BY HERB JACKSON
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT |
THE RECORD
Governor Christie may be gung-ho for Donald Trump, but it remains to be seen whether the reality show star’s bid for the presidency gets a boost from the state Republican Party by placing his name on the ballot next to party-backed candidates for Congress and local office.
https://www.northjersey.com/news/n-j-s-political-primary-gains-in-relevance-1.1525137
By Dan Balz March 5 at 4:12 PM
At the core of Donald Trump’s political success this year are the grievances of a sizable and now vocal block of disaffected voters, many of them white and working-class, and a Republican Party that has sought and benefited from their support while giving them almost nothing tangible in return.
The New York businessman’s position as the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination has plunged the party into a contentious debate and raised some of the most troubling questions about its future since the Watergate scandal in 1974 or Barry Goldwater’s landslide defeat a decade earlier.
Campaigning on Friday, Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.), who is seeking to deny Trump the nomination, put the threat in apocalyptic terms. If Trump becomes the nominee, he said, “He will split the Republican Party and it will be the end of the modern conservative movement.”
Trump and so-called Trumpism represent an amalgam of long-festering economic, cultural and racial dissatisfaction among a swath of left-out Americans who do not fit easily into the ideological pigeonholes of red and blue, right and left.
Shock Video: Alex Jones Is Assaulted After Turning On Trump
“Nothing is more symptomatic of the GOP establishment’s death drive than their continued embrace of the presidential aspirations of a man who shrank the party in 2012.”
Clueless GOP establishment continues to flounder
Mittens: GOP Establishment Chooses Mount Romney as Hill to Die on
by STEPHEN K. BANNON & REBECCA MANSOUR3 Mar 20163,677
After President Jeb, President Walker, President Christie,President Kasich, President Ryan, and President Rubio, the Republican establishment is now turning once again to the Adlai Stevenson of the GOP – Willard Mitt Romney.
Perhaps nothing is more symptomatic of the GOP establishment’s death drive than their continued embrace of the presidential aspirations of a man who shrank the party in 2012.
But then, these are the same Republican elites who are determined to grant amnesty to 40 million future Democrats. So, obviously party expansion and broad national victories are not their priorities. How else do you explain their bizarre desire to board the S.S. Mittanic one more time?
A full recounting of the unmitigated disaster that was the Romney campaign is beyond the scope of this op-ed. But let’s cut to the chase. Mitt Romney lost because he was unpalatable to working class Americans.
Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics explained in detail how Romney lost the election in large part because he couldn’t win over white working class voters.
That wasn’t an accident. It was by design. An August 2012 op-ed by Matthew Continetti in the Washington Free Beacon outlined the Obama campaign’s “voter suppression” strategy “to disillusion white voters without degrees in the Rust Belt and Mountain West.” Obama calculated that these working class voters would make Romney president if they voted Republican by the same 30-point margin as they did in 2010, but if they were demoralized and alienated by the GOP candidate, they would hand the election to Obama by simply sitting it out.
By Geoff Earle
March 2, 2016 | 10:59pm
WASHINGTON — A few months ago, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was salivating over the chance to take on Donald Trump — but the real-estate mogul is now positioned not only to win the GOP nomination, but also the White House. The master campaigner has defied uncharitable predictions, danced circles around the press, and outfoxed his Republican rivals to keep them from forging a unified plan to stop him. Here are eight reasons why Trump is actually the Democrats’ most potent foe.
Trump has been the driving force behind record-setting Republican turnout, while Democratic turnout has been flat. The GOP has set turnout records in every state, except for Vermont.
In Alabama alone, nearly 200,000 more Republicans voted on Super Tuesday than in 2008. “What Trump is doing is he’s able to attract more voters to turn out,” said Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), who backs Marco Rubio.
Hillary and Bill Clinton are ripe targets for Trump, who has revealed an uncanny ability to shred his opponents by brutally defining them. He blew apart former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as “low-energy” and helped explode Ben Carson’s feel-good biography.
So far, Trump has confined his comments about Hillary Clinton mostly to assumptions she may not be allowed to run because of her email scandal — a dubious claim — and saying she lacks the stamina for the job.
But once he gets her in his sights, he can drill down on the e-mail controversy, hit her on Libya and the Iraq war, and go after any number of flip-flops she has made throughout the campaign.
O’Toole Comes Out Strong for Trump
Following Governor Chris Christie’s surprise endorsement of GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, Senator Kevin O’Toole (R-40) said Monday that he thinks the provocative former reality star is the party’s best chance at drawing out independents and taking the White House. JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
by NEIL MUNRO23 Feb 2016446
Exit polls show that nine percent of votes in the Nevada caucus were cast by people who describe themselves as Latino Americans, and Donald Trump won a plurality of their votes.
CNN reported shortly before 12:30 a.m. that Trump won 44 percent of the votes from Nevada’s GOP Latinos, despite strong competition from two Latino candidates.
“This is the wow number of the night,” said David Chalian, a CNN political expert. “It is just unbelievable,” he added.
That 44 percent is 15 points above the 29 percent score won by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)
79%, who has been touted since 2012 as the GOP’s best shot to win Latino votes.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 97% won 18 percent of the votes, and Gov. John Kasich won four percent.
Rubio and Cruz are Latinos.
However, the number of Latinos in the poll is so small that the survey has a margin-of-error of roughly 10 percent.
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2016/02/23/3127941/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social
Biden in ’92: No election-season Supreme Court nominees
By Sarah Wheaton
02/22/16 04:36 PM EST
Updated 02/22/16 07:19 PM EST
Republicans are delighted that a recently unearthed Joe Biden speech appears to be a strong endorsement of the GOP’s current Supreme Court strategy.
“Politics has played far too large a role in the Reagan-Bush nominations to date. One can only imagine that role becoming overarching if a choice were made this year, assuming that a justice was announced tomorrow that he or she was stepping down,” Biden said on the Senate floor in June 1992, not long after Bill Clinton won the Democratic nomination to challenge then-President George H.W. Bush.
“A process that is already in doubt in the minds of many will become distrusted by all,” Biden continued. “Senate consideration of a nominee under these circumstances is not fair to the president, the nominee or to the Senate itself.”
Nearly 24 years later, after C-Span posted the old video, Republicans are offering Biden a hearty second — at least to the part of the 90-minute speech where he calls on the Senate to “seriously consider” not scheduling confirmation hearings and dismissing the potential impact of a short-handed court.
“The precedent of not confirming SCOTUS justices nominated in election years was established by both parties,” the office of Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) tweeted on Monday, with a link to a 2-minute clip of the old footage.
In the aftermath of Antonin Scalia’s death, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was quick to say that any nominee to fill the vacancy should wait until after the coming election.
The clips and quotes Republicans seized on, however, ignored a passage buried deep in the transcript where Biden called for a “compromise” pick, much as he’s done in the past week.
Read more: https://www.politico.com/story/2016/02/joe-biden-supreme-court-nominee-1992-219635#ixzz410xD3RQl
BY DAVID LIGHTMAN
CHARLESTON, S.C.
Things sure look good for Donald Trump.
The Republican presidential race expanded across the country Sunday, and polls show the real estate mogul ahead in eight of the dozen states voting in the next nine days.
Trump has now won primaries in two very different states, center-right New Hampshire and evangelical-dominated South Carolina. And the Republican Party system of choosing a presidential nominee favors candidates who continue to win early primaries and caucuses.
“He seems to have about a third of the Republican electorate under his spell, and it’s a durable, non-ideological coalition,” said Kyle Kondik, managing editor at Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball Sunday.
The biggest hope for stopping Trump is for a single strong challenger to emerge, and so far that hasn’t happened.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., finished second Saturday in South Carolina, but he was 10 percentage points behind Trump and barely edged Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, even though Rubio barnstormed the state with popular Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.
Rubio also lacks an obvious state where he can win in the next few weeks. He should be a favorite in Tuesday’s Nevada caucus. Rubio lived in Las Vegas as a child, was a church member, and Sunday picked up the endorsement of Sen. Dean Heller, R-Nevada. But a CNN/ORC poll last week showed Trump with a huge lead, with more support than Rubio and Cruz combined.
Read more here: https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/election/article61652557.html#storylink=cpy
By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Sunday, February 21, 2016
SPARTANBURG, S.C. | Republicans’ turnout streak continued, with GOP voters shattering their South Carolina primary record Saturday night.
With almost all precincts reporting, more than 737,000 votes had been counted. That was more than 20 percent higher than 2012, when about 603,000 voted.
It follows record GOP turnout in Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary earlier this month.
By contrast, Democrats’ turnout has tumbled from its 2008 records in all three contests, including Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada. About 80,000 voters took part in the caucuses, with was 33 percent less than 2008’s level.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/feb/21/gop-sets-another-turnout-record-democrats-numbers-/
Bernie Sanders will become our next president and it should come as no surprise to people actually paying attention
H.A. GOODMAN
In one major poll, Bernie Sanders is now leading Hillary Clinton nationally. In most others, he’s not far behind from the former Secretary of State. Vermont’s Senator already has an “edge over Clinton in matchups with GOP opponents,” dispelling Clinton’s electability myth. In an average of national polls, Bernie Sanders is less than eight points from Hillary Clinton, after being over 50 points behind in 2015. In addition, there’s only one person capable of challenging a Republican in 2016 withoutJames Comey declaring national security was jeopardized by a private server.
Bernie Sanders is the only Democratic candidate capable of winning the White House in 2016. Please name the last person to win the presidency alongside an ongoing FBI investigation, negative favorability ratings, questions about character linked to continual flip-flops, a dubious money trail of donors, and the genuine contempt of the rival political party. In reality, Clinton is a liability to Democrats, and certainly not the person capable of ensuring liberal Supreme Court nominees and President Obama’s legacy.
The precious and all-knowing polls already show Bernie Sanders defeating Republicans in a general election and Robert Reich has already explained why Sanders can easily win the presidency. In a Huffington Post piece titled “6 Responses to Bernie Skeptic,” Reich debunks the trusted myth of Clinton supporters and Republicans:
With the campaigns of Donald Trump and Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) riding high after first and third-place showings in New Hampshire, some Republican insiders believe that this spring’s New Jersey primaries could see a substantial rise in conservative turnout from independents and the undecided. As Trump and Cruz maintain their leads against the GOP establishment’s deep bench, June could bring surprises in a primary that typically serves as a late stepping stone for candidates who have all but sealed up the nomination. JT Aregood, PolitickerNJ Read more
Obama and Ryan, Long at Odds, Said to Meet as Soon as Next Week
Margaret Talev
Angela Greiling Keane
January 22, 2016 — 3:02 PM EST
President Barack Obama and House Speaker Paul Ryan may sit down together at the White House for a long-anticipated meeting as soon as next week, a person familiar with their plans said.
The blizzard bearing down on Washington may force them to postpone if the capital remains shut down at the start of next week.
The two men haven’t spent significant time together since Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican, was sworn in as speaker in October. White House press secretary Josh Earnest said last week that the president hoped that they would have a chance to talk face-to-face “relatively soon.” The person who said the meeting may happen next week asked for anonymity because the timing hasn’t been settled.
It wasn’t clear whether other congressional leaders would take part. A spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican, didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Doug Andres, a spokesman for Ryan, said that “nothing is currently scheduled.” Jen Friedman, deputy White House press secretary, declined to comment.
Obama, 54, and Ryan, 45, have enough in common personally and in some policy areas for the foundation of a relationship, if either of them desired one. They also have enough accrued tension to dissuade either from bothering in Obama’s final year in office.
January 17,2016
Hackensack NJ, At County Committee Meeting Maura McMahon DeNicola announced her intention to run for reelection as Bergen County Freeholder in November 2016. Maura is the last one standing and ready to take on new challenges .
Maura said , “It’s hard to believe it’s already time to be a part of this great political process once again! “
Maura’s was educated at Boston College, B.A., graduated magna cum laude and recieved and M.A. from Columbia University.
Maura has been Married to Philip, 29 years with 4 children,Philip, Graduate U.S. Naval Academy, Lieutenant U.S. Navy
Paul, Graduate Leonard N. Stern School of Business at the New York University,Conor, Automotive Mechanic
Lucia, Freshman, Villanova University
Maura commented of the the defection of Sheriff Saudino ,”I am disappointed that the sheriff chose to turn his back on his party, and his commitment to the people who nurtured his political career. I am disappointed that he chose political expediency, and self-interest ahead of the people’s interest.
I am sure the allure of the power of the Democratic Party in Bergen County is difficult to resist. I am sure Chairman Stellato made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. But there are those of us who believe in fighting for what is right and what we believe in regardless of the outcome.
Sheriff Saudino may want us to believe that his decision is about law enforcement, but we know it’s not. It’s about making a deal to secure his re-election. So let’s not for a moment pretend that this defection today has anything to do with differences with the past administration or the sheriff’s ability to carry out his duties.
It’s about nothing more than political ambition and succumbing to the allure of power and prolonging a political career.
I am prepared to work this year with the citizens of this county who want fair, honest and open government and I look forward to working with the Republican Party’s nominee for sheriff.”
By James Oliphant
Reuters
January 15, 2016
NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. (Reuters) – With two weeks to go until the first contest of the 2016 presidential race, Republicans who fear their party has been hijacked by the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz found little to comfort them in the latest debate.
Both candidates, one a billionaire developer with no political experience and the other a U.S. Senator from Texas with a reputation for clashing with his colleagues in Washington D.C., stood center stage Thursday night and, for the most part, dominated the proceedings.
More mainstream hopefuls such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and U.S. Senator Marco Rubio from Florida were left nipping at their heels and squabbling among themselves.
With characteristic bravado, Trump dubbed himself the winner on Friday. Speaking to 250 people at Living History Farms in Iowa, he called the debate “interesting” and said “even the pundits last night were treating me nicely.” Trump told MSNBC the overnight polls showed him winning the debate, saying Cruz was “very strident” and made “inappropriate” comments.
“I don’t know that he’s a nice guy,” Trump said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program. “I think he hurt himself last night.”
