June 22, 2016

Trump Hits Clinton's 'Phony Landing' In Bosnia, Compares Her To Brian Williams

Donald Trump on Wednesday compared Hillary Clinton's account of coming under sniper fire in Bosnia to the embellishments that infamously got NBC's Brian Williams suspended from his job.

During a wide-ranging speech attacking Clinton at Trump SoHo in New York City, Trump brought up an incident where Clinton had said she "landed under sniper fire" at an air base in Bosnia during a visit as first lady.

"Most people know she's a world class liar," Trump said. "Just look at her pathetic email server statements or her phony landing—or her phony landing in Bosnia where she said she was under attack, and the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers."

Clinton's account was disputed by several journalists and colleagues, and during the 2008 election the former first lady and said she "may have misspoke."

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-clinton-bosnia-brian-williams

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Trump Tells Voters Clinton ‘Gets Rich Making You Poor’

“Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs, and effectively let China completely rebuild itself,” Trump said in a prepared speech delivered via teleprompter. “In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!”

Trump cited the conservative author and activist Peter Schweizer's book “Clinton Cash,” to which "7-8 factual corrections" were made after publication, as proof of his claims that Hillary and Bill Clinton “used the State Department to enrich their family at America’s expense.”

Trump framed his “America first” worldview as a rebuttal to the Clintons’ globalism, claiming he would promote U.S. manufacturing, oppose international trade dealsand strengthen control over America’s intellectual property.

“She sold out our workers, and our country, for Beijing,” the real estate mogul said of the former secretary of state.

more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/trump-clinton-making-americans-poor

June 22, 2016

Marco Rubio: I’m running for reelection because both Trump and Clinton scare me

by Andrew Prokop on June 22, 2016, 10:57 a.m. ET

Sen. Marco Rubio reversed course Wednesday and announced that he will be running for reelection after all.

-snip-

When asked by Fox News’s Chris Wallace to explain his decision, Rubio said, "No matter who wins this presidential election, the Senate’s role of being able to act as a check and balance on bad ideas from the president, I think, are gonna matter more in 2017 than they perhaps ever have in our history."

And in a statement announcing his decision that was harshly critical of Hillary Clinton, Rubio added that the prospect of a Trump presidency is "also worrisome to me." He added: "His positions on many key issues are still unknown. And some of his statements, especially about women and minorities, I find not just offensive but unacceptable. If he is elected, we will need Senators willing to encourage him in the right direction, and if necessary, stand up to him. I’ve proven a willingness to do both."

Yet Rubio’s hopes to mount another presidential campaign in 2020 have surely weighed heavily on his mind too. Such a bid could be easier to launch if Rubio remains prominent in the Senate, criticizing the new administration, rather than fading away by going to the private sector.

-snip-

http://www.vox.com/2016/6/22/12000610/marco-rubio-reelection-senate-trump

June 22, 2016

Digging in the imaginary dirt: Trump’s speech devised to destroy Hillary today is based on...

Digging in the imaginary dirt: Trump’s speech devised to destroy Hillary today is based on a book of lies

Trump's desperately trying to reboot his campaign with smear speech against Hillary drawn from discredited book

HEATHER DIGBY PARTON

I don’t know exactly what Trump is going to say in his highly anticipated Hillary speech today, but we do have some hints. Recall that he announced his intention to deliver this speech on the night of the California primary largely in reaction to Clinton’s scathing recitation of his inane rhetoric in San Diego a few days before. He had scheduled it for the Monday after the Orlando Massacre and postponed it for obvious reasons. We can predict from what he said that night as well as subsequent tweets this week that he will say she’s a criminal who used her position as Secretary of State as a “hedge fund” to steal money from ordinary Americans and sell out the security of the United States. He’ll say she’s being protected from prosecution and a lengthy jail term by an equally corrupt president. And he’ll complain about her “judgment” and her “strength” and her “stamina.”

It’s possible that the “reboot” everyone’s breathlessly talking about in the wake of the firing of his inept campaign manager has resulted in his focusing his grotesque overwrought allegations only on her official record. But whether or not he goes further than that and launches into the personal attacks he telegraphed on twitter that night is unknown. This was his immediate reaction to her win:

Donald J. Trump ✔
@realDonaldTrump

A former Secret Service Agent for President Clinton excoriates Crooked Hillary describing her as ERRATIC & VIOLENT. Bad temperament for pres

9:51 PM - 6 Jun 2016
8,982 8,982 Retweets 22,759 22,759 likes

Donald J. Trump ✔
@realDonaldTrump

In just out book, Secret Service Agent Gary Byrne doesn't believe that Crooked Hillary has the temperament or integrity to be the president!

10:21 PM - 6 Jun 2016
8,129 8,129 Retweets 22,281 22,281 likes

more
http://www.salon.com/2016/06/22/digging_in_the_imaginary_dirt_trumps_speech_devised_to_destroy_hillary_today_is_based_on_a_book_of_lies/

June 22, 2016

Bachmann’s new gig: Trump adviser on evangelical issues

By Steve Benen

The religious right movement has struggled for decades to play a leading role in choosing the Republican Party’s presidential nominee, but this year, social conservatives declared early on, would finally be their year.

And yet, after doing everything right and carefully following their specific strategy, the GOP ended up going with a thrice-married adulterous casino owner who quite literally can’t tell the difference between a communion plate and a collection plate.

Will the right-wing theological movement and the secular nativist forge a constructive partnership? As The Atlantic noted, the two sides are working on it.

No matter how much American politics have changed during this election cycle, one eternal truth remains: Republicans need evangelical voters. Even Donald Trump, the man of botched Bible verses and many wives, is making moves to win over conservative Christians. On Tuesday, he met with more than 1,000 mostly evangelical leaders, along with some Catholics, in a closed-to-the-press meeting in New York City.

Big names – from former presidential candidate Ben Carson to the Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. to the pollster George Barna – apparently spoke at the event, while Trump took pre-selected questions in a discussion moderated by the former presidential candidate and preacher Mike Huckabee. But while Trump has a number of vocal evangelical cheerleaders, and leaders gave him a hearing on Tuesday, many conservative Christians are still wary of the presumptive Republican nominee.

more
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/bachmanns-new-gig-trump-adviser-evangelical-issues?

June 22, 2016

Cleveland V. RNC? GOP Plans To Take Down City's Iconic LeBron James Sign

The pride of Cleveland, a massive, iconic image of LeBron James – newly updated to tout the city bringing home the NBA Championship – won't last long, with the Republican National Convention coming to town July 18.

The Cavaliers ended the city's 52-year dry spell with a championship win over the Golden State Warriors on Sunday. The image of James, with armed outstretched, was updated with a laser projection to add the word "champions."

But Sherman Williams, who owns the space, said Tuesday that the RNC already had standing plans to strip James from his place high atop the city in favor of a red, white and blue image declaring "land is our land," Cleveland's ABC 5 reported.

The company said it would let the "champions" banner stand until then to celebrate the championship and James' selection as MVP.

###

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/lebron-james-rnc-cleveland

Ironically, Sherwin-Williams is one of the many companies encouraging its employees to work from home during the week of the convention.

June 22, 2016

Marco Rubio will seek Senate re-election, reversing pledge not to run

Source: The Washington Post

Sen. Marco Rubio will announce Wednesday he will seek re-election to the Senate, reversing a pledge he made a year ago to either assume the presidency or return to private life in Florida, instantly transforming an already competitive race and improving the chances that Republicans can maintain the Senate majority.

Rubio is set to announce the decision sometime Wednesday, according to three people familiar with the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss it before a formal announcement. One person said Rubio has started privately informing key Republicans he will run.

His entry into the race comes shortly before a Friday deadline for candidate filings and after weeks of pressure from national GOP figures who urged Rubio to reconsider his frequently repeated intention to either become president or a “private citizen” come 2017.

Those entreaties were rooted in blunt political reality: Rubio, with his near-universal name recognition and proven fundraising capacity, would give Republicans their best chance of winning the swing-state seat and, perhaps, the Senate majority.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/06/22/marco-rubio-will-seek-senate-re-election-reversing-pledge-not-to-run/

June 22, 2016

Nearly Half of Sanders Supporters Won't Support Clinton

June 22, 2016 — 5:00 AM EDT

In the two weeks since Hillary Clinton wrapped up the Democratic presidential primary, runner-up Bernie Sanders has promised to work hard to defeat Donald Trump — but he’s given no sign he’ll soon embrace Clinton, his party’s presumptive nominee. Neither have many of Sanders’s supporters. A June 14th Bloomberg Politics national poll of likely voters in November’s election found that barely half of those who favored Sanders — 55 percent — plan to vote for Clinton. Instead, 22 percent say they’ll vote for Trump, while 18 percent favor Libertarian Gary Johnson. “I’m a registered Democrat, but I cannot bring myself to vote for another establishment politician like Hillary,” says Laura Armes, a 43-year-old homemaker from Beeville, Texas, who participated in the Bloomberg poll and plans to vote for Trump. “I don’t agree with a lot of what Trump says. But he won’t owe anybody. What you see is what you get.”

Conversations with two dozen Sanders supporters revealed a lingering distrust of Clinton as too establishment-friendly, hawkish or untrustworthy. As some Sanders fans see it, the primary was not a simple preference for purity over pragmatism, but a moral choice between an honest figure and someone whom they consider fundamentally corrupted by the ways of Washington. Sanders has fed these perceptions throughout his campaign, which is one reason he's having a hard time coming around to an endorsement.

Voters like Armes, who says she’ll “definitely” vote in November, highlight the difficulty Clinton faces in unifying her party. Clinton’s paltry support among Sanders voters could still grow, as his disheartened fans process the hard-fought primary campaign. But the Bloomberg poll found that only 5 percent of Sanders supporters who don’t currently back Clinton would consider doing so in the future.

Eric Brooks, 52, a community organizer in San Francisco, won’t be among them. “I will absolutely never vote for Clinton,” says Brooks, a Sanders supporter who participated in the Bloomberg poll. Although Brooks indicated in the poll that he’ll support Johnson, that is not his intention. “I’d be okay voting for Johnson as a protest vote,” says Brooks. “But as a Green Party member, I’m going to vote for [Green Party candidate] Jill Stein. If you care about the climate, like I do, it makes a lot of sense strategically to vote for Stein, because she could get five percent, which has implications for the Green Party getting federal funding.”

more
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-06-22/nearly-half-of-sanders-supporters-won-t-support-clinton

June 22, 2016

Abortion is weakness for Clinton VP favorite

Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is generally seen as a safe vice presidential pick for Hillary Clinton.

A white man fluent in Spanish and from a swing state, Kaine is a former Democratic National Committee (DNC) chairman.

He’d provide some balance to the Clinton ticket and give her a running mate many see as an ideal partner in government. There’s only one big problem with picking Kaine: abortion.

While Kaine does not back overturning the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion, he is personally opposed to the practice and has backed controversial restrictions, such as parental ­notification laws and a ban on late-term abortions.

more
http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/284379-abortion-is-weakness-for-clinton-vp-favorite

June 21, 2016

Trump panders to evangelical leaders by promising to force store clerks to say ‘Merry Christmas’

Donald Trump greeted religious right leaders by asking not what Christianity could do for them but boasting about what evangelical voters had done for him.

“Christianity, I owe so much to it in so many ways, through life, through having incredible children, through so many other things,” Trump said. “But I also owe it, frankly, from standing here because the evangelical vote was mostly gotten by me. If you remember, I went to South Carolina, and I was going to be beaten — very heavy evangelical state — and I was going to be beaten by (Sen. Ted) Cruz or somebody because he had very strong with the evangelicals (vote), and I ended up getting massive majorities on the evangelical vote. Everybody said, ‘What’s going on? How did Trump do that? And then I went elsewhere and, and I won the whole South and heavy evangelical and Christian vote, and frankly, a Jewish vote, right, where we had Jewish population.”

Trump launched a broadside in the so-called “war on Christmas” Tuesday afternoon at the event organized by the anti-LGBT groups Family Research Council, Vision America and AFA Action.

“I’m a tremendous believer, and we’re going to straighten it out,” Trump said. “You know, oftentimes at some of my rallies I’ll have 25,000 (or) 35,000 people more, and I say in a joking fashion — but boy, do I mean it, we’re going to be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.”

more + video:
http://www.rawstory.com/2016/06/watch-trump-panders-to-evangelical-leaders-by-promising-to-force-store-clerks-to-say-merry-christmas/

June 21, 2016

Lawsuit Accuses Donald Trump Of Raping Teenage Girl In 1994

BY EMMA WHITFORD IN NEWS ON JUN 20, 2016 5:20 PM

A federal lawsuit filed Monday in New York accuses Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump of repeatedly raping a 13-year-old girl more than 20 years ago, at several Upper East Side parties hosted by convicted sex offender and notorious billionaire investor Jeffrey Epstein.

The suit, first reported by the Real Deal, accuses Trump and Epstein of luring the anonymous plaintiff and other young women to four parties at Epstein's so-called Wexner Mansion at 9 East 71st Street. Epstein allegedly lured the plaintiff, identified in the suit only as Jane Doe, with promises of a modeling career and cash.

Another anonymous woman, identified in additional testimony as Tiffany Doe, corroborates Jane's allegations, testifying that she met Epstein at Port Authority, where he hired her to recruit other young girls for his parties.

Trump had known Epstein for seven years in 1994 when he attended the parties at Wexner, according to the suit. He also allegedly knew that the plaintiff was 13 years old.

more
http://gothamist.com/2016/06/20/trump_rape_lawsuit.php