Tuesday, December 6, 2016
Biden says, 'I'm going to run in 2020'
:-) |
"I'm going to run in 2020," Biden, 74, told a group of reporters at the Capitol Monday evening. "So, uh, what the hell, man."
When asked if he was serious or joking, the vice president paused for about four seconds and sighed. He was then asked if he would run for president.
"Yeah, I am," Biden said. "Yeah, I am. We're going to run again."
When pressed further, Biden backed away somewhat from his statement, saying, "I'm not committing not to run. I learned a long time ago fate has a funny way of intervening."
Biden was on Capitol Hill to preside over the Senate as it cleared away procedural hurdles to a biomedical research bill he's supporting. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., got the Senate to rename a portion of the bill after the vice president's son Beau, who died of brain cancer last year.
Biden's possible entry into the 2016 presidential race was a subject of intense will-he-or-won't-he speculation. He ultimately decided last October not to challenge eventual Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders.
The vice president previously sought the Democratic nomination in 1988 and 2008. He suspended his first campaign in September 1987 after becoming embroiled in a series of plagiarism controversies. In 2008, Biden ended his bid for the Democratic nomination after the Iowa caucuses and later endorsed then-Sen. Barack Obama.
Biden will turn 78 shortly after the 2020 election. Ronald Reagan was just a few days short of turning 78 when he left office in January 1989, making him the oldest person to serve as president.
Gingrich: Trump's phone call with Taiwan leader 'a very tough signal to Beijing'
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich defended President-elect Donald Trump's phone conversation with Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, saying the break with decades-long diplomatic tradition was a "deliberate ... specific signal."
In an interview with Fox News' Sean Hannity Monday night, Gingrich favorably compared Trump's Taiwan call to President Barack Obama's visit to Cuba earlier this year.
FORMER OBAMA NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER SAYS TRUMP CALL WITH TAIWAN 'DIDN'T BOTHER ME'
"[Trump] accepted a phone call from the freely elected head of a democracy of 23 million people and frankly, if it’s OK for President Obama to go down and hang out with the Castro dictatorship, it ought to be OK for Donald Trump to talk to a democracy," Gingrich said.
"But he’s also sending a very tough signal to Beijing," the former Speaker continued. "This ain’t the old order, we’re not gonna let you push us around. You don’t dictate to us."
Gingrich also defended Trump's agreement with Carrier that enabled the air conditioning manufacturer to keep hundreds of jobs in Indiana, calling the president-elect a pragmatist "in the classic American sense."
"Trump is the first American president to realize that we are in a worldwide economic competition, just like the 50 states are in competition," Gingrich said. "I mean, these guys who yell 'free trade!', have they ever tried doing business in Mexico? Have they tried doing business in China? What are they talking about?
"I think these guys who are sitting around these academic centers spouting off ideology are as much out of touch with reality as left-wingers who are sitting around similar centers spouting off their version of ideology."
Pentagon reportedly buried study exposing $125 billion in waste
Senior defense officials suppressed a study documenting $125 billion worth of administrative waste at the Pentagon out of fears that Congress would use its findings to cut the defense budget, the Washington Post reported late Monday.
The report, which was issued in January 2015 by the advisory Defense Business Board (DBB), called for a series of reforms that would have saved the department $125 billion over the next five years.
Among its other findings, the report showed that the Defense Department was paying just over 1 million contractors, civilian employees and uniformed personnel to fill back-office jobs. That number nearly matches the amount of active duty troops — 1.3 million, the lowest since 1940.
The Post reported that some Pentagon leaders feared the study's findings would undermine their claims that years of budget sequestration had left the military short of money. In response, they imposed security restrictions on information used in the study and even pulled a summary report from a Pentagon website.
"They’re all complaining that they don’t have any money," former DBB chairman Robert Stein told the Post. "We proposed a way to save a ton of money."
Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, who originally ordered the study, told the paper that the plan laid out in the report was "unrealistic."
"There is this meme that we’re some bloated, giant organization,” Work said. “Although there is a little bit of truth in that ... I think it vastly overstates what’s really going on."
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook echoed Work's claim in a statement to Fox News, which said that the DBB report "had limited value" because it "lacked specific, actionable recommendations appropriate to the department."
Work claimed that some of the report's recommendations were being implemented on a smaller scale and would save an estimated $30 billion by 2020. However, the Post reported that most of the programs had been long-planned or unreleated to the Defense Business Board report.
The limits of outrage: Liberal journalists coming to grips with Trump's win, Hillary's loss
Kurtz: Are anti-Trump pundits guilty of ‘outrage porn’? |
As liberal pundits struggle to come to terms with the
Trump victory they never expected, some are finally pulling themselves
out of denial.
They are still appalled by Donald Trump, but they are edging toward more honesty about why Hillary Clinton lost and how they need to calibrate their opposition to the next president.
I don’t think the media have gotten over the shock either. Trump continues to use disruptive tactics, and many journalists are still smacking their foreheads in the belief that “this is not how it’s supposed to be done.” It’s the same mistake they made during the campaign. Governing is much harder, of course, and some tactics can backfire, but every president brings his own style—and takes advantage of new technology.
In a kind of meta-tweet, Trump wrote yesterday: “If the press would cover me accurately & honorably, I would have far less reason to ‘tweet.’ Sadly, I don't know if that will ever happen!”
Almost everything Trump has done since the election has kept him in the news, and has riled up the left. He gets little credit for conciliatory gestures. I mean, the guy met with Al Gore yesterday and talked about finding common ground on climate change. That certainly seems like reaching out.
In the New Republic, Eric Sasson, while ripping Trump, suggests that the liberal side might want to dial it down:
“It is painfully clear that all our outrage didn’t work. And now there’s a danger of getting sucked into a vortex of what I’d like to refer to as ‘outrage porn.’”
In other words, everything shouldn’t be cranked up to 11.
“Trump’s horrific statements aren’t going to stop. He’s going to keep tweeting about every sleight and alleged offense, from Hamilton controversies to unflattering Saturday Night Live sketches to the untold thousands of protests and articles and taunts forthcoming. And he will use these incidents to cement his reputation as a political outsider with his voters. He will weaponize these reactions, holding them up as proof of just how much know-it-all elites loathe his ‘deplorable’ white base.”
The piece argues that Trump’s more entertaining tweets distract from his business conflicts and controversies, and that left-wingers have every right to be outraged about, say, his Cabinet picks:
“But shouting into an echo chamber will not amplify our voices. To the extent that our outrage forces us to stay vigilant and harness our anger to formulate a plan of resistance, it can be useful. But we must remind ourselves that the television media, especially the cable news networks, will continue to highlight the glamorous if petty squabbles like the one between Trump and Alec Baldwin, while paying almost no attention to issues of grave importance like climate change.”
I would argue that the media’s coverage of Trump, tweets and all, is getting more substantive. The journalistic uproar over his call with Taiwan’s president wound up sparking a debate about the U.S. relationship with Taiwan (which is strong, despite the polite fiction that it doesn’t really exist) and the risk of antagonizing China (whose cooperation we will need on North Korea and other geopolitical matters).
At the same time, the initial media reports fed the narrative of Trump as a foreign policy neophyte unconcerned with decades of protocol. But the Washington Post reported yesterday that pro-Taiwan Trump advisers had been working on the call for weeks.
The same goes for Trump doing a deal to save 1,000 Carrier jobs in Indiana. The press loved the symbolism, but has explored whether the tax breaks involved amount to crony capitalism and provide leverage for other companies considering moving production to foreign countries.
There also may be an evolution on the left on the reasons for Clinton’s loss. (Yes, she won over 2.5 million more popular votes, but everyone builds their campaigns to win the Electoral College.)
In the Huffington Post, which when Arianna ran it included an editor’s note eviscerating Trump as a racist in every story, Zach Carter sympathizes with the Clinton campaign, but says its “defense of its own righteousness helps explain why the election was close to begin with.”
While Trump ran a “deeply bigoted campaign,” he insists, “his dominant performance among white working-class voters wasn’t due to his campaign message alone. Much of Clinton’s poor performance resulted from her campaign’s strategic decision to not even contest the demographic. A good chunk of the Democratic Party intelligentsia applauded Clinton for taking the moral high ground, declaring the entire white working class to be a deplorable racist swamp. The notion that economic issues played literally no role ― zero ― in Trump’s appeal became a common Democratic talking point. Democrats were Good People, and anyone even considering voting for Trump was a Bad Person.”
While saying some working-class Trump fans may be bigots, the author says, “the job of a presidential candidate is to appeal to our better angels and win votes anyway…Writing off the white working class is a pretty bad way to start…All of this was obvious to the Democratic Party, which plowed ahead anyway, insisting that anyone who wasn’t on board with the first woman president was a vile sexist.”
During the campaign I argued that Hillary didn’t seem to have much of a core message other than not being the scary Donald Trump. Now her folks could point you to 25 policy planks on the economy, but to me she didn’t seem to speak to people who worked in factory or service jobs and are anxious about their future. And, of course, she blew off Michigan and Wisconsin till the very end of the campaign, assuming the states would as usual vote for the Obama party.
Media liberals who want to rebuild the Democratic Party or effectively challenge Trump need to grapple more honestly with the earthquake of 2016. Some are finally digging their way out of the rubble.
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.
They are still appalled by Donald Trump, but they are edging toward more honesty about why Hillary Clinton lost and how they need to calibrate their opposition to the next president.
I don’t think the media have gotten over the shock either. Trump continues to use disruptive tactics, and many journalists are still smacking their foreheads in the belief that “this is not how it’s supposed to be done.” It’s the same mistake they made during the campaign. Governing is much harder, of course, and some tactics can backfire, but every president brings his own style—and takes advantage of new technology.
In a kind of meta-tweet, Trump wrote yesterday: “If the press would cover me accurately & honorably, I would have far less reason to ‘tweet.’ Sadly, I don't know if that will ever happen!”
Almost everything Trump has done since the election has kept him in the news, and has riled up the left. He gets little credit for conciliatory gestures. I mean, the guy met with Al Gore yesterday and talked about finding common ground on climate change. That certainly seems like reaching out.
In the New Republic, Eric Sasson, while ripping Trump, suggests that the liberal side might want to dial it down:
“It is painfully clear that all our outrage didn’t work. And now there’s a danger of getting sucked into a vortex of what I’d like to refer to as ‘outrage porn.’”
In other words, everything shouldn’t be cranked up to 11.
“Trump’s horrific statements aren’t going to stop. He’s going to keep tweeting about every sleight and alleged offense, from Hamilton controversies to unflattering Saturday Night Live sketches to the untold thousands of protests and articles and taunts forthcoming. And he will use these incidents to cement his reputation as a political outsider with his voters. He will weaponize these reactions, holding them up as proof of just how much know-it-all elites loathe his ‘deplorable’ white base.”
The piece argues that Trump’s more entertaining tweets distract from his business conflicts and controversies, and that left-wingers have every right to be outraged about, say, his Cabinet picks:
“But shouting into an echo chamber will not amplify our voices. To the extent that our outrage forces us to stay vigilant and harness our anger to formulate a plan of resistance, it can be useful. But we must remind ourselves that the television media, especially the cable news networks, will continue to highlight the glamorous if petty squabbles like the one between Trump and Alec Baldwin, while paying almost no attention to issues of grave importance like climate change.”
I would argue that the media’s coverage of Trump, tweets and all, is getting more substantive. The journalistic uproar over his call with Taiwan’s president wound up sparking a debate about the U.S. relationship with Taiwan (which is strong, despite the polite fiction that it doesn’t really exist) and the risk of antagonizing China (whose cooperation we will need on North Korea and other geopolitical matters).
At the same time, the initial media reports fed the narrative of Trump as a foreign policy neophyte unconcerned with decades of protocol. But the Washington Post reported yesterday that pro-Taiwan Trump advisers had been working on the call for weeks.
The same goes for Trump doing a deal to save 1,000 Carrier jobs in Indiana. The press loved the symbolism, but has explored whether the tax breaks involved amount to crony capitalism and provide leverage for other companies considering moving production to foreign countries.
There also may be an evolution on the left on the reasons for Clinton’s loss. (Yes, she won over 2.5 million more popular votes, but everyone builds their campaigns to win the Electoral College.)
In the Huffington Post, which when Arianna ran it included an editor’s note eviscerating Trump as a racist in every story, Zach Carter sympathizes with the Clinton campaign, but says its “defense of its own righteousness helps explain why the election was close to begin with.”
While Trump ran a “deeply bigoted campaign,” he insists, “his dominant performance among white working-class voters wasn’t due to his campaign message alone. Much of Clinton’s poor performance resulted from her campaign’s strategic decision to not even contest the demographic. A good chunk of the Democratic Party intelligentsia applauded Clinton for taking the moral high ground, declaring the entire white working class to be a deplorable racist swamp. The notion that economic issues played literally no role ― zero ― in Trump’s appeal became a common Democratic talking point. Democrats were Good People, and anyone even considering voting for Trump was a Bad Person.”
While saying some working-class Trump fans may be bigots, the author says, “the job of a presidential candidate is to appeal to our better angels and win votes anyway…Writing off the white working class is a pretty bad way to start…All of this was obvious to the Democratic Party, which plowed ahead anyway, insisting that anyone who wasn’t on board with the first woman president was a vile sexist.”
During the campaign I argued that Hillary didn’t seem to have much of a core message other than not being the scary Donald Trump. Now her folks could point you to 25 policy planks on the economy, but to me she didn’t seem to speak to people who worked in factory or service jobs and are anxious about their future. And, of course, she blew off Michigan and Wisconsin till the very end of the campaign, assuming the states would as usual vote for the Obama party.
Media liberals who want to rebuild the Democratic Party or effectively challenge Trump need to grapple more honestly with the earthquake of 2016. Some are finally digging their way out of the rubble.
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.
Iran vows not to let Trump destroy nuclear deal
Iran vows not to let President-elect Donald Trump to rip up its nuclear agreement that was signed with world powers, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said Tuesday.
"(Trump) wants to do many things, but none of his actions would affect us ... Do you think the United States can rip up the JCPOA (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal)? Do you think we and our nation will let him do that?” Rouhani said in a speech at the University of Tehran.
Rouhani added, "Some man is elected in the U.S. whatever plans he has, it will be revealed later. Yes, he may desire many things. He may desire to weaken the nuclear deal. He may desire to rip up the deal. Do you suppose we will allow this?"
The Iranian leader’s remarks were the latest attempt by the country to calm concerns over the future of the deal in the wake of Trump’s election.
Trump has vowed to renegotiate the deal, possibly imperiling an agreement that has put off the immediate threat of Tehran developing atomic weapons.
On the campaign trail, Trump called the deal “catastrophic” and vowed to renegotiate it. However, Trump’s video in which he laid out his first 100 days in office mentioned nothing about the deal.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in Beijing on Monday that each of the seven world powers involved in the agreement “have the obligation to fully implement it.”
The July 2015 deal came after two years of negotiations between Iran, the United States, China, Britain, France, Germany and Russia. The agreement imposed strict limits on Iran's nuclear activity in exchange for the end of wide-ranging oil, trade and financial sanctions.
The Senate on Thursday noted to extend the Iran Sanctions Act by 10 years. Rouhani told Iranian Parliament Sunday that Obama is “obliged” to let the sanctions expire.
Rouhani promised a "prompt response" from Iran if the U.S. sanctions are extended.
"We are committed to an acceptable implementation of the deal but in response to non-commitment, violation or hesitation in its implementation, we will act promptly," he said.
Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi also warned the U.S. of a “firm and strong reaction” if it persists in actions he claims are endangering the nuclear deal.
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