RUTHFULLY YOURS

The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State Department business may have violated public corruption laws, three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told Fox News.
This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.
“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and whether regular processes were followed,” one source said.

Clinton, speaking to the Des Moines Register, on Monday pushed back on the details of a second investigative track. According to reporter Jennifer Jacobs, Clinton said Monday she has heard nothing from the FBI.

While her lapdogs in the news media claim Hillary Clinton has changed her negative attitudes about the military and law enforcement, she has once again pandered to minority voters by attacking American police officers by comparing them with ISIS terrorists, according to officials with the National Association of Chiefs of Police. (See videos below.)

The Democrat’s presidential heir apparent Hillary Clinton participated in a Townhall event on Monday for Univision’s afilliated network Fusion where she answered questions about white privilege and terrorism. Hillary Clinton said “white terrorism” and “police violence” are just as big a threat today to blacks and Latinos as are the Islamist terrorist groups such as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

Question: “The danger of ISIS is clearly a major threat to American safety, but personally, I know many minorities who are much more concerned with racist attacks at the local level than radical Islamists, so just — question to put it plainly since often, issues of race are tiptoed, do you believe that white terrorism and extremism is as much a threat to some in this country as something like ISIS?”

Clinton’s Answer: “Yes, I believe there are all kinds of underground movements and efforts in our country that try to use violence or assert beliefs that I find often lead to violence,” Clinton said before outright accusing some police officers of being terrorists. I think that when you have police violence that terrorized communities, that doesn’t show the respect that you’re supposed to have from respecting people in your authority, that can feel, also, terrorizing.”

During the 2012 election, Mitt Romney gained a reputation as a man who was too nice to hit Barack Obama hard. The most glaring instance of this reluctance came on September 12, 2012, when the news broke that Benghazi had come under attack. Romney refused to go to the jugular. Later, it was reported that the Romney camp spiked an ad by the RNC attacking Obama on the events of that night. Anything Romney had to say about Obama’s incompetence (or even whereabouts that night) in a debate was effectively neutered. Candy Crowley’s interjection during the second presidential debate was simply the cherry on top.

Romney was too relaxed a candidate to get in the dirt and get bloody. His campaign’s preference for focusing on his policies and personal principles may have been noble, but his refusal to fight rough with Obama left voters with the impression that he was weak.

That impression was reinforced by Romney’s refusal to defend himself against Obama’s attacks. His campaign never really countered Team Chicago’s claim that he had given a woman cancer, nor did it effectively argue against the suggestion that as president he would delight in executing Big Bird live on PBS.

The Obama campaign was unrelenting against Romney. And in all likelihood, Clinton’s campaign against the GOP nominee will be just as ruthless. If Republicans do not learn to counter Democratic criticism — and hard — 2016 may yield the same result as did 2012 and 2008.

At present, there is little indication that the current crop of Republicans has learned the lesson of the past two elections. At last weekend’s Kemp Forum in Columbia, S.C., several GOP candidates were asked about former president Bill Clinton’s past behavior — specifically, about allegations of sexual assault. Alarmingly, their answers were uniformly weak.

As we near the end of the pre-season in this election cycle, voters in the early states are starting to look closely at the candidates for the first time. Over the past few days, I’ve tried to get a sense of what those who are really paying attention are hearing the candidates say. As far as possible, I’ve aimed to avoid the filters through which we political junkies have been following the race for months. So I have spent some time listening to the stump speeches that the major candidates have been delivering in the last couple of weeks in the early states. C-SPAN makes it easy. Most voters don’t attend campaign events and hear complete speeches from the contenders, but in the earliest primary states they can – and do. And these speeches are in any case a good indication of how candidates understand themselves and their message at this stage.

The most striking thing that emerges from listening to these speeches one after another is that the theme of this election year so far for Republicans is the question of the establishment and the public. That’s not surprising. But how candidates are taking up the question did surprise me. The natural way to think about the subject — a kind of generic populist template — is that our governing elite in general and the Republican establishment in particular are awfully strong and are oppressing the public in some way. But that’s not really how most Republican contenders are talking about the issue. More often, at least implicitly, their subject is not the strength but the weakness of the establishment, even if they don’t quite put it that way. All of them describe the hollowing out and decay of America’s elite, its core institutions, and its political leadership. And some of the key differences between the candidates become a little clearer when we see them as differences in how they would approach that serious problem.

MANCHESTER, N.H.—Republican front-runner Donald Trump said Monday he would slash funding for the Department of Education and Environmental Protection Agency if he is elected president.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal and New Hampshire’s WMUR at a local diner here, the businessman said he would do “tremendous cutting” of the federal government. Education policy, he said, should be returned to the states, and he said he would end the Common Core education standards, which conservatives view as federal overreach.

“Education should be local and locally managed,” said Mr. Trump, who also attacked the administration’s environmental policies. “The Environmental Protection Agency is the laughingstock of the world.”

Mr. Trump’s focus on domestic budgetary issues is a new plank in his presidential policy proposals. It is also one likely to appeal in New Hampshire, where voters have long rewarded candidates who promise fiscal restraint and to reduce federal government spending.

The case for incrementalism is based on the observation that extremism – whether from the right or the left – does not work in a country that prizes freedom. A democracy, by definition, is not efficient. It is not meant to be. It cannot totally satisfy all people with their myriad opinions, but it should satisfy most and be representative of the people.

Unfortunately, extremism has characterized politics for the past seven years and perhaps longer. Mr. Obama came to the White House promising to heal the wounds caused by an election in 2000 that many Democrats felt was illegal and from two wars that had grown increasingly unpopular. Instead, rifts deepened.

Immediately following the election in 2008, compromise went the way of the Dodo bird. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Affordable Care Act and Dodd-Frank – all passed with no (or minimal) support from the opposition. This “my way, or the highway” attitude on the part of the imperious Barack Obama has also led to deteriorating relations with Israel, an aggressive Russia, a rogue North Korea and a confrontational China. It brought about a premature troop withdrawal from Iraq, “leading from behind” in Libya, the abandonment of principle in Syria and a nuclear deal with Iran, perhaps conceived with good intentions, but executed in such a manner that it could turn the Middle East into a nuclear maelstrom. And, it has led to re-establishing relations with the most repressive Communist regime in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba.

On Tuesday night, my daughter and her friends went down to Claremont, New Hampshire to see Donald Trump in action. She and her chums range from the not terribly political to those with the usual enthusiasms of youth, so they went mainly because Trump’s a hot ticket, and we don’t get a lot of those in the Granite State. Her only other candidate encounter this season was at the North Haverhill Fair last summer when Lindsey Graham pounced outside the 4-H barn, no doubt with an eye to recruiting her for one of his “rotating first ladies”.

At any rate, after hearing my daughter’s account of the night, my sons said they wanted to see Trump, too. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic, having wasted far too much of my time in New Hampshire on campaign events, going all the way back to the oxymoronic “Dole rallies” of 1996. But they persisted. So we checked out the schedule and discovered that he was due to be in Bernie Sanders’ socialist fortress of Vermont on Thursday. Which is how we wound up crossing the Connecticut River and traversing the Green Mountain State, and eventually found ourselves in an unusually lively Burlington. Herewith, a few notes on what I saw:

~THE VENUE: When was the last time a GOP presidential candidate held (in the frantic run-up to Iowa and New Hampshire) an event in Vermont? Every fourth January, Republican campaigns are focused on the first caucus and the first primary states, as Bush, Rubio, Christie, Kasich, Huckabee, Fiorina et al are right now. But in fact the Green Mountain primary is on March 1st, and its delegates count as much as any other state’s. In recent cycles, the American electoral system has diminished and degraded itself by retreating into turnout-model reductionism and seriously competing only over a handful of purple states. Even if he’s only doing it as a massive head-fake, Trump understands the importance of symbolism: By going into Berniestan, he’s saying he’s going for every voter and he’s happy to play down the other guy’s half of the field.

“There is absolutely nothing to admire in Kim or Putin. They are the enemies of civilized behavior and should be held in utter contempt. That Trump doesn’t place their actions in a moral context should be worrying to anyone who cares about U.S. leadership.”

First, candidate Trump carried on a long-distance bromance with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, calling him “a strong leader” and saying it was a “great honor” to have Putin compliment him.

Now Trump has expressed admiration for an even loonier goon: North Korea’s boy tyrant Kim Jong Un. Speaking at a rally in Ottumwa, IA, Trump veritably gushed about the leadership qualities of Kim.

The Hill:

“If you look at North Korea, this guy, he’s like a maniac, OK?” Trump said at a rally in Ottumwa, Iowa, on Saturday.

“And you’ve got to give him credit: How many young guys — he was like 26 or 25 when his father died — take over these tough generals and all of a sudden, you know, it’s pretty amazing when you think of it. How does he do that?” he added.

40-something Hillary Clinton should Worry DemocratsBy Silvio Canto, Jr.
The latest FOX poll is bad news for Mrs Clinton:

She loses to Senator Rubio (50-41%),
Senator Cruz is up 7 (50-43%),
she ties Bush (44-44%),
Trump leads (47-44%),
and Christie leads (47-44%).

Dr. Carson is the only candidate that she defeats, according to this poll.

It takes more than one poll to persuade me one way or another. However, there is a trend in the polls that should scare Democrats: Hillary is 40-something time after time.

Hillary Clinton is between 42-45% in the average of polls. This is scary for such a well-known candidate.

A terrible way to forecast the 2016 contest is to gauge whose supporters are the loudest. Presidential elections are not decided by partisans or ideologues.

The arithmetic is pretty simple: 41% of voters in the 2012 presidential election described themselves as moderates, and 29% as independents. Almost all Republicans (93%) and self-described conservatives (82%) voted for Mitt Romney, but that wasn’t enough. Even if Mr. Romney had won every Republican or conservative voter, it still wouldn’t have been enough.

Because there are roughly 5% more Democrats than Republicans, the GOP needs a solid majority of independents to win a national election. In 2012 Mitt Romney outpolled Barack Obama among independents, 50% to 45%. But that didn’t take him across the electoral college finish line.

It is safe to predict that the proportions that held in 2012 will be about the same this year. About two-thirds of the voters will not be Republicans. Thus it is vital to pay early attention to how each of the candidates is doing among independents. A long, drawn-out primary that forces candidates to make strong appeals to the party’s ideological base can hurt the eventual nominee in November