Politics

Thursday was a rough day for GOP frontrunner Donald Trump.

At a pre-recorded town hall meeting hosted by MSNBC and Chris Matthews, Trump got tripped up over a question about illegal abortion.

“Should [illegal] abortion be punished?,” Matthews quizzed. “This is not something you can dodge,” he added.

“There has to be some form of punishment,” Trump responded, when pressed.

“For the woman?” Matthews asked, just so there would be no ambiguity.

“Yeah,” Trump responded.

Syrian President Bashar Assad has claimed that the Turkish army currently fighting on Syrian soil is “Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s own private army,” in an explosive new interview. Assad said that his country has no beef with Turkey but his army will respond to foreign aggressors. Russia Today reports: Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia, have “crossed all possible red lines, possibly from the first weeks of the Syrian war,” Assad said. “Today, the war against Erdogan and against Saudi Arabia is a war against terrorists.

Submitted by Judith Bergman via The Gatestone Institute,

• Erdogan has boasted that he is proud of boldly blackmailing EU leaders into paying him protection money.

• Erdogan's threats were almost criminally sinister: "... the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?"

Hillary Clinton has refused to discuss the contents of the emails sent on her private email server because they are her ‘private business.’ Appearing before reporters after a campaign speech on her home turf of New York, the Democrat frontrunner responded to questions about the FBI investigation into the email scandal by saying the emails were ‘very personal.’ ‘They are like poems that I write about my deepest thoughts and feelings. I don’t want to show anybody right now. How would you like it if I demanded to see your most personal things? You would feel violated.

Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

The last time a Republican Presidential Convention opened without a decided nominee in the primaries was 1976, during the fight between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. There were past efforts by the establishment to stop two people they regarded as outsiders — Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976.