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Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump once said that he thinks America must strike Iran, preferably through the air. “You know, the one thing I sort of liked was what they were saying about Iran,” Trump said on MSNBC on January 12, 2007, in response to a speech President Bush gave that day on the latest developments in the war in Iraq. “I believe you have to go in and strike Iran — not with soldiers,” Trump said. “You know, it’s not a world of soldiers anymore. It’s a world of air. It’s a world of different kinds of, you know,...

Donald Trump’s self-destruction will soon manifest itself in a drop in the polls. The problem remains for those GOP voters still seeking a candidate who is a viable alternative to Jeb Bush. It is not likely to be Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, who has been outshone by more credible candidates and again showed bad judgment in trying to ingratiate himself with Trump. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., seems practically irrelevant to the race, and his preference to let the Obama administration negotiate with Iran rather than press for sanctions may be the death knell of his effort.. Who then stands to...

The most amazing data point in this poll? He was near 30 percent when they first started polling on Thursday — and then dropped off the table after his comments about McCain as a prisoner of war. Hmmmm. I’ve been through enough online episodes of “criticizing Republican X makes you a RINO” to enjoy this one before it inevitably fades this fall. May President Trump reign for a thousand years, and may all the no-class RINO establishmentarians with their loser net worth in the low seven figures weep at his feet. His views on immigration are not widely shared. Just...

Bush defends McCain but backed those who attacked Kerry

A smoldering policy dispute over the Iran deal between two frontrunners for the Republican nomination caught fire over the weekend, as the campaigns of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and former Florida governor Jeb Bush traded accusations of bad faith and the candidates themselves engaged in a pointed back-and-forth about how a newly elected president should handle the deal. -snip- The following day, Michael Doran, a former National Security Council official and a well-regarded scholar at the Hudson Institute who has been briefing Walker and is close to his team, tweeted a link to a Politico article about Bush’s comments and...

No immediate damage from Trump’s ‘hero’ comment. The Monmouth University Poll of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers finds Scott Walker in the lead and Donald Trump in second place. The poll did not find any significant change in support for Trump in interviews conducted after his comments about John McCain’s military service. The poll also found that Bobby Jindal makes his way into the second tier of candidates, doing better in Iowa than in the national polls. When Iowa Republicans are asked who they would support in their local caucus, Scott Walker is the first choice of 22% followed by Donald...

The Conservative base is upset – to put it mildly – with the Progressive RINO Establishment Since November of 2010 – when Marco Rubio, along with John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, et al, began to walk back poker-faced campaign promises – I’ve been documenting evidence indicting Marco Rubio as a happy little ladder-climber within the Progressive RINO Establishment. After winning in 2010, they spoke of “compromise” and “bi-partisanship;” not unlike a marketing theme incongruously composed and presented in a conference call. Many other conservatives grasping history are with me in the Reagan school of compromise: We win, they lose. As with...

The results of the first major test of the 2016 presidential race were announced this past week: the initial six months of fundraising numbers for the slew of candidates running to be their party’s nominee next year and for aligned super PACs. As with any test, some people passed with flying colors. Others, well, didn’t. Here are the winners and the losers of the cash dash for those contests and other races. WINNERS ● Jeb Bush Sure, we all knew the former Florida governor was going to raise scads of money, largely through his Right to Rise super PAC. But...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.expressnews.com/news/us-world/article/Winners-and-losers-in-the-first-big-cash-grab-of-6393000.php

Rand Paul’s father Ron does not appear to be among the over 100,000 donors so far to his son’s presidential campaign. According to the younger Paul’s recent Federal Election Commission filing, the elder Paul, a former Texas congressman who himself ran for president three times, has yet to donate to his son’s 2016 presidential campaign — at least not more than the $200 threshold where his donation would be required to report. Rand’s mother, Carol, does not appear to have donated her son’s campaign yet either. In contrast, the other Republican presidential contender with a storied political family, Jeb Bush,...

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush says he's "fine" with transgender people openly serving in the military – as long as it doesn't compromise morale, Yahoo News reports. Bush's view – echoing that of Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, the Washington Post has reported – marks the first time he has commented on the issue. And it comes in the wake of the Defense Department decision this week to issue two directives bringing the Pentagon closer to rescinding its ban on open service by transgender people. Carter ordered a 6-month review to examine how allowing transgenders to serve openly in the military...

Jeb Bush took a tough but nuanced foreign policy stance during an appearance here Friday morning, calling for reversing the ban on concealed weapons at military installations and calling out his Republican rivals for hollow promises to repeal the Iran nuclear agreement on their first day in office. Bush, looking to position himself as an electable conservative in a sprawling primary field thrown into turmoil by the unexpected rise of Donald Trump, reiterated his opposition to the Iran agreement, which will ease economic sanctions on the country in exchange for a decade of limitations to its nuclear program. But he...

Brendan Bordelon has a piece up on the home page on Scott Walker taking a pass on commenting on Trump on grounds that he doesn’t want to discuss other candidates, which strikes me as entirely reasonable. The conventional wisdom demands that Republicans devote themselves to denouncing Trump, but candidates are foolish to do this unless it serves some other purpose. Jeb has criticized him repeatedly, even after he said he was done with it. I don’t know why he really needs to get drawn into a war of words with Trump, but at least this accords with Jeb’s orientation toward...

The most meaningful moment of Donald Trump's spectacle of a presidential campaign thus far may have come during a solemn evening news conference last Friday in Los Angeles, when he stood silently behind the family members of crime victims. One after another, a father or mother or aunt spoke emotionally about the death of a son or nephew at the hands of someone who was in the country illegally. "Nobody wants to hear from us," lamented Don Rosenberg, whose 25-year-old son was struck and then run over three times by a car driven by an unlicensed man from Honduras. "We...

Bernie Sanders is drawing more of Barack Obama's 2012 campaign donors than Hillary Clinton. And Marco Rubio is scoring the biggest share of Mitt Romney's contributors thus far. These are the findings of Crowdpac, a San Francisco-based political data-mining firm which analyzed the July presidential campaign finance reports. The Vermont senator has already received contributions from 24,582 of Obama's donors; whereas Clinton has only tapped just over 9,000 of them. Martin O'Malley, the former Maryland governor, has grabbed 383 Obama donors. That means Sanders has nabbed 72 percent of the 34,340 Obama donors who have given to a candidate in...

Link only due to copyright issues: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-17/ted-cruz-has-money-to-burn-the-gop

Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush told Yahoo News today that he was “fine” with transgender people openly serving in the U.S. military so long as the Pentagon determines that doing so would not compromise morale within the armed forces. The Obama administration announced this week that it would start the process of lifting military’s ban on transgender service. Defense Secretary Ash Carter has ordered a 6-month review to develop guidelines for implementation and study the policy implications of the move. He called the ban “outdated.”

Insiders say Donald Trump is a candidate who is as uncompromising as Cruz on hot-button issues like immigration — and can deliver the message with even more fiery rhetoric.Donald Trump’s turn in the national spotlight is mainly taking a toll on Ted Cruz, the Texas firebrand running as an uncompromising, anti-establishment conservative. That’s the assessment of this week’s POLITICO Caucus, our weekly survey of the leading strategists, activists and political operatives in Iowa and New Hampshire. Roughly a third of Iowa and New Hampshire Republican insiders pointed to Cruz as the candidate who is damaged the most in their states...

Last year, radical Muslim Nidal Hasan murdered 13 unarmed American soldiers and wounded 30 others. Thank you, George H.W. Bush! Yesterday, radical Muslim Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez murdered four unarmed American soldiers. Thank you, George H.W. Bush! Yes, it former President Bush whom we must thank for this, for it was he who put into place a regulation stating that American soldiers off the frontlines, for the most part, must be unarmed. (Clinton perpetuated it, but Bush started it.) That makes them sitting ducks for a single radical Muslim with a gun, who can casually go and shoot one soldier at...

John Catsimatidis, a Manhattan grocery chain owner, gave as much money as allowed to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Democratic primary campaign. Two months later, he gave the same amount, $2,700, to Jeb Bush, her would-be Republican challenger. “I’ve been friends with both of their families for many, many years,” he said. “They both love America, and I’d be happy if either of them won.”