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pnwmom's JournalCNN: "Stunning Political Theater" between Cruz and Trump, when Cruz fails to endorse.
Did Cruz renew on a promise to endorse?
Ted Cruz doesn't endorse Trump, then upstaged by him
http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/20/politics/ted-cruz-republican-convention-moment/
Cleveland (CNN)Ted Cruz sensationally withheld an endorsement of Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, earning a chorus of boos from the floor before he was upstaged in a power play by the GOP nominee himself.
In a dramatic development, as Cruz wrapped up his speech, Trump suddenly appeared in the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland. He walked to join his family in a VIP area and flashed a thumbs-up -- a gesture that transmitted clear anger at the Texas senator's behavior.
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The stunning political theater between the top two contenders in the Republican primary race blew open divisions in the party that the convention is designed to heal, and suggested Cruz believes Trump will lose in November.
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Cruz's rebuke ignited a hot scene around the senator as soon as he left the stage. People averted their eyes from Cruz and his wife as they walked with their security detail on the skybox level of boisterous Republicans.
AND FROM ABC:
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http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ted-cruz-booed-failing-endorse-donald-trump-vote/story?id=40755265
Cruz's wife, Heidi, was seen leaving the arena when the booing started getting very loud. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told ABC News that he escorted Heidi Cruz out of the convention hall because “it was volatile and the Trump folks were physically approaching and confrontationally yelling,” he said via text.
"People behind her were getting very ugly, and physically approaching her and Raphael, and it was not a pretty situation," Cuccinelli told ABC. "The decision was instantly made to not talk to media and get immediately out of the arena."
"People from my own delegation were physically approaching her while yelling at her. So, I physically moved media out of her way, and got in the way of my own delegation so she could clear by and get out of the arena," he said.
The fact that Cruz spoke at all came as a surprise to some considering how bitter the primary campaign became towards the end.
Ted Cruz Booed for Failing to Endorse Donald Trump, Says "Vote your conscience"
Source: ABC News
Donald Trump's former rival Sen. Ted Cruz was roundly booed after failing to endorse Trump during an address to the Republican National Convention.
Cruz told voters to "vote your conscience" in November and never specifically said that people should vote for the Republican nominee.
"To those listening, please, don’t stay home in November. If you love our country, and love your children as much as I know you do, stand, and speak, and vote your conscience, vote for candidates up and down the ticket who you trust to defend our freedom and to be faithful to the Constitution," Cruz said.
As he continued speaking, and the crowd began to realize that an endorsement seemed less likely, the cheers that marked the early part of the speech became boos.
Read more: http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/ted-cruz-booed-failing-endorse-donald-trump-vote/story?id=40755265
JUNE FEC: The Don had STILL not converted his campaign loans into gifts, which means
anyone donating money to his campaign was really just helping to pay back his loans -- those from himself to his campaign.
And it also means he was still not self-funding his campaign, despite his claims.
The next report was due today -- July 20th. No word on that yet.
http://www.nationalmemo.com/still-no-evidence-that-donald-trump-has-self-funded-his-campaign/
The next FEC filing deadline, July 20, comes one day after Trump is scheduled to become the official Republican nominee for president. On Wednesday, we will have another opportunity to see whether Trump’s loans have been paid off — by himself, or by his supporters.
Though Noble noted that regulations on candidates loaning their campaigns money are fairly new, he said “it would probably be unprecedented” for a candidate to publicly go back on a pledge such as Trump’s.
The scam, were Trump to try it, would work like this: As long as his loans remain loans, not contributions, he can legally pay himself back with money from his campaign’s bank account until 20 days after the primary election ends — likely on Tuesday, when Trump becomes the official Republican nominee.
If he does pay himself back within those 20 days, we likely wouldn’t know until his campaign files its August financial report, in mid-September.
For anyone who's interested in knowing more about Rev. Darnell Scott, Trump supporter.
***posted to the African American Group***
What's his deal? Well, for one thing, his wife wants to be a reality star . . . .
http://www.theroot.com/articles/politics/2016/03/in_search_of_pastor_darrell_scott_and_the_church_of_trump/
Scott, pastor of the New Spirit Revival Center in Cleveland, burst onto the political scene last November when he pulled together a group of black pastors who were supposed to endorse Trump for president. He’s been met with a lot of skepticism, criticism and a lot of side eye. However, I honestly wanted to know, why would an African-American pastor with an African-American church be such a strong Trump supporter? His answers were surprising and disappointing, and on the whole contradictory. Which may explain a lot about what Trump’s appeal is to a certain segment of black voters.
This isn’t a reflection of my personal relationship with the church; it’s more a reflection of Scott’s status contrasted with his high-profile gig as “pastor for the Church of Trump.” There are big-time pastors who are political players in Cleveland, regularly engaging in community activism, hosting candidate forums and tacitly endorsing candidates for office. There’s the Rev. Jawanza Colvin at Olivet Baptist Church, where Oprah Winfrey occasionally visits and then-Sen. Barack Obama attended service while on the campaign trail.
There’s Pastor R.A. Vernon of the Word Church, whose daughter was on MTV’s My Super Sweet Sixteen and whose church boasts an ice-skating rink and an indoor soccer field for members. Scott’s church doesn’t roll off the lips of the half-dozen activists, politicos and journalists I talked to about powerful black clergy in Cleveland. When I asked about Scott and his endorsement of Trump, the response (once people became aware of who he was) was almost universally negative.
“This is all about the money and getting next to Trump,” said Stephanie Howse, an Ohio state representative. “Just last year, his wife was on a reality show [Editor’s note: the quickly canceled Preach on Lifetime]. He’s trying to get famous and be on the come-up. … If he really cared so much about politics, where has he been on local issues, where he could make a much greater impact?”
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When Faux news led the racist charge against "Baby Mama" Michelle Obama.
They were also furious with her for saying that "hope was making a comeback" and not being proud enough of the country.
But it's just FINE for Trump to say that America is no longer great and he'll make it "great again."
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/09/brave-new-films-sorry-fox_n_111644.html
Which Democratic VP possibility probably has the most compelling life story
in addition to being a popular two term Governor and a key appointee in the Obama administration?
And has been a strong ally and friend of Hillary Clinton's for several decades?
The Secretary of Agriculture so many people here have called "boring."
He completed his second term as Iowa Governor with a 69% popularity rating. That doesn't sound too boring to me.
From an article in 2008, when Tom Vilsack was campaigning for Hillary.
http://www.gq.com/story/trail-of-tears
Sitting in the kitchen, waiting for him to wake up, I can’t help but wonder why they never replaced this hideous linoleum floor. (Governors don’t get paid much, but Jesus.) This is so Vilsack. Tom and Christie spent eight years in one of the most glorious governor’s mansions in the country—18,000 square feet of splendor in Des Moines—but were happy (relieved, actually) to come back to the place they call home: This big old house filled with mismatched “antiques” that Christie inherited from her family, who generations ago picked up pieces on the sidewalk and restored them to make a living. The only relics from their time in the mansion are on a silver tray in the dining room: teacups commemorating each year that Tom was governor. (Christie’s idea.)
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It wasn’t until he ran for president that he knew much of anything about where he came from. Last winter, during a campaign stop, he gave an interview and mentioned that he was adopted and grew up in Pittsburgh. Soon after, he got a letter from a nun: She worked at the orphanage where he’d been born and enclosed pictures of the place and of the kids who’d lived there with him. Did he want to know more? He did. She told him that his birth mother had been 23 (not the desperate teenager he’d imagined), that she’d called herself Gloria (an alias), and that his birth name was Kenneth. When he was fifteen months old, a couple from Pittsburgh came to the orphanage and picked him out of the litter. “My mother used to make fun about this,” he says, “and I always thought she was kidding. She made it sound like she was shopping for a Thanksgiving turkey. She said, ‘We looked for the plumpest kid we could find,’ on the theory that I’d be the healthiest kid.”
His father was a real estate agent, “a truly great human being, a people person. But not a good business guy. When he died, he was virtually penniless.” Both parents drank, but his mother was an especially ugly alcoholic. His childhood memories are these: being afraid to come home from school because he never knew how drunk his mother would be and whether she would beat him. Waking up in the middle of the night and peeking out his bedroom door to see his father walking his mother up and down the hall, trying to keep her awake and alive till the ambulance came, because she had drunk too much or taken pills to try to kill herself. Hearing the clunk clunk of liquor bottles crashing. “She’d go up in the attic and lock herself up there for weeks, and all you’d hear would be the dropping of liquor bottles on the floor.”
By the time he was an adolescent, his mother had been in and out of hospitals, mental and otherwise, and was living on her own. On his thirteenth birthday, his father took him and his sister to Mom’s apartment—she wanted to make him a steak dinner for his birthday. When they arrived, she was blotto (as usual), staggering around, too drunk to cook. The birthday boy got up and walked out. “That’s it, I’m done,” he told himself. Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, his mother was on a train somewhere, drunk, when she decided she’d had enough. “She had a religious experience, a revelation, whatever you want to call it.” She never drank another drop.
In the years she had left (she died at 57 of cancer), they grew very close. He learned to love her in ways he never dreamed possible. “She taught me to never give up,” he says. “She taught me the capacity of the human spirit to overcome anything.” She also left him with the legacy of a son of an alcoholic, something his pal Bill Clinton shares: You always try to fix things, always try to please, and always, at some level, feel that whatever happens, it is probably your fault.
Chicago Tribune: White privilege and why Melania gets a pass, Michelle doesn't
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-melania-michelle-criticism-glanton-talk-20160720-column.htmlThe fact that the words were stolen from Michelle Obama — one of the most demonized first ladies in the history of America — isn't what bothers me most. It's that many people have refused to hold her accountable.
It is one more example of white privilege that explains why Melania Trump has been treated so delicately while Michelle Obama has had to spend the past eight years on the defensive.
When Melania Trump appeared to be in trouble during her debut in the national arena, people quickly rushed to her defense. She was presumed innocent and easily given the benefit of the doubt. Though Twitter had some lighthearted fun with it, even some television pundits were convinced that it wasn't her fault. It was the work of some careless speechwriter, they surmised, who would surely be fired.
Never mind that Melania Trump told the "Today" show's Matt Lauer hours before giving the speech that she had largely written it herself.
The public was quick to attribute the "misstep" to Donald Trump's unorganized campaign. If anybody is to blame, some said, it was Donald Trump for putting his timid wife out there in the first place.
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Like Melania Trump, Michelle Obama never asked to be in the public spotlight. The first time she appeared at a political convention, she didn't feel comfortable speaking to the nation either. But she has never been able to garner the empathy and patience people were willing to immediately bestow upon Melania Trump.
John Kasich turned down 'most powerful' VP slot from Trump.
Source: CNN
Donald Trump's son tried to entice John Kasich with a position as the most powerful vice president in history, but he turned it down, multiple sources close to the Ohio governor told CNN Wednesday.
Kasich would have been in charge of all domestic and foreign policy in a Trump White House, Kasich sources said.
But it also is the clearest sign yet that the animosity between both the Kasich and Trump campaigns will likely continue, unhindered as Donald Trump delivers his biggest speech yet Thursday.
Trump denied ever personally asking Kasich to be his running mate in a tweet.
Read more: http://www.cnn.com/2016/07/20/politics/john-kasich-donald-trump-vice-president/
Trump basically asked Kasich to run the country while Trump served as figurehead, but Kasich refused to go along. Kudos to him.
From now on, non-complicit MSM reporters should ask Trump two simple questions
at the outset of every interview. And end the interview if he refuses to answer.
Answering "none of your business" -- as he did to George Stephanopolous -- should also end the interview.
1) When will he release his tax returns?
2) What was his 2014 tax rate?
STEPHANOPOULOS: What is your tax rate? TRUMP: "None of your business."
http://www.politicususa.com/2016/05/13/trump-loses-temper-accidentially-reveals-release-tax-returns.htmlGeorge Stephanopoulos pushed back on all of Trump’s claims that he can’t release his tax returns until he the audit of his returns is finished. The wheels started to fall off for Trump when he was asked when he released his tax returns when applying for a casino license, but won’t do so when running for president. Trump answered, “Well, at the time it didn’t make any difference to me. Now it does.”
Stephanopoulos said that every candidate since 1976 has released his tax returns, and pointed out that voters can learn a lot from tax returns.
The Good Morning America host finally got an answer when he said that Trump’s financials don’t show his tax rate. Stephanopoulos asked Trump what is your tax rate? He answered, “It’s none of your business. You’ll see it when I release, but I fight very hard to pay as little tax as possible.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/voters-are-still-waiting-on-your-tax-returns-mr-trump/2016/07/19/c87c4054-4de1-11e6-a7d8-13d06b37f256_story.html
MELANIA TRUMP’S Monday night speech to the Republican National Convention was so platitudinous — a gauzy collection of assurances that her husband, Donald Trump, is “kind and fair and caring” and will “never, ever, let you down” — it could have been delivered by any spouse about any candidate. In fact, as has been widely reported, some of it had been delivered by a different spouse about a different candidate.
No matter. The information Americans lack about Mr. Trump concerns not his personality, which is all too evident, but his life’s work before entering politics — his business record and tax history. Mr. Trump constantly assures Americans that he built a “great company” and is worth $10 billion. He promises to bring his no-nonsense business sense to government, renegotiating trade deals, striking bargains with drug companies and streamlining the federal government. His gilded private jet has been a campaign prop. Yet his company, the Trump Organization, is a closely held private enterprise, with many of its dealings hidden from public view. Bits of information that have emerged suggest Mr. Trump has had some success licensing his name and starring on reality TV. But a variety of Mr. Trump’s business ventures, such as Trump University, appear to have been unethical, unprofitable or both. The story of his professional life is unacceptably incomplete.
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