Benghazi victim's sister shocked by Bill Clinton's comments

The Edge: Cruz booms, but Palin gets Trump mega media

Has Trump become part of the Washington establishment?

 

THE EDGE: CRUZ BOOMS, BUT PALIN GETS TRUMP MEGA MEDIA
Ted Cruz is starting to horn in on GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s media monopoly. But just as Cruz was cresting, Trump found a new way to get the press back to wall-to-wall coverage of his campaign.
In this week’s installment of The Edge, a one-of-a-kind measurement of media mentions from the New Analytics Company, Cruz rocketed into second place with by far the biggest gains since last week.
But lest he lose his stranglehold on political coverage, Trump rolled out the one endorsement guaranteed to put the mainstream press into a frenzy: former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Despite the overwhelmingly negative tone of the coverage, as is often the case with Trump, the sheer volume drowned out other voices. A separate analysis from New Analytics shows that Trump and Palin dominated the discussion on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The Edge “scrubs” television, radio, print, internet and social media for mentions of the 2016 candidates. The team at New Analytics has built unique tool to measure which candidates are being talked about the most and the data are compiled into a single score and provided to Fox News First.

Here are their rankings for media mentions this week, with their gain or decline from last week in brackets. See the full results here.

Donald Trump, 27.05 [+1.55]; Ted Cruz, 15.68 [+4.24]; Ben Carson, 13.97 [+1.32]; Marco Rubio, 12.12 [+1.68]; Jeb Bush, 9.32 [-2.79]; Chris Christie, 5.83 [-1.37]; Rand Paul, 5.04 [-.23]; Carly Fiorina, 4.69 [-1.88]; John Kasich, 4.38 [-.83]; Mike Huckabee, 3.95 [-1.17]

Kansas lawmaker imposes dress code on female witnesses

File-This May 9, 2011, file photo shows Kansas House Pensions and Benefits Committee Chairman Mitch Holmes, a St. John Republican, at the Statehouse in Topeka, Kan. (AP)

A Kansas lawmaker came under fire Thursday from female legislators after he imposed a dress code that prevents women testifying on bills from wearing low-cut necklines and miniskirts.
State Sen. Mitch Holmes issued an 11-point code of conduct to urge women how to dress. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that Holmes’ rules don’t include any restrictions on men because, according to Holmes, men don’t need instructions on how to look professional.
"Oh, for crying out loud, what century is this?" Sen. Laura Kelly, a Topeka Democrat, said Thursday.
Holmes, 53, is the chairman of the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee. He said he wrote the instruction because provocatively dressed women are a distraction. The guidelines don't detail a minimum skirt length or a permissible neckline for blouses.
"It's one of those things that's hard to define," Holmes said. "Put it out there and let people know we're really looking for you to be addressing the issue rather than trying to distract or bring eyes to yourself."
Holmes did think about adding a provision on how men should dress, but decided males didn’t need any guidance. He expects lobbyists to understand the rules when interacting with his committee, although he acknowledged infrequent visitors to the Statehouse might be unaware.
Female senators said no one should impose gender-specific demands on those testifying before committees.
"Who's going to define low-cut?" said Sen. Vicki Schmidt, a Topeka Republican. "Does it apply to senators?"
Sen. Carolyn McGinn, a Sedgwick Republican, said people who don't have clothes that meet Holmes' standards might be deterred from testifying.
"I am more interested in what they have to say about the direction our state should go than what they're wearing that day," McGinn said.
State Sen. Oletha Faust-Goudeau, of Wichita, the ranking Democrat on the Senate’s elections and ethics committee, said people testifying before committees ought to present themselves in a professional way but she was put off by the lack of consistency for men and women.
"In my 13 years in the Legislature, that's the first time I've ever read anything like that," Faust-Goudeau said. "I thought it was a little strange."
Senate President Susan Wagle, a Wichita Republican, predicted the committee will reconsider the dress code Wednesday at its next meeting. Wagle, who is a member of the committee but wasn't present when the rules were given to members, indicated she isn't inclined to intervene personally.
"The legislative process eventually always evolves to a consensus of the majority without leadership having to take action," she told The Associated Press.
Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley, a Topeka Democrat, told the AP that the "irony" of the dress code was that it came from a committee that "should be more concerned about violations of campus finance law than what women wear."
"Coming from a man, I think it's important that women are supported in the choices that they make for themselves," he said.
Kansas lawmakers had a previous controversy in 2014 over interns and how they were dressing. State Rep. Peggy Mast decided that interns during the session had to comply with an expanded dress code, according to the Capital-Journal.
Mast sought to have males wear a dress shirt, tie, slacks and suit and their hair neatly styled. Females could wear business attire with a “dressy” top. Mini-skirt and tight pants – along with revealing necklines – were prohibited.

Trump endorsed by John Wayne's daughter

WINTERSET, Iowa –  Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is kicking off a swing through Iowa at the John Wayne Birthplace Museum, where he received an endorsement from the western film actor's daughter, Aissa Wayne.
The endorsement was announced Tuesday in front of a life-size, rifle-toting model of the actor in full cowboy gear.
Aissa Wayne says the country needs a strong and courageous leader like her father. She said John Wayne would be offering his endorsement if he were still alive.
Trump says he was a big fan of Wayne and that the actor represented strength and power — which the American people are looking for.
He says, "We have exactly the opposite from John Wayne right now in this country."
The museum includes an extensive collection of memorabilia from Wayne's movies.

Meg and Don Cartoon

Leading conservative voices unite to stop Trump?

Leading conservative voices unite to stop Trump?

And guess what it's no surprise that it is featured on the Fox's Kelly Files.

Megyn Kelly

Clinton emails so secret some lawmakers can't read them

Some of Hillary Clinton’s emails on her private server contained information so secret that senior lawmakers who oversee the State Department cannot read them without fulfilling additional security requirements, Fox News has learned.
The emails in question, as Fox News first reported earlier this week, contained intelligence classified at a level beyond “top secret.” Because of this designation, not all the lawmakers on key committees reviewing the case have high enough clearances.
A source with knowledge of the intelligence review told Fox News that senior members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, despite having high-level clearances, are among those not authorized to read the intelligence from so-called “special access programs” without taking additional security steps -- like signing new non-disclosure agreements.
These programs are highly restricted to protect intelligence community sources and methods.
As Fox News previously reported, a Jan. 14 letter from Intelligence Community Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III to senior lawmakers said an intelligence review identified "several dozen" additional classified emails -- including specific intelligence from "special access programs" (SAP).
That indicates a level of classification beyond even “top secret,” the label previously given to two emails found on her server, and brings even more scrutiny to the Democratic presidential candidate’s handling of the government’s closely held secrets.
Fox News is told that the reviewers who handled the SAP intelligence identified in Clinton’s emails had to sign additional non-disclosure agreements even though they already have the highest level of clearance -- known as TS/SCI or Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented information. This detail was first reported by NBC News.
This alone seems to undercut the former secretary of state’s and other officials’ claims that the material is "innocuous."
In an interview with NPR, Clinton claimed the latest IG finding doesn’t change anything and suggested it was politically motivated.
“This seems to me to be, you know, another effort to inject this into the campaign, it's another leak,” she said. “I'm just going to leave it up to the professionals at the Justice Department because nothing that this says changes the fact that I never sent or received material marked classified.”
Despite Clinton's claims, it is the content that is classified; the markings on the documents do not affect that.
A former Justice Department official said there is another problem -- warnings from State Department IT employees and others that she should be using a government account.
“If you have a situation where someone was knowingly violating the law and that they knew that what they were doing was prohibited by federal law because other people were saying, you're violating the law, knock it off, and they disregarded that advice and they went ahead, that's a very difficult case to defend,” Thomas Dupree said.

Palin takes heat from veterans for using son's arrest, PTSD to criticize Obama

Sarah Palin is taking heat from veterans for seeming to point the finger at President Obama over mental issues her son may be dealing with following his Iraq war service.
Her son Track was arrested earlier this week on domestic violence charges, and Palin publicly addressed the case Wednesday during a post-endorsement appearance on the campaign trail for Donald Trump. She appeared to link his alleged behavior to post-traumatic stress disorder – and used it to criticize Obama’s veteran policies.
But Paul Rieckhoff, the head of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), criticized the former Alaska governor’s comments Wednesday night.
He tweeted: “We need more programs and less politics to battle PTSD.”
Speaking with NBC News, he also said, “"It's not President Obama's fault that Sarah Palin's son has PTSD.”
He called PTSD a “very serious problem” and reportedly urged Palin not to “politicize” it.
"I hope this doesn't become a portable chew toy in a political campaign," he said, according to NBC News.
The comments touched off a Twitter exchange with other military servicemembers concerned about Palin’s remarks. One, who identified as a retired Army veteran, said her comments could cause “perceptual problems & future treatment issues” for those diagnosed with PTSD.
Palin addressed the “elephant in the room” – her son’s arrest – at her first stop on the campaign trail for Trump after endorsing him Tuesday.
“My son, like so many others, they come back a bit different,” she said in Tulsa, Okla. “They come back hardened. They come back wondering if there is that respect for what it is that their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have sacrificially given to this country and that starts at the top.”
Palin said military members look at Obama and question whether he knows the sacrifices they make to “secure America and to secure freedoms.”
“So when my own son is going through what he is going through coming back, I can certainly relate with other families who kinda feel these ramifications of some PTSD,” she said.
Track, a 26-year-old Iraq veteran, was arraigned Tuesday on charges of domestic violence assault, interfering with a report of domestic violence crime and possession of a firearm while intoxicated.
According to the police affidavit posted by KTVA-TV, officers were called to the residence Monday night following two 911 calls – the first from Track’s girlfriend and the second from him.
The woman claimed Track had “punched her in the face and that a firearm was involved,” according to police records.
The charges against Track were filed the same day Palin appeared at an Ames, Iowa, rally to endorse Trump, the current GOP frontrunner.

Trump and Sanders: How the insurgents are blowing up their parties

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have given a shock to the Republican and Democratic presidential races

Now it’s the Democrats’ turn to panic.
After a year in which the remnants of the Republican establishment has agonized over how to stop Donald Trump and now Ted Cruz, the Democratic party elders are now sweating bullets over Bernie Sanders.
Both the Trump tsunami and the Sanders surge were utterly underestimated by the media, for the same reason the political class is feeling desperate. The elites were blindsided by the degree of anger and frustration among voters of all political stripes.
The conventional wisdom at the start of 2015 was that Jeb Bush was a strong front-runner and Hillary Clinton was a lock. Now there is intense finger-pointing in Bush World for Jeb’s failure to emerge from single digits, and Hillary’s early-state strategy is being second-guessed as Sanders has raced to a huge lead in New Hampshire and threatens to beat her in Iowa.
What Bush and Clinton have in common, besides hailing from dynastic families, is that they were the safe choices expected to seize their respective crowns with vast sums provided by mega-donors. They are also 20th-century figures trying to retool themselves for a new century: Hillary first stood by her man in the 1992 campaign (and again during the Monica uproar of ’98), while Jeb first ran for Florida governor in 1994 and hasn’t held office since 2006. They’re both steady, serious and kinda dull.
Along come Trump and Sanders, neither one given a chance by the prognosticators, and they’re drawing bigger crowds and generating more enthusiasm than their rivals. Despite their vastly different ideologies, both are running against the establishment. Sanders, who spent his career as an independent, has even called Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign, which are backing Hillary, part of the establishment.
Trump, who doesn’t need to raise money, has shattered the rules of engagement and forced his rivals to be more aggressive on issues like illegal immigration; Sanders, who has raised far more dough than anyone imagined, has pushed Clinton to the left on health care and taxes.
Liberal commentators have enjoyed the spectacle of a GOP civil war, with some leading voices on the right declaring that the party will commit suicide by nominating Trump or Cruz, who as a freshman senator has alienated the establishment. But now it’s the Democratic elders who are freaking out about the possibility of a self-proclaimed socialist leading their ticket and dooming many down-ballot candidates.
“The Republicans won’t touch him [in the primaries] because they can’t wait to run an ad with a hammer and sickle,” Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Hillary supporter, told the New York Times.

In most campaigns, the insurgent candidate basks in the media spotlight but ultimately fades: Herman Cain. Rick Santorum. Howard Dean. Bill Bradley. Pat Robertson. Gary Hart.
But 2016 isn’t most campaign years. And what Trump, Cruz and Sanders have done is expose the weakness of the establishment, in both parties, along with the myopia of the media.
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.

RNC cuts debate ties with conservative magazine over anti-Trump issue

Leading conservative voices unite to stop Trump

The Republican National Committee announced late Thursday that the venerable conservative magazine National Review

This magazine has been grossly misnamed as being conservative. It is so far left it should be called the

Communist Manifesto.

had been dropped as a debate sponsor after it published an issue devoted to why voters should reject Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
RNC spokesman Sean Spicer confirmed to Buzzfeed News that the magazine had been dropped as a sponsor of the Feb. 25 debate in Houston, saying "a debate moderator can't have a predisposition."
"We expected this was coming," National Review publisher Jack Fowler wrote in a blog post early Friday, calling the RNC move  a "small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald."
The move by the RNC leaves CNN, Salem Media and Telemundo as the remaining debate sponsors. Earlier this week, the RNC announced that it had severed ties with NBC, the previously scheduled debate host, due to dissatisfaction with the way the network conducted a debate on CNBC this past October.
The National Review issue, described as a "symposium", featured a collection of scathing anti-Trump essays from noted conservatives, underscoring the deep resistance that remains to his unorthodox candidacy, despite his commanding lead in early polls.
Two of the National Review essays came from Fox News contributors Katie Pavlich and Cal Thomas.
"Trump’s liberal positions aren’t in the distant past—he has openly promoted them on the campaign trail," Pavrich wrote. "Trump isn’t fighting for anyone but himself, which has been his pattern for decades."
At an event in Las Vegas late Thursday, Trump described the magazine "a dying paper" out for publicity. Ironically, Trump named the magazine's late founder, William F. Buckley Jr., during last week's Republican debate as an example of a conservative who came from New York in response to Sen. Ted Cruz's jibe about Trump representing "New York values".

Trump also claimed Thursday that Republican powerbrokers are "warming up" to his candidacy.
I want to be honest, I have received so many phone calls from people that you would call establishment, from people — generally speaking ... conservatives, Republicans — that want to come onto our team," Trump told reporters in Las Vegas before an appearance at the Outdoor Sportsman Awards, also announced the endorsement of "Duck Dynasty" star Willie Robertson.
"We are getting calls from everybody that it's actually amazing. I'm actually surprised," he added. He declined to provide names.