Wow... how anyone could support these hucksters? They are either all morons, or near criminal in their contempt for the truth. Check out some quick checks of last nights debate....
Lies, damned lies, and Republican Presidential Contenders
Ted Cruz
"Do you know how many illegal aliens George W. Bush deported? 10 million."
Off by millions. Read more
President Obama is the record-holder for formal deportations: just more than 2 million since he has been in office. Mr. Bush deported about 1.8 million.
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Ted Cruz
Mr. Cruz said the Obama administration toppled former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt.
Not Obama’s doing. Read more
In reality, Mr. Mubarak stepped down in 2011 as his own people rallied against his rule.
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Carly Fiorina
Mrs. Fiorina said Stanley A. McChrystal and David H. Petraeus were "retired early because they told President Obama things that he didn’t want to hear."
Not the reason why. Read more
Mrs. Fiorina said she wanted to bring back several generals whom she asserted had been forced out of their jobs for speaking their minds, including Mr. McChrystal and Mr. Petraeus.
But she left out the highly memorable episodes that prompted the departures of those two men.
Mr. Obama fired Mr. McChrystal in 2010 after the publication of an article in Rolling Stone in which the general and his aides spoke critically of senior administration officials. At the time, Mr. McChrystal was the top commander in Afghanistan.
Mr. Petraeus stepped down in 2012 from his position as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The reason for his departure was also a high-profile episode: He resigned after an investigation by the F.B.I. found evidence that he had been involved in an extramarital affair.
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Carly Fiorina
Mrs. Fiorina said Silicon Valley companies “do not need to be forced, they need to be asked” to help law enforcement get access to encrypted data.
They were asked, and resisted. Read more
They have been asked — and they have resisted. When Apple instituted end-to-end encryption in the operating system for the new iPhone, its chief executive, Tim Cook, said he would not create a back door or a front door for law enforcement or the N.S.A. to get access to such data. To do so would create a hole in the system that the Russians, the Chinese and others would exploit. Google and Microsoft have largely agreed. The world would be less safe, they argue, by making all of us more vulnerable to state-sponsored and private hackers.
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Rand Paul
Rand Paul on Marco Rubio: “He is the one for an open border that is leaving us defenseless.”
Way off. Read more
The comprehensive immigration reform bill that Senator Marco Rubio helped write in 2013 included $40 billion to strengthen border security, including adding 20,000 Border Patrol agents. Mr. Rubio has since said that he does not support fixing immigration in one bill, but he has called for even more border security.
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Donald J. Trump
Mr. Trump said he “certainly would never have made that horrible, disgusting, absolutely incompetent deal with Iran, where they get $150 billion. They're a terrorist nation.”
The amount is in question. Read more
The world powers are not giving Iran money, but by easing or terminating sanctions, they would allow Iran to have access to many billions of dollars of its own money that has been frozen in overseas accounts. Much of the money came from Iranian sales of oil and other goods and has been frozen in China, India, South Korea and other countries for years.
Whether it would be as high as $150 billion is unknown. As Rick Gladstone reported in The New York Times, the Treasury Department has estimated that Iran has between $100 billion and $125 billion in foreign exchange assets worldwide, but that its usable liquid assets after sanctions relief would be much lower, more like $50 billion. Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew told Congress that after Iran’s financial obligations, it would have roughly $56 billion left.
The governor of Iran’s central bank said that of roughly $77 billion held abroad, only $29 billion would be usable because the rest had already been committed to petrochemical investments or as collateral for Chinese-financed development projects. But critics said those estimates are too low and are an attempt to shape the political debate.
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Donald J. Trump
“One of the first things I do in terms of executive order if I win will be to sign a strong, strong statement” that “anybody killing a police officer — death penalty.”
Not how it works. Read more
Mr. Trump has long supported the death penalty. He made his call for the death penalty for people who kill police officers at an appearance in New Hampshire on Thursday, where he received the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association.
“It’s going to happen, O.K.?” Mr. Trump promised. “We can’t let this go.”
But that is not how America’s legal system works.
For a person prosecuted in state court for killing a police officer, that state’s laws would apply, not the wishes of the president.
“He would have no authority over what happens in prosecutions under state law,” said Austin D. Sarat, a professor of law and political science at Amherst College who has studied the death penalty.
Moreover, nearly 20 states do not have the death penalty.
The death penalty does exist for some federal crimes, including killing a federal law enforcement official. But it is seldom used; only three people have been executed by the federal government in the last half-century.
Those issues aside, if Mr. Trump wants the death penalty to be mandatory for people who kill police officers, that is problematic, too, according to experts. The Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that mandatory death sentences were unconstitutional.
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Donald J. Trump
“I am self-funding my own campaign. I have no people giving me money.”
Hasn’t been true for months. Read more
Mr. Trump continues to assert that he is paying for his campaign. In an interview on CNN on Wednesday, he suggested that his financial independence allows him to speak his mind, unlike typical politicians who rely on campaign donors.
But Mr. Trump has become one of those politicians.
Early in his presidential bid, Mr. Trump did supply most of his campaign’s money, providing it with about $1.8 million in loans.
But in the quarter that ended Sept. 30, Mr. Trump raised about $3.7 million in individual contributions, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission. His own contributions in that period totaled about $101,000.
In a news release, his campaign said it had received nearly 74,000 “unsolicited donations” during the quarter with an average contribution of about $50.
At a rally in Florida in October, Mr. Trump recalled how a woman sent him $7.50 along with a four-page letter.
“How do you send the seven dollars and fifty cents back?” Mr. Trump said. “You can’t. You can’t. There’s no letter you can write. It’s true. There’s no letter that you can write to that woman to say, ‘We don’t want your money.’ ”
Mr. Trump has noted that unlike his rivals, he has no wealthy-donor "super PACs" supporting him, which he says frees him from the influence of special interests. But as for his own campaign operation, as of Sept. 30, donations from people other than Mr. Trump had accounted for about two-thirds of the total funding for his presidential bid.
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Donald J. Trump
A poll asserting that 25 percent of Muslim Americans condone acts of violence against other Americans was from a “very highly respected group of people.”
More like “widely shunned.” Read more |
