Tag Archives: 2016 elections

Marco Rubio Turns His Back on Puerto Rico, at His Own Peril

by Tabatha0432 Posted on January 14, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In early September, Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio campaigned in San Juan, the Puerto Rican capital, on the same day—a nod to the island’s importance in the November presidential election, thanks to a surging population of Puerto Ricans in Florida, the mother of all swing states. But the two candidates came bearing very different visions for how the island territory should cope with its severe debt crisis. At a roundtable event, Clinton backed bankruptcy reforms that would spare the island from the worst ravages of austerity at the cost of profits for its Wall Street creditors. “You can’t fix your economy through austerity,” she said. At his own rally across the city, Rubio took Wall Street’s side. The Associated Press reported that Rubio, speaking in Spanish, “railed against giving Puerto Rico bankruptcy protection.”

Rubio wasn’t always a vocal opponent of bankruptcy protections for Puerto Rico. And his current stance is one that, should he become the Republican nominee, would be hard to explain to the hundreds of thousands of Puerto Rican voters in Florida.

Puerto Rico is currently embroiled in dire financial troubles. The island is $72 billion in debt. In August, Puerto Rico began missing payments to its lenders. Last week, it defaulted on $174 million in payments to creditors. Meanwhile, the island’s economy is floundering, with unemployment at 12 percent. The governor, Democrat Alejandro García Padilla, has repeatedly requested that Congress grant cities and public utilities in Puerto Rico access to Chapter 9 bankruptcy, which would give them the same tools to restructure debt that are available in the 50 states.

Like residents of the District of Columbia, Puerto Ricans lack full congressional representation. The island’s lone representative in Congress is Pedro Pierluisi, who is not allowed a vote on the final passage of legislation even though, as he likes to point out, he represents more people than any other member of the House of Representatives. Since the island doesn’t send anyone to the Senate, Pierluisi has to court friends on the other side of the Capitol to push for Puerto Rico’s interests. “My natural allies in the Senate are the senators who have a significant Puerto Rican presence in their states,” Pierluisi says, ticking off New York’s Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand and Florida’s Bill Nelson and Rubio as his usual Senate partners.

Typically, Rubio has backed Pierluisi’s proposals, he says. In 2013, for example, Rubio introduced in the Senate Pierluisi’s bill to allow Puerto Rico to receive funds to implement electronic medical records.

But that alliance crumbled when Pierluisi asked for help with the island’s debt crisis. “He has supported us on other areas,” Pierluisi says of Rubio. “But not on Chapter 9.”

Democrats approached Rubio’s office earlier this year about co-sponsoring a Chapter 9 bill in the Senate, and they were initially hopeful that he’d sign on when his office didn’t offer any policy objections, according to a Democratic aide in the Senate. But as the process dragged on, Rubio backed away without offering any alternatives or trying to find a compromise. “They ultimately didn’t have substantive issues with what we were talking about but couldn’t commit,” the aide said.

Last month, the New York Times detailed how Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut had initially tried to woo Rubio to join the Democrats’ bill, only for Rubio to back away just three weeks after a fundraiser with a hedge fund founder who had a stake in Puerto Rico’s debt. In November, Fusion reported that six hedge fund executives who hold Puerto Rican debt have donated to Rubio’s presidential campaign.

While perhaps good for his presidential fundraising, Rubio’s decision to back away from bankruptcy protections for the island could haunt him. The same economic turmoil that created the conflict between the island’s government and Wall Street has also spurred the biggest migration of Puerto Ricans to the US mainland since the 1950s and 1960s. Back then, Puerto Ricans headed mainly for New York and New Jersey. This time, about a third of Puerto Ricans coming to the mainland are landing in Florida, an important swing state in this year’s presidential race.

Today, there are more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland (5.1 million) than in Puerto Rico (3.5 million). As the US economy rebounded from the Great Recession but the island’s economy remained stagnant, migration to the mainland accelerated. Today, there are about 1 million Puerto Ricans in Florida—likely at least 100,000 more than in 2012, although exact figures are hard to come by. That increase is greater than President Barack Obama’s 73,000-vote margin of victory in Florida in 2012.

The Puerto Rican vote in Florida is mostly Democratic, although there are opportunities for Republicans to make inroads into the community. Obama won 77 percent of the Puerto Rican vote in Florida in 2008 and 84 percent in 2012. But it wasn’t too long ago that Jeb Bush won the backing of a majority of Puerto Ricans in his 2002 gubernatorial race, by diligently courting their votes. (Bush, incidentally, supports both Puerto Rican statehood and bankruptcy protections.) In 2010, Rubio significantly outperformed both John McCain’s 2008 campaign and Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign among Puerto Rican voters. If he is the nominee in November, Rubio will have a built-in advantage with Puerto Ricans due to “the Hispanic heritage he brings, the ability to speak the language, and the fact that he’s from Florida,” says Fernand Amandi, a Democratic pollster in Florida.

The newest arrivals from Puerto Rico represent an even bigger opportunity for Republicans. Unlike those who have lived in Florida for years and have forged a connection with the Democratic Party, newcomers don’t strongly identify with either party. (On the island, political divisions are centered on disagreements over Puerto Rico’s status as a territory rather than the left-right breakdown that defines the parties on the mainland.) What they do feel is a connection to the island, its economic distress, and the livelihoods of their family members who remain there.

“In Puerto Rico they can’t vote, but we can here,” says Betsy Franceschini, a Hispanic outreach director in Florida for the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, an arm of the island government that works as a liaison to the federal and state governments. “We want to make sure that whatever candidate we support will stand by our community and stand by during this crisis.”

“We will not forget,” Franceschini adds, “especially in November.”

Maurice Ferré, a former Democratic mayor of Miami who was born in Puerto Rico, believes that US policy toward the island will be more important in the 2016 elections than ever before. “Everyone has family in Puerto Rico, and they’re all being affected by this,” he says. “Pensions are now in doubt, health services are now in question…They’re cutting the police, they’re cutting education.”

Thanks to Florida’s presence among the handful of key swing states that candidates will have to jockey over this fall, small issues like this can take on an outsize importance—even deciding the outcome of the election.

“When you have a state as close as Florida potentially could be, and a lot of people anticipate to be, every segment of the electorate has an overmagnified sense of importance,” says Amandi, the pollster. “If anything, the newer arrivals from Puerto Rico that don’t have as much of a cultural history with either of the two parties here, you might say, are more important because they are potentially up for grabs. And some of these single issues, especially as it relates to the island, could very well be a litmus test issue.” Amandi estimates these recent arrivals in Florida, from the latest migration wave over the past decade, could number around 200,000.

So do the math: In Florida, that means potentially as many as 200,000 up-for-grab voters in a state that could, in a close election, be decided by a few thousand votes.

“The Republicans cannot afford to ignore the Puerto Rican electorate because if they do, they will lose Florida,” says Amandi, noting that the GOP nominee doesn’t need to win a majority of Puerto Ricans, but rather needs to surpass McCain and Romney’s poor showings—as Rubio did in 2010. This time around, Amandi says, Rubio is “going to have to explain to Puerto Rican voters why he is against bankruptcy protections.”

Puerto Rican leaders are already showing their anger at Rubio’s decision to back away from bankruptcy. During a December trip to Washington to lobby for bankruptcy protection, the island’s governor warned that Puerto Ricans in Florida would remember Rubio’s decision not to support bankruptcy come November. “They will be here on Election Day,” he said.

Excerpt from – 

Marco Rubio Turns His Back on Puerto Rico, at His Own Peril

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Marco Rubio Turns His Back on Puerto Rico, at His Own Peril

Fox Should Ask the GOP Candidates These Questions at Tonight’s Debate

by DarrylSwitzer Posted on January 14, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

On Thursday night, the Republican 2016 wannabes will once again gather for a debate, with the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary just weeks away. Though each of these candidates has been on the debate stage multiple times this campaign—and has occasionally granted interviews to reporters—there are still many questions that they have not had to address. So editors and reporters at Mother Jones have compiled a short list of queries that we’d put to the GOP candidates. Kudos to Fox Business Network if any of these get asked.

Donald Trump

* When you appeared on the talk show of conspiracy theory promoter Alex Jones, you told him that his “reputation is amazing” and added, “I will not let you down.” Jones has championed many conspiratorial notions, including that the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School never happened and that the attacks on the World Trade Center were an inside job. So what’s “amazing” about him?

* Why did you cut a deal with Amar Mammadov—an Azerbajani businessman accused of cronyism and profiting off his family’s ties to the government—to open a new Trump hotel in Baku?

* How many new government employee will be needed to implement your plan to bar Muslims from entering the nation? Given that any would-be terrorist who happens to be Muslim would likely lie about his or her religion to reach the United States, you couldn’t rely on the statements provided by foreigners trying to get into the United States. So then wouldn’t you need an army of federal workers to investigate each person coming into the United States? And how much would this anti-Muslim program cost?

* Can you now explain what the nuclear triad is?

Ted Cruz

* Your father, Rafael Cruz, who is an evangelical pastor, has often resorted to fiery, if not extremist, rhetoric. He has called the United States a “Christian nation,” and he has said that President Barack Obama is an “outright Marxist” who “seeks to destroy all concept of God” and should be sent “back to Kenya.” Most of us would not want to be judged on the basis of what a relative says. But you have extensively used your father as a campaign surrogate and to recruit religious leaders as supporters of your campaign. Would you disavow these comments?

* You have described Trump’s efforts to raise questions about you eligibility to be president—due to your birth in Canada—as a “silly” sideshow. But some of your own supporters, such as Rep. Steve King of Iowa, have questioned whether Obama was born in the United States and whether he is eligible to be president—even though, like you, his mother was indisputably a US citizen. Have King and other conservative birthers engaged in a silly sideshow?

* As a candidate, you have advocated tort reform—that is, imposing a cap of $750,000 on punitive damages that can be awarded in cases of malpractice or corporate malfeasance. Yet when you were a lawyer in private practice, you twice worked on cases to secure $50 million-plus jury awards in tort cases. Why the double standard?

Marco Rubio

* You’ve supported background checks for gun purchases in the past. Now you’re attacking the president for a similar proposal. Why have you flip-flopped?

* In a recent campaign ad, you attacked Obama for spying on Israel. Do you believe the US government should never mount any intelligence-gathering operations regarding Israel and that the United States should not spy on Israel to detect possible Israeli intelligence actions aimed at the US government or American corporations?

Ben Carson

* More than half of every dollar your campaign has raised has gone into the bank accounts of the consultants you’ve hired to raise that money. Why should conservatives continue opening up their checkbooks for a cause that’s mainly enriching political professionals?

* In a 2013 book, you wrote that people who commit health care fraud should suffer “some very stiff penalties…such as loss of one’s medical license for life, no less than ten years in prison, and loss of all of one’s personal possessions.” Yet you are in business with a former dentist who pleaded guilty to health care fraud. How does a candidate who campaigns on honesty and integrity explain this?

* You are a Seventh-day Adventist, and in a talk you gave in 2014 you indicated that you accept the church’s belief that a time will come when Seventh-day Adventists will be imprisoned by the government and even put to death merely for observing the Sabbath on Saturday, not Sunday. Do you truly think the US government will one day round up, jail, and possibly execute Seventh-day Adventists?

* Please name your favorite surgeon general and explain your choice.

Jeb Bush

* Paul Wolfowitz, a deputy secretary of defense in your brother’s administration, was one of the architects of the Iraq War, and prior to the invasion he made a series of predictions about the war that were wildly inaccurate. Why did you sign him up as a foreign policy adviser for your campaign?

Chris Christie

* Your administration in New Jersey has vigorously fought open-records requests for a wide variety of government documents: your schedule, your travel records, and contracts you handed out following Superstorm Sandy. Do you have a problem with transparency?

John Kasich

* You’ve said, “When you die and get to the meeting with Saint Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small. But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.” But as governor you have decreased food aid for the poor in Ohio in a manner that disproportionately affects minority communities. What do you think Saint Peter will say to that?

Source article:

Fox Should Ask the GOP Candidates These Questions at Tonight’s Debate

Posted in Anchor, Casio, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fox Should Ask the GOP Candidates These Questions at Tonight’s Debate

Chelsea Clinton Accuses Sanders of Trying to "Dismantle Obamacare"

by Aaleyah William Posted on January 12, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Chelsea Clinton hit the trail for the first time this election cycle on Tuesday to campaign for her mother, and she came out swinging.

In New Hampshire, the younger Clinton attacked Bernie Sanders’ Medicare-for-all, or single-payer, health care plan by wondering if it would in fact take away coverage from millions.

“Sen. Sanders wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the CHIP program, dismantle Medicare, and dismantle private insurance,” she said, according to MSNBC. “I worry if we give Republicans Democratic permission to do that, we’ll go back to an era—before we had the Affordable Care Act—that would strip millions and millions and millions of people off their health insurance.”

Chelsea Clinton is technically right: Millions of Americans would lose their current health insurance plans, which would be replaced by enrollment in a coverage program available to all (except, perhaps, undocumented immigrants). But it’s unclear how a plan that would make almost everyone eligible for coverage would strip millions of health care coverage, which is what Clinton seemed to be saying. (The Clinton campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Sanders’ health care plan, which he outlined in legislation in 2013, would replace the current piecemeal approach to coverage through many different programs—private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP—with government-provided coverage for everyone. As with the Affordable Care Act’s health care exchanges, Sanders’ 2013 bill relies on states to develop single-payer plans. But as the Sanders campaign stresses, any state that refused to set up a singe-payer system would have the federal government step in and do it. So unlike with the current Medicaid expansion, states could not opt out of “Berniecare.”

“It is time for the United States to join the rest of the industrialized world and provide health care as a right to every man, woman, and child,” Sanders campaign spokeswoman Arianna Jones said in a statement responding to Chelsea Clinton’s attack. “A Medicare-for-all plan will save the average middle-class family $5,000 a year. Further, the Clinton campaign is wrong. Our plan will be implemented in every state in the union regardless of who is governor.”

Like her daughter, Hillary Clinton has taken to attacking Sanders over health care, despite having said in 2008 that Democrats shouldn’t criticize each other over universal health care. In Iowa on Monday, Clinton called Sanders’ plan a “risky deal.” Expect this issue to come up on Sunday, when Clinton and Sanders face off in the last debate before voting begins with the February 1 caucuses in Iowa.

Read this article:

Chelsea Clinton Accuses Sanders of Trying to "Dismantle Obamacare"

Posted in Anchor, Everyone, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Chelsea Clinton Accuses Sanders of Trying to "Dismantle Obamacare"

How the Conservative Media Went Nuts When David Brooks and I Discussed Cruz’s "Satanic" Tone

by MargueriteNoonan Posted on January 11, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Jeez, the conservative media is really sensitive these days when it comes to Sen. Ted Cruz.

On Friday night, New York Times columnist David Brooks, a mild conservative, and I were on the PBS Newshour, and our discussion of Cruz’s recent surge in Iowa really ticked off some within the right-wing press. Here are a few headlines:

PBS: Ted Cruz and His Father Are ‘Satanic’ (National Review)

Watch PBS Panel of Journalists Call Ted Cruz and His Father ‘Satanic’ (The Blaze)

PBS Panel: Ted Cruz and His Pastor Father ‘Satanic’ (cnsnews.com)

The Blaze story summed up the big news this way: “During Friday’s episode of “PBS NewsHour,” New York Times columnist David Brooks and Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief David Corn referred to presidential hopeful Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and his father as ‘satanic.'”

I don’t know about Brooks, but I was besieged on Twitter by conservatives who hurled angry how-dare-you tweets at me. Some accused me of committing a hate crime (the victims: Christians). But this was yet another exercise of false right-wing outrage, and a demonstration of rather poor reading comprehension on the right.

This phony brouhaha was triggered when Newshour host Judy Woodruff asked Brooks and me to evaluate recent developments in the GOP presidential primary. Brooks went first:

Ted Cruz is making headway. There’s — you begin to see little signs of liftoff. Trump has sort of ceiling-ed out. Carson is collapsing. And Cruz is somehow beginning to get some momentum from Iowa and elsewhere. And so people are either mimicking him, which Rubio is doing a little by adopting some of the dark and satanic tones that Cruz has, and so—

Woodruff interrupted Brooks at this point to ask about his use of the word “satanic,” and Brooks explained:

Well, if you go to a Cruz — if you watch a Cruz speech, it’s like, we have got this enemy, we have got that enemy, we’re going to stomp on this person, we’re going to crush that person, we’re going to destroy that person. It is an ugly world in Ted Cruz’s world. And it’s combative. And it’s angry, and it’s apocalyptic.

At that point, with this article in mind, I chimed in to point out that Cruz’s father, an evangelical pastor who officially campaigns for Cruz, truly does believe and promote satanic conspiracies, claiming in a recent speech that Lucifer was responsible for the Supreme Court’s gay-marriage decision:

Well, actually, if you go to a speech from his dad, who is a pastor, evangelical, Rafael Cruz, it actually is satanic. He — I watched a speech in which he said Satan was behind the Supreme Court decision to legalize gay marriage.

Brooks replied, “I withdraw the satanic from Ted Cruz.” I noted, “You’re thinking that it’s political, but, sometimes, it’s literal.” Brooks went on to compare Cruz’s “dark and combative and, frankly, harsh” approach to the sunnier political disposition of Sen. Marco Rubio. And that was it regarding Cruz and the devil.

As you can see, neither one of us called either Cruz “satanic.” Brooks did use the word “satanic” to describe Cruz’s tone, but he meant that Cruz pitches an apocalyptic message of good-versus-evil, light-versus-dark. Which he does. And I then explained that his father, who has been recruiting religious leaders to support his son’s campaign, does indeed see political and policy developments he opposes as the handiwork of Satan. That is, the elder Cruz, who routinely resorts to fiery fundamentalist rhetoric, often labels his (and his son’s) foes as “satanic,” noting that they’re being manipulated by the Evil One. Neither Brooks nor I suggested that Ted or Rafael Cruz are serving the Dark Lord.

The points we made were not that hard to understand. Yet conservatives—perhaps driven by their antipathy to the RINO-ish Brooks—quickly tried to manufacture a fake controversy. I wonder if the devil made them do it.

See the original article here: 

How the Conservative Media Went Nuts When David Brooks and I Discussed Cruz’s "Satanic" Tone

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on How the Conservative Media Went Nuts When David Brooks and I Discussed Cruz’s "Satanic" Tone

Why the Heck Is Ben Carson Campaigning in Staten Island?

by NicoleXZKZ Posted on January 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

The New York Republican presidential primary is in 106 days, on April 19. It is the 37th nominating contest, coming more than three months after the first votes are cast in Iowa on February 1. So naturally Ben Carson is campaigning there on Monday night.

This is kind of strange. Carson’s campaign is a mess right now. When three of his top aides quit before the New Year, Armstrong Williams, Carson’s top advisor, found out about it on Twitter. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, once was at the top of the polls, but his numbers have plummeted in Iowa and elsewhere. Still, he insists he’s plowing ahead and remains a contender. If so, what’s he doing in Staten Island, while the other candidates rightly focus on Iowa and New Hampshire in the pre-voting homestretch? Some possibilities:

The ferry offers a great view of the harbor at a low price.
Carson wants to run for mayor of New York and is learning from Harold Ford’s mistake.
Fresh Kills is a cool name for one of the world’s largest garbage dumps.
Great pizza.
???

There’s no real explanation for this stop. (Has Carson sold every book he can possibly sell in Iowa?) It’s the latest sign his campaign—though it collected $23 million in the most recent quarter—cannot be considered a serious effort.

See original article:

Why the Heck Is Ben Carson Campaigning in Staten Island?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why the Heck Is Ben Carson Campaigning in Staten Island?

Trump’s First TV Ad Embraces His Most Controversial Ideas

by JaneTowrehvqdt Posted on January 4, 2016

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A week after promising to open his ample war chest and start spending on television ads, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump unveiled his campaign’s first TV advertisement on Monday morning. Trump has previously aired ads on his personal Instagram account, but a mere month before the Iowa caucus, his campaign decided it was time to make the move to the airwaves.

The ad focuses on ISIS and immigration, and doesn’t shy away from the more controversial positions Trump has staked out. A voiceover from an ominous narrator promises that Trump will temporarily ban Muslims from entering the country, “quickly cut the head of ISIS and take their oil,” and build a wall along the southern border of the United States that Mexico will finance.

Original article: 

Trump’s First TV Ad Embraces His Most Controversial Ideas

Posted in alo, Anchor, FF, GE, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump’s First TV Ad Embraces His Most Controversial Ideas

Was New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Drunk at Rowdy Hotel Party?

by RogelioGorsuch Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

A new audio recording released by Santa Fe police on Tuesday suggests that New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, once a rising star within the Republican party, appeared to be “inebriated” inside a hotel room where a party for her friends and staff was taking place. Hotel employees were forced to call police during the evening of December 14th, after guests complained about loud noises and bottles being thrown from the room’s balcony.

In the recording, a security guard at the Eldorado Hotel can be heard talking to Sgt. Anthony Tapia about the disturbance. A segment of the audio, recorded on Tapia’s police belt, below:

“I never expected the first time it would be the governor,” the guard said. “I can tell she is…”

“Inebriated,” Tapia said.

“Yes.”

Martinez could also be heard saying:

“Five hours ago, there was somebody that we said, ‘Get out of the room, do not be doing what you’re doing.’ There were bottles being thrown over. We said, ‘Get the hell out and stop.'”

The audio sharply contrasts to a previous statement made by Martinez’s spokesman last week, claiming that snowballs, not bottles, were thrown off the balcony. In a statement apologizing for the incident on Friday, Martinez also returned to the snowball version of the story.

“There was apparently a party in a hotel room earlier in the night that was disruptive,” Martinez said. “Someone was also throwing snowballs from a balcony. None of that should have happened and I was not aware of the extent of the behavior, until recently. And that behavior is not acceptable.”

During a public appearance on Tuesday, the Santa Fe New Mexican reports Martinez refused to answer questions about the recording.

The recording’s release comes at a particularly inopportune time for Martinez, who is reportedly being investigated by the FBI for alleged fundraising violations during her first run for governor in 2009.

Her landslide reelection victory last year brought her national attention and she has been raised as a strong contender for vice president in 2016. But Martinez’s latest gaffe and unflattering comparisons to Sarah Palin are likely to have dampened such enthusiasm.

Link to original: 

Was New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Drunk at Rowdy Hotel Party?

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Was New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez Drunk at Rowdy Hotel Party?

Jeb Abandons Jeb!

by wlqclksxq Posted on December 23, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Perfect last-minute Christmas present for the low-energy person in your life who needs an extra exclamation point: Jeb!

Not the candidate, just his name—upbeat punctuation mark and all. The word has apparently lost its appeal. Even to the candidate.

Last winter, months before Jeb Bush announced he was running for president, a Miami intellectual property attorney filed a trademark request for the word “Jeb!” on behalf of a mysterious Delaware corporation called BHAG LLC. As we discovered this summer, BHAG was an acronym for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. This phrase came from one of Bush’s favorite business management books, and when he was governor he used this term to motivate his underlings. It wasn’t until Bush, as a declared candidate, filed his financial disclosure form in July that the world learned he directly owned BHAG.

One of BHAG’s few activities was to trademark “Jeb!” As is par for the course, the US Patent and Trademark Office accepted the submission and requested additional information before it would grant the trademark. But according to that office, on November 9 Bush’s application was officially abandoned. Technically, Bush has until January 9 to restart the process, but for now the name is not trademarked and open for anyone else to try to grab.

According to the original application, Bush wanted the name reserved for use on leather key chains, stadium cushions, stemware, stuffed toys, hair bands, and other cool stuff. In April, the USPTO asked BHAG to provide, within six months, written consent from Bush himself to use his name. Bush never responded. So the USPTO issued an abandonment notice regarding the trademark request.

Bush’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

To be fair, Bush has had many other things to worry about these past few months. But his chief antagonist, Donald Trump, did find the time to re-up his hold on “Trump,” and he added a trademark claim to cover the use of his name for books on how to succeed in business and politics.

Source:

Jeb Abandons Jeb!

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Jeb Abandons Jeb!

That Time When Donald Trump Said Jeb Bush Would Make a Great President

by MarylouXAC Posted on December 22, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

In recent days, it seems nothing makes Donald Trump happier than assailing Jeb Bush. The current GOP front-runner gleefully slams the former front-runner almost any chance he gets, and in the past week, with Bush finally trying to attack Trump with some verve, Trump has had plenty of opportunities to one-up Bush with counterattacks. On Saturday, Bush said, “I gotta get this off my chest: Donald Trump is a jerk.” Naturally, Trump fired back the next day on Meet the Press with Chuck Todd:

Jeb is a weak and ineffective person. He’s also a low-energy person, which I’ve said before. But he’s a weak and ineffective person. Jeb, if he were president, it would just be more of the same, it would be just—he’s got money from all of the lobbyists and all of the special interests that run him like a puppet. He’s got 2 percent in the polls; I have 41 percent in the latest poll. He has 2 percent. He’s going to be off the stage soon. He’s an embarrassment to the Bush family and, in fact, he doesn’t even want to use the Bush name, which is interesting. Jeb is an embarrassment to himself and to his family and the Republican Party—they’re not even listening to Jeb. Jeb is saying that—by the way, Chuck, Jeb is only saying that to try and get a little mojo going, but in the meantime, I went up 11 points in the new Fox poll. I went up 11 points after the debate, and he went down 2.

This was just more of Trump’s dismissive and taunting schoolyard bully approach to dealing with Bush. Two days earlier, Trump tweeted out this assessment of Bush: “The last thing our country needs is another BUSH! Dumb as a rock!”

But there once was a time when Trump held Jeb Bush in high regard, hailed him as a leader the country needed, and declared he would make a great president.

In 2000, Trump was pondering a possible presidential run as the Reform Party nominee. (The Reform Party was the remnants of Ross Perot’s independent presidential bid of 1992.) And he wrote a book, The America We Deserve, in which he pontificated on a host of political and policy matters. (He now claims that in this book he predicted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attack, but that’s not true.) Toward the end of the book, Trump shared his thoughts about prominent politicians. Trump noted that, should he decide to run for president, he would, of course, offer the best approach “available in the presidential marketplace,” and that he could bring to the presidency “a new spirit, a great spirit that we haven’t had in this country for a long time.” Still, Trump did point out that there were a few politicians of whom he thought highly. And at the top of this list was Bush.

Trump wrote:

Florida Governor Jeb Bush is a good man. I’ve held fundraisers for him. He’s exactly the kind of political leader this country needs now and will very much need in the future. He, too, knows how to hang in there. His first shot at Florida’s governorship didn’t work out, but he didn’t give up. He was campaigning the day after his loss. He won the next race in a landslide. He’s bright, tough, and principled. I like the Bush family very much. I believe we could get another president from the Bushes. He may be the one.

Of the pols Trump cited in the book, Jeb Bush was the only one who Trump pronounced presidential material. High praise, indeed, given that Trump was eyeing the White House himself at the time.

Other prominent Americans Trump fancied included Oprah Winfrey (“enormously successful in an incredibly competitive field”) and then-Sen. Bob Torricelli, a New Jersey Democrat (“a first-rate public figure”). Torricelli, though, pulled out of his reelection campaign in 2002 after media reports revealed he had accepted illegal campaign contributions from a businessman linked to North Korea. In the book, Trump—who now wants to ban Muslims from entering the United States—proclaimed his admiration for Muhammad Ali (“on the spiritual level, I believe, he still floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee”). He praised then-Gov. George Pataki, a New York Republican, as the “most underrated guy in American politics.” Trump said he was looking for Pataki to end up on the Republican national ticket in 2000 or 2004. He cited Al Gore for being a man of “formidable intellect” and also “vastly underrated.” (Yet in a 2010 speech, Trump said the Nobel Prize committee should take back the prize it awarded Gore in 2007 for raising awareness of human-induced climate change, claiming that “China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity.”)

And Trump had positive things to say about the Clintons. He called Hillary “definitely smart and resilient.” He added, “She was very nice to my sons, Donny and Eric, when she visited New York.” As for Bill, he noted that he “could have gone down as a very good president. Instead he goes down as a guy they tried to impeach.” Trump continued:

Now he can’t even get into a golf club in Westchester. But he can join my golf club—I’d be proud to have him. I’m developing a spectacular new country club five minutes from his new home.

And speaking of his new home, in all candor, he really overpaid. He really got ripped off on the house. If I had represented him in buying the house, I could have saved them about $600,000.

Nowadays, it’s not likely that he wants to help the Clintons.

Source: 

That Time When Donald Trump Said Jeb Bush Would Make a Great President

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on That Time When Donald Trump Said Jeb Bush Would Make a Great President

Sanders Threatens to Sue Democratic Party in Data Breach Dustup

by NicholaHertz Posted on December 18, 2015

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

At a press conference Friday afternoon, Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, threatened legal action against the Democratic National Committee for cutting off the Sanders’ presidential campaign from critical voter data, such as addresses and phone numbers of potential supporters. The DNC took this step after a Sanders campaign staffer on Thursday accessed private voter data belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign in a breach that the Sanders campaign has denounced.

“We will be in federal court this afternoon seeking immediate relief,” Weaver said. Our data “has been stolen by the DNC.”

Weaver’s threat was the latest move in a serious—and complicated—digital dustup involving the Sanders and Clinton campaigns, the DNC, and a contractor hired by the Democratic Party to maintain voter data for various campaigns. This contractor, NGP VAN, is supposed to keep data for different campaigns separate. But on Thursday, news broke that at least one member of the Sanders campaign accessed Clinton campaign data when a firewall temporarily went down. Evidence surfaced Friday that more than one staffer of the Sanders campaign had access to the Clinton campaign voter data, and that some of the information had been downloaded.

The Sanders campaign immediately fired a staffer responsible and is undertaking an internal review into what happened and who else was involved. But the Sanders campaign insists that fault also belongs to the DNC and NGP VAN for the firewall failure. “Given that it is the DNC’s responsibility to secure the voter data file, the DNC failed in this regard,” the campaign said in a statement released Friday.

In response to the breach, the DNC revoked access for the Sanders campaign to this database—which includes crucial voter data collected by the campaign itself—until the campaign can prove it has destroyed any Clinton campaign data that it downloaded. The Sanders campaign needs this information in order to maintain contact with voters and reach out to supporters, especially as the initial voting and caucusing approaches. The lawsuit threat is an indication of how serious the situation is for the Sanders campaign.

The incident has given the Sanders campaign an opportunity to bolster its long-running claim that the DNC favors Clinton, though the party insists that is not true. “This is taking our campaign hostage,” Weaver said of the DNC’s action.

As of Friday afternoon, the Clinton campaign had said nothing about the breach or the threatened lawsuit. Saturday is the third Democratic debate, and it may well be that Sanders and Clinton address this issue there.

Update: The Clinton campaign commented on the situation.

Excerpt from: 

Sanders Threatens to Sue Democratic Party in Data Breach Dustup

Posted in Anchor, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Sanders Threatens to Sue Democratic Party in Data Breach Dustup