Tag Archives: Donald Trump

News

Ted Cruz explains his position on the issues of abortion and right to life

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Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event
Ted Cruz meets voters at a campaign event

A new 6-minute video was released earlier this week, and I heard about it from my friend Chad.

Videos are nice, but we probably shouldn’t believe anything that Cruz says in campaign speeches and campaign ads. Politicians say anything in election years in order to get elected. What would really be interesting would be to see what the pro-life organizations rate this guy, and whether he has any kind of record fighting for the lives of the unborn.

Fortunately, I have one article that answers both questions… from Charisma News.

Excerpt:

On Saturday, Texas Senator Ted Cruz received a ringing endorsement from Georgia’s largest pro-life organization. “Senator Cruz has an unblemished record of standing up for innocent life,” said Ricardo Davis, the director of Georgia Right to Life’s Political Action Committee (GRTL PAC).

And here are the pro-life achievements:

Senator Cruz’s pro-life record includes the following:

  • Leading the charge on behalf of 13 states in successfully defending the federal Partial Birth Abortion Act before the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • Joining 18 states in successfully defending New Hampshire’s Parental Notification Act before the U.S. Supreme Court;
  • Successfully defending a Texas law that prevents state funds from being sent to organizations that perform abortions; and
  • Calling for the defunding of Planned Parenthood amid charges that the abortion giant sells aborted body parts.

The Washington Times reports that Cruz has also been endorsed by the pro-life leaders I most respect, Tony Perkins and James Dobson.

Excerpt:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, has endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas for president, calling Mr. Cruz “a constitutional conservative who will fight for faith, family and freedom.”

“I trust Ted to fight to pull America out of the political and cultural tailspin that President Obama’s policies have put us in,” Mr. Perkins said. “This is no normal election; this election is about the very survival of our Constitution and our republic.”

Mr. Cruz said he was “honored” to have Mr. Perkins’ endorsement, calling him “a man of incredible principle and faith.”

Mr. Perkins is currently president of the FRC, which promotes socially conservative values and is one of the most influential conservative advocacy groups in the country. Mr. Perkins said on Fox News’ “The Kelly File” it was a personal endorsement and not from any of the nonprofits he leads.

Mr. Cruz has been jockeying with 2016 GOP rival Donald Trump for support from social conservatives ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday.

The Texas senator has also been endorsed by Dr. James Dobson, another social conservative leader, and past FRC President Gary Bauer.

I think anyone whose main issue is protecting the unborn from the use of force for selfish adults should give Cruz a look. I personally don’t trust any other candidate running on the pro-life issue. Trump is pro-abortion, and there’s no evidence he’s changed his mind except his words form like 5 minutes ago. Rubio can’t be trusted on anything he says – he lied to Florida voters about his intention to oppose amnesty, and when he got to Washington, he sponsored a bill to give 20 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. We can’t trust anything that Trump or Rubio say on any issue, in my opinion. In any case, we don’t have to settle for “maybe pro-life, if it’s popular”. We can pick Ted Cruz and get “pro-life regardless of whether it’s popular or not”.

Ted Cruz has a record of defending unpopular positions, and trying to explain conservative values to others. In Iowa, he was the only candidate to stand up to the power ethanol lobbies and their crony capitalism. Marco Rubio and Donald Trump sided with the ethanol crony capitalists, because they were afraid to lose votes. And Cruz won Iowa.

He is not afraid to defend conservative values. When it comes to the life issue, we should look for the candidate with the proven record of fighting for conservative values: Ted Cruz.

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News

Is Trump right to praise Putin’s leadership abilities?

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Donald Trump and his friends, the Clintons
Donald Trump and his friends, the Clintons

In my previous post, I took on a couple of the meltdowns that Trump had in the CBS News debate Saturday night. Let’s look at another one.

Let’s first see what Trump said in this article from the leftist CNN.

Excerpt:

Donald Trump on Friday praised Vladimir Putin and appeared to defend the autocratic Russian president when pressed about his alleged killing of journalists and political opponents critical of his rule.

One day after Putin called Trump a “bright and talented” and the “absolute leader of the presidential race,” the Republican presidential front-runner returned the compliments, hailing Putin as a “leader” and pointing to his high favorability numbers in Russia.

“He’s running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country,” Trump said when asked by “Morning Joe” Republican host Joe Scarborough about Putin’s alleged killing of journalists and political opponents.

“I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe, so you know. There’s a lot of stupidity going on in the world right now, a lot of killing, a lot of stupidity,” he said.

And from the leftist Washington Post:

On Sunday, Trump took the opportunity to defend himself. “Nobody has proven that he’s killed anyone. … He’s always denied it. It’s never been proven that he’s killed anybody,” the American billionaire explained during an appearance on ABC’s “This Week.” He added: “You’re supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, at least in our country. It has not been proven that he’s killed reporters.”

OK, so Trump thinks that Putin is a great leader.

Three points in response to that:

  • Putin kills people who criticize him in the Kremlin
  • Putin kills journalists who criticize him
  • Putin initiated a completely unprovoked invasion of peaceful Ukraine

Let’s look at them in order.

First point, from the leftist Washington Post.

Excerpt:

Gaunt and frail, his organs succumbing to the cruelly destructive power of radioactive poisoning, Alexander Litvinenko lay in a London hospital bed in November 2006 and identified the man responsible for his impending demise: Vladimir Putin.

Nearly a decade later, an exhaustive inquiry by a British judge concluded on Thursday that the dying former KGB operative was probably right. For the first time, the Russian president was officially implicated in a murder that seemed plucked from the pages of a Cold War spy novel but actually played out in the bar of a posh hotel in 21st-century London.

The victim: an outspoken Kremlin critic who had defected to Britain, joined the payroll of British intelligence and accused Putin of vices­ including corruption and pedophilia. The killers: a pair of assassins who, the report found, were almost certainly acting on orders from the Russian spy service, the FSB, and who left a trail of radioactive evidence strewn across London. The weapons of choice: one teacup and one massive dose of a rare nuclear isotope, polonium.

Second point, from the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

A 2009 investigation by the International Federation of Journalists reported 96 killings of journalists between 1991 and 2009, by far the highest number among the 20 richest countries in the world.

Another rolling report from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) collects data of journalists killed in each nation from 1992 on. Only cases where the motive has a clear correlation to the victim’s work as a journalist make the lists.

There have been 56 such cases in Russia since CPJ started collecting data, with 25 deaths after Putin took office in May 2000. This means the frequency of deaths went down significantly after Putin’s inauguration, with less deaths during Putin’s 15 years as president or prime minister, than in the previous eight combined.

Third point, from the Washington Free Beacon.

Excerpt:

Russia has deployed as many as 10,000 troops in eastern Ukraine for more than a year and has actively sought to hide the deaths of its soldiers, according to a new report that provides a comprehensive assessment of the Kremlin’s invasion of its neighbor.

The report was published Thursday by the Interpreter, a daily online journal that translates Russian media and reports on Russian affairs, also detailed the Kremlin’s provision of increasingly sophisticated weaponry and vehicles to separatists in Ukraine. Nearly 8,000 people have been killed in the Ukrainian conflict since April 2014.

The conflict originated in March 2014 when unmarked Russian soldiers seized the Crimean peninsula in Ukraine, an invasion that followed Ukraine’s ousting of a pro-Moscow leader. Despite denials from Russian President Vladimir Putin at the time that the troops belonged to Russia, he later admitted that he deployed them.

Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Putin escalated support to separatists in eastern Ukraine that resided in areas with a majority of ethnic Russians. Reserve officers in the Russian military, who also had ties to the Russian military intelligence agency known as the GRU, commanded the rebels in attacks. By June 2014, the Ukrainian military said that Russia had massed more than 40,000 troops on Ukraine’s border and deployed about 7,000 to 10,000 Russian soldiers inside Ukraine.

Aside from complete ignorance about anything related to the job of being President of the United States, Trump has two other qualities that worry me. First, his temperament during the debate – the unhinged screaming and calling people liar about things he said on video – is disturbing. Second, I have no doubt that Trump would go from praising Putin to attacking him for killing journalists, if Putin made the slightest criticism of Trump. Perhaps by mocking Trump’s short, stubby fingers.

Trump supporters in denial

I know 3 Trump supporters, and I’ve tried to speak to them about things like eminent domain, support for bank bailouts, single payer health care, touchback amnesty, Planned Parenthood support, support for Vladimir Putin, adultery and divorce, support for the gay rights agenda, four bankruptcies, etc. Their response has been do deny the evidence. Trump never did those things, all the news articles are lies, and all the videos of Trump saying those things are fake. I expect better than that from Trump supporters. This time, the stakes are as high as they could be: 4-5 Supreme Court picks.  This is the ballgame for America.

News

Is Trump right to say that Bush lied about the Iraq war, and there were no WMDs?

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There was a debate on Saturday night, and Donald Trump started screaming like an unhinged psychopath not once, not twice, but THREE TIMES.

Red State introduces the meltdowns:

In Saturday’s CBS Republican presidential debate Donald Trump was the biggest loser. It wasn’t even close. Worse, the Donald was whiney, uncivil and so very un-presidential. He threw Trumpertantrum after Trumpertantrum, interrupted again and again and was booed over and over.

Here they are:

You can listen to all three meltdowns and read the transcripts in the Red State article. Let’s look at them.

The third statement about Planned Parenthood has already been turned into an ad by Ted Cruz, who was called a liar by Trump in the debate. The new Cruz ad shows Trump saying exactly what Cruz said that he said about Planned Parenthood on the Sean Hannity show.

I’m going to cover the “George W. Bush lied us into war and there were no WMDs there” statement below, and then this afternoon, I’ll cover the “Putin is a leader and there’s no evidence that he assassinated anyone” statement.

Here’s the part of the transcript that’s relevant:

DICKERSON: … On Monday, George W. Bush will campaign in South Carolina for his brother. As you’ve said tonight, and you’ve often said, the Iraq war and your opposition to it was a sign of your good judgment. In 2008, in an interview with Wolf Blitzer, talking about President George W. Bush’s conduct of the war, you said you were surprised that Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi didn’t try to impeach him. You said, quote: “Which, personally, I think would have been a wonderful thing.” When you were asked what you meant by that and you said: “For the war, for the war, he lied, he got us into the war with lies.” Do you still believe President Bush should have been impeached?

[…]TRUMP: You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction.

Two points to make about this.

Chemical weapons found in Iraq
Chemical weapons found in Iraq

First, we did find WMDs in Iraq – lots of them. And this was reported in the radically leftist New York Times, of all places.

Read it:

Five years after President George W. Bush sent troops into Iraq, these soldiers had entered an expansive but largely secret chapter of America’s long and bitter involvement in Iraq.

From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Second point, three different reports found that George W. Bush did not lie about the WMDs, nor did he pressure the intelligence agencies.

Excerpt:

Everyone was convinced that Saddam had WMDs. It remains a fact Saddam used WMDs against and his own people. The intelligence and common wisdom that Iraq still possessed such weapons at the time we liberated Iraq proved to be wrong, but that doesn’t equate to a lie. So lets go over the facts again.

The Bipartisan Senate Select Committee Report On The U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments On Iraq found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community’s judgments related to Iraq’s weapons programs. At pages 284-285 the report states:

Conclusion 83. The Committee did not find any evidence that Administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capabilities.

[Redacted]

Conclusion 84. The Committee found no evidence that the Vice President’s visits to the Central Intelligence Agency were attempts to pressure analysts, were perceived as intended to pressure analysts by those who participated in the briefings on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs, or did pressure analysts to change their assessments.

Besides that report, two other independent investigations came to the same conclusion.

The Robb-Silberman Commission On The Intelligence Capabilities Of The United States Regarding Weapons Of Mass Destruction likewise found “no evidence of political pressure.” At pages 50-51 the Robb-Silberman report states: The Commission found no evidence of political pressure to influence the Intelligence Community’s pre-war assessments of Iraq’s weapons programs. As we discuss in detail in the body of our report, analysts universally asserted that in no instance did political pressure cause them to skew or alter any of their analytical judgments. We conclude that it was the paucity of intelligence and poor analytical tradecraft, rather than political pressure, that produced the inaccurate pre-war intelligence assessments.

The British Butler Report, Review Of Intelligence On Weapons Of Mass Destruction similarly “found no evidence of deliberate distortion.”

Trump can say anything he wants, but the facts are what they are.

Trump supporters in denial

I know 3 Trump supporters, and I’ve tried to speak to them about things like eminent domain, support for bank bailouts, single payer health care, touchback amnesty, Planned Parenthood support, support for Vladimir Putin, adultery and divorce, support for the gay rights agenda, four bankruptcies, etc. Their response has been do deny the evidence. Trump never did those things, all the news articles are lies, and all the videos of Trump saying those things are fake. I expect better than that from Trump supporters. This time, the stakes are as high as they could be: 4-5 Supreme Court picks.  This is the ballgame for America.