Carson Continues to Hit Back Against Media Attacks

Ben Carson continued to push back against the mainstream media as he criticized recent scrutiny of his descriptions about his youth.

The retired neurosurgeon and Republican presidential contender insisted at a political rally and on three Sunday morning news shows that reports about his claims about a violent youth, a Politico report about a scholarship offer to West Point and a story about a Yale class are actually helping his campaign.

Speaking to reporters after a political rally in Puerto Rico Sunday morning, Carson pushed back on the notion that the scrutiny on his past is “getting under his skin,” but then launched into an angry and mocking critique of the media coverage this week.

“It’s not particularly getting under my skin, obviously it’s helping me,” said Carson, who on Saturday thanked a “ biased media” for helping him fundraise $3.5 million last week. “But I simply cannot sit still and watch unfairness. I am always going to call that out when I see it.”

“Obviously, the Politico thing was a hit job, no question about that,” Carson said in Puerto Rico. “The kind of investigations that were done, talking to the wrong people. Not going to Wilson Junior High School where the lock incident occurred. But talking to other people and saying, ‘See we can’t find them,’ I mean this is just stupid, and I mean if our media is no better than investigating than that, it’s sick. The Wall Street Journal thing coming out and saying ‘there’s no such course, obviously this is all fabricated’ how come with all their tools they can’t find it, but we can? That doesn’t make any sense, does it?”

He added: “The burden of proof is not going to be on me to corroborate everything I have ever talked about in my life, because once I start down that road, from now until the election, you’re going to be spending your time doing that and we have much more important things to do,” Carson said. “You’re asking me about something that occurred 50 years ago. And you expect me to have the details about that? Forget about it. It’s not going to happen.”

Carson also appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” CBS’ “Face the Nation” and ABC’s “This Week” to rebut the reports.

“People are seeing through exactly what’s going on, and they’re getting fired up,” Carson said on “Meet the Press.” “It’s almost an us-versus-them thing. And every place I go, you know I go to a book signing, there’s a thousand people in line, ‘Please don’t let them get to you. Don’t give up. We got your back. We know what’s going on. We believe you.'”

Responding to Politico’s report about being offered a scholarship to West Point, Carson said on “Face the Nation” that he’d been referring to a conversation with military brass who were impressed by his academic and ROTC achievements and said they could get him into the military academy which does not charge tuition.

“They were very impressed with my incredible rise to city executive officer faster than anyone had ever done that before, and said that, you know, ‘Well, we would be able to get you a full scholarship to West Point,'” Carson said.

“And I said, ‘That’s wonderful,'” he continued. “And I was very flattered by that. But I had already determined that I was going to go on to college and on to medical school. So, you know, that’s what happened. And that’s why I said I was offered that.”

He also said his campaign had successfully dug up a photo published in Yale’s student newspaper that The Wall Street Journal said it couldn’t find and said his campaign would release it soon, verifying an anecdote about a psychology class Carson attended. He did, however, admit he and his co-author had made up the psychology class’s number and name.

“Why could we find it and they could not find it?” Carson asked. “And why do people put this stuff out there to make the accusation to try to make somebody seem dishonest, and then when it is disproven, ‘Oh, well, let’s talk about this. Oh, well, you said this when you were in kindergarten.’ Give me a break. I mean, there’s so many important things that need to be talked about.”

He said the reporters who have scrutinized his past would make minor mistakes when recalling the events of four or five decades before.

“Show me somebody even from your business, the media who is 100 percent accurate in everything that they say that happened 40 or 50 years ago,” Carson said on “This Week.” “Please show me that person. I will sit at their knee and I will learn from them.”

 

 

 

President Obama to Start Going on Offense Against ISIS

President Obama said it is time for the United States to “start going on some offense” to stop the advances of the Islamic State in the Middle East. “There’s going to be a military element to it,” Obama said in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” And what I want people to understand, though, is that over the course of months, we are going to be able to not just blunt the momentum of ISIL.  We are going to systematically degrade their capabilities.  We’re going to shrink the territory that they control.  And ultimately we’re going to defeat them.”

In a wide-ranging interview with moderator Chuck Todd, Obama also signaled for the first time he is likely to dispatch military resources to help deal with a serious outbreak of Ebola in several African countries.

Obama’s remarks on the security situation in the Middle East came as the U.S. military launched a series of new airstrikes late Saturday against the Islamic State, also known by the abbreviation ISIL, which had been threatening to seize control of a second giant dam that generates electricity and irrigation for much of the country. In the “Meet the Press” interview, the president did not specify what stepped-up military efforts he had authorized, but he emphasized, as he has repeatedly, that it would not include commitments of large numbers of U.S. combat troops on the ground.

“This is not the equivalent of the Iraq war,” Obama said. “What this is, is similar to the kinds of counterterrorism campaigns that we’ve been engaging in consistently over the last five, six, seven years. … We’re not looking at sending in 100,000 American troops.”

The interview marked the start of a concerted effort by the White House this week to more clearly articulate the administration’s strategy to deal with the Islamic State, which has shown sophisticated military capabilities and employed extreme acts of brutality, including the beheading of two U.S. journalists, in gaining wide swaths of territory in Syria and Iraq. Obama was criticized by members of Congress for saying two weeks ago that “we don’t have a strategy yet” for increased action.

Obama is set to meet with the bipartisan leaders of Congress at the White House on Tuesday to discuss his plans, and he will deliver a speech to the public on Wednesday, a day before the 13th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2011, attacks.

“They’re not a JV team,” Obama acknowledged of the Islamic State, after Todd reminded the president that he had referred to offshoots of al-Qaeda as akin to junior varsity terrorist groups in an interview with the New Yorker last January. Obama told Todd he had been referring to other groups, and said the Islamic State “has metastasized, has grown.  And now we’re going to have to deal.”

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who had criticized Obama’s approach to the Islamic State as too cautious, said: “I want to congratulate the president. He is now on the offense. He has put together the coalition of nine nations. His people are in different regional countries as we speak, consulting and trying to bring in other countries in the region. I think that this is a major change in how ISIS is approached. It is overdue, by the president is now there.”

Obama, who has called on Sunni countries in the region to help mount the military and political response to the Islamic State. He said the primary fighting forces in both Syria and Iraq would have to be local troops from those countries. The president said that Congress would be kept abreast of his decisions and that he would seek support for stepped-up U.S. efforts in the region.

“I do think it’s important for Congress to understand what the plan is, to have buy in, to debate it,” Obama said. The speech on Wednesday “will allow Congress, I think, to understand very clearly and very specifically what it is that we are doing but also what we’re not doing.”

Obama said he had seen messages delivered to him from Islamic State fighters in videos that showed the beheadings of the two American journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff. The militant group has a sophisticated recruiting campaign to gain members, Obama said, and effectively employed social media to reach well beyond the Middle East. Other Sunni nations must develop an “effective counter-narrative” to explain that the Islamic State does not stand for Islam, he added. “It is an abortion, a distortion, an abomination that has somehow tied Islam to the kind of nihilistic thinking that any civilized nation should eliminate,” Obama said.

Romney Blasts Hillary Clinton for Underestimating Global Threats While Secretary of State

Mitt Romney had some harsh words on Sunday for the person many believe will be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016: Hillary Clinton.

“Consider what’s happened around the world during the years that she was secretary of state,” the former Massachusetts governor and 2012 Republican presidential nominee said on NBC’s “Meet the Press”, calling her tenure “a monumental bust.”

Romney slammed U.S. foreign policy, saying both Clinton and President Barack Obama have “repeatedly underestimated” America’s enemies on the international stage.

“This administration, from Secretary Clinton to President Obama, has repeatedly underestimated the threats that are faced by America,” Romney said. “It has repeatedly underestimated our adversaries. And whether that’s Russia or [Syrian President Bashar] Assad or ISIS or al-Qaeda itself, it has not taken the action necessary to prevent things from happening. We have not used our influence to do what’s necessary to protect our interests.”

Romney also blasted Clinton for comments she made during her recent book tour about the decision to release five Taliban prisoners in order to free U.S. soldier Bowe Bergdahl.

“She was asked whether the Bowe Bergdahl trade was one that presented a threat to the United States,” Romney said. “And she came back with a clueless answer. She was clueless. She said, ‘Look, these commandos don’t represent a threat to the United States.’ Well, of course they do. And then she went on to say, ‘They only represent a threat to Afghanistan and Pakistan.’ Are you kidding? I mean, we’re in Afghanistan. And we’re in Afghanistan in part to protect America’s security.”

To defeat Clinton in 2016, Romney said, the GOP “playbook, I believe, is to look at her record.”

“I think her clueless comments about the Bergdahl exchange as well as her record as the secretary of state are really going to be the foundation of how a Republican candidate is able to take back the White House,” he said.

Romney also downplayed House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s shocking loss in last week’s Virginia GOP primary, saying Cantor’s defeat doesn’t signal the tea party’s resurgence within the GOP.

“Our party is becoming stronger,” Romney said, noting South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham’s primary victory against tea party challengers on Tuesday.

“In a very conservative state, Lindsey Graham won in a landslide,” Romney said. “This has a lot to do with the effectiveness of relative campaigns.”

Romney spoke after a GOP fundraising event he headed in Park City, Utah. He dismissed talk that the event, attended by heavy hitters including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, Ohio Sen. Rob Portman, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan — was precursor to another presidential run for him.

“I’m not running for president,” Romney said. “I brought a number of the 2016 contenders here to meet with my fundraisers. If I had been running, I wouldn’t be doing that.

“Look, I want to find the best candidate for us to take our message to the American people,” he added. “That we can bring better jobs, higher incomes, and more security globally. We can do that. And I’m convinced that the field of Republican candidates that I’m seeing is [in] a lot better position to do that than I am.”

Paul criticises Clinton over Benghazi and calls for GOP to stop alienating communities

Sen. Rand Paul sharply criticized Hillary Clinton for her handling of Benghazi, which he argued should disqualify her to serve as U.S. president, in remarks Friday to members of the Republican National Committee.

He charged that when Clinton served as Secretary of State, the agency was spending money on items that were not needed instead of boosting security for the U.S. diplomats serving in Libya.

“The thing is, is that this is about judgment and we are talking about should we, should we as a country have a commander-in-chief who didn’t provide added security in Libya, didn’t send reinforcements and then gave us nothing but spin?” Paul said. “My opinion is that Hillary Clinton has precluded herself from ever being considered for that position.”

His denouncement of Clinton drew hoots and hollers and loud applause from the room of politically weary Republicans who are anxious to take back the White House in 2016.

In an interview prior to his speech, Paul said he thinks Clinton should again testify to Congress about Benghazi.

“I think it’s really important that you know, for six months leading up to Benghazi, there were multiple requests for more security and she turned them down,” Paul said.

He was also highly critical of Bill Clinton, when he was asked his thoughts about the former president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Earlier this year, Paul described Clinton’s actions as “predatory behavior,” in an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“I think that he harassed people,” Paul said Friday in the interview. “He was sued multiple times for it, so yes, I think what he did was absolutely inappropriate. Is that being a predator? I don’t know how you want to define it but the thing is, most people would say that it’s contemptible.”

While Paul never mentioned his own political ambitions, his speech to the state GOP leaders and activists was an opportunity for the Kentucky Republican to promote his own agenda and policies, which will serve as his political platform if he decides to run for president. Paul, who publicly acknowledges he is considering seeking the Republican nomination, is frequently leading or consistently places in the top tier of candidates in early 2016 polling.

Paul of Kentucky broke Friday with fellow Republicans who have pushed for stricter voting laws as a way to crack down on fraud at the polls, saying that the focus on such measures alienates and insults African-Americans and hurts the party.

Paul advised his fellow GOP members to be “more sympathetic” toward communities who have felt alienated by Republican policies. The party’s struggle to connect with communities of color was a large part of the focus of a post-mortem commissioned by RNC head Reince Priebus following the 2012 presidential election.

“Everybody’s gone completely crazy on this voter ID thing,” Mr. Paul said in an interview. “I think it’s wrong for Republicans to go too crazy on this issue because it’s offending people.”

Mr. Paul becomes the most prominent member of his party, and among the very few,  to distance himself from the voting restrictions and the campaign for their passage in states under Republican control, including North Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin, that can determine presidential elections. Civil rights groups call the laws a transparent effort to depress black turnout.

For his part, Paul’s Memphis meeting with the group of pastors was the latest in a series of outreach trips, which included heavily-criticized appearances at Howard University and Detroit, Michigan

“There is only upside potential,” Paul said. “There is no downside.”

 

Romney Campaign Still Upbeat Despite New Polls

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign sought Monday to reassure donors and supporters in a “State of the Race” bulletin after polling data showed a convention bounce for Barack Obama.

“Don’t get too worked up about the latest polling. While some voters will feel a bit of a sugar-high from the conventions, the basic structure of the race has not changed significantly,” said Romney campaign pollster Neil Newhouse.

In his “State of the Race” memo, Newhouse argues that there are three sets of numbers that will ultimately affect the way people will vote in November: unemployment trends, how many Americans are looking for work, and how many are on food stamps.

“President Obama is the only president in modern American history to stand before the American people asking for re-election with this many Americans struggling to find work,” Newhouse writes. “The key numbers in this election are the 43 straight months of 8% or higher unemployment, the 23 million Americans struggling to find work, and the 47 million Americans who are on food stamps.” “The reality of the Obama economy will reassert itself as the ultimate downfall of the Obama presidency, and Mitt Romney will win this race.”

Following last week’s Democratic convention in North Carolina, a series of national polls showed Obama edging ahead of his Republican rival and a survey in the must-win swing state of Ohio put him five points clear.

Newhouse, however, argued that Romney was still the preferred candidate on the crucial issue of the economy and that all the signs pointed to a tight race in which the former Massachusetts governor had a money advantage.

The message was seen as an attempt to shore up support for the Republican candidate after some disappointing polls and after Obama outraised Romney in August for the first time in four months.

Newhouse said Romney’s supporters were more enthusiastic and that the campaign had crossed a 20 million volunteer threshold as they deploy an all-out “Ground Game” across the key states in the November 6 election.

“Mitt Romney will be the next president,” he said. “The outcome of this race will ultimately be determined in favor of governor Romney because he has the better leadership skills, the better record, and the better vision for where he wants to take the country.

“In short, the combination of having the superior candidate, being in a margin-of-error race with an incumbent president, having a cash advantage, and having an unprecedented grassroots effort and a winning message on the economy ensure that Americans will make a change in leadership in Washington on November 6.”

He results though may not be as bad as they suggest, The Gallup seven day tracking poll of 3050 registered voters, that has a margin of error of 2.0 percent, samples Democrats by about a 8 percent margin based on calculations from the reported data. If the data is properly weighted for the partisan makeup of the electorate, the data from this poll unskewed would show a Romney lead of 49 percent to 44. By skewing the poll, it gives Obama a five point lead instead of showing Romney leading by the same total.

The Gallup tracking poll has Democrats favoring Obama by a 90 percent to seven percent margin while Republicans surveyed in the poll favor Romney by a 91 percent to six percent margin. Independent voters to support Romney by a 43 percent to 42 percent edge. The significance of this is, somewhere along the way the weighting and sampling used by Gallup appears to have changed. The polling output resulting from this change demonstrates an apparent change that may not have happened at all, resulting in the showing of a Barack Obama post-convention “bounce” much larger than what might have actually occurred.

Midweek victories bring Santorum’s stances under media scrutiny

Beware GOP supporters in placing too much faith and belief in Rick Santorum’s ability to win the nomination or General election. In a week that saw Santorum win three states and raise $3 million in fundraising, his first appearance on Sunday shows as a potential leading candidate brought questions that his socially conservative views will alienate working women. I like Santorum as a candidate on social values however, if anyone seriously believes he can lead the charge against President Obama in the fall and win, they are gravely mistaken. Santorum’s rise should be viewed as a hot-air balloon that will burst and come crashing back to earth with a bang. Not if, only a matter of when!

The former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania minimized Mitt Romney’s victory in Saturday’s straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, implying that the Romney forces had somehow rigged the win.

“For years, Ron Paul’s won those because he just trucks in a lot of people, pays for their ticket, and they come in and vote and then they leave,” Santorum told CNN’s Candy Crowley. “I don’t try to rig straw polls.” “Do you think Governor Romney rigged it?” Crowley asked.

“Well, you have to talk to the Romney campaign,” said Santorum, who Tuesday won Missouri’s primary and caucuses in Minnesota and Colorado. “We’ve heard all sorts of things.”  The truth for most conservatives like or loath it at this stage, is that Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich are the only two serious candidates, that can hope to challenge President Obama on a national level. I’m not dismissing Ron Paul’s candidacy, I just happen to believe he will be kingmaker in the eventual decision of where the GOP nomination goes, not the nominee himself.

“Rick Santorum has a history of making statements that aren’t grounded in the truth,” said  Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul. “Yesterday Mitt Romney won the CPAC straw poll and won a separate nationwide survey of conservatives conducted by CPAC organizers. Also, Mitt Romney won the Maine caucuses.”

Santorum, who did not campaign in Maine, said he was satisfied with his third place finish in the state. He said he expects to compete strongly in Arizona and Michigan, which hold primaries Feb. 28, thanks in part to the more than $3 million he raised this week, a stunning amount for a campaign that has so far been run on a shoe string. He said on “Meet the Press” that he plans to release his tax returns early next week.

Many pundits have suggested that Santorum’s deeply conservative views on social issues such as gay marriage, abortion, contraception and working women could present formidable obstacles in attracting moderate and independent voters if he were to become the GOP nominee.

“Meet the Press,” host David Gregory read a passage from Santorum’s 2005 book “It Takes a Family,” which was written as a response to Hillary Clinton’s 1996 bestseller “It Takes a Village.”

“ ‘The radical feminists succeeded in undermining the traditional family and convincing women that professional accomplishment are the key to happiness,’ ” read Gregory.

In response, Santorum said that his own mother worked, and earned more than his father — “somewhat unusual in the 1950s and 1960s.” He said that section of the book was co-written by his wife, Karen, a former nurse and lawyer who left the workforce to stay home with the couple’s seven children.

When his wife quit working, she “felt very much like society and those radical feminists that I was referring to were not affirming her choice,” Santorum said. “All I’m saying is … we should affirm both choices. … That’s what the book says, and I stand by what I said.”

Santorum has often touted himself as the only uncompromised conservative in the race, with a record of working to shrink government.

But while in the Senate he reached across the aisle to work with many high-profile Democrats, including Joe Lieberman, Barbara Boxer and Hillary Clinton.

On CNN’s “State of the Union,” Crowley played a 2006 TV spot cut for Santorum’s losing Senate reelection campaign. In it, he held up a newspaper and said: “This paper, they say ‘The real problem with Rick Santorum is he’s too liberal.’ They didn’t like my legislation calling for a raise in the minimum wage. And the White House probably called me a lot of things, but I fought their efforts to cut Amtrak funding.”

Santorum said he voted many times against increasing the minimum wage, but supports the concept. As for giving federal funds to Amtrak, he said, the issue was important to his Pennsylvania constituents, but he has since changed his mind: “Amtrak funding would be one of those things that’s just going to have to go.”

Crowley asked Santorum to explain why it was acceptable for him to have supported a program that was important to his state, but not acceptable for Romney to have embraced universal health care when he governed Massachusetts only to oppose the federal version that President Obama signed into law.

“And yet Mitt Romney is criticized by you and others when he says, ‘Listen, I did what was best for my state when I … signed healthcare into law,” said Crowley. “It was not a federal thing. … He was representing his state at the time. What’s the difference here?”

“It’s very different than having the government mandate that you buy health insurance,” said Santorum. “That’s a very different thing than a transportation program.”

Meet the Press – Plouffe says Romney has ‘no core’

WASHINGTON — White House senior adviser David Plouffe, talking about the 2012 campaign in much blunter terms than is common for an administration official, accused Mitt Romney of lacking the necessary conviction to be president.

“He has no core,” Plouffe argued during a Sunday appearance on “Meet the Press.” “I can tell you as one thinking, working a few steps down from the president, what you need in that office is conviction. You need to have a true compass, and you have got to be willing to make tough calls. You get the sense with Mitt Romney that if he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.”

Plouffe noted a litany of issues on which Romney has changed: from cap-and-trade pollution controls (“now he doesn’t think that climate change is real”) to gay rights (“now he wants to amend the Constitution to prohibit gay marriage”) to abortion (“now he believes that life begins at conception and would ban Roe v. Wade“).

But it was his core argument — so to speak — that stood out above the specific policy points, echoing (to a lesser degree) the type of character swipes that George W. Bush took at his 2004 opponent, John Kerry, and spurring cries of foul play almost instantaneously.

“What surprised me, and not a lot surprises me in politics, was that Mr. Plouffe went for a direct personal character assault on Mr. Romney a little while ago,” said Mike Murphy, the longtime Republican consultant and frequent “Meet the Press” guest, shortly after Plouffe’s interview aired. “This is a White House staffer saying the opponent has no core? That’s harsh character attack politics, and I think he owes Mr. Romney a bit of an apology on that. I thought that was a step too far.”

UPDATE: Romney spokesperson Ryan Williams emails the following response:

President Obama can’t run on his abysmal economic record and he is desperate to distract from the historic loss of middle class jobs that has occurred on his watch. Americans won’t be fooled by false and negative attacks – they know that President Obama has failed, and they are eager to replace him with a leader like Mitt Romney who can turn around our struggling economy.