Now that we've absorbed how awful Rubio looked when he kept repeating his line during the debate that Obama knows exactly what he was doing, it is worthwhile to consider whether Rubio's actual point is correct. I thought it was; Rubio's mistake was to keep repeating it instead of moving on to other reasons why he is qualified to be president. But the argument that the problem with Obama was not that he was inexperienced, but what he believed and went on to accomplish as president. Andrew McCarthy has reflected on that point and has reconsidered that Rubio's point is correct.
Christie contends that the Obama who ran for president in 2008 was an unaccomplished, hyper-programmed, first-term senator who was utterly unprepared to be president. That, according to Christie, has caused seven years of amateur-hour governance. To elect Rubio, he thus concludes, would be to invite another disastrous presidency led by an untested young man who would be in way over his head.
This analogy to Obama, rather than Rubio’s own alleged failings, was the part of Christie’s case that Rubio seized on. To some extent, this is understandable: Rubio is on surer footing talking about Obama than about his own record of accomplishment, the best known aspect of which is pushing through the senate, in collusion with Obama, a bipartisan immigration bill that is anathema to the GOP base (but, by the way, would have been fine with GOP “moderates” like Christie).
Yet Rubio also had an important point: Christie’s premise is dead wrong. Obama has not steered the Titanic into an iceberg because he is an unprepared, untested amateur. He has done it quite deliberately, at times masterfully, because Obama believes in the policies that constitute the iceberg. He is a movement leftist with a transformational agenda and an Alinskyite’s understanding of the extortionate uses of power. Authoritarian rule, government-controlled health care, open borders, runaway spending, Islamist sympathies, crony-capitalist green energy – these are not initiatives Obama stumbled into because he was unprepared. Obama has studiously taken the country where he wants it to go. And he has rolled over the old experienced hands to do it – so much for amateur hour.
McCarthy goes on to criticize Christie's record as governor and then to argue that the President has accomplished Obama's own goals when he pushed through Obamacare, the stimulus, Dodd Frank, and the Iran deal.
And, fortunately for Marco Rubio, Rush Limbaugh spent a good part of his show defending Rubio's point and praising him for seeing Obama as he is and saying that Obama knows what he's doing.
Rubio's point, no, no, no, no, no. Obama's not incompetent. He's not inexperienced. He's doing exactly what he wants to do. And none of these Republican moderates will go there. You want to know why? You want to know why? You want to know why they cannot agree that Obama's doing this on purpose? Very simple. They cannot agree that Obama's doing it on purpose. They do not dare say that Obama's doing it on purpose because they have all worked with Barack Obama, in one way or another, every one of these governors, many of them, and even a lot of Republicans in the House and Senate have worked with Obama to advance certain elements of the agenda.
We've worked with Obama on the spending bills. We have worked with Obama, or we want to, on amnesty and immigration. There are some on the Republican side who want to work with Obama when it comes to issues on the so-called War on Women. But when you have worked with Obama, when you have asked Obama to come to your state, and when you have embraced Obama and done everything you can to get assistance from Obama, well, you can't turn around and then say Obama is purposefully trying to transform the country 'cause that makes you look like an idiot.
Hmmm. Which governor has embraced and Obama and "done everything you can to get assistance from Obama"? I'm not sure that I buy that the governors want to paint Obama as incompetent so they can hide their cooperation with him. I think they're just saying it as a proxy for attacking the inexperience of Rubio and Cruz.
I'm not sure how many people still get their opinions from Rush Limbaugh and if he has a big audience in New Hampshire, but his defense of Rubio for the second time in a week has to be the best news that Rubio has had since Saturday's debate.
Meanwhile, Mark Levin spent a lot of his show ridiculing Chris Christie. First he demonstrates how Christie repeats his one-liners over and over just as he accused Rubio of doing. Not that that is unexpected. These guys are giving their standard speech over and over. Of course, they're repeating the same lines. Then Levin blasts Christie's record in New Jersey. And he points out that Christie is more liberal than Rubio, especially on amnesty and gun control.
Marc Thiessen points out how "scripted" Chris Christie is. He also repeated himself in the debate and repeated lines from his stump speech. They all do it. And why shouldn't they? Not everyone hears their stump speech. And if the speech is their best argument why people should vote for them, why shouldn't they use it?
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Who are you calling scripted, Gov. Christie?
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New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie speaks at a campaign town hall meeting in Hampton, N.H., on Sunday. (Katherine Taylor/European Pressphoto Agency)
By Marc A. Thiessen February 8 at 9:47 AM
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pummeled Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for being overly scripted during the New Hampshire debate, pouncing when Rubio, for the third time, repeated his stock line that President “Obama knows exactly what he is doing” by moving the country to the left. “There it is, there it is,” Christie declared. “The memorized 25-second speech. There it is, everybody!”
It’s the moment everyone is talking about. But there is one small problem. While Christie attacked Rubio for using memorized, scripted lines, the governor used his own memorized, scripted lines during the very same debate.
Marc Thiessen writes a weekly column for The Post on foreign and domestic policy and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. He is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. View Archive
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When asked about the problem of drug addiction in New Hampshire, Christie gave an impassioned answer: “I’m pro-life,” he declared, “and I’m pro-life not just for the nine months in the womb, I’m pro-life for when they get out and it’s a lot more complicated. Sixteen-year-old, heroin-addicted drug girl on the floor of the county lockup, I’m pro-life for her life. . . . Every one of those lives is an individual gift from God.”
It was a moving statement — and it was taken almost verbatim from a speech he gave in October at Shooter’s Tavern in Belmont, N.H. “I’m pro-life,” Christie said back then, “and I think that if you’re pro-life, you’ve got to be pro-life for the whole life, not just for the nine months they’re in the womb. . . . But when they get out, that’s when it gets tough. The 16-year-old girl on the floor of the county lockup addicted to heroin, I’m pro-life for her, too. Her life is just as much a precious gift from God as the one in the womb.”
There it is, everybody: Rubio was not the only candidate on the debate stage with a “canned speech that he’s memorized.”
Christie has also used some version of the same line contrasting his executive experience with Rubio’s alleged inexperience as a legislator in each of the past four debates. In New Hampshire, Christie declared, “This is the difference between being a governor who actually has to be responsible for problems” and then a few moments later repeated “When you’re a governor, you have to take responsibility . . . We have to take responsibility as executives.” Christie used the same construct in the Iowa debate (“That’s the difference between being a governor . . . and being someone who has never had to be responsible for any of those decisions”) . . . the South Carolina debate (“this is the difference between being a governor and a senator. See, when you’re a senator, what you get to do is just talk and talk and talk . . . When you’re a governor, you’re held accountable for everything you do”) . . . and the Nevada debate (“This is a difference between being a governor and being in a legislature . . . You have to be responsible and accountable”).
Let’s be clear: There’s nothing wrong with any of this. Every politician has a “stump speech” he or she repeats over and over on the campaign trail. Every politician uses language from his or her stump speech in the debates. And every politician repeats the best lines over and over and over. It’s called message discipline. It’s how elections are won.
And, by the way, Christie and Rubio were not the only ones up on stage practicing message discipline Saturday night. In a December speech in Nashville, Ted Cruz railed against what he called “bipartisan corruption” of career politicians in Washington. In Saturday’s debate, he told New Hampshire voters “I will always stand with the American people against the bipartisan corruption of Washington.” In his closing statement in the first GOP debate, Donald Trump declared: “The country is serious trouble. We don’t win anymore.” In his closing statement at Saturday’s New Hampshire debate, Trump told us (for the gazillionth time) “Our country that we love so much doesn’t win anymore. . . . If I’m elected president, we will win, and we will win, and we will win.”
It should be no great revelation that all of the candidates have a core message they are trying to get across and well-rehearsed lines to make their point. Trump wants you to know he’s going to make America great again. Cruz wants you to know he will take on the Washington establishment. Christie wants you to know that he has executive experience. And Rubio wants you to know that he is the best candidate to take on Hillary Clinton and replace Obama.
So the idea that Christie had some great “gotcha” moment catching Rubio repeating “scripted” lines is absurd. Everyone uses a campaign script in presidential debates — including, it seems, a certain governor from New Jersey.
One of my readers in the comments pointed to this post by Neo-Neocon that looks at the actual transcript of the Rubio-Christie exchange. And her point is that it reads a lot differently than it seemed listening and watching it.
Strangely enough, when I actually went back to the transcript of the debate (something very few people seem to have done), I was very surprised to find that Christie was startlingly wrong. What’s more, Christie was repeatedly ignoring Rubio’s main point and repeating his own flawed premise. Rubio was repeating himself in response because Christie kept restating the error.
When people (and that most definitely included me) listened to the debate, they didn’t catch it. It happens fast, and you have to be tracking the back-and-forth very very carefully. But going back to the transcript and reading closely, I found it fairly clear.
Unfortunately, because of Christie’s emphasis on Rubio’s repetition (as though that has any deep meaning), Rubio’s point got lost. Rubio would have done well to have specifically said something like “You keep repeating your error and that’s why I’m repeating my answer,” but that was his biggest failure, and it was rhetorical.
Those who believe that it was Christie who had a good night must believe it’s true that Obama is a bad president because of inexperience, because that was Christie’s position. In other words, Christie’s answer to the “knave or fool?” question for Obama is: fool.
That, IMHO, makes Christie a fool about the biggest question of Obama’s presidency, and in addition a fool about the danger the left presents. Rubio was trying to say that. Too bad Christie’s belittling of Rubio’s method of saying it fooled so many listeners.
I wonder: would people have liked it better if Rubio had just let the analogy of his inexperience with Obama’s inexperience—and the idea that that’s the source of Obama’s “errors”—stand? Or would it have been better if, instead of saying “Obama knows exactly what he’s doing” several times, Rubio had said “Obama is aware is the meaning and consequences of his own actions, and is therefore culpable rather than incompetent?” Yes, Rubio repeated himself for emphasis, but he also said plenty of other things that evening (and elsewhere) that weren’t in his stump speech. And of course Christie, and the others, repeat themselves all the time.
She adds something I had noticed but been too lazy to look up the transcript to check. Christie ignored Rubio's attacks on him and basically let those stand while pontificating about Washington politicians.
(2) Christie had no answer to Rubio’s charge about his snow removal faux pas (and it was Christie who cited snow removal as some sort of experience relevant to the presidency, which it is not)
(3) Christie had no answer to Rubio’s charge about Christie’s budget failings.
Actually, of Rubio’s three points, Christie only even attempted to answer one—the snow removal charge. And he did so ineffectively.]
I think the debate will depress Rubio's total today. It hurts him that it took place so close to the voting and that so much of the commentary was devoted to that moment rather than any other topic. And the media all bought into the same interpretation so it got repeated over and over how robotic Rubio seemed instead of a discussion of his actual point. If the vote were next week, I think this would have all blown over by then. So, we'll have to wait until tonight to see if Dixville Notch's vote for Kasich presaged anything or nothing.
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James Taranto explains why younger women are not so impressed with the opportunity to vote for Hillary Clinton to be the first woman president. Hillary Clinton wants young women to realize that the struggle for women is not over.
Whether or not the “struggle” is “over,” it is surely far less arduous today than when Mrs. Clinton completed her bachelor’s degree in 1969. Women today attend and finish college in considerably greater numbers than men, and many of them go on to hold high positions in business, politics and other institutions. Thirty years ago, for example, the Democratic caucus in the U.S. Senate was all-male; today, it is one-quarter female.
In addition, consider the example the Democratic Party set for young women in 2008. Then as now, Mrs. Clinton entered the race as the inevitable nominee. But she lost to a younger man with superior political skills. Mrs. Clinton and her supporters (except a few die-hards who called themselves PUMAs, an acronym for “Party Unity My Ass”) accepted the result and united behind Barack Obama and his male running mate.
Then John McCain put a woman on the Republican ticket, a first for either party since Geraldine Ferraro in 1984. Democrats reasonably enough viewed Sarah Palin as a threat, to which they responded by attacking her viciously, often in ways they would have denounced as sexist had the target been a liberal woman.
Are women who supported Obama over Mrs. Clinton and Obama-Biden over McCain-Palin going to hell? We don’t recall Albright having said so. The Democratic Party as a whole behaved in 2008 exactly the way older feminists are faulting young female Democrats for behaving today: It prioritized ideology and party over the advancement of individual women.
To our mind it is the behavior of older liberal women that begs to be explained. It’s understandable that they’d like to see a woman become president, and even more understandable that they want it to be someone like-minded as opposed to, say, Carly Fiorina or Sarah Palin. But at a time when there is no shortage of capable Democratic women who hold or have held high office, why does it have to be Mrs. Clinton?
Perhaps the answer can be found in the compromises that older Democratic women made to protect Bill Clinton. In January 1998, when Mr. Clinton’s sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky was first revealed, then-Secretary of State Albright announced after a cabinet meeting: “I believe the allegations are completely untrue.” When they turned out to be completely true, “I clearly was deeply disappointed, personally,” Albright told PBS’s “Frontline.” But she remained in his cabinet until the end of his term in 2001.
When Kathleen Willey accused Mr. Clinton of sexual assault, Steinem wrote a New York Times op-ed—it seems to have vanished from the Times website but was picked up elsewhere, including in the Philadelphia Inquirer—minimizing the charges, along with Paula Jones’s sexual-harassment claim:
The truth is that even if the allegations are true, the president is not guilty of sexual harassment. He is accused of having made a gross, dumb and reckless pass at a supporter. She pushed him away, she said, and it never happened again. She went to see him three more times in the same private setting without any repeat of unwelcome behavior.
In her original story, [Paula] Jones essentially said the same thing. She went to then-Gov. Clinton’s hotel room, where she said he asked her to perform oral sex. She refused, and even she claims he said something like, “Well, I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to do.”
Her lawyers now allege that, as a result of the incident, Jones was slighted in her job as a state employee and even suffered long-lasting psychological damage. But there appears to be little evidence to support those accusations.
Jones actually said Mr. Clinton dropped his pants and ordered her: “Kiss it.” And in a line that was cut from the Inquirer version of the op-ed, Steinem also observed: “If any of the other women had tried to sell their stories to a celebrity tell-all book publisher, as Ms. Willey did, you might be even more skeptical about their motives. But with her, you think, ‘Well, she needs the money.’ ”
That was all too much even for the New York Times editorial board, which observed:
For feminist leaders, wrestling over legal standards misses the danger involved. Social pressures have greatly restricted the acceptable range for sexual talk or gestures by men in the workplace. That has been a healthy development, based on years of legal work and exhortation by women’s advocacy groups. The Clinton case raises the very real possibility that if the President is seen as getting away with gross behavior, more bosses will feel free to behave abominably.
And Albright and Steinem were far from alone. Virtually the entire feminist establishment—you’ll pardon the phrase—defended Mr. Clinton. A September 1998 Inquirer news story: reported on a news conference where “such feminist stalwarts as Betty Friedan, Eleanor Smeal and Patricia Ireland” answered “a reverberating question posed by Clinton’s opponents: ‘Where are the women?’ ”:
The answer, they said one by one, was steadfastly on the side of a president who has stood with them on such issues as abortion rights, family leave, violence against women, pay equity, minimum wage, Social Security and child care.
Friedan, widely viewed as the founder of modern feminism, said in an interview that the leaders decided to speak out “because we don’t want to see feminism used to bring down a president whose basic public policies have been good for women.” She added that the use of a sexual tryst to undo Clinton’s presidency could harm the issues key to the women’s-rights movement.
Exactly how Mr. Clinton’s departure from office would “harm” those “issues” was not made clear and is still a puzzle all these years later. After all, had the Senate convicted the president (or had he resigned), his successor would have been Al Gore, a fellow Democrat.
I'm sure that young women today don't know all this history. But it is worth remembering when these aging feminist leaders chastise females for not supporting Clinton.
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With all the discussion by Bush, Kasich, and Christie about how they're more qualified because they have been governors, William McGurn makes an interesting point about a rhetorical advantage that a senator might have in running for president. The governors talk about what they've done which means that they're talking about the past.
Which brings us back to the senators. By the nature of the job, a senator shines when he opposes a president. In this race, Mrs. Clinton’s pitch that a victory for her will effectively be a third Obama term may feed this rhetorical advantage. Without an executive record to boast about, Mr. Cruz and Mr. Rubio are forced to campaign on what their presidencies would mean for America’s future—and draw sharp contrasts with the vision Mrs. Clinton is offering.
I don't know if that ability to focus on the future cancels out being able to point to a solid record of accomplishments. But then none of these three governors have totally unblemished records to appeal to a Republican electorate. Kasich is positioned to appeal to independents because of the way he's governed sometimes. That won't translate in other states. I'm not sure where he makes a stand after New Hampshire.
And here is Kasich's argument to appeal to Democrats.
A possibly very confused voter at a John Kasich town hall in Windham, New Hampshire, wanted to know why she should vote for the Ohio governor in the "Democratic primary" — and Kasich, a Republican, didn't correct her. The question did not seem to be a slip of the tongue, either: The voter said she was having a hard time deciding between Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and John Kasich in the "Democratic primary" and wanted to know why Kasich should have her vote.
"Isn't that interesting," Kasich said as the crowd around her gasped. However, without mentioning his political allegiance or correcting the voter, Kasich went on to position himself as a good compromise between Sanders and Clinton saying, "One of them's too hot, one of them's too cold, but I've got the right temperature."
My takeaway - Kasich sees himself somewhere between Sanders and Clinton. Sounds about right.
Jason Hart writes at Conservative Review to explain how Kasich became the "top Obamacare cheerleader" for the Republicans.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Ohio Gov. John Kasich both implemented Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion in their respective states. Medicaid expansion – which puts working-age adults with no kids and no disabilities on welfare – is responsible for three-fourths of all Obamacare enrollment nationwide.
Unlike Christie, who has the sense to downplay his Obamacare expansion, Kasich built his whole campaign around a decision that has already cost taxpayers $6.4 billion.
Even after the Supreme Court ruled that states didn't have to enact the Medicaid expansion, Kasich went ahead to plan to expand it.
To win lawmakers’ support, Kasich’s health policy team lied about how Obamacare expansion would be paid for, warning that a failure to expand Medicaid would “NOT keep $2.4 billion in Ohioans’ federal tax dollars in Ohio ($13 billion over seven years).”
The governor made this falsehood a focal point of his 2013 State of the State address, telling the General Assembly Obamacare expansion was “an unprecedented opportunity to bring $13 billion of Ohio’s tax dollars back to Ohio to solve our problem.”
Of course, there is no Obamacare warehouse in D.C. piled full of Ohio money and New Jersey money and California money waiting to be shipped out. Obamacare expansion is paid for with a blank check of new federal deficit spending – and, starting next year, a state share that starts at five percent and ratchets up to 10 percent.
Kasich combined his false claims about “Ohio’s tax dollars” with pseudo-Christian rhetoric, accusing legislative opponents of ignoring the poor. State lawmakers didn’t buy it.
The Ohio House stripped Obamacare expansion from Kasich’s budget, to the governor’s dismay. In the waning days of the fiscal year, Kasich told the press Obamacare critics were risking eternal damnation.
Even though the Ohio legislature stripped out the Medicaid expansion from their budget and included an explicit ban on that expansion, Kasich used the line-item veto to strip that ban out and went ahead to expand Medicaid unilaterally. And his decision, while maybe ensuring he gets to walk through the Pearly Gates, is costing his state plenty.
Kasich’s Obamacare expansion was $1.5 billion over budget in its first 18 months, with 2015 enrollment exceeding Kasich’s projection for 2020. Instead of apologizing to the skeptics who were right all along, Kasich has traveled the country chewing out Obamacare critics in other states.
Fast forward to February 2016, and Kasich’s Obamacare expansion has enrolled 650,000 Ohioans at a cost of more than $6 billion in new federal spending.
What has Kasich done to address this glaring policy failure during his presidential campaign?
The governor has tweaked his $13 billion cost projection to $14 billion, and now insists that’s the amount of “Ohio money” Obamacare expansion is “bringing back” to the state. Based on the latest Ohio Department of Medicaid data, Kasich’s Obamacare expansion will cost federal taxpayers double his original 2014-2020 estimate.
Kasich boasts of Ohio’s slow Medicaid growth rate, deliberately using a 2014-15 budget figure that excludes Obamacare expansion; Kasich says he slowed Medicaid growth to 2.5 percent annually, but he increased Medicaid spending by 33 percent in his first term.
And, in one of the boldest lies of this election cycle, Kasich is bragging in his final New Hampshire ad that he “rejected Obamacare.”
All of Kasich's maneuvering to expand Medicaid despite the legislature's disapproval and the budgetary problems that now presents for his state hasn't received much attention because he's been floating beneath the radar. If he does well tonight in New Hampshire, expect to hear a lot more about this.
Ramesh Ponnuru notes that Kasich is defending his actions of going around the legislature by saying that they secretly wanted him to do that but didn't want to go into primaries having voted for it. So Kasich intuited their secret desires and went ahead to doing it on his own. Don't we want a "father of America" who can figure out the legislators' secret desires so he can go around and act on his own. Not even Obama claims that. Ponnuru writes,
On Kasich’s own account, the point of this arrangement was to prevent accountability to primary voters by making legislative responsibility indirect. And that’s the basic problem with his answer, even if it turns out that he’s entirely right about what legislators were thinking (which I doubt). We shouldn’t care about presidential unilateralism because it offends the self-regard of legislators. We should care about it because it undermines our system of divided, checked, and accountable power. It doesn’t become better if the legislators agree to it because they would rather evade political accountability. For Kasich to say that as president he would unilaterally set policy only after consulting with legislators in this fashion should be the opposite of reassuring.
But hey, he wants to be the "father of America" so we should let him do whatever he wants.
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A member of the Yale admissions committee reveals some of the secrets of who gets in. This has to be the most original admissions essay topic I've heard of.
The applicants were an impressive lot. A girl wrote a brilliant feminist essay — worthy of Harper’s, really — about gender and socialization, revealing that she was a phantom serial farter in public and yet no one ever suspected because of her gender.
Who knew that flatulence was gender biased?
It's not good when insiders say that socialist Bernie Sanders "is winning the economic argument" against Hillary Clinton.
The New York Times looks at Joe Scarborough's hate for Marco Rubio. It makes sense that Scarborough was a Charlie Crist supporter. And the NYT doesn't mention that his former wife was an aide to Jeb Bush.
Well, this is just charming. Trump repeated when someone in his audience called out that Cruz is a pussy. Just the role model we want in the White House. I remember during the Monica Lewinsky scandal when I was teaching in middle school and sixth grade girl was found to have given oral sex to several boys in the locker room. They all defended themselves by saying that the President had done it and said that that wasn't sex so it was okay. It was horrifying to realize what these children had picked up from Clinton. If Trump continues to receive acclamation across the country, I'm sure I'll hear students using this sort of language and figuring it's no big deal because the leading GOP contender uses it. Just lovely.
Beyond Trump's increasing public vulgarity, he is also letting his more radical side show through. As Byron York writes, Trump sounds almost like Bernie.
In a nearly one-hour speech, Trump railed against pharmaceutical companies. He railed against oil companies. And insurance companies. And defense contractors. And he set himself against a political system that he said allows big-money corporate "bloodsuckers" to control the government with campaign contributions.
"Whether it's the insurance companies, or the drug companies, or the oil companies, it's all the same thing," Trump said. "We're never going to get our country back if we keep doing this."
Trump promised to allow the government to negotiate drug prices — a common position among Democrats but rarely heard at nominally Republican events. He said he would not raise military spending, arguing that the nation's defenses can be improved without increasing its already huge Pentagon budget. He promised tough sanctions on American companies that move jobs overseas.
Just what the country needs - more government interference in the medical field. Apparently, Trump doesn't understand the cost/benefit considerations a pharmaceutical company must make when it conducts research into new treatments. It's one thing for a Democrat to rail against high drug prices, but it's disturbing when the GOP frontrunner does.
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This is cute. Marco Rubio gives tidings of salvation for young women bound for hell for not supporting Hillary.
Not the headline the Clinton campaign wants on the morning of the New Hampshire vote.
FBI formally confirms its investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email server
This is how persecuted some college kids are. Some Northwestern University students are complaining that they didn't get solos in a school burlesque show.
Students at Northwestern University are complaining that an upcoming burlesque performance at the school is not a “safe space” because the group of students selected for solos wasn’t inclusive enough.
According to the school newspaper, the Daily Northwestern, every single student who tried out was cast, but only some of them get solos.
This is, of course, the normal way of doing things — and seeing as small children in church Christmas pageants are able to handle it, you’d think that these adult students would be able to handle it, too.
But no. They’re offended, and the directors are actually changing the show to appease these whiners.
“It was brought to our attention that there are people in our community who feel that those solos and duets and trios are not best representing what the Burlesque community is,” co-director Avril Dominguez told the Northwestern.
“We do have a very inclusive and representative cast at large [and] we’re taking that criticism into account and really trying to reestablish a safe space,” she continued.
Rich Lowry notices that the Republican candidates are back to basically ignoring Trump except for Bush's attack on Trump's efforts to use eminent domain to take an elderly lady's house away so he could build a parking garage for his casino.
This is maybe a sign of Jeb Bush's basic decency or a pledge to disarm himself rhetorically if he should become president.
Jeb Bush vowed Monday that he will not scapegoat President Obama for any challenges he faces should he be elected president.
“My pledge to you: When I’m president I will not blame Barack Obama for a single thing,” he told listeners at the Nashua Country Club in Nashua, N.H. "The day that I’m sworn into office, I’m on watch — whatever it is."
“I am really tired of politicians that blame their predecessors,” the Republican White House hopeful added. "I have a personal kind of feeling about it having watched it for a while.
“I hope you want a president who actually accepts accountability and responsibility but also has the skills to fix the mess that exists. I hope you want a leader who’s focused like a laser beam on the mess in Washington, D.C.”
I can see how he would feel that way given how Bill Clinton and Barack Obama spent a lot of time bashing Jeb's father and brother respectively. So it's admirable that Jeb doesn't believe in blaming someone else. But I'm not sure that the Republican electorate is eager for someone who won't continue to expose how Obama weakened the country.
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Apparently, with same-day registration, it would not be that hard for people who have moved to New Hampshire to campaign for a candidate to also vote in the election.
Some famous political operatives have done this in the past, including New York resident and niece to the Vice President, Alana Biden, who volunteered for the Obama-Biden campaign in 2012 in New Hampshire and voted in New Hampshire. She simply said she was living (with eight other campaign staffers) in New Hampshire on Election Day.
As Secretary Gardner has stated, “working on political campaigns is not sufficient evidence” to make someone eligible to vote in New Hampshire. Secretary Gardner personally witnessed vote fraud in 2008 when AmeriCorps volunteers who planned to leave on December 1 registered at the polls and voted....
Importantly, data from the State Election Results published regarding the 2012 and 2014 general elections by the N.H. Secretary of State demonstrated the margin of victory for the winning candidate in the races for governor, U.S. Senate and U.S. President was less than the number of votes cast Election Day by same day registrants. A few votes from out-of-state people can literally change the winner of a race.
The state is small enough that some elections could actually be swayed by such fraudulent voters. But the Democratic governor has blocked any reform.
Ladies and Gentlemen: Your military under the Democrats.
The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.
A new directive’s theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show “resilience” and beat back the threat based on “actionable science.”
It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy — a wide array of “climate change boards, councils and working groups” to infuse climate change into “programs, plans and policies.”
