TRENTON -- Gov. Chris Christie is among the people being vetted as a possible running mate for presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, according to a report by the New York Times that explores how the New Jersey governor has become a powerful figure in Trump's campaign. The report said Christie has also pleaded with GOP…
Two transgender women have been selected by primary voters in Utah and Colorado to run for the US Congress in November.
Democrats Misty Snow and Misty Plowright would make history if elected.
Snow, 30, a Utah grocery store clerk, is running for the Senate while Plowright, 33, a Colorado army veteran and former Microsoft employee, is running for the House of Representatives.
Snow is the first transgender candidate of a major party to run for the Senate, and if elected would also be the youngest senator of the chamber.
"While I'm not running on the basis of being a trans woman, my experiences as a trans woman have given me the empathy to understand the struggles of groups that feel that the American Dream is out of reach," she said in a statement. "I'm running to give a voice to the voiceless."
The two candidates, who won primaries on Tuesday, will be fighting fierce election battles as their Republican opponents, both incumbents, are ahead in polls.
Plowright is not the first transgender candidate to run for the House.
The late Karen Kerin, of Vermont, ran for the House as a Republican in 2000 but lost overwhelmingly to Bernie Sanders.
Sanders now represents the state in the US Senate and ran a campaign backed by strong grassroots support to challenge Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.
The same popular frustration that saw a majority of Britons vote to abandon the EU could send droves of disgruntled Americans into the arms of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders warned on Wednesday.
In an opinion piece appearing in the New York Times, Sanders wrote that legions of American voters, alienated by the forces of globalization, are ripe for the message of political retrenchment and economic protectionism espoused by Trump.
"Could this rejection of the current form of the global economy happen in the United States? You bet it could," wrote Sanders, runner-up to Hillary Clinton for the Democrats' presidential nomination, who will be formally crowned the party's nominee next month.
"The notion that Donald Trump could benefit from the same forces that gave the 'Leave' proponents a majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in the United States," Sanders wrote.
"Millions of American voters, like the 'Leave' supporters, are understandably angry and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle class," he continued.
"In this pivotal moment, the Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left behind. We must create national and global economies that work for all, not just a handful of billionaires."
The Republican Party's presumed White House nominee, Trump has won the support of millions by echoing many themes embraced by disaffected "Leave" supporters in Britain -- including sentiments viewed by some as hostile to immigration.
Sanders, a senator from the state of Vermont and self-described democratic socialist, said economic stagnation is the source of much of the public disaffection in the United States with the status quo.
"Let's be clear. The global economy is not working for the majority of people in our country and the world. This is an economic model developed by the economic elite to benefit the economic elite. We need real change," he said.
"But we do not need change based on the demagogy, bigotry and anti-immigrant sentiment that punctuated so much of the Leave campaign's rhetoric -- and is central to Donald J. Trump's message."
Donald Trump surrogate Kayleigh McEnany suggested on Thursday that the recent terrorist attacks in Orlando and San Bernardino could have been prevent if the Obama administration had been willing to use waterboarding and put "someone in a bit of discomfort to extract information."
On CNN's New Day, McEnany was asked to explain Trump's call to "bring back waterboarding" and "a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding."
"I think that's all consistent," McEnany replied. "He's talking about expanding the law the same way the Bush administration did to use this only when needed in very limited circumstances to get information from detainees."
CNN host Alisyn Camerota and guest Ali Velshi both pointed out that waterboarding had been proven to produce unreliable information.
"I mean this is the point is that it's actually not, what the FBI director has said, Robert Mueller, is that it actually has not been effective," Camerota recalled. "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times and gave erroneous information."
"I think the point is that what Donald Trump is talking about is punitive. He's talking about it as punishment," the CNN host added. "They behead us, we should waterboard them, but not talking about whether it's effective for actual intelligence."
McEnany disagreed: "But I'm not sure that it's punitive so much as saying that we need to be strong."
"The fact that in this country we're not willing to put someone in some form of discomfort, be it sleep deprivation, which many argue is what broke KSM," she said. "We are trying to thwart terrorist attacks. We don't want 49 to die in Orlando. We don't want 14 to die in San Bernardino."
"If it means putting someone in a bit of discomfort to extract information, I think most of the nation would say that's OK within the bounds of the law," McEnany concluded.
Watch the video below via Media Matters.
A Massachusetts attorney is asking federal prosecutors to investigate a donation made to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi by GOP candidate Donald Trump, the Sun Sentinel reports.
Whitfield Larrabee, a Boston-based trial lawyer, has filed bribery complaints with the U.S. Attorney's Offices in Florida and New York against Bondi and Trump, alleging they violated federal law. In 2013, Bondi, a Republican, personally solicited Trump and received a $25,000 contribution to her political committee.
Bondi's office at the time was reviewing complaints against Trump University, which has since come under heavy scrutiny for allegations of fraud. Trump U offered seminars on real estate investing, but attendees said the courses proved useless and they were billed thousands of dollars.
Bondi was considering joining a New York state-led lawsuit against Trump, but after receiving the donation, dropped plans to pursue the case, even though her office had received fraud complaints from Floridians who alleged they had been cheated out of large sums of money by Trump.
Larrabee says he believes Bondi dropped the case as quid pro quo in return for receiving the money.
"If it looks like a bribe and quacks like a bribe, I think it’s a bribe,” Larrabee told the Sentinel.
His complaint, provided to the Sentinel, states, "Evidence strongly indicates that Bondi’s decision not to initiate or participate in litigation against Trump University was given in exchange for Trump’s contribution based on the short time period between the receipt of the political contribution and the announcement of Bondi’s decision not to participate in the New York litigation."
Larrabee's complaint is not the only one like it. Then-Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott — who is now the governor — received a $35,000 campaign contribution from Trump three years after dropping a proposed 2010 lawsuit against Trump U. Former Texas Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owen has since said the case was dropped for political reasons.
Michael Hayden, a former CIA director who served under President George W. Bush, warned on Thursday that presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump's foreign policy would be "destructive," but he asserted that Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton could be stronger against terrorism than the current administration.
During an interview on CBS This Morning, Hayden said that lone wolf terrorist attacks like the recent massacre at an Orlando night club should not be considered a failure of the Obama administration.
"The great fear we had is we had the ability to take a tactical defeat over here on our part," he explained. "And by the way we responded, turn it into a strategic success for al Qaeda."
Hayden, who has been critical of Democrats in the past, pointed out that "some of the language that Mr. Trump used after the attack -- some things were bad, don't get me wrong, that were in effect a tactical success for our enemy. But in the language he has used to describe them, he has elevated them to this realm that they can claim strategic success."
Without "disowning" the enhanced interrogation techniques used under President Bush, Hayden insisted that the CIA would never use waterboarding again even if Trump became the commander-in-chief.
CBS host Charlie Rose noted that some national security experts had said "that they cannot support Donald Trump."
"I am one of those," Hayden volunteered. "What evidence I have of his thinking about foreign policy things suggests courses of action that I think would be destructive for our country, our allies and the world."
However, Hayden gave Hillary Clinton's foreign policy high marks.
"In that lane, she's fine," he opined. "In many ways -- in my view -- in that lane, I think she might be a little stronger than the current president."
Watch the video below from CBS News, broadcast June 30, 2016.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are the two least popular major-party presidential candidates in history, but there's a dark horse candidate that is hurtling toward Earth at alarming speed.
Public Policy Polling has released a new poll that asked just under 950 respondents whether they'd rather vote for Clinton, Trump or a giant meteor that would crash into Earth and wipe out all life on our planet.
Thirteen percent of the people picked the meteor.
"[The meteor has] far more support than the third party candidates actually on the ballot -- with Clinton at 43% and Trump at 38%," writes Public Policy Polling. "The Meteor is particularly appealing to independent voters, functionally in a three way tie at 27% to 35% for Clinton and 31% for Trump. Maybe that's who the Libertarians should have nominated."
Without the meteor in the mix, PPP found that Clinton garnered 48 percent of the vote, while Trump garnered 44 percent. Interestingly, if President Barack Obama were running for a third term this year, PPP finds that he'd crush Trump 52 percent to 43 percent.
Donald Trump lashed out at his former Republican presidential rivals who have not yet endorsed his campaign -- and MSNBC's "Morning Joe" added his latest vindictive attack to the list of disqualifying character traits.
"The stupidity is breathtaking," said host Joe Scarborough. "Here you have a guy that delivers a speech that actually can convert Democrats in Ohio and Pennsylvania and across the Rust Belt, and the next day -- because he's talking about people, he's talking about other people's jobs, he's talking about bringing jobs to America, he's not obsessed with the minutiae of politics. And then he goes off on GOP candidates -- they're not going to endorse him now. He keeps knocking them around like that, that's the last way to get people."
"Who cares? Who cares if Jeb Bush endorses him?" Scarborough continued. "Who cares if John Kasich endorses him? He's obsessed -- it's like when he was ahead in 49 states in polls but he was just losing in Iowa, he went to Iowa and he called people stupid. I wonder why he lost in Iowa. He said, 'What, are you stupid?' The guy, is he capable of being disciplined in moving on or not?"
Trump blasts former GOP rivals... @JoeNBC: Is Trump capable of being disciplined of moving on or not? https://t.co/MhFbc3eEBs
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 30, 2016
Co-host Mika Brzezinski said Trump's erratic behavior could cause voters to fear him.
"People do vote their fears, they do, but they can't fear you," she said. "They can't fear that you're unhinged. They can't fear that you're inconsistent. They can't fear that you say one thing and you mean another. They can't fear that you'll just blurt out a lie, a blatant lie."
Scarborough broke in and imagined how Trump might conduct diplomacy if he's unable to let any petty insult to his fragile ego go unquestioned.
"They can't fear that in the middle of a conference over, let's say in Geneva, where you're negotiating something that's extraordinarily important to the United States, that you read an article and then you go off on (German Chancellor Angela) Merkel or you go off on somebody else the next day at a press conference," Scarborough said. "Does he have any discipline at all? Can he do the same thing two days in a row? Right now, the answer seems to be a resounding no."
.@morningmika on Trump: People do vote their fears but they can't fear you. They can't fear that you're unhinged. https://t.co/fROmc92NII
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) June 30, 2016
The efforts of anti-Trump Republicans to stop the presumptive GOP nominee have so far fallen short, but they're nonetheless preparing to make a final stand.
The Hill has an interesting piece on the efforts of "Never Trump" Republican delegates to overthrow Donald Trump at this year's Republican National Convention, and they insist their chances of succeeding are better than anyone is giving them credit for.
"This is a laser-guided bomb aimed right at the foundation of the Trump campaign," Virginia GOP delegate Beau Correll tells The Hill.
The major challenge for these anti-Trump delegates won't be convincing their fellow delegates to undermine the wills of voters in their states, but in convincing the Rules Committee to unbind the delegates to let them vote their consciences. It's in this area where the anti-Trump Republicans appear badly outgunned.
Beau Correll, we should recall, was the GOP delegate who filed a lawsuit late last week in which he argued that he should be allowed to vote his conscience at this year’s Republican National Convention instead of being forced to vote for a candidate whom he has no desire to vote for.
If Correll's lawsuit is successful, it could effectively unbind the delegates without any changes from the Rules Committee, although its chances of success at this point are pretty remote.
"They’ve laid down the dried leaves to start the fire but they need lightning to strike," an anonymous "prominent conservative lawyer" told The Hill. "It is really tough to organize the kind of whip operation you need at something as sprawling as Republican National Convention. Really, really tough."
A British author who angered Christians when he compared their religion to a virus has found an even more virulent analogy to explain how the faith spread throughout Europe.
Science writer Matt Ridley explained that Christianity spread across Europe and established a "monopoly religion" in much the same way that Starbucks -- perhaps the only thing more contagious than infectious disease -- has conquered the global coffee market, reported the Daily Mail.
"Religions are a good example of things that have taken a very specific form but have a sort of inevitability," explained Ridley, a Conservative member of the House of Lords.
He examined his theory, which he explores in his most recent book, The Evolution of Everything: How Ideas Emerge, that history's most successful trends came from the "bottom up" during this week's Chalke Valley History Festival.
"We give far too much importance to individuals in history – that is my claim and that is a pretty big claim," said Ridley, who believes humans share a sort of "collective brain."
Ridley argued that any of the "many little cults" that existed in the Roman Empire might have become Europe's dominant belief system, but only Christianity thrived in that way.
"The notion that the Roman Empire was ripe for a monopoly religion to take it over at around the time of Christ is probably an inevitable one," he said. "There were a huge number of different religions in the empire, and the chances were that one of them would 'do a Starbucks,' and become ubiquitous, monopolistic and eventually intolerant and kick the other ones out."
He explained that a mystic from Cappadocia was far better known and more widely followed than Christ in the first century A.D., but Christianity was ultimately more successful.
"It’s a bit like Google," he said. "Maybe other companies were just as good at inventing search engines, but Google just happened to scoop the pool."
Watch Ridley discuss his book in a video posted online by Talks by Google:
The 2016 presidential election has been the strangest one in memory.
And it's even stranger when you consider that at one time Donald Trump wrote an op-ed for The Los Angeles Times where he denounced former Republican presidential candidate Pat Buchanan for the kind of racism Trump has deployed in his own campaign.
The op-ed, which was written in 1999, starts out by denouncing a book that Buchanan had published that claimed America's fight against Germany in World War II was "unnecessary."
"Buchanan winks at barbarism in his new book," Trump wrote. "There is no other way to describe his views. Buchanan argues that we should have ignored Hitler's rampage to Eastern Europe during World War II. Hitler meant us no harm, Buchanan says. The same man who argued forcefully -- and in my opinion correctly -- that we should not give an inch during the Cold War is now saying in effect that Hitler should have been appeased."
But where things get really, really weird is when Trump goes after Buchanan for scapegoating racial, religious and ethnic minorities during his two runs for the presidency.
"Buchanan has enjoyed a long psychic friendship with Hitler, whom he has called 'an individual of great courage, a soldier's soldier and a leader steeped in the history of Europe,'" Trump wrote. "He also warns his followers that the United States is controlled by Jews, especially regarding foreign policy. On slow days, he attacks gays, immigrants, welfare recipients, even Zulus. When cornered, he says he's misunderstood."
Someone who makes attacking immigrants and religious minorities a central part of his campaign, why does that sound familiar?
Oh right: It's exactly what Trump has been doing for the last year.
"Buchanan is rewriting history and spreading fear for one purpose: To gain political power," Trump wrote toward the end of his piece. "That makes him a very dangerous man."
It does indeed.
Today's bizarre moment in Donald Trump's history from Mother Jones is a short story from Trump's 1997 book The Art of the Comeback in which The Donald got outsmarted by a fifth grader.
In a chapter about his scheduling secrets, Trump talks about an award as "Principal for a Day" at an elementary school in the Bronx, New York's P.S. 70. Trump offered the students a drawing to see how many would win coupons for a free pair of Nike shoes from the store in Trump Tower.
While many students were excited about it, others had problems. The school's chess team was desperate to reach fundraising goals so they could go to a national tournament. Another student pointed out that picking up the sneakers meant taking a bus all the way across town to get to Trump Tower. But the best came from a student who thought the whole idea was dumb.
"Why did you offer us sneakers if you could give us scholarships?" asked Andres Rodriguez, a fifth-grader whose father had died and whose mother couldn't work because she had a bad leg, MoJo cites New York Times.
"I asked because school is more important than sneakers, but he didn't really answer," he told the New York Daily News.
Trump must have felt guilty, because he ultimately ended up handing out free sneaker coupons to disappointed kids and gave all of them their own Trump hats. But the worst was that he put a fake $1 million dollar bill, like Monopoly money, in the donation box at the bake sale for the chess team. Some assumed that was Trump's pledge to actually give $1 million. Except, Trump only gave $200, an unfortunate exchange rate from Trump money to actual money.
Trump got so much backlash for Trump's stingy Scrooge-like ways that money poured in from other people who felt sorry for the children that they got duped by a self-proclaimed billionaire.
"One woman called and offered $2,000," said David MacEnulty, the chess teacher at P.S. 70. "Another person pledged $5,000. Another just gave $500, and someone else, $125. I just got off the phone with a woman who is getting a group of her friends together to help us. When people know their money is going to do some good, they are very eager to give."
Trump referred to the event as a success because he had "a wonderful time" and "talked strongly about working hard and incentives" with the students. "The honorary position should really be called 'principal for a half day,' because I was finished by about 12:30," he wrote.
Classy.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee hasn't endorsed Donald Trump -- and he has a lot of reasons why.
The Utah senator appeared on NewxMaxTV, where host Steve Malzberg asked why he wasn't "trumpeting Trump."
“Hey look, Steve, I get it -- you want me to endorse Trump,” Lee said. “We can get into that if you want."
Lee then listed several reasons why he couldn't back Trump, who became the GOP's presumptive nominee after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) dropped out of the race in May.
"We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK," Lee said. "We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church -- a people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838 -- and statements like that make them nervous.”
Even so, the Republican senator said Trump could still win his endorsement.
"These statements are not something I could not get over, if I heard the right things out of him," Lee said. "But if you want to go into why I have concerns, I could go on if you'd like. I hope I can get over these concerns, I hope Mr. Trump can help me identify them. But don’t sit here and tell me, Steve, that I have no reason to be concerned about Donald Trump."
Malzberg insisted he wouldn't tell the senator to do anything, but he then said he would think that Lee should be more concerned about Hillary Clinton than Trump.
"She's under FBI investigation, she takes money from countries that kill gays, that treat women like garbage, you know about the email scandal -- the list goes on -- the Clinton Foundation, the conflict of interest, the corruption, the lifelong corruption, it goes on and on and on," Malzberg said. "The first thin on your list -- again, with all due respect -- he said that my best friend's father, you know, killed Kennedy or was involved in it. So I hope it's not personal."
Lee pointed out that Trump had actually leveled that accusation "without any scintilla evidence," and he said that concerned him.
"I hope I can get over this, because I can't vote for Hillary -- I know there's no possibility of that," Lee said. "What I am saying is that Donald Trump can still get a lot of votes from a lot of conservatives like me, but I would like some assurances on where he's going to stand his ground. I would like some assurances that he is going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution, that he's not going to be an autocrat, that he's not going to be an authoritarian -- that he's not going to be someone that's going to abuse a document to which I've sworn an oath to uphold and protect and defend. I'm sorry, sir, but that is not an unreasonable demand.
Watch the entire segment posted online by NewsMaxTV:
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