Ben Carson is finished?

Monday, Nov 23, 2015 05:13 PM EST
Salon
Sean Illing

[Bloggers note: Sadly, Ben Carson is a bible thumping Adventist. While I consider myself a very religious, Christian, right-wing conservative, it is a mistake for a political candidate to boast their religious beliefs during an election. This was the cause of Mitt Romney's last minute failure in 2012.]

Ben Carson is finished: The one-time Republican frontrunner continues his free fall
Carson's foreign policy ignorance is death knell for campaign after latest terror attacks.

Ben Carson has had a great run. He has no experience, no knowledge of the issues, and no real inclination to learn the things he has to learn in order to run for office. In every debate so far, he’s embarrassed himself with meandering non-answers. Oftentimes it’s not clear Carson even understands the question he’s been asked, and that’s pretty much the case across topics.

Remarkably, none of that has mattered in this race. Carson has slithered his way to the top of the polls in recent months, and he appeared well-positioned at least until the Iowa caucuses. Carson’s only real competition thus far has been Trump. And the leading “establishment” candidate at this point is Rubio, who remains roughly seven points behind Carson in most of the polls.

But things have changed.

It appears the recent terrorist attacks in Paris have awakened GOP primary voters from their slumber – well, sort of. And that’s bad news for Carson, who just had one of his worst weeks as a presidential candidate. In case you missed it, Carson stumbled last week when he mistakenly claimed that China was militarily involved in Syria. He then failed to name the nations he would ask to join a coalition against ISIS.

Things spiraled further out of control for the retired neurosurgeon when his own foreign policy adviser questioned his understanding of and interest in the issues. “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of information about the Middle East,” said Duane R. Clarridge, a chief adviser to Carson’s campaign. Clarridge added that “Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so ‘we can make him smart.’’’

Even in a party that devalues experience and champions know-nothingism, this is a potential death knell for Carson’s campaign.

Read more at: http://www.salon.com/2015/11/23/after_paris_attacks_carsons_campaign_nosedives_in_iowa/

Reuters/Alvin Baez

FBI Hillary Clinton Probe Expands!

NewsMax
By Cathy Burke   |   Thursday, 12 Nov 2015 11:05 AM

The FBI has expanded its probe into the private email arrangement of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to determine if there's any evidence she violated a federal false statements law, Fox News reports.

According to Fox News, unnamed intelligence sources say the agency is now focusing on U.S. Code 18, Section 1001 — a provision that pertains to "materially false" statements given either in writing, orally or through a third party — a felony punishable by five years in prison.
The wider scope represents an expansion of the agency's investigation that's also looking at potential violations of an Espionage Act provision relating to "gross negligence" in the handling of national defense information, Fox News reports.

"The agents involved are under a lot of pressure and are busting a —," a source tells Fox News.

The expanded probe follows a report earlier in the week that the FBI is stepping up the Clinton email investigation.

Former FBI agent Timothy Gill explains the section of the federal statute on false statements that may apply to Clinton "is a broad, brush statute that punishes individuals who are not direct and fulsome in their answers."

Read more at: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/FBI-hillary-clinton-email-scandal-probe/2015/11/12/id/701812/?ns_mail_uid=14826077&ns_mail_job=1642929_11122015&s=al&dkt_nbr=lzrwhvpm

Hillary Clinton CBS News Photo 2015

Hillary Clinton pledges to make gun control a 'voting issue' for Democrats

[Bloggers note: Here comes the big gun grab! Time to kick this worn out, criminal bitch to the curb!]

The Guardian

November 4, 2015

Hillary Clinton is attempting to make gun control and reducing gun violence a key part of her presidential campaign, as a once politically sensitive campaign issue moves front and center in the wake of the Charleston church massacre in June.

“Thirty-three thousand people a year die from something,” the Democratic frontrunner said at a campaign event at Grinnell College in Iowa on Tuesday night. “Shame on us if we don’t respond.”

The frequency and force with which she and the other Democratic presidential candidates discuss gun control marks an evolution on an issue that was once a near-taboo for Democrats on the campaign trail. Since a 21-year-old white supremacist killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in June, Clinton has wrapped toughening the nation’s gun laws into her standard stump speech.

It also marks a rare policy on which Clinton is to the left of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who is closely chasing the frontrunner in Iowa and New Hampshire.

During an earlier campaign event in Coralville, Iowa, Clinton vowed to challenge the powerful US gun lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), and pledged to make gun control a “voting issue” that motivates Democrats in the same way gun rights motivates Republicans to vote.

“We’re going to make this a voting issue – just like the other side does,” Clinton said on Tuesday afternoon.

Read more at: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/04/hillary-clinton-gun-control-forefront-campaign

Hillary Clinton - AP Photo John Locher 11/2015

Joe Biden: I Would Have Run for President, but I Couldn't Win

NBC News
Oct 26 2015, 9:57 am ET
by M. Alex Johnson

Vice President Joe Biden said Sunday he would have run for president, but he decided that he "couldn't win" and that he would never again seek political office.

In a joint interview with his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, on CBS' "60 Minutes," the vice president said helping his family grieve over the death in May of his son, former Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden, took precedence over a presidential campaign.

"I've said from the beginning that I don't know whether our ability to deal with the loss of Beau would reach a point where we could do that before time ran out," he said. "And there was nothing we could control."

Related: Joe Biden Announces He Will Not Seek Democratic Nomination for President

Asked by CBS News correspondent Norah O'Donnell whether he chose not to run because "you think you couldn't win" or "didn't want to run," Biden answered:

"Couldn't win. I'll be very blunt. If I thought we could've put together the campaign that our supporters deserve and our contributors deserved, I would have gone ahead and done it."

[Bloggers note: Of course Biden couldn't win - He is a clone of Hillary Clinton without the brashness, visibility or speaking ability. And, the Democratic Party machine would have had him assassinated for interering with their plan to elect Hillary - He would have diluted the vote!]

Read more at: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/biden-i-would-have-run-i-couldnt-win-n451211

Joe Biden - AP Photo

The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared

Electronic Frontier Foundation
October 9, 2015 | By Jeremy Malcolm


The Final Leaked TPP Text Is All That We Feared

Today's release by Wikileaks of what is believed to be the current and essentially final version of the intellectual property (IP) chapter (https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/the-term) of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) (https://www.eff.org/issues/tpp) confirms our worst fears about the agreement, and dashes the few hopes that we held out that its most onerous provisions wouldn't survive to the end of the negotiations.

Since we now have the agreed text, we'll be including some paragraph references that you can cross-reference for yourself—but be aware that some of them contain placeholders like “x” that may change in the cleaned-up text. Also, our analysis here is limited to the copyright and Internet-related provisions of the chapter, but analyses of the impacts of other parts of the chapter have been published by Wikileaks (https://wikileaks.org/tpp-ip3/) and others.

Quite honestly there are no parts of this agreement that are positively good for users. Of course, that doesn't mean that it's not improved over the earlier, horrendous demands of the U.S. negotiators. Some of the areas in which countries rightly pushed back against the U.S., and which are reflected in the final text are:

1. The exhaustion of rights provision (QQ.A.11) that upholds the first sale doctrine of U.S. law, preventing copyright owners from extending their control over the resale of copyright works once they have first been placed in the market. In particular, this makes parallel importation of cheaper versions of copyright works lawful—and complementing this is an explicit authorization of devices that bypass region-coding on physical copies of such works (QQ.G.10, though this does not extend to bypassing geoblocking of streaming services).
A thoroughly-misguided provision that would have extended copyright protection to temporary or "buffer" copies in a computer system was one of the earliest rightsholder demands dropped by the USTR, and rightfully so, given the damage this would have wreaked to tech companies and users alike.

2. But we have struggled to come up with more than two positive points about the TPP, and even then the absence of these tragic mistakes is a pretty poor example of a positive point. If you look for provisions in the TPP that actually afford new benefits to users, rather than to large, rights-holding corporations, you will look in vain. The TPP is the archetype of an agreement that exists only for the benefit of the entitled, politically powerfully lobbyists who have pushed it through to completion over the last eight years.

There is nothing in here for users and innovators to support, and much for us to fear—the ratcheting up of the copyright term across the Pacific rim, the punitive sanctions for DRM circumvention, and the full frontal attack on hackers and journalists in the trade secrets provision, just to mention three. This latest leak has confirmed our greatest fears—and strengthened our resolve to kill this agreement for good once it reaches Congress.

Read more at: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/10/final-leaked-tpp-text-all-we-feared

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Jeb Bush Should Face Facts: It’s Time to Drop Out

Jeb, this isn’t working. You’re a bad candidate, and all you’re going to do now is damage the guy who can beat Trump. Is that what you want?

Jeb, this just isn’t going to work. After all that money spent, you’re still sagging nationally and in fourth place in New Hampshire, a state you need to win.

You’ve had nearly a year to make your case. It isn’t working. You should pack it in.

The conventional wisdom a few months ago was that your brother’s catastrophic presidency would be your bid’s biggest hurdle. Now, in a fit of desperation, it looks like you’re about to draft him to stump for you. Putting aside that George W. is still despised by a not-insignificant swath of the Republican electorate, how is that going to play in the general should you somehow win the nomination? You’re making the Democrats’ job easy, Jeb. They’ll be more than happy to attach you to his legacy, and you’re doing that for them.
....
(Jeb,) your problems go well beyond polling, though. For starters, you don’t seem to want the job. You’re not as politically adroit as others in the race—a charge that could never be made against McCain. And by using all that cash you’ve raised to tear down the other plausible nominees while simultaneously reminding everyone of your brother’s failed presidency, your continued presence on the campaign trail will likely wind up helping the other side.

So just go home, Jeb. There’s no dishonor in leaving politics behind.

Read more at: Shttp://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/10/06/jeb-bush-should-face-facts-it-s-time-to-drop-out.html

Melina Mara/The Washington Post, via Getty

Clinton unveils plan for tighter gun control including executive action, expanded background checks

(Bloggers note: I am beginning to wonder if the liberal news media has been searching for gun violence incidents to report, or perhaps the gun control freaks are actually setting up these acts of violence. Please, just put the criminals in jail and leave our guns alone! I have NEVER seen a gun kill anyone - unless it is used by a criminal! Guns SAVE many more lives then they kill.)

Published October 05, 2015FoxNews.com

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Monday proposed tighter gun-control measures, including expanded background checks, and suggested that if elected she would use executive powers to achieve her goals.

“I want to push hard to get more sensible restraints,” Clinton said on NBC’s “Today” show. “I want to work with Congress, but I will look at ways as president.”

She called for expanded background checks for firearms sales online and at gun shows. Clinton also called for closing loopholes in federal laws that allow for gun-sale transactions to be completed if the buyer’s background check is not finished within three days.

Clinton will unveil more details about her plans Monday during a campaign swing through New Hampshire.

Her campaign says her proposals also include a repeal of legislation shielding gun manufacturers, distributors and dealers from most liability suits, even in the case of mass shootings like the one that killed nine students and teachers at an Oregon community college on Thursday.

The fatal shootings have sparked renewed interest in Washington, the 2016 presidential campaign trails and elsewhere across the country about curbing gun violence.

Clinton’s proposals also mark an attempt to make up ground among the liberal wing of the Democratic Party against her closest rival, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. While Sanders has wooed the Democratic base with his liberal positions on issues like income inequality and college debt, he's struggled to defend a more mixed record on gun legislation -- a reflection, he says, of his rural, gun-friendly home-state.

Read more at: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/10/05/hillary-clinton-to-push-new-gun-control-proposals-executive-action-expanding/