China Warns U.S. After Trump Wins Nevada Caucus

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Chinese Communist Party leaders stand up while the international communist anthem is played. / AP

BY: Bill Gertz Follow @BillGertzFebruary 24, 2016 5:00 pm

China warned the United States on Wednesday not to adopt punitive currency policies that could disrupt U.S.-China relations after Donald Trump’s win in the Nevada caucus.

Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters in Beijing that “we are following with interest the U.S. presidential election.”

Hua was asked about China’s response to a possible Trump presidency and his announced plan to punish China for currency manipulation with a tax on Chinese goods.

“Since it belongs to the domestic affair of the U.S., I am not going to make comments on specific remarks by the relevant candidate,” she said.

“But I want to stress that China and the U.S., as world’s largest developing and developed countries, shoulder major responsibilities in safeguarding world peace, stability and security and driving world development,” the spokeswoman added.

“The sustained, sound and steady growth of China-U.S. relations serves the fundamental and long-term interests of the two countries and benefits the world. We hope and believe that the U.S. government will pursue a positive policy toward China in a responsible manner.”

The comments came as Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, is holding talks in Washington that include U.S. concerns about a Chinese military buildup on disputed islands in the South China Sea, and cooperation on dealing with North Korea’s nuclear and missile provocations.

Hua said Wang and Secretary of State John Kerry agreed the two sides will enhance cooperation and increase talks and exchanges.

“We stand ready to preserve and advance China-U.S. relations together with the U.S. side,” she said.

Kerry said he spoke to Wang about reducing tensions and finding diplomatic solutions to competing South China Sea claims.

“We want there to be a halt to the expansion and militarization of occupied features,” Kerry said. “Everyone benefits by true demilitarization, non-militarization.”

Kerry also said the United States remains committed to freedom of navigation and overflight, “something which China says it does not stand in the way of; it agrees that there should be peaceful freedom of navigation.”

Reports from Asia say Chinese state-run media have been ordered by the Communist Party to minimize reporting on the U.S. presidential election.

Hong Kong’s Chinese-language news outlet Oriental Daily reported Feb. 5 that the Party’s Propaganda Department, which sets policies for all state-run media, ordered all publications to ban election coverage of U.S. policies toward China and to focus election coverage on negative stories and scandals.

Trump won the Nevada caucus with 45 percent of the vote, increasing his chances of winning the Republican nomination later this year.

Last month, Trump vowed to impose a 45 percent tariff on Chinese good to offset China’s devaluation of the yuan.

“They’re devaluing their currency, and they’re killing our companies,” Trump said. “We are letting them get away with it, and we can’t let them get away with it.”

The Obama administration has adopted conciliatory policies toward China on trade and currency issues.

Trump, on his campaign website, outlined a hardline approach to dealing with China that involves officially declaring China a currency manipulator and negotiating an end to the practice.

Trump also wants to thwart China’s theft of intellectual property and adopt policies aimed at bring jobs back from overseas to the United States.

Bolstering the U.S. military and “deploying it appropriately in the East and South China Seas” are other goals.

“These actions will discourage Chinese adventurism that imperils American interests in Asia and shows our strength as we begin renegotiating our trading relationship with China,” the Trump website states. “A strong military presence will be a clear signal to China and other nations in Asia and around the world that America is back in the global leadership business.”

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ACU Chairman: Marco Rubio Cannot Unite Republicans Without Showing Up At CPAC

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Abortion Clinics Are Closing at a Record Pace

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Abortion access in the U.S. has been vanishing at the fastest annual pace on record, propelled by Republican state lawmakers’ push to legislate the industry out of existence. Since 2011, at least 162 abortion providers have shut or stopped offering the procedure, while just 21 opened.

At no time since before 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion, has a woman’s ability to terminate a pregnancy been more dependent on her zip code or financial resources to travel. The drop-off in providers—more than one every two weeks—occurred in 35 states, in both small towns and big cities that are home to more than 30 million women of reproductive age.

QuickTake The Vanishing U.S. Abortion Clinic

No region was exempt, though some states lost more than others. Texas, which in 2013 passed sweeping clinic regulations that are under scrutiny by the Supreme Court, saw the most: at least 30. It was followed by Iowa, with 14, and Michigan, with 13. California’s loss of a dozen providers shows how availability declined, even in states led by Democrats, who tend to be friendly to abortion rights.

Stand-alone clinics, not doctors’ offices or hospitals, perform the vast majority of pregnancy terminations. They account for the vast majority of the tally, which was compiled by Bloomberg News over the past three months and builds on a similar undertaking from 2013.

Typically defined by medical researchers as facilities that perform 400 or more abortions per year, the ranks peaked in the late 1980s at 705, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a New York-based reproductive-health research organization. By 2011, the most recent year for which Guttmacher has data, that number had fallen to 553.

Bloomberg’s reporting shows that the downward trend has accelerated to the fastest annual pace on record since 2011, with 31 having closed or stopped performing the procedure each year on average.

State regulations that make it too expensive or logistically impossible for facilities to remain in business drove more than a quarter of the closings. Industry consolidation, changing demographics, and declining demand were also behind the drop, along with doctor retirements and crackdowns on unfit providers.

Texas stands as a case study in the way abortion opponents have changed strategies, opting for legislative action over the clinic blockades and violence of the past.

Most providers there closed after the state became the largest and most populous in the U.S. to require that they become hospital-like outpatient surgical centers, which can cost millions to buy or build. The state also mandates that doctors have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. The drop-off in access has helped depress the abortion rate in the state by 13 percent, according to a July study, and providers there say full implementation of the law would leave almost a fifth of Texas women 150 miles or more from a facility.

Summit Women’s Center in Bridgeport, Conn., closed in 2015 after 40 years in business, citing reduced demand. In Kalispell, Mont., Susan Cahill said she didn’t have the money to rebuild after her practice got vandalized in 2014. Following the loss of two providers, Missouri is now one of five states in which a sole clinic remains. Of all the facilities in the nation that closed or stopped performing terminations, about a third were operated by Planned Parenthood; of the ones that opened, three-quarters were.

That just 21 new clinics opened in five years underscores the difficulty the industry has faced in replenishing the ranks of health-care providers willing and financially able to operate in such a fraught field. The impact of that challenge is likely to be long-lived: Even rarer than the building of a new clinic is the reopening of one that has shut.

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Trump Has Won More Votes Than Romney Had At This Point in 2012

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And many more than McCain had in 2008, too.

8:07 AM, FEB 24, 2016 | By ETHAN EPSTEIN

Donald Trump has yet to win an outright majority in a primary or caucus – though he's getting closer, pulling in 46 percent of the vote in Nevada. But he's winning massive numbers of votes.

Mitt Romney won Nevada's caucus in 2012 with about 50 percent of the vote. He did so by pulling in roughly 16,000 total votes – roughly the same number that second-placefinisher Marco Rubio pulled in this year. Donald Trump, by contrast, more thandoubled Romney's total, garnering 34,500 votes.

That pattern has played out across all of the early states, which are seeing huge Trump-inspired (and, at some level, anti-Trump-inspired) turnout.

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All told, Trump has now won approximately 420,000 votes. After the first four states had voted in 2012, Mitt Romney had won about 311,000 votes. Back in 2008, meanwhile, eventual nominee John McCain had won a little more than 250,000 votes after Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada had voted.

Before the primaries got underway in earnest, many assumed that Trump would fare more poorly than his poll numbers indicated because so many of his supporters had rarely voted in the past. But with this election, the past has not been a reliable predictor of future events.

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Trump wins Nevada caucuses

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Donald Trump trounced his rivals in the Nevada caucuses on Tuesday, notching his third consecutive victory and giving the Manhattan mogul even more momentum heading into Super Tuesday next week, when voters in a dozen states will cast their ballots.

Trump’s decisive win, which the Associated Press announced immediately after polls closed, was propelled by an electorate even more enraged than the ones that had swept him to wins in New Hampshire and South Carolina, and a second-place showing in Iowa.

For the first time in the 2016 primary season, media entrance polls showed that a majority of voters, 57 percent of Nevada caucus-goers, said they were "angry" with the federal government. Another 36 percent said they were dissatisfied.

And, as significantly, they want to bring in an outsider to fix it. More than three in five caucus-goers said they favor someone from outside the political establishment rather than a candidate with political experience as president.

That was bad news for Marco Rubio, who is now 0 for 4 in the February contests, and Ted Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses but finished a disappointing third in South Carolina on Saturday.

Those two senators continued to vie for second place — and for the crucial mantle of the best candidate to eventually take down Trump.

But they face a political calendar that now plays even more to Trump’s strengths: massive made-for-TV rallies and free national media coverage, with a dozen states voting in only seven days.

Early reports on the ground showed long lines and turnout trending higher than expected — and, at times, disorganization and confusion about the caucus rules. There were reports of ballots running low, caucus workers in campaign gear and even double-voting.

However, the Nevada Republican Party tweeted at 10:20 p.m., "There have been no official reports of voting irregularities or violations."

In a sign of the vote’s importance, Trump himself attended a caucus in Las Vegas to garner support, arriving at the same site as radio host Glenn Beck, who appeared on behalf of Cruz.

The 2016 Republican campaign has set turnout records in the first three states but Nevada has had poor showings the last two cycles. In 2012, only 33,000 Republicans showed up to caucus in Nevada, which was down from 44,000 four years before that.

Caucuses are notoriously difficult to poll and predict, especially in states like Nevada without a long history, but Trump led public surveys handily.

Still, Trump, who lost the Iowa caucuses despite leading in most public polls ahead of the vote, entered Nevada warily.

“The caucus system is dangerous, to use a very nice word,” Trump said in a radio interview with Hugh Hewitt on the eve of the election. "It’s sort of a dangerous system.”

Low turnout puts a particular premium on early organizing, in which both Rubio and Cruz quietly invested. Cruz had the backing of the state’s Republican attorney general, Adam Laxalt, and has appealed to Nevada’s rural voters with a television ad highlighting his opposition to the fact that the federal government controls 85 percent of the state’s land. (John Kasich targeted the same issue in TV ads, as well.)

Rubio, meanwhile, tried to connect with Nevada voters from his time living there as a child in the late 1970s and early 1980s, telling audiences about how his father worked as a bartender at Sam's Town and his mother as a maid at the Imperial Palace. (He still has numerous cousinsin the state.) Rubio’s family’s dabbled with Mormonism during those years and Rubio hopes an active Mormon political network that lifted Mitt Romney to a landslide win, with 50 percent of the vote, turns out for him.

Stumping in rural Nevada on caucus day, Trump continued to boast of his strong poll numbers in states coming up on the voting calendar, including Cruz's home state of Texas. He warned supporters to be wary of “dishonest stuff” from Cruz, whom he dubbed a "baby" and a "liar."

And Trump issued a warning shot to Rubio to beware taking him on: The two have largely avoided tangling but that could change if Rubio builds on his second-place finish in South Carolina on Saturday.

“When he hits me, ugh, is he gonna be hit,” Trump said. “Actually, I can’t wait."

During a rally in Las Vegas Tuesday, Rubio alluded to Trump several times but didn't attack him head on. The Florida senator emphasized that while voters have a right to be angry, the election has to be about more than that.

“Frustration’s not a plan. Being angry’s not a plan,” Rubio said. "So this election can’t just be about making a point. It can’t just be about electing the loudest person in the room because that alone will not solve the problem.”

Rubio has received a rash of endorsements since Jeb Bush dropped out of the race on Saturday night, including from Sen. Dean Heller, who is Mormon, and Rep. Mark Amodei.

Cruz’s campaign, meanwhile, mocked Rubio’s status as the favored son of the GOP establishment, and for his inability to win a state. Early in the cycle, South Carolina and Nevada had been targeted as potential Rubio wins, but Trump’s dominance has proved too thorough.

"Rubio’s stated strategy is to lose the first four primary states, lose every state on Super Tuesday, then lose every state on March 5, then lose every state on March 8, and then finally win in Florida (where he's currently polling third, behind Donald Trump and Ted Cruz),” Jason Johnson, Cruz’s top strategist, wrote in a memo this week.

Despite being one of only four states to vote in February, Nevada has gotten short shrift this cycle, especially on the GOP side, coming just three days after the highly competitive South Carolina primary and only a week before Super Tuesday, when a dozen states with far more delegates at stake will vote.

Ben Carson and Kasich were widely expected to finish at the bottom of the field.

Nolan D. McCaskill contributed to this report.

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Trump: ‘We’re Winning, Winning, Winning the Country’

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by IAN HANCHETT23 Feb 2016

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump enthusiastically declared his campaign to be a “winning” one in a speech after winning the Nevada Republican caucus on Tuesday.

Trump said, “You know, we weren’t expected a couple of months ago, we weren’t expected to win this one. You know that, right? We weren’t. Of course, if you listen to the pundits, we weren’t expected to win too much. And now we’re winning winning winning the country. And soon the country is going to start winning winning winning.”

After touting his numbers in some of the upcoming primary states, Trump stated, “It’s going to be an amazing two months. We might not even need the two months, folks, to be honest, all right?” Trump further predicted that he would inherit a lot of the votes of other candidates if they dropped out. Later on, he touted his numbers among Evangelicals, and winning among young voters, old voters, highly-educated, “poorly-educated” voters, and Hispanic voters.

After touting his support for the Second Amendment, he added, “Now we’re going to get greedy for the United States. We’re going to grab and grab and grab.”

Later, Trump said he would keep Guantanamo Bay open and “load it up with bad dudes” before turning to immigration.

Trump concluded, “We’re going to be the smart people. You’re going to be proud of your president, and you’re going to be even prouder of your country, OK?”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter@IanHanchett

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