RUTHFULLY YOURS

Christie: Muslim Americans are ‘Not Nearly That Sensitive’ on Syrian Refugee Issue By Nicholas Ballasy
Republican presidential candidate Gov. Chris Christie (R-N.J.) criticized President Obama for standing on foreign soil and belittling governors across the country over the Syrian refugee issue, arguing that Obama does not listen to the majority of the American people.

“It is true today as well that we have a president who I believe no longer listens. He listens to a very small, insular group of people around him, and I’ve said this publicly before and I’ll say it again, that when I look back on this presidency I think it will be marked by one phrase more than anything else: often wrong but never in doubt. That’s a dangerous thing to have in a president of the United States,” Christie said at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“The president’s huge blunder, in my view, is going overseas and criticizing folks here at home who have raised genuine concerns about the safety and security of America under this policy,” he said, referring to the president’s determination to allow Syrian refugees in the United States.

A recent poll revealed that the majority of Americans oppose admitting Syrian refugees into the U.S.

Christie said the right path forward on the issue is clear.

“When the FBI director stands up and says that he cannot assure the American people that Syrian refugees can be effectively vetted, that ends the conversation for the moment. We cannot allow ourselves, at a time of great peril, to put ourselves voluntarily at even greater risk just because there are some folks who believe that it will make our country look better here around the world,” he said.

These people are wearisome, and not serious.

“We don’t know yet everything about this specific attack,” Clinton said. But regardless of the couple’s reasons for the murders, something needs to be done to prevent gun violence, she added.

“The vast majority of Muslim-Americans are just as concerned and heartbroken about this as anyone else and, no matter what motivation these killers, these murderers had, you can say one thing for certain: They should not have been able to do this,” Clinton said, transitioning into impassioned comments on gun control.

The reflexive narrative-protection instinct of the Democrats is not only nauseating, it’s dangerous. This woman wants to be commander in chief yet she is more inclined to protect Democrat policy talking points than American lives.

Since Obama gave Nidal Hasan a free pass in 2009 with his “workplace violence” nonsense, terrorists have known that the purported leaders of this country were going to be easy to dupe from time to time because they would never really be looking at the problem clearly. If you’re walking around barefoot on a bed of glass but attribute the pain in your bleeding feet to chapped hands, all the lotion in the world isn’t going to prevent the further slicing of your feet as you move forward.

A few months ago, overhearing some ladies in the audience of a pro-Israel lecture trash Donald Trump, and clearly sensing that they were Obama fans, I turned to them and said, “At least he will be a huge improvement over the current inhabitant of the White House.” They were greatly displeased.

But after reading this account of Mr. Trump’s views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I think I owe those ladies an apology.

It turns out, after all, that Mr. Trump’s views on the Middle East conflict are a carbon copy of Mr. Obama’s. For one, Mr. Trump believes that it is up to Israel to make peace happen. He is apparently unaware of Palestinians’ outright rejection of Israel’s existence as a Jewish state. Secondly, Mr. Trump believes that solving the conflict is a central challenge, and so he promises to jump on it right at the onset of his presidency – as did Mr. Obama, having thought it was the key sore point that ruins the world’s universal happiness.

Donald Trump is not the favorite to win the Republican primary in 2016. National polls can be misleading — there is no day or time when Republicans across the nation will pick their presidential candidate. Instead, there will be multiple elections in all 50 states, on multiple days, and some states will matter more than others. This explains why so many pundits have predicted a Cruz-Rubio race.

In order to make this contest easier to understand, RealClearPolitics authors Sean Trende and David Byler created an interactive tool called the GOP Race for Delegates (you can find it here). Any reader can enter the polling results from each state’s primary and see how these results would affect the overall outcome. For convenience, Trende and Byler integrated each state’s rules into the program, and loaded the RealClearPolitics polling averages for the early states as a guideline.

Using this tool, Trende and Byler discovered many important features of the Republican primary to come. While conservative southern states will likely winnow the field, more liberal northern states will play a huge role in actually determining who will become the nominee. Some traditional wisdom is proven false, and there is a strong likelihood of a final battle between Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Marco Rubio (FL).
Cruz-Rubio

While Trende and Byler emphasize that “there are an almost infinite number of possibilities,” they did tend to find one much-discussed outcome kept showing up in their simulations — a struggle between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

When Bernie Sanders proposed $18 trillion in increased federal spending over the next ten years, most observers chuckled and asked what else one could expect from the self-described socialist. But what then is one to make of Hillary Clinton? She hasn’t — yet — risen to Sanders-level spending, but she’s certainly heading in that direction.

This week, for example, she unveiled a “jobs” plan that includes the usual motley collection of infrastructure projects, “green energy,” subsidies, manufacturing incentives, government research and development, and so on. In total these proposals would cost at least $350 billion over a decade.

Clinton’s jobs program comes on top of a $75 billion proposal for increased spending on clean energy that she announced earlier. She also wants more government support for child care, a proposal that some estimate could cost $200 billion or more over ten years. That would be on top of her proposal to give states grants to encourage them to implement paid family leave, which would cost at least $10 billion, and her $10 billion proposal for subsidizing home care for the elderly.

One summer afternoon in 2013, Marco Rubio arrived at Mike Lee’s Senate office for a strategy session on derailing the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Waiting inside were some of the upper chamber’s most conservative members, along with a group of influential activists. It promised to be an awkward pow-wow for the Florida senator, who had spent the 113th Congress authoring and promoting an immigration bill that turned some of his staunchest supporters — including some of those gathered in Lee’s office — into disgruntled opponents. Unperturbed, Rubio flashed a boyish grin and, according to multiple people present, greeted the group with a declaration: “The prodigal son is here.”

He knew he had sinned in their eyes, and that he needed the leaders of the increasingly powerful conservative movement that had championed his insurgent Senate bid to forgive him if he hoped to win their support for an eventual White House run. Yet one person in the room was already working overtime to make sure that wouldn’t happen. Ted Cruz, having copied Rubio’s anti-establishment blueprint to win his own Senate seat in 2012, had since usurped Rubio’s standing as the Tea Party’s favorite senator — in no small part by becoming the most vocal antagonist of the immigration-reform package that had blown up in the Floridian’s face earlier that summer. Both young senators harbored presidential ambitions, and if they ran against each other, Cruz wanted a clear contrast drawn between his brand of uncompromising ideological warfare and Rubio’s more pragmatic conservatism.

He’s not just sticking around.

Ted Cruz is on the move.

The combative Texas senator has climbed to second place in our GOP Power Rankings, the highest he has placed in the 14 weeks we have been polling political experts on who is the strongest candidate in the Republican field.

“The biggest news of the week was Ted Cruz’s surge in Iowa,” said Emory University professor Andra Gillespie. “One of the interesting features of this cycle has been the crowded evangelical field, where no one candidate has dominated and (Donald) Trump has held his own. Social conservatives may have found their candidate in Ted Cruz.”

Trump remains No. 1 in our survey, with 17 first-place votes. While he has continued to toss out comments that are considered poor taste or inaccurate, he is the unquestioned front-runner.

But Cruz and Marco Rubio are gaining ground. Rubio actually took more first-place votes in our survey (seven) than Cruz (four), but Cruz scored higher in total because 19 of our experts put him in second place.

It can be tiresome and ultimately pointless to fact-check Donald Trump: He and his supporters will believe what they want to believe. But it is nevertheless dismaying the extent to which he plays fast and loose with the facts. “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan (a far greater New Yorker than Trump will ever be) once said. Trump wants to prove Moynihan wrong by showing that he is entitled to his own facts.

Just look at what happened when Trump was confronted by demands for evidence to back up his claim that “thousands and thousands” of people in Jersey City were cheering at the World Trade Center was falling — a claim denied by the mayor of Jersey City, its police chief, and every other responsible individual who has ever looked into this matter.

First Trump claimed that it must be so because he remembered it happening, and “I have the world’s greatest memory. It’s one thing everyone agrees on.” (Everyone? Does anyone outside of Trump himself and his paid sycophants actually think so?)