percent in a CNN poll?--and a modest lead in Iowa, the press is taking a second look.
What took so long? I just loved this New York Times headline the other day: “Clinton Campaign Underestimated Sanders Strengths, Allies Say.”
You got that? It’s not that every pundit on the planet has insisted for a year that Bernie had no chance, none, zero, nada, of stopping Hillary’s coronation. It’s her dumb campaign that didn’t see this coming.
The journalistic consensus—and I’m not exempting myself here—is that a 74-year-old Vermont senator who wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party didn’t have a prayer of knocking off a former first lady, senator and secretary of State who is, after all, a Clinton.
But now the email scandal, which was dormant for so long, could be coming back to haunt her. An inspector general has told congressional leaders in a letter that her home server contained information on some of the government’s most secret programs. Clinton told NPR this was merely a “leak” designed to damage her.
And yesterday, after weeks of a media debate over whether Bill Clinton’s sex scandals are relevant to the campaign, the New York Times certified them as fair game—which matters because of its agenda-setting role. A piece saying that young women are troubled by her role in the 1990s scandals led off with Lena Dunham, the HBO star who’s already conducted a gushing interview with the former first lady, telling an Upper East Side dinner party that she too is concerned about whatever role Hillary played in going after Bill’s accusers.
This, says the Times, “captures the deeper debate unfolding among liberal-leaning women about how to reconcile Mrs. Clinton’s leadership on women’s issues with her past involvement in her husband’s efforts to fend off accusations of sexual misconduct…
“Even some Democrats who participated in the effort to discredit the women acknowledge privately that today, when Mrs. Clinton and other women have pleaded with the authorities on college campuses and in workplaces to take any allegation of sexual assault and sexual harassment seriously, such a campaign to attack the women’s character would be unacceptable.”
Other than that, it’s been a great week.
I’m going to take a deep breath here and remind everyone that Clinton is still the overwhelming favorite in this race, even if the previously unthinkable happens and she loses the first two contests.
But did the press fall into the same trap as in 2008, convinced that Hillary’s celebrity, money, gender and huge lead would make the race into a cakewalk? Once Joe Biden decided against running, Sanders declined to press on her “damn emails” and her polls stabilized, journalists concluded that she was a lock.
What they missed—and this was on a par with misreading the Trump phenomenon—is the deep anger and frustration among voters fed up with the political and media establishment.
Now, says the Times, “the Clintons are particularly concerned that her ‘rational message,’ in the words of an aide, is not a fit with a restless Democratic primary electorate.”
The paper also reports that the Clinton camp is preparing for a “long slog” against Sanders: “The campaign boasted last June, when Mrs. Clinton held her kickoff event on Roosevelt Island in New York, that it had at least one paid staff member in all 50 states. But the effort did not last, and the staff members were soon let go or reassigned.”
Even Hillary supporters, such as Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, says she talks too much about her one- and two- and three-points plans:
“Frankly, I don’t give a damn about her plans. I sort of already know what they are anyway. After being first lady, senator from New York, secretary of state and, going all the way back, the 1969 commencement speaker at Wellesley College, she can’t possibly have any surprises up her sleeve. When it comes to policies and plans, she is a known commodity. The rest of her is encased in an emotional burka.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but Hillary is using a factual approach to make the case that Sanders is out of the mainstream. The plan that he released just before Sunday’s debate shows he would slap a 52 percent tax rate on people earning more than $10 million. And obviously he’s been pulling Clinton to the left, since first she has to win the nomination.
Even nationally, a Monmouth poll has Sanders cutting Clinton’s lead to 52 to 37 percent.
The press clearly didn’t expect a competitive race, but hey, this hasn’t been a great year for campaign coverage.
Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of "MediaBuzz" (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington. Follow him at @HowardKurtz. Click here for more information on Howard Kurtz.
U.S. renews travel warning to Mexico as killings of Americans climb
The U.S. State Department has issued a travel warning to all Americans planning on going to Mexico – renewing an expired travel ban issued in May of last year – as the latest figures show the number of murdered U.S. citizens south of the border has gone up.
The number of American citizens murdered in Mexico rose from 81 in 2013 to 100 in 2014, according to the U.S. government. Citing threats to safety and security posed by organized criminal groups, the State Department says U.S. citizens have been the victims of violent crimes such as kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery in certain parts of Mexico.
Mexico's government continues their drug war against cartels, as evidenced by the recent headlines over Mexico's top drug lord, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, and his recent escape and recapture.
"The location and timing of future armed engagements is unpredictable," the warning says about gun battles between criminal organizations with Mexico authorities. The warning implores U.S. citizens to lower their personal profiles and avoid wearing jewelry or clothing that indicate wealth.
Despite the travel warnings, however, Mexico's tourism industry is booming.
Mexico ranked No. 9 among the world's top 10 most visited countries in 2015. More than 32 million tourists visited Mexico last year, an increase of nearly 10 percent from 2014, according to the United Nations World Travel Organization.
Millions of Americans visit Mexico each year – including more than 150,000 who cross the border every day, the State Department says. The Mexican government has dedicated substantial resources to protecting major tourist destinations, the State Department says, and generally these areas do not see the levels of drug-related violence and crime seen along the border or major drug trafficking routes.
This latest travel warning comes as Mexico’s homicide rates continued to fall for the third year in a row. There were 27,213 murders in 2011 and 20,670 in 2014, according to Mexico’s National Institute of Statistics and Geography.
Still, violence has increased in 2015 and it appears that the number of drug-related homicides will be higher than in 2014. May 2015 was the worst month of violence since October 2013. Experts and authorities say since President Enrique Peña Nieto took office, the cartels have fragmented, creating weaker cells but more chaos on the streets as they resort to kidnappings, extortion, and murder of innocent people in an attempt to gain power.
FBI reportedly investigating Kent State professor for ties to ISIS
A Kent State professor long known for fiery anti-Israel rhetoric is under investigation for alleged links to ISIS, and an independent probe Tuesday turned up disturbing posts on his purported Facebook page praising Usama bin Laden and urging Al Qaeda fighters to merge with the black-clad terror army.
"Sheik Osama (May Allah be Pleased with Him) was the greatest, and desrves (sic) praise for kicking off this jihad," one post from an account in Julio Cesar Pino's name begins. The post, which has since been deleted, was preserved in a screenshot by The Clarion Project, a New York-based research institute that monitors international terrorism.
It continues: "However, the organization he left behind is not the same AQ he founded. The brave warriors of AQAP and the Nusraf Jabbat should join #IslamicState."
An FBI spokeswoman confirmed to the Akron Beacon Journal that the bureau was looking into Pino, an associate professor of history, for ties to the terrorist group. Pino is also known by the Muslim name Assad Jibril Pino, according to his essay "Born in The Fist of the Revolution: A Cuban Professor's Journey to Allah."
A Kent State spokesperson told FoxNews.com that Pino is still teaching classes.
"Kent State is fully cooperating with the FBI," the University said in a follow-up statement. "As this is an ongoing investigation, we willl have no further comment. The FBI has assured Kent State that there is no threat to campus."
"If I was a student there, I would not go on campus, personally."Pino, a Cuban-born convert to Islam, denied the allegations.
- Ryan Mauro, The Clarion Project
“I’ve never broken the law,” he told the Beacon Journal. “I support no violence or violent organizations. One man or one woman’s interpretation of events can be very different from another’s. As they say, ‘Haters gonna hate.’ Truth always prevails, and truth will prevail in this case.”
Pino blamed his past rhetoric for possibly inspiring the probe.
“I can only imagine, given my past record at Kent State dealing with controversial issues about the Middle East, some people may be favorable or unfavorable,” he said. “Rumors start, and that’s the only thing I can think would draw attention from a government agency.”
Attempts by FoxNews.com to reach Pino via phone and email were unsuccessful.
The FBI has already questioned several of Pino’s colleagues and students, the Beacon Journal reported.
Emily Mills, the editor-in-chief of student newspaper the Kent Stater, said she was among those interviewed.
“They said they were looking into his alleged ties to the Islamic State,” Mills told the Beacon Journal. “They said it was an ongoing investigation and that they were questioning faculty and other students.”
A Kent State spokesperson said the FBI assured the college there was no threat to the school.
Pino has a long history of making controversial and anti-Semitic statements.
In a 2014 “open letter” to “academic friends of Israel,” he accused pro-Israel members of the academic community as being “directly responsible for the murder of over 1,400 Palestinian children, women and elderly civilians.” He signed that letter “Jihad until victory!”
He also shouted “Death to Israel” during a presentation by a former Israeli official in 2011, eulogized a Palestinian suicide bomber in the Kent Stater and allegedly posted jihad-promoting messages on a jihad website in 2007.
The call to join ISIS from Pino's purported Facebook page was just one of many troubling posts.
In the "Intro" section the account claims Pino studied "Overthrowing the Government at UCLA." Pino received his Ph.D. in History from UCLA, according to his Kent State online bio.
On Sept. 14, 2014, the account posted a photo of two masked Islamist fighters with the comment, "Keep it a secret: That's me on the left!"
In August 2012, the account posted a photo of Pino standing in front of the U.S. Capitol Building. A comment below the picture from Pino's account said, "I come to bury D.C., not to praise it."
Ryan Mauro, a National Security Analyst for the Clarion Project, called some of the postings "smoking gun material."
"Anyone that is a supporter of ISIS needs to be considered an imminent threat," Mauro told FoxNews.com. "If I was a student there, I would not go on campus, personally."
A Fulbright Scholar and a member of Phi Beta Keppa, Pino has written numerous magazine and journal articles and authored a book in 1997, "Family and Favela: The Reproduction of Poverty in Rio de Janeiro." Pino is listed in "Who's Who in American Education" and "Who's Who in America."
Pino has a B-minus average on ratemyprofessors.com and numerous bad reviews from former students.
"Pushes his personal views WAY too much," one student wrote. "Stay away from him. Awful professor."
Another wrote: "This professor is knowledgeable, but may insult you with his opinions."
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