Sunday, June 12, 2016

Romney Cartoons

Herman Cain breaks down Trump, Clinton presidential race (Video)

Trump, and what he might say next, is burning up GOPs political capital in Washington

McConnell: This is the worst economic recovery since WWII

Everyone’s a little bit racist sometimes.
Doesn’t mean we go around committing hate crimes
-- “Everyone’s A Little Bit Racist” from the Tony award winning Broadway musical “Avenue Q”
Congressional Republicans might not be capable of directly measuring their tolerance of Donald Trump. But there is certainly a metric that helps them gauge the amount.
Most Republicans have gone along grudgingly with Trump -- if they support the presumptive presidential nominee at all. Some of those lawmakers are now reviewing that political quotient as they wonder what Trump might say next.
They ponder how many more times they’ll have to condemn Trump’s remarks. They ask themselves if they’ll again have to awkwardly criticize Trump’s comments about a judge or women or Muslims -- yet reaffirm allegiance to him in the next breath.
Only Trump knows what lies in his heart when it comes to race, ethnicity and religion. But some of his comments give people pause and perhaps make them think of the lyrics in the Avenue Q tune. No, Trump doesn’t “go around committing hate crimes.” But his comments certainly sound “a little bit racist” to some and “a lotta bit racist” to others.
House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, says he’ll vote for Trump. But he adds that Trump needs to alter his rhetoric. And if Trump keeps it up?
“It causes a lot of us to think,” Sessions responded.
Senate Republican Conference Chairman John Thune, South Dakota, said Trump’s “going to have to adapt. … This is not working for him.”
This has been an unconventional election year because it flips political norms on their ear. But political capital still exists and isn’t unlimited.
Republicans cannot repeatedly find themselves crossways with the top of their ticket, blasting Trump’s provocative language yet failing to disavow that person and their ideals. Political capital is fungible, and some of Republicans could see their own stock plunge if they are linked too closely to Trump.
“I’m not going to be sucked into talking about Trump 24/7,” protested Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, when asked about the Trump’s views that federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel is incapable of fairly adjudicating a lawsuit involving Trump University because he is “Mexican.”
Never mind that Curiel was born in Indiana to Hispanic parents.
Cornyn says Republicans should focus instead on policy and the issues. But try as they might, the GOP fights a powerful political news vacuum that insists on focusing on Trump and his missteps “24/7.”
At the Senate Republican leadership press conference Tuesday afternoon, just outside the Senate chamber, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke about plans to finish a defense bill this week (which didn’t happen).
The leader mentioned opioid and energy measures. Cornyn then spoke about defense and North Korea. Thune cited the Iran nuclear deal and ISIS. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, discussed the economy and job numbers.
And then reporters ignored the leadership boilerplate and asked four consecutive questions about Trump.
“I’m going to let you all try one more time,” beseeched an exasperated McConnell to the press corps.
Naturally, journalists fired a fifth sidewinder interrogative at McConnell about Trump’s invective “overshadowing” the GOP agenda and the ability of Congress to legislate.
“OK. I’m going to wrap it up with this,” huffed McConnell, who turned his ire on Trump. “It’s time to quit attacking various people that you competed with or various minority groups in the country and get on message. He has an opportunity to do that. This election is eminently winnable.”
McConnell left the scribes with a parting shot.
“We’re all anxious to hear what he might say next,” said the Kentucky Republican.
Or dreading?
House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., didn’t fare much better when he spoke Tuesday in inner-city Washington at an event rolling out the GOP’s anti-poverty plan.
Naturally, the first question focused on Trump, forcing the speaker to characterize the remarks about Curiel as “the textbook definition of a racist comment.”
One Republican lawmaker hit the ceiling with Trump earlier in the week.
Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., faces perhaps the most-challenging re-election campaign of any GOP senator this fall.
Kirk this week dropped his support for Trump. He said the first-time candidate and billionaire businessman “has not demonstrated the temperament necessary to be president.”
Kirk also said he wouldn’t support Hillary Clinton for president. When asked who he might back, Kirk initially said “no one” before quickly adding he would “write-in David Petraeus.”
Trump then published a statement that failed to extinguish the flames on the Curiel comments. Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., doesn’t support Trump. The new statement vexed the senator.
“This is a new level,” Flake said. “He needs to retract.”
A reporter asked Flake whether he thought Trump had sufficiently “walked back” the Curiel remarks.
“Keep walking,” replied Flake, sounding like a pitchman for Johnnie Walker Blue Label.
Not all congressional Republicans are able or willing to tell Trump to take a hike.
Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., says Trump would throttle Clinton in his district on eastern Long Island. Zeldin wants reporters to focus on the issues and not Trump’s words.
“It’s a disservice for any presidential campaign and those following it who is not doing a deep dive on substantive issues,” argued Zeldin.
But it was Zeldin who found himself crossways in a CNN interview about his own word choice.
“You can easily argue that the president of the United States is a racist with his policies and rhetoric,” he said.
When confronted by reporters in a congressional hallway the next day, Zeldin wanted to revert to substantive issues.
“There’s a lot more to this presidential race then just analyzing what the most provocative thing of the day was said,” Zeldin said.
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., defended Trump when reporters asked whether the candidate’s statements disqualified him for president.
“Absolutely not,” he answered.
Reporters pressed Perdue on whether Trump’s comments could wound him with voters.
“People back home aren’t worried about that,” said Perdue, noting that he disagreed with Trump’s “tonality.”
Tone is indeed an issue for Trump. And as McConnell and even Zeldin suggested, so is substance.
After the weekly Capitol Hill huddle of the pro-Trump caucus Thursday morning, Rep. Chris Collins, R-N.Y., remarked that Trump would “be on message on policy.
He’s going to take the fight to Hillary Clinton.” Collins also asserted “we’re going to be disciplined.”
Exiting the same session, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., said that Trump was now playing ball in “a much tougher league.”
“You’ve got to be more careful and you’ve got to think through
what you’re going to say,” he said.
Within hours, Trump reverted to name-calling. He upbraided Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and called her “Pocahontas,” referring to a 2012 dispute about whether she has Native American roots.
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, had an idea on how to fix things for Trump.
“You folks in the media need to give him a little more leeway,” suggested Hatch, third in line to the presidency as the Senate’s resident pro tempore.
Sen Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., isn’t supporting Trump. He argues there’s a limited threshold for how much political capital some GOPers are willing to burn if Trump continues the trash talk.
“If he keeps doing this he’s really dishonoring that support,” Graham said.
That’s the political risk Trump poses to his own supporters -- especially in Republicans in Congress.
Lawmakers don’t want the public to perceive them like someone out of Avenue Q. As the song goes, no one’s going around “committing hate crimes.”
But if Trump continues the rhetoric, lawmakers worry voters could label Republicans “a little bit racist.”

Paperback version of Clinton's 'Hard Choices’ omits her former TPP trade pact support

The paperback version of Hillary Clinton’s memoir “Hard Choices” fails to include her support of the international trade pact TPP that rivals Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump have opposed, raising criticism about Clinton “reinventing herself” for the general election race.
The paperback version of Clinton’s 2014 book, which details her work as secretary of state for President Obama, omits the passage in which she touts her efforts to get the country to support the 12-nation trade deal, which she once referred to as the “gold standard” for such agreements.
“We worked hard to improve and ratify trade agreements with Colombia and Panama and encouraged Canada and the group of countries that became known as the Pacific Alliance -- Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Chile -- all open-market democracies driving toward a more prosperous future to join negotiations with Asian nations on TPP, the trans-Pacific trade agreement,” Clinton says in the hardback version about a 2009 effort.
However, Clinton changed her position on the Trans-Pacific Partnership in October 2015, about a month after the deal was signed and after weeks of being pressed by the news media for an answer.
A total 96 pages were trimmed from the hardback version. Publisher Simon & Schuster said a “limited number of sections” were cut to “accommodate a shorter length for this edition," according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, which reported on the changes shortly after the paperback edition was released in April.
“That Clinton's own memoir is reinventing itself for the general election shows the lengths she will go to mislead the American people," Republican National Committee spokesman Michael Short told DailyMail.com, which along with The International Business Times earlier this week picked up on the changes and reported them.
The Clinton campaign declined Saturday to comment.
The Obama administration says TPP attempts to help American entrepreneurs, farmers and small business owners sell products on the international market by eliminating roughly 18,000 taxes and others “trade barriers” that “put American products at an unfair disadvantage.”
Democratic primary candidate Sen. Bernie Sander has said the deal and its accompanying Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership are “disastrous” and need to be renegotiated -- in large part because of their potential to kill millions of U.S. jobs and negative environmental impact.
Clinton, now the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, also supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, signed by husband President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and criticized by Trump, the GOP’s presumptive nominee.
Trump, a billionaire businessman, says he supports free trade but has been highly critical of the TPP, calling it a “horrible deal” in part because, he argues, it continues to allow such countries as China to continue “currency manipulation.”
“This is one of the worst trade deals,” Trump said during the Fox Business Channel/ Wall Street Journal debate in November 2015. “I’d rather make individual deals with individual countries. We will do much better. ... We’re losing now over $500 billion in terms of imbalance with China.”

Trump's no-apologies campaign tour hits hard on Romney, Warren

Warren

Supposedly Republican Romney.

Donald Trump on Saturday kicked his unapologetic presidential campaign into high gear -- saying he won’t apologize for his personal attacks on Sen. Elizabeth Warren and extending his feud with GOP establishment leader Mitt Romney.

“The guy’s a stone cold loser, a choker,” Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, said about Romney at a rally in Tampa, Fla.
Also on Saturday, Romney, who this weekend is holding an ideas summit in Utah, suggested that Trump’s misogynistic and racially insensitive remarks have opened the door for generations of Americans to engage in similar behavior.
Trump told the crowd of about 5,000 in Tampa that Romney, the GOP presidential nominee who lost to President Obama in 2012, “doesn’t even know what a misogynist is.”
Trump and Warren, a leading progressive voice in the Democratic Party, have attacked each other increasingly in recent weeks, with the exchanges appearing to intensify now that Clinton has become the party’s presumptive presidential nominee.
On Thursday, Warren endorsed Clinton and accused Trump of “race baiting” and using “racism” toward the federal judge of Mexican heritage who is presiding over a civil fraud suit against the Trump University real estate school.
Trump has suggested the American-born judge won’t give him a fair trial, considering Trump’s disparaging comments about Mexican immigrants.
Trump has not apologized to the judge, despite widespread calls for him to do so.
On Saturday, Trump sarcastically suggested he’ll apologize for referring to Warren as “Pocahontas,” in response to Warren apparently attempting to use Native American heritage to further her academic and political career.
Trump said he’d apologize because his name calling “is an insult to Pocahontas, not Warren.”
Romney, at his summit Saturday in Park City, likened the impact of Trump's words to former President Bill Clinton’s sexual “dalliances in White House,” which he said have “impacted generations.”
“Now we have kids in elementary schools joking about the size of their hands,” Romney said about one Trump comment, in a question-and-answer session with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer.
Romney, nevertheless, credited Bill Clinton with correctly articulating that a candidate’s views on jobs and the economy largely decide elections when Clinton said: “People vote with their pocketbooks.”
He appeared to give a mixed message about how he’ll deal with Trump through November, saying he’s not going to spend the next six months arguing his point of view.
“I’m not going to be an attack dog,” said Romney, who then made clear that he’ll call out Trump for comments with which he does not agree.
Trump, who also held a rally Saturday in Moon Township, Pa., told supporters that former GOP House Speaker Rep. Newt Gingrich, Alabama GOP Sen. Jeff Sessions and former Secretary of State Condleezza Rice appear popular choices to be his running mate.
He dismissed Clinton’s recent line of attack that he lacks the temperament to be president and said, “She’s got the bad temperament.”
Trump said the recent tell-all book by a former Secret Service agent referred to the former first lady as a “total mess.”
“We need strong temperament,” Trump said. “I have a strong temperament.”

Saturday, June 11, 2016

Harry Reid Cartoons (Dumb Democrat)

Reid accuses GOP senator of 'praying' for Obama's death

At left, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid; at right, Sen. David Perdue.

As if the 2016 cycle couldn’t get any uglier, a nasty war of words broke out Friday when Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid accused a Republican senator of “praying” for President Obama’s death.
The allegations followed Georgia Sen. David Perdue’s remarks Friday to a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington.
“We are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and yes, even our president,” Perdue said. “I think we should pray for Barack Obama.”
He added, “We need to be very specific about how we pray. We should pray like Psalms 109:8 says. It says, 'Let his days be few, and let another have his office.'”
Reid spokeswoman Kristen Orthman let Perdue have it, claiming he had just issued a call to prayer for Obama’s demise – as opposed to the end of his term.
“If Republicans are still wondering why Donald Trump is their nominee, look no further than today’s Faith and Freedom conference where a sitting Republican Senator left the impression he was praying for the death of President Obama and then the Republican Leader followed him on stage and did not condemn him,” she said in a statement.
Perdue’s office rejected the allegation.
Megan Whittmore said in a statement: "Senator Perdue said we are called to pray for our country, for our leaders, and for our president. He in no way wishes harm towards our president and everyone in the room understood that. However, we should add the media to our prayer list because they are pushing a narrative to create controversy and that is exactly what the American people are tired of."
Perdue was speaking at the same Washington conference that Donald Trump addressed Friday afternoon.
In the remarks, he made clear he was joking. “In all seriousness, I believe that America is at a moment of crisis,” he added.
He did not recite the next lines of Psalm 109, which are: “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”
Asked later at Friday's briefing whether the senator should apologize, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said: “As Senator Perdue considers whether or not an apology is appropriate, there are a variety of other Scripture he might consult.”

School rejects teen's gun-toting, flag-waving photo

Joshua Bruner (Courtesy of Joshua Bruner)

Joshua Bruner is a real-life Captain America.
The 15-year-old country boy from Ringoes, New Jersey is a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association. He’s a member of two state shooting teams and he serves as a United States Sea Cadet.
Darcy Meys said her son wants to follow in his great-grandfather’s footsteps and enlist in the Marines.
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“Josh considers himself to be a patriot,” she told me. “He loves his country.”
A few weeks ago Josh was given an assignment in a photography class at Hunterdon Central Regional High School. He had to take a self-portrait representing self-expression.
So Josh and some of his buddies gathered in a field behind his house and set up a tripod – striking their best male model poses.
Josh climbed atop a four-wheeler. He was holding Old Glory in one hand and a shotgun in the other – a Remington pump action 12-gauge to be precise.
It was, by all accounts, an epic picture that summed up the heart and soul of this teenage patriot.
Now, at Hunterdon Regional kids have to upload their assignments to the school’s Google site. And that’s when Josh learned there was a problem.
Click here to get your primer on how to restore traditional American values!
His self-portrait was rejected because it violated the school’s gun policy.
“The rules of our school prohibit students from using artwork depicting themselves or another person with any weapon,” the teacher wrote to Mrs. Meys.
Mrs. Meys told me she looked at the school policy and she believes it was referring to actual guns on school property – not a photograph of a gun taken on private property.
“Josh was just showing pride for his country and who he is as a shooter and as a kid who wants to be in the Marines and protect his country and follow in his grandfather’s footsteps,” she told me. “He was not dressed inappropriately. He was not holding the gun incorrectly and He was respecting the flag.”
The school decided to offer Josh a compromise, according to email correspondence between his mother and the teacher.
But it’s really not much of a compromise.
The school agreed to grade Josh’s photograph – but they were adamant that it could not be uploaded onto the school’s server nor could it be publicly displayed.
“He will not be able to upload the image to our server, post them to his Google site or display them in his presentation,” the teacher wrote. “We would like to recognize his work on the portrait but limit the possibility that the photo can be taken out of context.”
Good Lord! It’s not pornography, people. It’s a kid holding Old Glory and a shotgun.
“They are crushing his spirit,” Mrs. Meys told me. “They are stifling his creativity.”
And for that matter – they are in effect telling this child that he cannot take pride in who he is – his identity as an American.
“If it is okay for people to show pride in their sexuality, why can’t my son show pride in his country,” she asked.
I know the answer to that question. These days Gay Pride is in vogue and American Pride is passe.
“I’m supposed to accept guys going into bathrooms with my daughters and girls going into bathrooms with my boys but they won’t accept my kid for just wanting to be a patriot,” she said.
In this age of tolerance and diversity it’s too bad our public school system can’t be more tolerant of red-blooded American patriots like Josh Bruner.

Board of Education: Hunterdon Central RegionalHigh School

Deborah Labbadia, President
Readington Township
dlabbadia@hcrhs.org

Kathy Raborn, Vice President
Raritan Township
kraborn@hcrhs.org

Lori Blutfield
Readington Township
lblutfield@hcrhs.org

John Cannizzaro
Raritan Township
jcannizzaro1@hcrhs.org
James Davidson
East Amwell Township
jdavidson@hcrhs.org
Patrick Dugan
Raritan Township
pdugan@hcrhs.org
Robert McNally
Flemington Borough
robert.mcnally@hcrhs.org
Karen Palestini Falk
Delaware Township
kfalk@hcrhs.org
Vincent Panico
Readington Township
vincent.panico@hcrhs.org