Tag Archives: Primary

News

Bobby Jindal won first CNN debate, Carly and Rubio win second CNN debate

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CNN Debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library
CNN Debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library

First of all, if you missed the two debates on CNN on Wednesday night, you missed two great political debates. Hugh Hewitt asked great questions of the candidates. Jake Tapper and Dana Bash were slightly biased against Republicans. Really both debates were so good, and a million times better than the two Fox News debates. There were no gotcha questions, there were plenty of issue-focused exchanges between the candidate.

First debate:

Here’s an exchange between Jindal and Graham:

Jindal: “If we can’t defund Planned Parenthood… It is time to be done with the Republican Party.”

JIndal on Trump and Obama:

Jindal: “He’s declared war on trans fats, and a truce with Iran. Think about that – he’s more worried about Twinkies than he is about the Ayatollahs having a nuclear weapon!”

Jindal on the refugee crisis and illegal immigration:

Jindal: “Simply allowing more people into this country doesn’t solve this problem.”

Jindal on radical Islam, and discrimination against Christians in America:

Jindal: “In America … right now, the biggest discrimination going on is against Christian business owners and individuals who believe in traditional forms of marriage.”

Here are my ratings, candidates in red are the ones I support.

First debate grades:

  • Bobby Jindal: A-
  • Lindsay Graham: B+
  • Rick Santorum: C
  • George Pataki: D

Jindal went after Trump hard, but didn’t talk enough about policy and his own record. LIndsay Graham was solid on foreign policy. He is far too liberal on fiscal issues and social issues, and especially on illegal immigration. Graham is one of the most establishment RINOs in the Senate. It was fun watching Jindal take him on. Jindal is still my favorite candidate, and I hope he gets a bump in the polls from his debate performance.

Second debate:

Carly Fiorina on Planned Parenthood:

Marco Rubio on foreign policy:

If you watch only one clip, watch this one – Rubio and Christie on global warming:

Ted Cruz on illegal immigration:

Scott Walker on minimum wage, jobs and Obamacare:

Second debate grades:

  • Carly Fiorina: A
  • Marco Rubio: A
  • Chris Christie: B+
  • Ted Cruz: B
  • Scott Walker: B-
  • Ben Carson: C+
  • Jeb Bush: C+
  • Rand Paul: C
  • Mike Huckabee: C
  • John Kasich: D
  • Donald Trump: F

Fiorina solid on the facts, but took a few hits on her record at Hewlett Packard, which was not good. She is much too liberal and inexperienced for me, but she talks about these issues very seriously. I am more conservative than she is on abortion, marriage, religious liberty, criminal justice, and many other issues. She has no record of achievement as a governor, either. Marco Rubio is amazing at foreign policy, and knocked a question on global warming out of the park. I love to see a Republican explain the global warming issue so that people understand what is at stake. Rand Paul made some great points about federalism, which I think was valuable in explain conservative principles to the CNN audience.

I’m glad to see that Erick Erickson of the grassroots site Red State agrees with me on the winner of the first debate, and the winners of the second debate.

For a good review of the second debate, here’s something from The Weekly Standard and a new episode of the The Weekly Standard podcast, as well.

My top 4 candidates are still Jindal, Walker, Cruz, Rubio.

News

Scott Walker: eliminate NLRB, enact national right-to-work, ban federal public sector unions

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Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker

I hope that by the end of this post, everyone will consider whether it makes more sense to elect someone who says they will do something conservative as President that they have already done in their state, as Governor.

The story is from the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

Republican presidential hopeful Scott Walker promised Monday to go far beyond what he did to rein in union power in Wisconsin if elected to lead the country.

The plan includes eliminating the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), eliminating federal employee unions and implementing a national right-to-work law. It will also do away with federal workers being allowed to do union work on taxpayer time.

[…]The plan would go far beyond the career defining reforms Walker pursued in 2011 during his first term as governor of Wisconsin. The changes to labor policy in the state, known as Act 10, mostly just outlawed mandatory union dues for state public employees.

[…]Critics have argued the NLRB unfairly benefits unions, often at the expense of employers and their workers. This includes changes to union elections, contracting and the franchise model. Walker also promised to outlawmandatory union dues for all public and private workers. A policy known as right-to-work.

[…]Walker also plans to end the policy which allows government workers to do union work on taxpayer time. The practice is known as “official time” on the federal level.

“In 2012, taxpayers subsidized 3,395,187 hours of ‘official time’ time spent working for the union or lobbying,” Walker noted. “That cost the taxpayers $156 million.”

“While the IRS was busy harassing conservative organizations they also had more than 200 federal employees whose only work was for the big government union bosses,” Walker continued. “How about the Department of Veterans Affairs? While more than 600,000 veterans were facing delays for medical care in the VA system, more than 250 federal employees.”

There’s no question in my mind that Walker has the strongest record of activism as a fiscal conservative in the GOP primary. He is only proposing to do at the federal level what he already has done at the state level. No other candidate has the record of past performance that Walker has. Been there, done that – wrote a book about it. It’s very important that we get the public sector unions out of politics, because they are always pushing for bigger and bigger government, which means higher taxes for you and your children. And of course the unions are pro-abortion and anti-natural-marriage. By the way, workers like right-to-work: a recent Gallup poll found that non-union workers are happier with their work than forced-unionized workers.

I expected Walker to do this if he were elected President, which is why he was my first choice for so long. (He is now #2, behind my #1 pick Bobby Jindal) It’s a shame that he had to tip his hand, because it will make it harder for him to win in the general election, now. I really think I might have to put him back in as my #1 choice because I think that getting rid of NCLB and public sector unions would be such an Earth-shattering conservative move. This truly would be on the level of some of the radically leftist policies that Obama pushed for. I trust Walker to do what he says, because of his record of achievement in Wisconsin along these same lines. This is not just talk.

People should have understood what they were getting in Scott from his past record, but I fear that many Republican voters (not evangelicals, of course) are not looking into the candidates’ backgrounds. They are being swayed by charismatic talk from leftist clowns like Donald Trump. They should be looking for proven leaders who have made good things happen at the state level – as governors, preferably.

By the way, Walker is one of one three candidates who has a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare. The other two are Jindal (of course) and Rubio.

Related videos

Anyway, for the rest of this post, I want to include a few short, 5-minute, videos on capitalism and unions. These are all from Prager University, and I hope they help you to understand why you need to support the free enterprise system, and oppose public sector unions.

George Mason University professor of economics Walter Williams on “Is Capitalism Moral?”:

Entrepreneurship guru George Gilder on “Why Capitalism Works”:

City College of New York professor of political science Daniel DiSalvo on how unions influence politics:

Stanford University professor of political science Terry Moe on how teacher unions oppose the interests of students:

Please look into these issues, and consider supporting either Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal or Ted Cruz for President in the general election. These guys understand economics, and will get good things done if elected President.

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News

Are there any candidates Christians can get excited about in 2016?

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Iowa Republican Primary Poll
Iowa Republican Primary Poll

Well, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference, four candidates shined – according to the left-wing Politico, no less.

Intro:

At the latest GOP cattle call, about a dozen presidential contenders rolled through a Washington, D.C. ballroom over a three-day period to tout their socially conservative bona fides at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “Road to Majority” conference. Most of the 2016 hopefuls managed to impress evangelical and other conservative Christian voters by championing religious freedom, highlighting support for traditional marriage and stressing the importance of family and family values.

Here’s their summary of the 4 winners:

Ted Cruz

Cruz flat-out owned this event, firing up the crowd like no other candidate did — attendees were still talking about him two days after he spoke. The Texas senator delivered a rousing call to action aimed at the evangelical community, saying that 50 million of them sat home in 2012 but could make the difference in 2016. “If people of faith show up, if we stand for our faith and our liberty and the Constitution, we will win and turn the country around,” he said. To a rapt crowd, Cruz did his best Reagan impression when he promised “Morning is coming. Morning is coming.” And he tore into what he framed as the Obama administration’s assault on religious liberty — a prominent theme at the conference. When Cruz finished, the crowd mobbed him.

Bobby Jindal

The Louisiana governor, who is expected to announce his presidential bid next week, is trailing badly in the polls but his appearance Friday was a chance to impress evangelicals — and he seized the moment. More than just about any other candidate, Jindal is a champion of religious liberty, and at the Faith and Freedom conference, he came out swinging. He blasted big business for making an “unnatural alliance” with liberals who opposed controversial religious freedom measures in Indiana and Arkansas. He tweaked Obama and Clinton for, in his view, “evolving” to support same-sex marriage only when the polls suggested it was safe — something Jindal pledged he would never do. He warned darkly that freedom, particularly religious freedom, is under assault, a stance that went over well with the crowd.

Scott Walker

The Wisconsin governor, the son of a preacher, met an enthusiastic crowd as he keynoted the closing session on Saturday night. The audience greeted him with a standing ovation after the president of Concerned Women for America introduced him by ticking through his record of opposition to abortion rights, and the speech itself was punctuated by attendees standing up to applaud. He reiterated his support for religious liberty, and his recitation of his confrontation with unions was well-received. But the biggest and most sustained applause of the night came as the governor offered a hawkish riff on foreign policy, tearing into the Obama administration for its approach to ISIS, Syria and Iran. Walker, who has been seeking to burnish his national security credentials ahead of an all-but-certain presidential run, appeared most energized during that portion of the speech — and the audience responded.

Carly Fiorina

The former Hewlett-Packard executive, who has shined at other GOP cattle calls, did it again Saturday. Attendees, particularly female attendees, were buzzing about her morning speech on the final day of the conference. Some noted that they had gone in knowing little about her, but had come out impressed with her resume and her energetic speech, praising her delivery as clear and direct. For Fiorina, who is known as her party’s most frequent and vigorous critic of Hillary Clinton, raising her standing in the polls is essential — her long-shot bid all but depends on qualifying for the primary debate in August, an event she nodded to in her remarks.

My first choices are Scott Walker, Bobby Jindal and Ted Cruz. I like Walker the best, though, because he has more accomplishments than Cruz (who is not able to build consensus to get legislation moved forward) and his state is doing better financially than Bobby Jindal’s Louisiana (Louisiana is struggling with a huge budget deficit).