Madison Cartoon

Trump turns attack on Walker

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Sunday turned his attack on rival Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, in his soaring and often unpredictable campaign that has largely targeted frontrunners but spared essentially nobody.

“His state has not performed well,” Trump, the billionaire businessman who now leads in most polls, told ABC’s “This Week.” “We need someone who’s going to make it perform well, this country perform well. … I’m the one to do it.”
Like many political candidates, Trump is spending the early part of the election cycle trying to downgrade the early favorites -- in this case Republican Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, and Democrat Hillary Clinton, a former secretary of state.
Still, Walker, another early favorite who remains a top-tier contender, was more than willing to block and tackle, telling ABC later in the morning that Trump sounds like a Democrat when attack his record as a two-term governor.
“He’s using the talking points of the Democrats,” Walker said. “They didn’t work in the past. They’re not going to work now.”
Trump essentially said he was unconcerned about the campaign for Walker, who trails Trump and Bush in an averaging of polls by the nonpartisan website RealClearPolitics.com.
He argued that Wisconsin has a $2.2 billion deficit, instead of an anticipated $1 billion surplus and that Walker has been forced to borrow money instead of raising taxes to keep state projects going.
Trump argued that people’s realization about Wisconsin’s situation is reflected in Walker’s declining polls numbers.
Walker, who began a second term is January, disagreed by saying the state’s roads and schools have improved under his leadership.
However, he acknowledged the voter frustration into which Trump and other first-time candidates have tapped, albeit misdirected at him.
“It’s why you see not only (Trump’s) numbers up, you see some of the other candidates who have not run for office before,” Walker said. “They’re angry at Washington. Heck, I’m angry at Washington. I’m angry at my own party’s leadership, who told us there were going to repeal ObamaCare and we still don’t see a bill on the desk of the president.”
Trump has also attacked Clinton, suggesting that her email controversy has put her campaign in jeopardy; Bush for comments about federal spending on women's heath care and even fellow GOP candidate and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Trump suggested Perry stared wearing eye glasses to look smarter. Perry's polls numbers are at about 1.5 percent, among the lowest of the top 17 GOP candidates.

Walker appears to take third stance in seven days on birthright citizenship issue

Republican presidential candidate Scott Walker said Sunday he doesn’t support a change to the country’s birthright citizenship laws, appearing to take a third stance on the issue in seven days.
The Wisconsin governor told ABC’s “This Week” that U.S. officials need to “enforce the laws, including those that are in the Constitution.”

Walker made the statement after fellow GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump raised the issue in an Aug. 16 white paper focusing on whether the 14th amendment provides for such rights.
Trump suggested some pregnant women are coming to the United States simply to give birth to secure their family’s stay in the country, which he claims is a misuse of the law. He also said his lawyers think the amendment might not withstand a legal challenge.
"Well, I said the law is there,” Walker said Sunday, arguing he prefers to address the problem of illegal immigration by bolstering border security and requiring employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of prospective hires.
At the Iowa State Fair on Monday, Walker told MSNBC that birthright citizenship should be ended.
"Yeah, absolutely, going forward," he said, arguing like Trump that Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid has also supported such a plan. "To me it's about enforcing the laws in this country.”
Walker was less clear on Tuesday, however. When asked by Fox News about his position on the issue, he said: “I believe (in) securing the border, enforcing the laws. … I do not believe in amnesty going forward. I believe in a legal immigration system that gives priority to American working families and their wages in a way that will improve the American economy.”
Walker also said Sunday that any discussion on immigration that goes beyond focusing on border security and enforcing the laws “should be a red flag to voters.”
The issue has caused some division within the GOP field.
Ben Carson, a retired pediatric neurosurgeon and another of the 17 major GOP candidates, said Tuesday that the U.S. allowing so-called “anchor babies” to stay just “doesn’t make any sense at all.”
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham agreed, saying the birthright citizenship issue must be addressed but disagreeing with Trump’s call for “forced deportation.”
The issue has also been complicated for another GOP candidate.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, a former Supreme Court lawyer, suggested in 2011 that conservatives would be making a “mistake” in trying to fight against the amendment. Last week, however, Cruz, who was born in Canada to an American-born mother and Cuban immigrant father, said he supports changes to birthright citizenship.

Mukasey: FBI probe is about Hillary Clinton, not her private emails

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey said Sunday that Hillary Clinton is indeed the focus of a Justice Department probe, calling the argument that the investigation is about her private email network when she was secretary of state “ridiculous.”

“The FBI doesn’t investigate machines,” Mukasey, a Bush administration attorney general, told “Fox News Sunday." “It investigates people.”
"It is not a political witch hunt," he said.
For months, questions about the private email network Clinton used while secretary of state have nagged her 2016 Democratic presidential campaign.
In recent weeks, the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community have asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into whether Clinton’s network received or sent classified emails.
Clinton and her campaign have repeatedly said that she neither sent nor received classified email. And they have argued the investigation is not a “criminal” probe and that government nomenclature is at the center of the issue.
"What's going on here is something that happens all the time," Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon recently argued. "You have a bureaucratic tangle over what counts as classified and what doesn't."
Mukasey, an adviser for Republican Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, said arguments about what information was either classified or unclassified is “at the margins” of the debate.
“It’s inconceivable that a great deal of the information was unclassified,” he told Fox.
However, Mukasey acknowledged that the issue of Clinton perhaps or eventually facing criminal charges like now-retired Gen. David Petraeus would depend on what she knew about the content of the exchanges.
Petraeus gave classified information to a female writer with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
Former California Democratic Rep. Ellen Tauscher, who is now a Clinton campaign surrogate, on Sunday largely dismissed the email controversy as a political attack.
“We can quibble about what [emails] should be re-classified when they go out to the public, but that’s dancing on the head of a pin,” she told Fox. “That’s partisan politics.” 

American train attack heroes awarded France's highest honor

The three Americans who helped thwart a massacre on board a high-speed European train were awarded the Legion d'honneur (Legion of Honor), France's highest decoration, by the country's president Monday.

U.S. Airman Spencer Stone, National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, and their longtime friend Anthony Sadler were honored for tackling and subduing a suspected Islamist militant carrying an AK-47 on the Paris-bound train Friday.
Francois Hollande praised the actions of the three men, saying "You behaved as soldiers but also as responsible men." Hollande added that the men demonstrated "that faced with terror, we have the power to resist ... You also gave a lesson in courage, in will, and thus in hope." British businessman Chris Norman, who helped Stone, Skarlatos, and Sadler subdue the would-be gunman, also received the medal.
On Sunday evening, Stone, who was stabbed with a box cutter during the melee, described his version of the events on the train for the first time during a press conference at the U.S. ambassador's residence in Paris.
The 23-year-old described how he was waking up from a deep sleep when Skarlatos "just hit me on the shoulder and said 'Let's go.'"
Stone and Skarlatos, 22, moved in to tackle the gunman, identified as 26-year-old Moroccan Ayoub El-Khazzani, and take his assault rifle. Sadler, 23, moved in to help subdue the assailant. "All three of us started punching" him, Stone said. Stone said he choked him unconscious.

More on this...

• French train gunman belonged to radical Islamist movement

On Monday, Hollande said that with Skarlatos' words, a "veritable carnage" was avoided.
"Since Friday, the entire world admires your courage, your sangfroid, your spirit of solidarity," the French president said. "This is what allowed you to with bare hands -- your bare hands -- to subdue an armed man. This must be an example for all, and a source of inspiration."
Stone is also credited with saving a French-American teacher wounded in the neck with a gunshot wound and squirting blood. Stone described matter-of-factly that he "just stuck two of my fingers in his hole and found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped." He said he kept the position until paramedics arrived.
"When most of us would run away, Spencer, Alek and Anthony ran into the line of fire, saying 'Let's go.' Those words changed the fate of many," U.S. Ambassador Jane Hartley said Sunday
Asked if there were lessons, Sadler had one for all who find themselves in the face of a choice.
"Do something," he said. "Hiding, or sitting back, is not going to accomplish anything. And the gunman would've been successful if my friend Spencer had not gotten up. So I just want that lesson to be learned going forward, in times of, like, terror like that, please do something. Don't just stand by and watch."

Border Crossing Cartoon

US judge orders immigrant families released from detention

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A federal judge in California has ordered the government to release immigrant children from family detention centers "without unnecessary delay," and with their mothers when possible, according to court papers.

 U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee

Another Dumb Ass

 In a filing late Friday, U.S. District Judge Dolly Gee refused the government's request to reconsider her ruling in late July that children held in family detention centers after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border illegally must be released rapidly.

Calling the government's latest arguments "repackaged and reheated," she found the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in breach of a longstanding legal agreement stipulating that immigrant children cannot be held in unlicensed secured facilities, and gave agency officials until October 23 to comply.

Lawyers for Homeland Security had asked the judge to reconsider her ruling, arguing that the agency was already doing its best to move families through detention quickly and that the facilities had been converted into short-term processing centers.

Attorneys for the government are reviewing the order, said Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman for the Department of Justice, said Friday night.
This is the second time Gee has ruled that detaining children violates parts of a 1997 settlement from an earlier case. The settlement requires minors to be placed with a relative or in appropriate non-secure custody within five days. If there is a large influx of minors, times may be longer, but children still must be released as expeditiously as possible, under the terms of the law.

In her order, Gee countered that immigration officials "routinely failed to proceed as expeditiously as possible to place accompanied minors, and in some instances, may still be unnecessarily dragging their feet now."

Peter Schey, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, said that the court's order "will protect refugee children and their mothers from lengthy and entirely senseless detention."

The government poured millions of dollars into two large detention centers in Texas after tens of thousands of immigrant families, mostly mothers with children from Central America, crossed the Rio Grande into the U.S. last summer. Many have petitioned for asylum after fleeing gang and domestic violence back home.

The centers in Karnes City and Dilley, both south of San Antonio, recently held more than 1,300 women and children combined. A third, smaller facility located in Berks County, Pennsylvania, held about 70 people. All three are overseen by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but the two centers in Texas are run by private prison operators.

Between September 2013 and October 2014, some 68,000 family members — mostly mothers with children in tow — were caught at the border, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Between last October and July of this year, less than 30,000 have been apprehended, a drop authorities say is a result of better enforcement in both the U.S. and Mexico.

In her order Friday, Gee challenged Homeland Security's claim that drastically limiting or ending its family detention policy could spark another surge in illegal border crossings, calling this "speculative at best" and "fear-mongering."

Report: Biden makes unscheduled trip to huddle with Warren, adding to 2016 speculation

Speculation about a White House bid for Vice President Biden intensified Saturday when he made an unscheduled weekend trip from his Delaware home to his Washington residence, reportedly to see Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

Democrats in past months have called for the Massachusetts senator to seek the party nomination, convinced that her progressive, Wall Street-reformer message was good enough to defeat front-running Democrat Hillary Clinton.
Warren has so far decline. However, Clinton’s slipping polls numbers amid an email controversy has raised speculation that the 72-year-old Biden after the recent death of his son Beau Biden began considering a likely third-and-final White House bid
Biden ran in 1988 and 2004 but failed to get past the primaries.
Such talk has also been fueled by reports that Democratic donors and operatives along with Biden supporters are putting together plans for another Biden run.
The purported Biden-Warren meeting at the Naval Observatory, the vice president’s residence, was reported first by CNN.
Biden’s official schedule shows him spending the weekend in Delaware. The administration confirmed Saturday only that Biden went to his Washington residence for a last-minute meeting.
In addition, Fox News observed him traveling on Amtrak on Saturday morning from his regular stop in Wilmington, Del., to Washington, D.C., and Warren arriving via a commercial jet from Massachusetts.
Also this week, the pro-Biden group Draft Biden 2016 signed up longtime Democratic strategist Steve Schale, who helped President Obama win Florida in 2008 and 2012. And a Quinnipiac Poll showed Biden running strong in head-to-head match-ups with Republican candidates in key states.