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.

Trump and Cruz Cartoon

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.”