Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Michael Moore: ‘God Bless You Megyn Kelly’ — ‘War on Women’ Question to Trump Was ‘Great’

by IAN HANCHETT26 Jan 2016686

Filmmaker Michael Moore told Fox News Channel anchor Megyn Kelly “You asked a great question [to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump], by the way. The war on women. God bless you Megyn Kelly” on Tuesday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Kelly File.”

Moore began by addressing Trump skipping on the FNC debate, saying, “I feel bad for you.” And “What’s he afraid of? I’m sitting here. I don’t feel any fear. … Donald, come now, come sit beside me, I’ll hold your hand. She’s fine.”

He also told Kelly that she had frightened Trump and “made him run, shut him down.” Something no candidate had done.

Moore ended the interview with, “And before I leave, I just want to say again, Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch, it’s pp to get elected president in this country, you have to come on this network. You have to play ball with this network. Donald Trump today said I’m not playing ball with this network. That’s a historic moment, and it’s going to be interesting to see where the real power is. Trump thinks he doesn’t need Fox News. I think Fox News probably has something else to say about that. And it’ll be interesting to see where do the powers that be go with this?”

He then said to Kelly, “You asked a great question, by the way. The war on women. God bless you Megyn Kelly.”

Moore said of Obama, “I wrote to him and I said you’ve got to get off the dime here and do some of the things we elected you to do, because it’s not going to be enough in the history books to say the big claim to fame is that you were the first African-American president. That’s an important thing, but we need you to do some other things for us, and we need you to do it before your term ends.”

He elaborated on Obama, stating, “I would have wished we had a single-payer healthcare system, not Obamacare, something that would be for everybody. … he had two years actually, where he had the House and the Senate, and he decided to play nice and get along and he thought the Republicans were going to get along with him and they had no intention of doing that.”

Moore added, “Guantanamo Bay should be closed by now.” He later said of Obama, “I’m very happy that we’ve had him for these eight years, believe me, after what we had before that.”

When asked if there were any Republican candidates he would get behind, Moore responded, “I would get behind all of them and take them — and push them somewhere.” He added, “[M]y grandfather was the head of the Republican Party in the town that I grew up in. And — yes, but back then, a conservative meant that you conserved your money, you had family values, you had — you conserved the earth, the air, the water, God’s gifts to us. That’s what Republicans believed back then, and those days seem to be gone. I know it’s hard for Republicans who have those feelings, and they have nowhere really to go right now.”

Moore was also asked about criticisms that he dislikes America. He answered, “I don’t get that, because one of the great things about being an American in great this country is the ability to criticize what’s going on and try to make it better.” And “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. This is the best country to live in. What I want us to do is to aspire to be better. And what we’ve done is, we’ve helped these European countries since World War II. They have gone ahead and done some great things, in terms of helping their people, paid maternity leave, school lunches are not crap on a Styrofoam tray.”

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CNN’s Ryan Lizza: Trump ‘At War’ With Fox News, ‘Conservative Intelligentsia from National Review’ and ‘He Is Winning’


Donald Trump speaks before a crowd of supporters.(AP Photo / Ross D. Franklin

by BREITBART TV26 Jan 20161812

CNN political commentator and Washington correspondent for The New Yorker, Ryan Lizza said, “Trump has been at war with” Fox News “all season and he is winning. He is at war with the conservative intelligentsia from National Review, to every conservative columnist in the opinion pages, and he’s winning” on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” on Tuesday.

Lizza said, “On the one hand, we’re going to be talking about Donald Trump from now until the debate. We’ll probably be watching Donald Trump not on Fox, on other networks that don’t obviously take the debates live when it’s on another network. He obviously has some counter-programming plans. So, he will dominate the news cycle on the eve of the caucuses, and he won’t be at the debate, so he won’t be under fire from the other candidates. On the other hand, there’s no doubt that the Fox debate is still going to get big ratings, right? It’s the number one news source for Republican voters, and he’s going to give a platform to a Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) andSen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), Ted Cruz is his primary rival there in Iowa, who are going to be allowed to say what they want about Donald Trump without Trump responding. I would imagine that the Fox moderators will feel under no obligation to defend Donald Trump in any way, or inject his opinions. So, it’s obviously a risk. I will also say, just to step back a second, this guy is basically at war with every power center in the Republican Party. There was a rule in politics that you don’t go to war with Fox News and Roger Ailes, because that network is too powerful and too influential in Republican politics, and Trump has been at war with them all season and he is winning. He is at war with the conservative intelligentsia from National Review, to every conservative columnist in the opinion pages, and he’s winning. This is a essentially a hostile takeover by Trump and his fans of the Republican Party that we’re watching in real time.”

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Google and Fox TV Invite Anti-Trump, Hitler-Citing, Muslim Advocate to Join Next GOP TV-Debate

Youtube

by NEIL MUNRO26 Jan 20163,293

Fox News and Google have invited three YouTube personalities to ask questions at the Jan. 28 GOP debate — including a Muslim advocate who describes Donald Trump as a bigot and who visually portrayed him as being in agreement with national socialist Adolf Hitler.

“We have a presidential candidate whose loudest message reeks of hatred and Islamophobia… turning on the news now is scary, and oftentimes, humiliating,” the Muslim woman, Nabela Noor, says in a December YouTube video.

She admits to becoming a Muslim political activist amid the growing criticism of Islam’s doctrines. “The current social environment for Muslims today is not safe or just… as a Muslim American, I felt like I needed to use my voice,” she claimed. 

Noor also urged her YouTube viewers to rally against critics of Islam. “I’m so thankful for those who speak up and out against anti-Islamic speech and ideologies. Our community needs more allies like you, but we have a long way to go,” she said.

The two companies announced Tuesday afternoon that the anti-Trump Muslim advocate would be allowed to play a role in the debate.

Google is teaming up with the Fox News Channel for the final  Republican debate in Iowa on Thursday, January 28, 2016, and integrating three new components into the debate to help people get informed before they head to the polls, including a way to hear directly from candidates on Google; real-time Google Trends data; and questions from three of YouTube’s most prominent voices—Nabela NoorMark Watson, and Dulce Candy — who will join the moderators in the debate to ask the candidates a question on an issue that matters to them and their communities.  


The Republican National Committee also approved the choice of Noor, an LA.-based press aide for YouTube, Jackie Cavanagh, at MPRM Communications, told Breitbart. “I believe” she was chosen by YouTube, with help from the RNC and Fox, she said.

“YouTube creators were selected in collaboration with Fox based on things such as audience size and their ability to bring a new, fresh perspective to the most important issues of our time. Fox informed the party/candidates of the format,” said a p.r. person. 

Allison Moore, a press secretary for the RNC, told Breitbart that “We had nothing to do with that.” 

Irena Briganti, a spokeswoman for Fox, also did not respond.

In December, Trump announced he would restrict the immigration of Muslims until the jihad problem can be addressed. “It is obvious to anybody the hatred is beyond comprehension. Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine. Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” said Trump.

The statement came 14 years after Islamic jihadis killed 3,000 Americans and destroyed the Twin Towers in New York, and after many other jihadis launched or tried to launch a series of attacks across the United States.

In her videos, Dulce Candy, the invited Latino questioner, said she was brought from central Mexico to the United States while a young girl. She later joined the U.S. military and served in Iraq. The press announcement described Candy:

With over 2 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, Dulce is a top YouTube beauty, fashion and lifestyle influencer. The only thing more impressive than her fanbase is her story: she immigrated to the United States from Mexico at age 6 and served in the armed forces in Iraq. Today, she’s a proud U.S. citizen, mother, and entrepreneur who serves as a role model for latinas, women, and more.


Noor is described in the company anouncement as well: 

Born in New York, Nabela is a 24 year old Muslim American whose parents immigrated from Bangladesh. As an up-and-coming beauty creator with over 140,000 subscribers, Nabela hasn’t shied away from social issues. In arecent video, she spoke about being called a “terrorist” in elementary school after 9/11 and emphasized the importance of tolerance above all.


The perspective of the Muslim woman, Noor, has been shaped by her Bangladeshi immigrant parents, who were paired off by their parents in an arranged marriage as teenagers, aged 17 and 14.

These Bangladeshi Muslim parents migrated to the United States — while hiding am anchor-baby pregnancy — and later kept Noor in the house for many years to prevent her from integrating with American society. “Growing up, we weren’t allowed out much, our parents wanted to preserve our culture at all costs,” she said. They even refused tolet her date a man, even after she had gone to college, Noor said in a biographical video. The parents also arranged a marriage for Noor’s older sister. Her mother still wears a head-covering to mark her as a loyal Muslim. 

Aspects of Islamic culture remain part of Noor’s personality, under the outward appearance of an American fashionista.

For example, Noor argues that Muslims are individually and collectively insulted when many Americans’ offer sincere and well-argued criticism of Islam’s violent doctrines — for example, jihad, bans against free speech, the death penalty for quitting Islam, sexual subordination of women, opposition to democracy and the separation of mosque and state, etc., etc. That bigoted claim of injury from free speech echoes the demand from orthodox Islam that critics of Islam be silenced – by force if needed – and that the status or honor of each Muslim is damagedif they fail to fight against any criticism of Islam by non-Muslims.

So Noor claimed:

To be hateful and Islamophobic has become so common that it is proudly displayed all around us, online, on the news, and in politics. it is dehumanizing and it hurts. It is hard not to see a bumper sticker of a bigoted presidential candidate and not feel personally attacked when his entire campaign rests on the backs of Muslim-Americans. Where there should be messages of hope and tolerance, there are messages being spread of fear and hate, thus breeding violence.


In contrast, Western Christians and non-Christians try to treat criticism of ideas, such as Christianity’s claim that unborn humans deserve the right to life, or the merits of any particular presidential candidate, as a problem to be solved by facts, logic, free-speech, and compromise. That’s fundamentally different from Noor’s Islamic-style, only-one-winner fight over honor, pride, and supremacy.

That only-one-winner, zero-sum attitude often pushes Muslims to escalate debates into shouting matches and threats. Noor, for example, showed an image linking Trump and Hitler, which suggests that Trump’s criticism of Islam’s jihad ideology is so morally reprehensible that it is equivalent to actually murdering six million Jews, plus at least 10 million Slavic Russians, plus millions of other victims of Hitler’s socialism-for-Aryans Nazi ideology.

In fact, much to the embarrassment of Muslim advocates in the United States, that aggressive aspect of Islam was admired by Jew-hating, left-wing Hitler, who naturally also hated Christianity’s peacefulness, reason and emphasis on individuals’ conscience.

Noor also described criticism of Islam as “Islamophobia,” as if only the existence of a nationwide mental-disease could explain why Americans criticize jihad or child-marriages or the murder of captured Christians or the murders of homosexualsor the murder of a seventh-century poet.

That term, “Islamophobia,” was developed by Islamic advocates to help their allies stigmatize critics of Islam. Generally, Western advocates do not describe their critics as mentally diseased, but as illogical, selfish, or misinformed.

In her video, Noor also tried to argue that Trump’s implied criticism of the violence associated with Islam — likely, including the 9/11 atrocity, the San Bernardino murders, and many other recent jihad attacks — is somehow causing more attacks by Americans against Muslims in America. She did not supply evidence, but did show anewspaper clipping that was actually about a Muslim in Detroit who stabbed two non-Muslims after asking them if they were Muslims. 

“Nick Loussia, Deputy Chief of Police for the Southfield Police Department, said [the stabber] ‘is Muslim, and asked the victims what religion they were’ before allegedly attacking them,” said a report atMLive.com

But Noor portrayed the Muslim-against-not-Muslim jihad attack as actually caused by Americans’ fear of Muslim attacks

“The fear-mongering tactics are a direct cause of hate-violence against Muslims and that makes being a Muslim in America today very, very scary,” she claimed. Noor did not mention any of the manymany,many attacks by Muslims against non-Muslims in America.

She did, however, try to argue that the many Islam-inspired attacks are not Islamic. ‘There are people out there that manipulate our texts to serve their own sick twisted agenda,” she said, without trying to explain how ISIS violates Islamic texts, or trying to disavow the many commandments for jihadin the Koran. 

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The Anti-Trump Network: Fox News Money Flows into Open Borders Group

Andy Kropa/Getty Images

by JULIA HAHN26 Jan 2016Washington D.C.1,827

The announcement from Donald Trump’s campaign that the Republican frontrunner will “definitely not” partake in Thursday night’s Fox News debate has sent shock waves throughout the nation’s political scene.

At a press event Tuesday evening, Trump seemed to cite disparate treatment from the network as his reasoning for not participating. “What’s wrong over there, something’s wrong,” Trump said of the “games” Roger Ailes and the network are “playing.”

In asking the question of “what’s wrong over there?” Trump has shined a spotlight on one of Washington’s best kept secrets: namely, Fox’s role via its founder Rupert Murdoch in pushing an open borders agenda. The Trump campaign is a direct threat to Murdoch’s efforts to open America’s borders. Well-concealed from virtually all reporting on Fox’s treatment of Trump is the fact that Murdoch is the co-chair of what is arguably one of the most powerful immigration lobbying firms in country, the Partnership for a New American Economy (PNAE).

In addition to blanketing the country, media, and politicians with literature, advertisements, and a barrage of lobbyists pushing for open border immigration policies, the Partnership for A New American Economy (PNAE) was a prime lobbyist for one of the biggest open borders pushes in American history: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL)’s 2013 Gang of Eight immigration bill.

While Donald Trump has pledged to deport those illegally residing in the country and temporarily pause Muslim migration, Rubio’s immigration bill would have granted immediate amnesty and eventual citizenship to millions of illegal aliens, it would have doubled the annual admission of foreign workers, and it would have dispensed 33 million green cards to foreign nationals in the span of a single decade despite current record immigration levels.

While Megyn Kelly made headlines with her heated questioning of Donald Trump, not one of the Fox News anchors asked Rubio in the first Fox News debate about his signature piece of legislation, which Murdoch’s immigration lobbying firm had endorsed. Instead, they lobbed Rubio a series of softballs, such as asking Rubio if he could put God and veterans in the same sentence.

Interestingly, Bill Sammon — FOX News’s vice president of News and Washington managing editor —  is the father of Brooke Sammon, who is Rubio’s press secretary.

As Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza back in 2013, Fox News was essential to the Rubio-Schumer effort to expand immigration levels beyond all known historical precedent. As Lizza wrote at the time:

McCain told me, “Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too.” Murdoch is the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corp., which owns Fox, and Ailes is Fox News’s president. McCain said that he, [Lindsey] Graham, [Marco] Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto… “God bless Fox,” Graham said. “Last time [i.e. during the 2007 immigration push], it was ‘amnesty’ every fifteen seconds.” He said that the change was important for his reelection, because “eighty per cent of people in my primary get their news from Fox.” He added that the network has “allowed critics to come forward, but it’s been so much better.”


Murdoch’s support of open borders immigration policies has been identified as a potential conflict of interest for years. As ABC reported in 2013:

Murdoch, Australian born and a naturalized U.S. citizen, has become an outspoken advocate for immigration reform and mass legalization of the country’s undocumented immigrants, partnering with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in this cause. Whether Murdoch’s personal views will percolate through his network, or at least temper criticism on the airwaves of those who don’t share it, remains to be seen.


In 2013, during the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight push, Mickey Kaus similarly pointed out:

In 2007, John McCain’s “comprehensive” immigrant-legalization bill failed after opponents flooded the Senate with calls, shutting down the switchboard… It won’t be that easy this time… The GOP donor class is asserting itself… One of the more influential members of this “donorist” class is Rupert Murdoch, which means that FOX News has for all intents and purposes switched sides, giving immigration “comprehensivists” a monopoly in the MSM–five networks to none.


Indeed, Murdoch has himself expressed his support for large-scale immigration. In a 2014 op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal’s open borders opinion pages, titled, “Immigration Reform Can’t Wait,” Murdoch wrote:

When I learned that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor had lost his Republican primary, my heart sank. Not simply because I think he is an intelligent and talented member of Congress, or because I worry about the future of the Republican Party. Like others who want comprehensive immigration reform, I worried that Mr. Cantor’s loss would be misconstrued and make Congress reluctant to tackle this urgent need. That would be the wrong lesson and an undesirable national consequence of this single, local election result.


In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Murdoch echoed Rubio’s position on granting citizenship to illegal immigrants. Murdoch wrote, “We need to give those individuals who are already here… a path to citizenship.” Murdoch even decried Americans who opposed amnesty as, “nativists who scream about amnesty” — a statement which is perhaps even more significant given the fact that Murdoch is himself a beneficiary of the nation’s generous immigration policy.

Murdoch praised President Obama for showing “wise restraint” on immigration, even though, at the time of Murdoch’s writing, Obama had already implemented his first unconstitutional executive amnesty, giving away American jobs to illegal aliens — including the jobs of black Americans whose have suffered some of the greatest harms from mass immigration.

When asked about the president’s unconstitutional 2012 executive amnesty, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA], Marco Rubio has said that, if he is elected president, he “wouldn’t undo it immediately.” This was another statement of Rubio’s which the Fox News anchors utterly failed to probe in their first debate to which they came loaded with questions for Trump, who — unlike Rubio — had not pushed an immigration plan backed by the network’s founder.

Murdoch also called for an unlimited number of foreign workers to fill coveted tech jobs through the H-1B visa program, which experts have described as an “indentured servitude” program:

We need to do away with the cap on H-1B visas, which is arbitrary and results in U.S. companies struggling to find the high-skill workers they need to continue growing. We already know that most of the applications for these visas are for computer programmers and engineers, where there is a shortage of qualified American candidates.


Contrary to Mr. Murdoch’s assertions, there are more than 11 million Americans with degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) who lack employment in these fields, and U.S. schools are graduating two times more students with STEM degrees than are annually finding employment in these fields.

Here again is another undisclosed conflict of interest from Fox News. Sen. Rubio introduced legislation last year — the Immigration Innovation Act — which would have tripled H-1B visa issuances. This legislation was endorsed by Murdoch via the Partnership for a New American Economy, on whose board also sits Disney CEO Bob Iger.

Though, once again, Rubio was not questioned about the legislation by Megyn Kelly and her fellow Fox News hosts, scores of American workers in Florida Disney were terminated and forced to undergo the humiliation of training their lower-paid foreign replacements, now the subject of a lawsuit against Disney.

Mickey Kaus has long documented Fox News’s coverage of the immigration issue. As Kaus explained last year, Fox News —perhaps recognizing how at-odds its views of open borders are with its viewership (one Fox News poll reveals that Americans by a 2-to-1 margin want to see visa issuances reduced) — implemented an “immigration tamp-down,” blocking out coverage of key immigration fights in Washington D.C.

Kaus analyzed “a list of the lead story each day on Megyn Kelly’s ‘Kelly File’ show from January 14 (the day the House sent the Senate a DHS bill with a ‘rider’ blocking Obama’s amnesty) until March 3, the day the House finally caved and passed a ‘clean’ DHS bill,” and he ultimately found that immigration was not the lead story once. [See list here].

Instead, Kaus writes, “immigration was discussed as the underlying issue in the funding fight only 6 times over the whole 34 show period — and only 3 times in the crucial 20 show period that followed the Senate Dems’ initial filibuster of the Republican DHS proposal.”

Conservative columnist and best-sellingauthor Ann Coulter has criticized the media’s fixation on ISIS to the exclusion of immigration, considering that the only way that ISIS terrorists will be able to personally carry out attacks against American citizens on American soil is if our immigration system allows them into the country.

The way media bias on immigration often manifests itself is not simply in what media outlets and anchors do cover (i.e. focusing on the needs of illegal immigrants rather than Americans), but what the don’t cover.

As any casual viewer of Fox News would observe, one sees scant to any coverage at all on the record-setting, foreign-born population inside the United States; nor coverage of census findings that immigration is about to surpass all historical records; nor stories on the total number of immigrants allowed into the country each year and the strain this number puts on education, the economy, the welfare states and the profound changes to U.S. culture. By not covering these issues in any real depth, it helps clear the way for the enactment of the Murdoch-backed immigration agenda — bringing in the New American Century hoped for by Rupert Murdoch, Marco Rubio, and Barack Obama.

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Updated: Donald Trump ‘Definitely Not’ Doing Fox News Debate

by ALEX SWOYER26 Jan 2016Washington, DC31,104

GOP frontrunner Donald Trump will ‘definitely not’ be participating in Fox News’s GOP debate on Thursday, according to the Trump campaign.

“He’s definitely not participating in the Fox News debate,” Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told The Washington Post. “His word is his bond.”

During a press conference on Tuesday evening, Trump told reporters he would hold an event to raise money for veterans instead of attending the debate.

Trump had called for Fox News’s Megyn Kelly to be removed as a debate moderator because he said she was not fair to him in the previous debate.

Also, Trump appeared to be upset by a “wise guy” press statement made by Fox News on Tuesday.

Before the Trump campaign said they would not participate in the Iowa confab, Fox News released the following statement toMediaite:

We learned from a secret back channel that the Ayatollah and Putin both intend to treat Donald Trump unfairly when they meet with him if he becomes president — a nefarious source tells us that Trump has his own secret plan to replace the Cabinet with his Twitter followers to see if he should even go to those meetings.


Fox also backed Kelly in the dispute. “Megyn Kelly is an excellent journalist and the entire network stands behind her — she will absolutely be on the debate stage on Thursday night,” Roger Ailes added about the upcoming debate.

After Trump announced that he will not participate in the Fox News debate, his campaign released the following statement:

 As someone who wrote one of the best-selling business books of all time, The Art of the Deal, who has built an incredible company, including some of the most valuable and iconic assets in the world, and as someone who has a personal net worth of many billions of dollars, Mr. Trump knows a bad deal when he sees one. FOX News is making tens of millions of dollars on debates, and setting ratings records (the highest in history), where as in previous years they were low-rated afterthoughts.

 Unlike the very stupid, highly incompetent people running our country into the ground, Mr. Trump knows when to walk away. Roger Ailes and FOX News think they can toy with him, but Mr. Trump doesn’t play games. There have already been six debates, and according to all online debate polls including Drudge, Slate, Time Magazine, and many others, Mr. Trump has won all of them, in particular the last one. Whereas he has always been a job creator and not a debater, he nevertheless truly enjoys the debating process – and it has been very good for him, both in polls and popularity.

 He will not be participating in the FOX News debate and will instead host an event in Iowa to raise money for the Veterans and Wounded Warriors, who have been treated so horribly by our all talk, no action politicians. Like running for office as an extremely successful person, this takes guts and it is the kind [of] mentality our country needs in order to Make America Great Again.


Update: New York Magazine reported at 9.30 pm. that Trump was rejecting telephone calls from Fox News’ chief Roger Ailes. Instead, Trump is requiring that any negotiations must take place between him and Ailes’ boss, Rupert Murdoch, the owner of News Corp, which owns Fox. 

Update: Fox News released a statement in response to Trump’s decision, in which the network trashed Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, accused Trump of “terrorizations” of Kelly, and said that Trump is “walking away” from Iowans.

“As many of our viewers know, FOX News is hosting a sanctioned debate in Des Moines, Iowa on Thursday night, three days before the first votes of the 2016 election are cast in the Iowa Caucus,” Fox News said in the statement. “Donald Trump is refusing to debate seven of his fellow presidential candidates on stage that night, which is near unprecedented. We’re not sure how Iowans are going to feel about him walking away from them at the last minute, but it should be clear to the American public by now that this is rooted in one thing – Megyn Kelly, whom he has viciously attacked since August and has now spent four days demanding be removed from the debate stage. Capitulating to politicians’ ultimatums about a debate moderator violates all journalistic standards, as do threats, including the one leveled by Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski toward Megyn Kelly. In a call on Saturday with a Fox News executive, Lewandowski stated that Megyn had a ‘rough couple of days after that last debate’ and he ‘would hate to have her go through that again.’ Lewandowski was warned not to level any more threats, but he continued to do so. We can’t give in to terrorizations toward any of our employees. Trump is still welcome at Thursday night’s debate and will be treated fairly, just as he has been during his 132 appearances on FOX News & FOX Business, but he can’t dictate the moderators or the questions.”

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Opec pleads for Russian alliance to smash oil speculators

www.telegraph.co.uk

The Opec oil cartel has issued its strongest plea to date for a pact with Russia and rival producers to cut crude output and halt the collapse in prices, warning that the deepening investment slump is storing up serious trouble for the future.

Abdullah al-Badri, Opec’s secretary-general, said the cartel is ready to embrace rivals and thrash out a compromise following the 72pc crash in prices since mid-2014.

"Tough times requires tough choices. It is crucial that all major producers sit down and come up with a solution," he told a Chatham House conference in London.

Mr al-Badri said the world needs an investment blitz of $10 trillion to replace depleting oil fields and to meet extra demand of 17m barrels per day (b/d) by 2040, yet projects are being shelved at an alarming rate. A study by IHS found that investment for the years from 2015 to 2020 has been slashed by $1.8 trillion, compared to what was planned in 2014.

Abdalla El-Badri, OPEC secretary-general, speaks at Chatham House in London

Mr al-Badri warned that the current glut is setting the stage for a future supply shock, with prices lurching from one extreme to another in a deranged market that is in the interests of nobody but speculators. "It is vital that the market addresses the stock overhang,” he said.

Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Russia’s oil group Lukoil, said Opec policy had set off a stampede, comparing it to a “herd of animals rushing to escape a fire”. He called on the Kremlin to craft a political deal with the cartel to overcome the glut. “It is better to sell a barrel of oil at $50 than two barrels at $30,” he told Tass.

This is a significant shift in thinking. It has long been argued that Russian companies cannot join forces with Opec since the Siberian weather makes it hard to switch output on and off, and because these listed firms are supposedly answerable to shareholders, not the Kremlin.

Mr Fedun said Opec will be forced to cut output anyway. “This could happen in May or in the summer. After that we will see a rapid recovery,” he said.

• Oil price crash: rout reaches $27 as Opec warns US shale will be forced to relent

He accused the cartel of incompetence. “When Opec launched the price war, they expected US companies to go under very quickly. They discovered that 50pc of the US production was hedged,” he said.

Mr Fedun said these contracts acted as a subsidy worth $150m a day for the industry though the course of 2015.

“With this support shale producers were able to avoid collapse,” he said.

The hedges are now expiring fast, and will cover just 11pc of output this year. Iraq’s premier, Haider al-Abadi, was overheard in Davos asking US oil experts exactly when the contracts would run out, a sign of how large this issue now looms in the mind of Opec leaders.

Mr Fedun said 500 US shale companies face a “meat-grinder” over coming months, leaving two or three dozen “professionals”.

Claudio Descalzi, head of Italy’s oil group Eni, said Opec has stopped playing the role of “regulator” for crude, leaving markets in the grip of financial forces trading “paper barrels” that outnumber actual barrels of oil by a ratio of 80:1.

The paradox of the current slump is that global spare capacity is at wafer-thin levels of 2pc as Saudi Arabia pumps at will, leaving the market acutely vulnerable to any future supply-shock. “In the 1980s it was around 30pc; 10 years ago it was 8pc,” said Mr Descalzi.

Barclays said the capitulation over recent weeks is much like the mood in early 1999, the last time leading analysts said the world was “drowning in oil”. It proved to be exact bottom of the cycle. Prices jumped 50pc over the next twenty days, the start of a 12-year bull market.

Mr Norrish said excess output peaked in the last quarter of 2015 at 2.1m b/d. The over-supply will narrow to 1.2m b/d in the first quarter as of this year as a string of Opec and non-Opec reach “pain points”, despite the return of Iranian crude after the lifting of sanctions.

By the end of this year there may be a “small deficit”. By then the world will need all of Opec’s 32m b/d supply to meet growing demand, although it will take a long time to whittle down record stocks.

Mr Norrish said the oil market faces powerful headwinds. US shale has emerged as a swing producer and will crank up output “quite quickly” once prices rebound.

Global climate accords have changed the rules of the game and electric vehicles are breaking onto the scene.

Unhedged short positions are huge so there is certainly the potential for a steep move up in prices at some point Barclays

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Debt Up $70,612.91 Per Household in Obama’s First 7 Years

$8,314,529,850,339.07:

cnsnews.com

(AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

(CNSNews.com) - The debt of the federal government increased by $8,314,529,850,339.07 in President Barack Obama’s first seven years in office, according to official data published by the U.S. Treasury.

That equals $70,612.91 in net federal borrowing for each of the 117,480,000 households that the Census Bureau estimates were in the United States as of September.

During President George W. Bush’s eight years in office, the federal debt increased by $4,899,100,310,608.44, according to the Treasury. That equaled $44,104.65 in net federal borrowing for each of the 111,079,000 households that, according to the Census Bureau, were in the country as of Jan. 20, 2009, the day that Bush left office and Obama assumed it.

In the fifteen years from the beginning of Bush’s first term to the end of Obama’s seventh year in office, the federal debt increased $13,213,630,160,947.51.

That $13,213,630,160,947.51 increase in the debt during the Bush-Obama years equals $112,219.57 for each of the 117,748,000 households that were in the country as of September.

When Bush took office on Jan. 20, 2001, the federal debt was 5,727,776,738,304.64. When Obama took office eight years later, on Jan. 20, 2009, the federal debt was 10,626,877,048,913.08.

As of Jan. 20, 2016, when Obama completed his seventh year in office, the federal debt was $18,941,406,899,252.15.

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