Presumptuous Politics

Monday, September 26, 2016

Trump, Clinton meet with Netanyahu as presidential debate looms

Possible 'wildcard topics' during first presidential debate

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday as the presidential candidates brush up on foreign policy hours before their debate.
Clinton’s meeting with Netanyahu was brief. The two met for less than an hour in Manhattan, according to Clinton campaign officials. Her meeting came after Trump sat down with the prime minister at his residence in Trump Tower at length, Trump campaign officials said.
Reporters were barred from covering either meeting.
Clintons' campaign said in a statement that the two had an "in-depth conversation." She stressed that "a strong and secure Israel is vital to the United States" and "reaffirmed unwavering commitment" to the relationship.
According to her campaign, Clinton stressed her support for the 10-year, $38 billion military aid package signed between the two countries earlier the month and opposition to efforts to boycott Israel. They also discussed Iran, the conflict in Syria and other regional challenges, including her support for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict negotiated by the two parties — not an outside organization like the U.N. Security Council.
Trump and Netanyahu discussed such key issues as the Iran nuclear deal, Middle East stability and the problems that the Islamic State terror group has created in the region, according to Trump campaign officials.
Trump and Netanyahu are long-time acquaintances. But in December 2015, Trump postponed a trip to Israel to meet with Netanyahu after the prime minister’s office criticized his proposal to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants -- in the aftermath of several terror attacks inspired or executed by radical Islamic terrorists.
The Trump campaign said Sunday that the nominee and the prime minister “have known each other for many years and had the opportunity to discuss many topics important to both countries,” citing ISIS, the Iran deal and Trump suggesting, if elected, continuing U.S. military aid to Israel.
Trump and other leading Republicans have suggested that Obama and his administration have failed to maintain strong ties with Israel, which has provided Western nations with support and stability amid decades of Middle East turmoil. The United States also provides billons annually to Israel in military aid.
Most recently, Trump and fellow Republicans have agreed with Netanyahu that the administration-brokered Iran nuclear deal hurts Israel, Tehran’s enemy, because it lifts economic sanctions without enough safeguards to ensure Iran has indeed curbed efforts to build a nuclear weapon.
“Mr. Trump recognized that Israel and its citizens have suffered far too long on the front lines of Islamic terrorism,” the campaign also said after the meeting. “He agreed with Prime Minister Netanyahu that the Israeli people want a just and lasting peace with their neighbors, but that peace will only come when the Palestinians renounce hatred and violence and accept Israel as a Jewish State.”
They also said Trump acknowledged that Jerusalem has been “the eternal capital of the Jewish People for more than 3,000 years” and that the U.S., with Trump as president, “will finally accept the long-standing congressional mandate to recognize Jerusalem as the undivided capital of the State of Israel.”
Netanyahu’s meeting with each of the candidates was designed to put Israel on good footing with the next U.S. president. Both candidates likely will seek Netanyahu’s support for their respective White House bids, considering Israel is often called the United States’ most important ally.
The Israeli leader has sought to project neutrality this time after perceptions arose that he favored Mitt Romney over President Barack Obama in 2012.
But it also served to showcase the candidates' expertise in foreign policy in the shadow of their first debate Monday, six weeks before Election Day. Clinton, a former senator and secretary of state, often says that Trump does not know enough about the world and lacks the temperament to be president. Trump has argued that he has extensive experience with foreign policy through his career as a business executive and blames Clinton for many of the nation's stumbles in foreign policy.

Clinton, Trump take distinct paths to debate, now a prime-time, mega event

The final hours before the first 2016 presidential debate on Sunday seemed more like the eve of Super Bowl -- with experts offering predictions and strategies, the Clinton and Trump campaigns posturing and Americans wondering who indeed has first-row tickets.
Arguments about whether Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump or Democratic rival Hillary Clinton would do better on substance or style were indeed largely overshadowed this weekend by Trump suggesting Saturday that he’d invite Gennifer Flower, with whom Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, has acknowledged having a sexual encounter.
GOP vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence told “Fox News Sunday” that Trump was merely mocking the Clinton campaign for confirming that Trump nemesis-entrepreneur Mark Cuban was indeed invited to a front-row seat at the Hofstra University debate.
He argued the campaign was really trying to “distract attention from where the American people are going to be focused,” which is picking a president to chart the future of America.
However, the Indiana governor’s comments did little to end the debate sideshow.
“It’s legitimate to have a business person sitting there who's been advocating for you because of your economic policies,” Clinton campaign strategist Joel Benenson told “Fox News Sunday.”
Former Obama campaign official Stephanie Cutter later told NBC’s “Meet the Press" that Clinton and Trump are “trying to throw each other off their game.”
“The difference is that Hillary Clinton is doing it with a legitimate businessman, also a celebrity,” she said. “Trump is just jumping right down in the sewer and swimming by inviting Gennifer Flowers.”
Clinton, a former New York senator and secretary of state, and Trump, a first-time candidate and reality TV star, are essentially tied with Election Day about six weeks away, according to essentially every major poll.
And their debate preparations are reflective of their paths to success -- with Clinton off the campaign trail to study briefing books at her Westchester, N.Y., home and participate in mock debates
Longtime Clinton aide Philippe Reines, a combative political operative, is purportedly playing Trump in the rehearsals. And President Clinton has sat in on some sessions, offering advice from his own White House debates.
Trump has eschewed traditional debate preparations but has held midflight policy discussions with a rotating cast of advisers. He's also spent numerous Sundays batting around ideas with aides.
He remained on the campaign trail this weekend, with a stop Saturday in southwestern Virginia.
Trump’s loose approach is potentially risky, considering he is new to the many policy issues expected to come up during the debate. But advisers contend he will compensate by being quick on his feet and point to his experience at performing under pressure.
"Imagine the practice and the training of 13 years of reality television on 'The Apprentice' and then imagine Hillary's experience reading hundreds of papers," said Newt Gingrich, the former GOP House speaker and a Trump adviser who has been talking through policy with the candidate in recent days.
The 90-minute debate in Long Island, N.Y., is expected to attract 75 million viewers -- many of them disenchanted with both candidates, the least-popular presidential hopefuls in history.
On Sunday, Clinton campaign aides express concern about Trump's habit of saying things that might be untrue and voters’ general distrust of Clinton.
Robby Mook, Clinton's campaign manager, on ABC’s “This Week” called on NBC debate moderator Lester Holt to correct inaccuracies made by the candidates. But Trump's campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, said it's not the job of debate moderators to fact check.
The Clinton aides also fear Trump will be judged more for his performance than his grasp of the numerous challenges that pass across a president's desk.
Trump will likely need to prove to voters that he has the policy depth and gravitas to serve as commander in chief. Clinton will likely need to connect with Americans who question whether she can be trusted.
Clinton will be the first woman to take the stage in a presidential general election debate.
Trump emerged as the Republican nominee in an improbable primary run in which he gave an overall, solid debate performance amid a huge field of established politicians and debaters.
However, he will not likely be able to resort on Monday to the personal attacks that doomed such primary rivals as GOP Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

People familiar with Clinton's preparations say she has been working on addressing possible questions about her lack of trustworthiness, a problem that has dogged her throughout the campaign.
Supporters cringed during a candidate forum earlier this month when Clinton was pressed about her use of a private server system while running the State Department and became defensive, rather than apologizing and trying to move on quickly.
Clinton has debated more than 30 times at the presidential level, including several one-on-one debates with Barack Obama in 2008 and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016.
But this will be her first presidential debate against a candidate from an opposing party.
"It's a lot more comfortable running against people in the other party than it is debating in the primary," said Anita Dunn, who worked on debate preparations with Obama. "The differences don't have to be manufactured. The differences exist."

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Colin Kaepernick Cartoons

Seattle Mariners suspend catcher Steve Clevenger

Video

Steve Clevenger

Mariners general manager Jerry Dipoto

Do you think Dipoto would have suspended these Idiots ? ? :-)

High school football team stages "die-in" to protest National Anthem

The Castlemont High School Knights Idiots

By Todd Starnes
A California high school football team staged a bizarre "die-in" to protest the singing of the national anthem.
Join Todd's American Dispatch: a must-read for Conservatives! And it's free!
The Castlemont High School Knights, based in Oakland, engaged in shameful display of anti-American behavior. It happened during a Friday night football game.
Disgraced NFL Colin Kaepernick was on hand to encourage the children to disrespect America and the U.S. Armed Forces.
"I had to come out here and stand with y'all," he said in remarks covered by the Mercury News. "So I appreciate what y'all did. I love y'all. Y'all my brothers -- I'm here with you."
But instead of collapsing on the ground with the children, Kaepernick simply took a knee. I guess he didn't want to get grass stains on his hoodie.

Idiots

Last week the football team and several coaches protested the "Star-Spangled Banner" by thrusting their fists in the air. The Castlemont Knights lost the football game -- not to mention their self-respect.

Team Obama launches a shocking broadside against religious faith

Why would he not be against Christians?

“The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy or any form of intolerance.” -- Those were the word uttered by one Mr. Castro.
Not Fidel.
Rather, one Martin Castro, the chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, who launched a broadside recently against religious faith, degrading the vision of the Founding Fathers that made this country the envy of the world.
Castro, an Obama appointee, released a report on September 7 on protections against discrimination. His finding, in part, is that Americans need to be protected from Bible-thumpers, and anyone else whose beliefs run afoul of the administration’s PC police. Religious folk need not apply.
in the report Castro cited John Adams. “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” But Adams did not write those words. They were part of a treaty to end the Barbary War. “Christian” ships and crew were fair game for Barbary pirates, Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli told Thomas Jefferson; that all Christians are sinners in the context of the Koran and that it was a Muslim's "right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners.”
U.S. negotiators tried to downplay the clash of religions. The treaty therefore stressed that the U.S. was not an officially Christian nation, but a secular one, and therefore should never have been targeted. Adams signed the treaty, but it had nothing to do with his belief about the importance of Judeo-Christian religions to the stability of society.
Here are the words that flowed from President Adams’ pen. “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion . . . Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
George Washington expressed similar thoughts in his Farewell Address. “Of all the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion and morality are indispensable supports. In vain would that man claim the tribute of patriotism, who should labor to subvert these great pillars of human happiness.”
Our Founding Fathers would have cautioned against attempts to “subvert these great pillars” of religion and morality.
Alexis de Tocqueville, the great French historian and admirer of American democracy, introduced the Continent to the workings of the American upstarts. “The Americans combine the notions of religion and liberty so intimately in their minds that it is impossible to make them conceive of one without the other.”
Waves of immigrants after de Tocqueville were often far less lettered, but they did share his understanding, and dreamt of being part of it. Religious freedom, toleration and fairness were all intertwined in the unique American package that so many desperately seek to be a part of.
Commissioner Castro has another vision. In the letter addressed to the president, the vice president, and the Speaker of the House, he wrote, “Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights.” What he is saying is that in 2016 it’s Big Brother’s responsibility to curtail those exemptions. If that isn’t to your liking, you can always move. Maybe to Tripoli.
Castro’s America would not be recognized by James Madison, who argued that religious conviction ought to be placed ahead of – not behind – the agenda of the State. In his "Memorial and Remonstrance against Religious Assessments of 1785," the architect of our Constitution wrote: “It is the duty of every man to render to the Creator such homage and such only as he believes to be acceptable to Him. This duty is precedent, both in order of time and degree of obligation, to the claims of Civil Society.”
Not so long ago, America projected its global power to protect religious freedoms. Throughout the Cold War we strove to help brave believers behind the Iron Curtain to keep the embers of religion from being totally extinguished by atheistic Communist dictatorships.
We demanded of our chief international nemesis, the USSR, that any negotiations on nuclear arms reduction must be linked to human rights—including freedom of religion.
Eventually, Gorbachev relented, the Berlin Wall came down, and the war against religion came to an end.
Recent U.S. administrations were true to the legacy of our Founders by taking a leadership role in urging all governments to guarantee the religious rights of minorities who, when leaving their respective houses of worship on their holy days, could return to their homes unmolested.
Today, hundreds of millions of minority Baha’i, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims – but chiefly Christians – have no confidence that American power or policy have their backs.
Respect for religion and religious values were at the core of our Founding Fathers’ vision and an inspiration to endangered religious people the world over. We can only hope that the next head of America’s Civil Rights Commission will protect -- not slander -- people who dare set their moral compass by the words of G-d.
Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles. Follow the Simon Wiesenthal Center on Facebook and on Twitter.

Trump threatens to have Gennifer Flowers attend first presidential debate

Mark Cuban

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted Saturday that he would invite former Bill Clinton paramour Gennifer Flowers to sit in the front row at Monday's first presidential debate against Hillary Clinton.
Trump extended the invitation to Flowers via social media after the Clinton campaign invited Mark Cuban, a fellow billionaire and prominent Trump critic, to the debate.
Trump initially misspelled Flowers' first name, with a J, then tweeted again to fix the mistake.
In response, Flowers' personal assistant wrote in an email to Buzzfeed News that the former model would be attending Monday's debate at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.
A message from a Twitter account purporting to belong to Flowers said, "Hi Donald. You know I'm in your corner and will definitely be at the debate!" followed by a lipstick kiss emoji. A Facebook account linked from Flowers' personal site posted two stories about the debate invitation, but no confirmation that she would attend.
It was not immediately clear whether Trump's tweet constituted an official invitation and his campaign had no further comment on the matter Saturday.
Clinton campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri responded: "Hillary Clinton plans on using the debate to discuss the issues that make a difference in people's lives." She added: "It's not surprising that Donald Trump has chosen a different path."
Hours later, Trump told supporters in Virginia that if elected, he would do more to help women than Clinton.
"My opponent likes to say that for decades she's been fighting for women, that she's been fighting for children. Why, then, are 70 million American women and children living in poverty or on the brink of poverty in our country?" Trump asked a rally crowd in Roanoke. "For years she's been doing this and she's done nothing."

Mall shooting suspect was 'zombie-like' when arrested, officials say

Shooter Arcan Cetin Turkish Immigrant

A suspected gunman believed to have killed five people at a Washington state mall was arrested Saturday, according to authorities.
At a news conference, officials said they had not ruled out any possible motives for why 20-year-old Arcan Cetin allegedly shot four women and one man at the Cascade Mall in Burlington Friday evening.
Island County Sheriff's Lt. Mike Hawley told reporters that he spotted Cetin near the suspect's home in Oak Harbor, around 30 miles due west of the mall. Hawley said he immediately recognized Cetin as the suspect, turned his patrol car around and arrested Cetin without incident.
"He said nothing," said Hawley, who added that Cetin was unarmed and carrying a computer in a satchel when he was apprehended. "He was kind of zombie-like."
Mount Vernon Police Lt. Chris Cammock said Cetin had immigrated to the U.S. from Turkey and was a "legal permanent resident." It was not immediately clear when Cetin came to the U.S.
Hawley said Cetin had been arrested for simple assault last year, but provided no further details on the case. The Seattle Times reported that Cetin faced three domestic violence assault charges in both Burlington and Island County, with the victim identified as Cetin's stepfather. The newspaper reports Cetin also was arrested for drunken driving.
Court records show Cetin was told by a judge on Dec. 29 that he was not to possess a firearm, the newspaper reported.

However, the stepfather urged the judge not to impose a no-contact order, saying his stepson was "going through a hard time."

Cetin was arrested almost exactly 24 hours after his alleged victims were shot at the mall Macy's makeup counter. The four female victims died in the store. The male victim died early Saturday as police finished sweeping the 434,000-square-foot building.
Local media outlets had identified the victims as of early Sunday. One was 16-year-old Sarai Lara, a cancer survivor and high school sophomore. Her mother, Evangelina, told the Seattle Times that through a translator that she was shopping with Sarai and her younger sister, but they split up.

She said Sarai went to Macy's looking for pants. News of the shooting spread through the mall, and Lara tried to get to her daughter but was unable to do so.

KIRO-TV identified two more victims as Belinda Galde, 64, and her mother, 95-year-old Beatrice Dotson.
The Seattle Times identified the other two victims as Macy's makeup artist Shyla Martin, 52, and Chuck Eagan, a Boeing maintenance worker who was shot while helping his wife flee the store.
"There are people waking up this morning, and their world has changed forever. The city of Burlington has probably changed forever, but I don't think our way of life needs to change," Burlington Mayor Steve Sexton said earlier Saturday. "This was a senseless act. It was the world knocking on our doorstep, and it came into our little community."

Surveillance video captured the suspect entering the mall unarmed and then recorded him about 10 minutes later entering the Macy's with a "hunting type" rifle in his hand, Cammock said. The lieutenant said late Saturday that the rifle was apparently brought into the mall from a suspect vehicle. The weapon was recovered at the scene.
"Probably one of the most difficult moments for us last night was knowing that there were family members wondering about their loved ones in there," Cammock said.
Burlington, a community of 8,600 people, is about 65 miles north of Seattle, too far to be a commuter town, but its population swells to 55,000 during the day because of a popular outlet mall, retail stores and other businesses. Burlington is the only major retail center within 30 miles in a region where agriculture is king, said Linda Jones, president of the Burlington Chamber of Commerce.

Residents gathered Saturday to comfort each other at a community gathering in a city park.

"It's too scary. It's too close to home," said Maria Elena Vasquez, who attended the gathering with her husband and two young children.

Joanne Burkholder, 19, of Mount Vernon, was watching the movie "The Magnificent Seven" in the mall's theater when security guards came in and told them to evacuate immediately. Dozens of panicked moviegoers gathered in the hallway, and Burkholder heard screaming as the officers escorted them to safety in a parking lot.
As she drove home later, she had to pull over because she was shaking so hard, she told The Associated Press.

"I'm just very thankful for my life this morning. I've never been so terrified in my life," she said Saturday, trying to hold back tears as she attended the community vigil.

"You'd think it would happen in Everett or Seattle, but a small town of Burlington, I'd never dream something like this would happen."

People who believed they may have lost loved ones were being sequestered at a church three blocks from the mall, where counselors and a golden retriever therapy dog were present.

Dozens of people attended a Saturday evening prayer service for the victims. The gathering was held at Central United Methodist Church in nearby Sedro-Woolley, Wash.

The Rev. Cody Natland lit five candles on a table in front of the church, one for each victim.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Related Image

Related Image

Sunday, September 25, 2016

Related Image