Politics

As we anxiously await the results out of Iowa, where we’ll get the first real test of whether “protest” candidates Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have a legitimate shot at upending America’s political establishment, Hillary Clinton is fighting to convince the electorate that the scandal involving her use of a private e-mail server to transmit state secrets is largely a distraction dreamed up by the GOP to derail what might otherwise have been a largely uncontested run for The White House.

Restricted by law from giving large amounts directly to candidates’ campaigns, wealthy individuals can instead donate to political action committees, better known as super-PACs. George Soros donated $6 million to a super-PAC financing US Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton last month, and Haim Saban, an Israeli-American media tycoon, and his wife Cheryl have contributed a total of $5 million to Clinton’s super-PAC.

In church news:

Cruz’s stump speech is by far the most religious one of all the Republican candidates, in which he tells his supporters to pray “each and every day” until the November election.

At a campaign stop in Hamlin, Iowa, before the caucus, he told supporters that it’s time to, “awaken the body of Christ that we may pull back from the abyss.”

Denials, Goldman's dismissal, and now Persian Gulf oil producers unsupportive, and Thursday's exuberance is done...

You didn't really think it was that easy right?

As WSJ reports,

Persian Gulf Arab oil producers don't support holding an emergency meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, officials said, dampening expectations that the group will act to prop up sagging crude prices.

 

Noah Millman makes some excellent points in response to Ross Douthat’s latest column:

Both Trump and Sanders, in very different ways, are saying: you know, America’s leadership class has been very busy, but it hasn’t really been taking care of business. And they are telling the people to rebuke their leadership for that by throwing them out. They may be the wrong tribunes of that sentiment – Trump certainly is. But how is that impulse not exactly the right response to elite decadence?