| Carly Fiorina was named vice president of a campaign without a president, Bernie Sanders is closing up shop in the early states and Donald Trump is releasing details on his tremendous foreign policy - you wouldn't believe how amazing this foreign policy is, all right? It's the end of the beginning part of the campaign, and now we're at the beginning of the middle part where all the candidates go off-script and chaos reigns. If the 2016 campaign was "Apollo 13," this would be the scene where they dump all the supplies on the table and tell the candidates to try to make something usable out of it. |
| Carly: Call me 'VP' |
| Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz named former candidate Carly Fiorina as his running mate today, prompting the Internet to create a bunch of anagrams involving the word "zodiac." "We were missing all the vowels until now," Twitter users explained. |
| At one point last fall following a war of words with Donald Trump, Fiorina's numbers jumped to 15%, good enough for third place at the time. Following disappointing finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, Fiorina suspended her campaign in February and endorsed Cruz in early March. After that, there's a statistically significant chance that Carly signed up for a gym membership and then quit. |
| So wait, is picking a VP a normal thing to do for someone mathematically eliminated from a first-ballot victory? Let's put it this way - even if you're ahead, it's not a normal thing to do before the race is over. But Cruz needed to recapture the limelight after a rough Tuesday showing, and choosing Fiorina may be an attempt to win over Republican women in the remaining states. The gamble for Cruz is that if there's a contested GOP convention, he's now unable to make a deal with (for example) Marco Rubio and his 171 delegates by offering to choose Rubio as his running mate. On the other hand, Fiorina does have the one delegate she won in Iowa, and every little bit helps, we guess? |
| Following the announcement, Trump tweeted a clip of that one time Fiorina referred to Ted Cruz - an elected official - as a "politician." Low blow, Carly! |
| Hundreds of Sanders staffers receive Bern notices |
| Just as Bernie Sanders transitions from Hillary's opponent to Hillary's progressive agenda badgerer, The New York Times announced his campaign's plan to lay off hundreds of campaign staffers in states that have already held elections, perhaps striking a fatal blow to his chances to retroactively win all the previous contests. |
| What happens now? His sizable number of delegates lets him roll into July's Democratic convention to push for aspects of his platform to be added to the overall Democratic platform, including "a $15 an hour minimum wage, an end to our disastrous trade policies, a Medicare-for-all health care system, breaking up Wall Street financial institutions, ending fracking in our country, making public colleges and universities tuition free and passing a carbon tax so we can effectively address the planetary crisis of climate change." So that's Bernie's first-draft letter to Santa ... the convention might give him, like, two of those things, along with a note to check back in another four to twelve years on the rest. |
| tl;dr: 'America first' |
| Yesterday in D.C., Donald Trump gave a speech outlining his foreign policy plans, including building up the American military, walking away from negotiations that aren't going our way (i.e., Iran), and making other countries pay us for things by insisting that NATO and Pacific allies to pay more for defense. (That's his signature move now, right? Making other countries pay for stuff is to Trump what lens flares are to J.J. Abrams.) |
| Don't call it the Trump Doctrine, though. "It won't be the Trump Doctrine because in life you have to be flexible," he told reporters on Tuesday in advance of his speech. Trump spent much of the speech saying that foreign relations under President Obama (and erstwhile Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) were "a complete and total disaster." Maybe a better outline of Trump's foreign policy speech is that he's going to do most of the same stuff, just "better." (Still not convinced? Good news, North Korea's latest ballistic missile launch failed. That ought to buy us all a few more months.) |
| More from the campaign trail |
| • | Cruz: Hey Brits, if you leave the European Union we'll be happy to buy all your Jaguars and Newcastle (USA TODAY) | | • | Bobby Knight backs Trump, offers to rearrange furniture in the Oval Office next January (Indianapolis Star) | | • | Still-not-campaigning Paul Ryan reaches out to millennial voters (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) | | • | Hillary on 'Indianoplace' joke: I can use that word, I have friends who are Indianapolitans (Indianapolis Star) | |
| Can a bison fit in the Trump Tower freight elevator? Let's find out! |
| On Tuesday, the House voted to make the bison the United States' official mammal. Is it too late to redo the Time Person of the Year photo shoot? |
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