Good morning everyone! Happy Monday to you! We/I hope you had a great weekend.

Joining today's show are Anne Thompson, John Heilemann, Harold Ford Jr., Steve Rattner, Jonathan Capehart, David McIntosh, Sen. John Thune, David Maraniss, Shane Smith, Brian Sullivan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and more.

Man did the rams suck it up yesterday. I am still bummed out about it. That was just a horribly played game. I knew there could be a let down after winning the Seahawk game. What a total debacle. At one point deep into the first half of play, The Rams had a total of 4 yards on Offense. How a team came to not play and how a team could have been so unprepared for a game is beyond me. There were little signs of brilliance across the board but the tea was so inconsistent after not showing up for the entire first half. It was awful. Just a waste. Whatever. Lets get into some news today and from the weekend. 

Donald Trump resurfaced at a high school (Trump spoke at the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition Forum in Des Moines, Iowa, on Saturday) after skipping that event in South Carolina. I guess doing a speech at high school would be safe for him but I think his time has come. He does not say much of anything any more. Besides, all he talks about is himself and how great he would be at things. He also lost about 10% or maybe it is 8% in the polls over the last few days / week. Now that his poll numbers plummeted this week, he will now start t say how poll numbers do not matter but for the last two months while he led big, all he would talk about are the polls.

The Emmy Awards were held last night and Louis Bergdorff got married in Long Island. I saw pictures of the wedding which looked nice and I also had a fundraiser (Chad Gunther Memorial Dinner) event I went to Saturday night.

As for those latest polls Imentioned about Trump here above, Carly Fiorina’s strong performance at last week’s primetime Republican debate has catapulted her into second place behind Donald Trump in the race for the GOP presidential nomination, a new CNN/ORC national poll shows. According to the survey, conducted three days after the Sept. 14 debate, Fiorina has 15 percent support among Republican and Republican-leaning voters, up from just 3 percent in August. The former Hewlett-Packard chief executive is one point ahead of retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson (14 percent), down 5 points from the previous poll.

Meanwhile, support for Trump’s candidacy — which stood at 32 percent in August — has slipped to 24 percent, the new poll shows. Trump, Fiorina and Carson are the only candidates in the Republican field who have not held public office.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who appeared to score points on foreign policy during the debate, is fourth, at 11 percent — up from 3 percent in August. Rounding out the top 10 are former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (9 percent), Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (6 percent), former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (6 percent), Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul (4 percent), New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie at (3 percent) and Ohio Gov. John Kasich (2 percent).

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who was once leading the crowded GOP field, registered less than half a percentage point of support among Republican voters, the CNN/ORC poll found.

1. Trump - 24%
2. Fiorina - 15%
3. Carson - 14%
4. Rubio - 11%
5. Bush - 9%
6. Cruz - 6%
6. Huckabee - 6%
8. Paul - 4%
9. Christie - 3%
10. Kasich - 2%

On ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos” Sunday, Trump dismissed his drop in the poll. “A lot of people say I won the debate based on Drudge and based on everyone else that did polls of the debate itself,” Trump said. “So, uh, generally speaking, I think I’ve gone up since the debate. But we’ll see what happens.”

According to the CNN/ORC poll, 52 percent of those who watched the debate felt Fiorina did the best job of all the candidates on the Simi Valley, Calif., stage, while 31 percent said Trump did the worst.

However, there was some good news to come out of the poll for the former “Celebrity Apprentice” star:

About 44 percent of likely GOP voters say they see Trump as the candidate who could best handle the economy — well ahead of his nearest competitors: Fiorina at 11 percent, Rubio at 10 percent and Bush at 8 percent. Trump also wins on immigration, with 47 percent saying he could best address the issue, ahead of second-place Rubio’s 15 percent and Bush’s 9 percent. He even edges Rubio, 22 percent to 17 percent, on who could best handle foreign policy.

And the Republican debates appear to have stirred enthusiasm for the party: 65 percent of GOP voters said they are either “extremely” or “very” enthusiastic about voting in the 2016 presidential race. Just 51 percent of Democrats could say the same.

“These polls don’t really mean anything at this stage,” Rubio said on “This Week” Sunday. “I’m not sure the mid-September winners are where you want to be. Obviously, you want to do well and they’re relevant because they’re deciding who gets on the stage. But they’re not going to decide this election.”

Justin Fox for Bloomberg wrote an article about Carly Fiorina's HP Record in One Chart. Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina wasn't the greatest chief executive officer in corporate history. That much we can all agree on.

Assessments of her 5 1/2 years in charge of tech giant Hewlett-Packard are everywhere these days, most of them negative. Fiorina herself offered a less-than-convincing defense in Wednesday night’s debate -- yes, the company’s revenue doubled during her tenure, as she said, but that was mainly because she made a gigantic and controversial acquisition.

That $19 billion purchase of computer maker Compaq was the signature move of Fiorina’s time at HP. It occasioned a revolt led by HP director Walter Hewlett, son of company co-founder Bill Hewlett. It brought criticism from Wall Street and sniping from rivals. Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems called it “a slow-motion collision of two garbage trucks.” Michael Dell of Dell Computer said it was the “dumbest deal of the decade,” a doomed attempt to “copy IBM.”

Fiorina was trying to copy IBM, or at least give HP the scale and breadth to compete successfully for corporate clients against Big Blue. Before the Compaq deal (announced in 2001, completed in 2002), she made a run at PricewaterhouseCoopers’s consulting business, only to blanch at the $18 billion price tag. After the deal she got HP into information-technology services in a big way,  running IT departments at Procter & Gamble and hundreds of other companies.
HP v rest better
How did it all work out? Opinions vary. Bloomberg Politics published a “Rashomon Roundtable” on the Compaq deal in May that nicely displays the wide range. But there is one simple, indisputable measure -- how did HP’s total return to shareholders compare with  Sun, Dell and IBM, probably its most important competitors, in the years that followed Fiorina's appointment as CEO in 1999?

HP v rest better
When the board pushed Fiorina out on Feb. 10, 2005, things weren’t looking so great. HP’s stock, as was the case at almost every tech company, was still below its 1999 levels. Among the four rivals, only Sun had done worse. My then-colleague at Fortune magazine, Carol Loomis, had just written a cover story titled “Why Carly’s Big Bet Is Failing.”
Then, not longer after Fiorina left, the bet started paying off. 

Part of the initial rise in HP’s stock price was probably relief that the contentious Fiorina era was over. And much of the company’s stock market success during the next five years can be attributed to Mark Hurd, the relentless cost-cutter who took over as CEO about a month after Fiorina left. But Hurd was for the most part executing the strategy that Fiorina had laid out. Her plan to make HP a credible competitor for IBM worked far better than the strategies of McNealy and Dell and enabled HP to modestly outpace IBM as well. Fairly assigning credit between Fiorina and Hurd here is impossible, but it seems clear that (a) Fiorina didn’t leave behind a basket case of a company and (b) the Fiorina-Hurd era was -- again, by the metric of total shareholder return -- a relative success.

Not long after my chart stops, though, everything began to fall apart. In August 2010, HP’s board pushed out Hurd (now co-CEO of Oracle) after an investigation of a sexual harassment claim absolved him of the sexual harassment but found irregularities in his expense accounts. The board put Leo Apotheker, the former co-CEO of German software maker SAP, in charge and he set about shocking investors and employees with a series of abrupt decisions that culminated in the $11 billion acquisition of British search-software firm Autonomy.  Apotheker was fired less than 11 months after he assumed control, the company’s stock price fell almost 50 percent during his tenure and within a year after his departure HP had written down almost all of Autonomy’s value and accused its executives of perpetrating a gigantic accounting fraud (they beg to differ). Now that’s a failed CEO.

Ever since, current CEO Meg Whitman has been trying to clean up the mess, with limited success. Now she’s splitting HP into a provider of services and servers to large enterprises, which she will keep running, and a printer and personal-computer maker. That isn’t really a repudiation of Fiorina’s strategy, which was all about selling to enterprises, and even if it were the fact that a company changes direction in 2015 doesn’t mean its CEO was wrong to set that direction in 2001. It does seem fair to say that the Fiorina-Hurd emphasis on consolidation and efficiency moved HP even farther away from the inventiveness and innovation of its early days. But that happens to lots of companies when they get big. HP had the added disadvantage, as former director Tom Perkins put it in a full-page New York Times ad last month, of having an “ineffective and dysfunctional” board that made life hard for its CEOs.

So, no, Carly Fiorina was not the greatest CEO in corporate history. But she certainly wasn’t the worst, either.
I realize that there’s a certain irony in a guy who wrote a book called “The Myth of the Rational Market” using total shareholder return as the sole metric of success, but over a 10-plus-year period I think it’s defensible. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Hillary Aides Have Turned Over more than 100,000 Emails. More and more potential evidence is showing up in the scandal surrounding Hillary Clinton’s emails. According to the government’s latest report, the total number of emails turned over to the State Department by Hillary’s aides has topped 100,000. The Washington Times breaks down the numbers:
Huma Abedin turned over an estimated 23,000 pages of emails, Philippe Reines gave back 70,000 pages of messages and Cheryl Mills returned somewhere in the neighborhood of 11,870 pages, the Obama administration told Judge Rudolph Contreras in a court filing.

And unlike Mrs. Clinton’s emails, the State Department does not have plans to post online all of those three aides’ messages, instead deciding to release only select messages that are requested through particular open-records demands.

The records from Ms. Abedin and Mr. Reines are all now in electronic format and can at least be searched, though it will still take some time to determine which of the messages contain classified information that must be redacted.

Ms. Mills returned some 3,000 pages of her records as printed pages, and those need to be processed still, the State Department said.

To add all those numbers together, we reach an estimated 104,870 pages of messages. We can be fairly certain that this will not be the end of people in the Clinton camp relinquishing emails, either. Also important to note is Huma Abedin’s name on the list provided. There have been a lot of calls to investigate her involvement in Hillary Clinton’s decision making at the State Department, and hopefully, these emails will provide some answers.

The State Department is not the FBI, though, and the two people overseeing the internal investigation, Patrick Kennedy and Janice Jacobs, are Democratic partisans and Clinton loyalists, meaning we can expect them to try to do everything they can to protect Clinton. Regardless, these documents are still there, should the FBI come calling, and I’m certain the bureau is very interested in the contents of these emails.

In a just world, I think there’s enough evidence already for Hillary to meet Albert Fall’s fate. Nevertheless, don’t expect her to be doing a perp walk anytime soon. If there’s a way to avoid holding her accountable for this, the Democrat and Clinton loyalists in the government and media will find it.

What these stories do create, though, is a non-negligible chance that Herself will not be the Democratic presidential nominee in 2016. Every new page of emails turned over to State or the FBI weakens that aura of inevitability around her, both in the primaries and the general, and it’s making the Democratic establishment nervous. That is what we should realistically be rooting for more than anything. That’s why, as I explained yesterday, they are beginning to seriously contemplate supporting Joe Biden. Even if he never becomes the nominee, he’s useful as an insurance policy against Bernie Sanders. as a back up to protect them from having to deal with the prospect of Bernie Sanders as the nominee. Still, if a severely damaged Hillary and those other two guys are the best they can do, the chances for Republicans look pretty good, as long as we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot, as we have a penchant for doing.

While our corrupt media frenzies over the fact that Republican frontrunner Donald Trump did not defend Barack Obama at a campaign event last night, there is one teensy-weensy detail the media is choosing to hide from everyone: It was Hillary Clinton who started the Obama-Is-A-Muslim rumors.

The reason this is pertinent is due to the fact that our feckless media is (again) trying to crucify Trump, his time for not vouching for Obama’s Christian faith after a questioner at a campaign event accused Obama of being a Muslim.

This is more bubbled overreach from our stupid media. Nobody cares that Trump didn’t defend Obama. It’s a stupid headline: Trump Doesn’t Defend Most Powerful Man In The World - a tempest in The Acela  Teapot.

But the media is telling a huge lie of omission.

And they know it.

The root of the Birther/Obama-Is-A-Muslim movement can be found in Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign.

That’s a fact.

That’s science.

Hillary Clinton is the grandmother of  the Birther movement.

Nevertheless, although they are well aware of this, hack reporters like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell aren’t asking Hillary about her clear responsibility here. Nope. Instead, today Mitchell chose to ignore this fact and instead ask Hillary three questions teeing up Trump as the villain.

It wasn’t Trump who sent the photo above to everyone.

All he did was blow off a loon.

The campaign that sent out the photo above (which is not a fake — it was taken during a visit to Africa) was the Hillary Clinton 2008 campaign.

At the time, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said,

“[This is] the most shameful, offensive fear-mongering we’ve seen from either party in this election”. Obama has had to spend much of the campaign stressing he is a Christian not a Muslim and did not study at a madrassa.

See, I’m not asking you to believe me. Team Obama said so.

The Clinton’s smear campaign went even further.

In a rare moment of intellectual honesty, the left-wing Politico told the truth: [emphasis mine]

Where did this idea come from? Who started it? And is there a grain of truth there?

The answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama. …

The original smear against Obama was that he was a crypto-Muslim, floated in 2004 by perennial Illinois political candidate and serial litigant Andy Martin. Other related versions of this theory alleged that Obama was educated in an Indonesian “madrassa” or steeped in Islamist ideology from a young age, and the theories began to spread virally after Obama appeared on the national stage – to the casual observer, from nowhere – with his early 2007 presidential campaign. …

Then, as Obama marched toward the presidency, a new suggestion emerged: That he was not eligible to serve.

That theory first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.

“Barack Obama’s mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother then took him to Hawaii to register his birth,” asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.

When asked by a reporter if Obama was a Muslim in 2008, she replied, “There’s nothing to base that on … as far as I know.”

The media is nothing but a bunch of left-wing liars.

And what’s wrong with being misidentified as a Muslim?

It’s a helluva lot better than being identified accurately as someone who spent 20 years in a racist church, which is Obama’s true (and very troubling) religious history.

US Military Allows Afghan Allies to Rape Young Boys.

US troops have been ordered to ignore numerous occasions in which their Afghan allies raped and abused young boys, the New York Times has revealed.

Court records and interviews showed that the practice, known as bacha bazi ["boy play"] is a rampant issue in Afghanistan. Rather than try to stamp it out, the US military has trained and armed many heinous violators, then placed them in charge of villages.

The father of one Marine told reporters that his son was troubled by hearing local police officers abusing boys inside of the base, and being told by his officers "to look the other way because it's their culture."

Pope meets Fidel Castro, warns against ideology on Cuba trip. Pope Francis met Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro on Sunday, hours after warning Cubans to beware the dangers of ideology and the lure of selfishness as their country enters a new era of closer ties with the United States.

Latin America's first pope and Castro, the region's last surviving leftist icon of the 20th century, discussed religion and world affairs at the home of the 89-year-old retired president for about 40 minutes.

Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi said the meeting, which included Castro's wife and other family members, was "very relaxed, fraternal and friendly."

Francis, 78, gave Castro several of his official papal writings, two books on spirituality and a book and CD on the writings of Father Armando Llorente, a priest who taught Castro in Jesuit prep school more than 70 years ago.

Castro, who wore a blue-and-white track suit, gave him a copy of "Fidel and Religion," a 1985 book of interviews with a Brazilian priest which lifted a taboo on speaking about religion in Cuba, then officially atheist.

Francis also went to the Palace of the Revolution for an hour-long private meeting with President Raul Castro, Fidel's 84-year-old younger brother.

Raul Castro, an atheist like his brother, surprised the pope by giving him a sculpture of a life-sized crucified Jesus Christ against a backdrop of fishing nets and oars.

The pope has drawn praise in Cuba for his behind-the-scenes role in supporting negotiations last year that led to a historic rapprochement between the United States and Communist-run Cuba.

His visit is aimed at further improving ties between the government and the Roman Catholic Church and encouraging a more open society in Cuba.

Celebrating Mass before tens of thousands of people in Havana's Revolution Square on Sunday morning, Francis sprinkled his mainly religious homily with criticism of "elitism" and ideology.

"Service is never ideological for we do not serve ideas, we serve people," he said at the Mass, attended by Raul Castro and top members of the Communist government.

Francis spoke beneath massive portraits of revolutionary leaders Ernesto "Che" Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos built into the facades of state buildings. For the Mass, a similarly giant poster of Jesus Christ was hung nearby.

Later on Sunday, the pope held a rally with young people and met with priests and nuns, putting aside his prepared comments and clearly enjoying the chance to improvise and tell jokes in his native language.

He told the young people to have the courage to think outside the box after hearing one of them say Cuba's youth were united in their desire for "profound change" in the country.

Dissidents complained that Cuban police have detained 30-40 opposition activists to stop them attending papal events, and a Reuters witness said security agents wrestled two men and a woman to the ground near Revolution Square on Sunday morning after they started shouting and tried to hand out flyers.

In what government foes could see as criticism of party bureaucracy, the pope said Jesus' apostles foolishly argued about rank and he compared it to "those who climb the ladder most quickly to take the jobs which carry certain benefits".

Francis also appeared to appeal to Cubans to look after each other as the country faces social changes and new economic opportunities.

He said they should continue to be "at the service of the frailty of your brothers and sisters" and "not neglect them for plans which can be seductive, but are unconcerned about the face of the person beside you".

At the end of the Mass, the pope appealed to Colombia's government and Marxist FARC guerrillas to ensure that nearly three years of peace talks in Cuba are successful in order to end their "long night" of war.

Since arriving on Saturday, Francis has exhorted Cuba and the United States to deepen their detente, and encouraged Cuba to grant more freedom to the Catholic Church, which has in recent years re-emerged as a powerful force after suffering decades of repression.

Francis will fly from Cuba to Washington on Tuesday.
Pope Francis meets with former Cuban President Fidel Castro in Havana, Cuba, September 20, 2015. (Additional reporting by Nelson Acosta, Andrew Cawthorne, Anahi Rama and Marc Frank; Editing by Kieran Murray and Eric Beech)

In A USA Today Report, Joe Biden moves closer to joining presidential race. Vice President Biden is edging closer toward joining the race for president, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Biden has been considering a bid for the Democratic nomination, and speculation on his potential candidacy increased after the death of his son Beau Biden this summer. His son urged Biden to seek the presidency, according to news media reports.

Biden, however, has publicly grieved the loss of his son and told Stephen Colbert earlier this month that he was struggling with the decision.

"I don't think any man or woman should run for president unless, No. 1, they know exactly why they would want to be president, and 2, they can look at folks out there and say, 'I promise you, you have my whole heart, my whole soul, my energy and my passion to do this.' And I'd be lying if I said that I knew I was there," Biden said on CBS' The Late Show.

Now aides are telling the Journal that it appears to be a matter of when, not if, Biden will announce his candidacy. They have told Democratic donors that he is more likely than not to run.

Meanwhile, a group of more than 50 Democratic fundraisers and activists signed a letter to encourage Biden to enter the race and continue what they called the “spectacular success” of the Obama-Biden administration. The list includes fervent Biden boosters, such as Dick Hartpoolian, a former chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, and Jon Cooper, a Long Island businessman raising money for a super PAC laying the groundwork for a possible Biden bid.

A Biden bid for president would pit him against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the two leading candidates. Front-runner Clinton's poll numbers among moderates have sunk recently as voters consider Biden a viable alternative.

"If Joe Biden gets in the race, it will be a new day," Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., told USA TODAY in a recent interview.

Helping drive Biden's decision is the first Democratic presidential debate, which is scheduled for Oct. 13.

Club for Growth launches campaign against TrumpThe group’s political arm is launching a $1 million advertising campaign in Iowa starting later this week, branding Trump “the worst kind of politician.” The two advertisements highlight Trump’s past statements that he identifies as a Democrat and that he has supported using eminent domain to take private property. Trump, one of the ads says, is “playing us for chumps.”

In a small room packed with lights and TV cameras at the National Press Club, Club for Growth President David McIntosh declared: “Donald Trump has the worst [economic] record in the entire field with the possible exception of Bernie Sanders.”

"We've tested the ads ... we're confident that most people in Iowa will see these messages," McIntosh said.

He said most of the group's 100,000-some members "are very supportive [of attacking Trump]. They see it as a logical extension of what the Club stands for."

Tuesday's announcement is the first significant and organized attack from a conservative group against the Republican front-runner, whom the party establishment has hoped and wished would disappear but to their dismay has continued rising in the polls.

Conservative donors have been privately debating how to deal with Trump, but a number have told The Hill they are wary about provoking his viciously effective counterattacks against their Republican candidate of choice.

Trump’s competitors’ campaigns have also been confused about how to combat him, and all have adopted different approaches.

Marco Rubio and John Kasich have largely ignored the billionaire, while at the other extreme Ted Cruz has embraced Trump, leading a rally with him last week at the Capitol to protest President Obama’s Iran nuclear deal. The best-funded Republican candidate, Jeb Bush, initially tried to ignore Trump but his campaign reversed course several weeks ago and released its first attack ad highlighting Trump’s history of liberal positions. 

Trump and the Club for Growth have been attacking each other for months.

The Club has commissioned research into Trump’s liberal-leaning policy positions, some of which he has abandoned in his run for president. McIntosh has described Trump’s record as “downright horrendous.” The conservative group takes particular exception with Trump’s support for single-payer healthcare, tax hikes on hedge fund managers and his threatening of new tariffs that would, in the Club’s view, bring on a “trade war” with China and Mexico.

Trump seems to enjoy fighting with the Club for Growth and appears to show no concern about the group’s history of defeating moderates and helping to propel the Tea Party in 2010, which saw non-establishment Republicans such as Rand Paul, Ron Johnson and Mike Lee win Senate seats.

Trump describes the Club for Growth as “that mafia organization of extortion.” His evidence for this claim is a June 2 letter McIntosh sent to Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. In the letter, McIntosh requests a $1 million contribution from Trump to the Club for Growth.

The Republican front-runner claims the group is only attacking him because he turned down their request for payment, but the Club for Growth says it was Trump who requested the initial meeting.

Asked for a response to the Club for Growth's announcement, Trump's campaign manager Corey Lewandowski directed The Hill to the billionaire's Tuesday Twitter feed:

Little respected Club For Growth asked me for $1,000,000 - I said "NO". Now they are spending lobbyist and special interest money on ads!

Said Lewandowski, "why would I add anything to Mr. Trump's statement?"
Such an aggressive entry into a Republican primary race is unusual for the Club for Growth. The group tends to get more involved in House and Senate races than presidential politics — during presidential primary season it mostly publishes white papers and research on candidates’ positions — but McIntosh is so concerned about the Trump phenomenon that he believes he cannot sit on the sidelines.

McIntosh explained just how concerned he is about Trump’s candidacy in a weekend email to the Club’s 100,000-some members: “The Club believes that Donald is the worst Republican candidate on economic issues — plain and simple.”

Ben Carson Does Not Believe a Muslim Should Be President. Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson said he would not support a Muslim as President of the United States.

Responding to a question on "Meet the Press," the retired neurosurgeon said, "I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that."

He also said that Islam, as a religion, is incompatible with the Constitution.

Carson, who is near the top of several early presidential polls, said a president's faith should matter depending on what that faith is. "If it's inconsistent with the values and principles of America, then of course it should matter," he clarified.

Carson's comments come days after another Republican presidential candidate, Donald Trump, did not distance himself from a questioner at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire who accused President Obama of being a foreign-born Muslim and called Muslims a "problem" in the United States. Carson said he has "no reason to doubt" that President Obama was born in the United States and is a Christian.

Many times in the past, Trump has questioned Obama's birthplace and American citizenship.

On "Meet the Press," Trump was asked if he was comfortable with a Muslim being president. Trump responded, "It's something that at some point could happen." The real estate mogul continued, "Would I be comfortable? I don't know if we have to address it right now."

On the topic of foreign policy, he said he would use "every resource available" when dealing with ISIS in Iraq. However, he was hesitant to commit to using U.S. troops in Syria.

Related: Carson Could Eclipse Trump as GOP Front Runner

He hopes to drive ISIS out of Iraq and into Syria, which would put them in a fight solely with the Assad government.

"I would be in favor of pushing them [ISIS] up into Syria, because there's going to be a lot of conflict, obviously, with them there," Carson said. "Let them fight each other."

Trump Criticizes CNN’s Debate Questions: Gave Fiorina ‘Some Beautiful Softballs’. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, during an interview on CNN’s Sunday broadcast of “State of the Union,” criticized the network’s questions in the second Republican debate, pointing out that opponent Carly Fiorina received “some beautiful softballs” while he received the toughest questions.

Host Jake Tapper asked Trump to survey the debate performances of the other candidates on “State of the Union,” and chuckled at Trump’s response.

Trump: Well, I think Carly had a good night, but I think you gave her a lot of easy questions. You know, you read off a couple of questions which all you had to say “I agree with that,” so I think she had some pretty easy questions. You gave her some beautiful softballs. Certainly the most difficult evening, and I got very good marks. I have won every poll in terms of, you know, the debate, but I think certainly — and this happened with Fox also — certainly I got the toughest questions. I think with you I got the toughest questions. And when they weren’t asked to me they were asked to other people with my name in it. I guess 47 percent of the questions according to what the media said had Trump or Trump-related.

Tapper: You are the frontrunner, sir.

Trump: I do think Carly did well and I think that Marco did well. I actually think just about everybody did well. I don’t think there was any disaster.

Crowd at Democratic event shouts over Wasserman Schultz 'more debates'. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz was heckled at an event Saturday in New Hampshire by crowd members calling for “more debates” for their party’s presidential candidates.

Crowd members shouted "more debates" and "we want debates" throughout Wasserman Schultz's remarks. Signs that spelled out "more debates" also were spotted in the crowd.

The event was the Democratic state party’s annual convention. And the incident was the latest in series in which the committee has been called on to have more than six sanctioned debates.

Critics of the debates, which begin October 3, suggest the schedule was conceived when Hillary Clinton was the clear frontrunner and by Clinton supporters who didn't think subjecting her to challengers was a good idea.

Wasserman Schultz has been criticized before, perhaps most notably by Democratic challenger Martin O’Malley. The former Maryland governor's polls numbers are in the single digits, and he needs the exposure of the debates, considering he has little campaign money and name recognition.

Wasserman Schultz has steadfastly said the committee, not her alone, has decided on the number of debates. Clinton has said the debate scheduled is a matter for the DNC, not her, to decide. Her closest primary challenger, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, has also called for more debates.

Clinton, O'Malley and Sanders are all scheduled to speak at the convention in Manchester, N.H.

The GOP has 11 sanctioned primary debates. 

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a Los Angeles Times interview published Friday that she thought her party should have more primary debates this election cycle.

John Thune from South Dakota joins the panel on the show now. They are discussing the GOP race and about not shutting down the Government, let alone because of the Planned Parenthood defunding issue. He is asked candidly if Obama was born in the USA, and whether Obama likes America. Joe goes on to say how can we elect a person that cannot answer these questions as fast as John Thune can answer them. John has always been a straight forward good guy. And, 'he passed the test' too.

David Maraniss chronicles glorious, vulnerable 1960s Detroit.
Once a great city
Trivia question for you: Early in the summer of 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. unveiled his “I have a dream” speech during what was then the largest civil rights march in American history. What city hosted that march?

If you guessed Washington, you’d be wrong.

More than two months before King gave the most famous speech of his career in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, he’d told the nation he had a dream during a June Sunday in Detroit, following a march organized by Aretha Franklin’s father. Jerome Cavanagh, Detroit’s Irish-Catholic mayor, welcomed King with open arms and joined the march.

The story of that march is among the dozens of sepia-toned snapshots tucked into David Maraniss’ “Once in a Great City,” in which this wide-ranging journalist — who was born in Detroit and whose many books include a justly celebrated biography of Vince Lombardi — chronicles what was happening in Detroit from late 1962 through early 1964.

As Maraniss makes clear, there was a lot to like.

In 1963, Detroit’s Big Three automakers were enjoying their best sales year ever. Detroit was the U.S. Olympic Committee’s choice to host the 1968 summer Olympics. And Detroit’s Motown landed 10 singles in the Billboard Top 10 and another eight in the Top 20. In 1964, President Johnson would call Detroit “a herald of hope.”

But as Maraniss writes in his introduction, “life can be luminescent when it is most vulnerable.”

Exactly 20 years before King’s 1963 march, Detroit’s June 1943 race riots injured or killed close to 500 people. Less than two weeks after King’s 1963 march, a white police officer shot and killed a fleeing black prostitute, scuttling efforts by a progressive police chief to improve Detroit’s race relations.

Segregation within Detroit was enforced by white neighborhood associations which Maraniss likens to “paramilitary organizations.” And in October 1963, Detroit’s nearly all-white city council voted down open-housing legislation.

Meanwhile, newly built freeways gutted black neighborhoods and accelerated the rate of white flight. Detroit’s tax base began to shrink, triggering the death spiral that would result in the city’s bankruptcy, 50 years later.

This is a depressingly familiar story, captured in many books about Detroit.

What makes Maraniss’ book so compelling is suggested by his title: Even as he foreshadows the troubles to come, Maraniss also vividly — and lovingly — captures the long-vanished glow of that heady time when Detroit truly was a great city.

Maraniss offers sketches of Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca, who throughout 1963 was preparing the launch of the Mustang, a car that would soon gallop into Detroit auto legend — even as 1963 also became the first year in which more than half the cars made in the world were manufactured outside the United States.

Portraits of Mayor Cavanagh and Republican governor George Romney — father of Mitt — recall a time when leaders from different political parties regularly collaborated on a variety of issues. Maraniss is particularly riveting when unfolding their joint, nearly successful effort to bring the Olympics to Detroit.

There are stories here of Detroit mafia dons, the cops trying to trap them and the football players — including Alex Karras, colorful Detroit Lions defensive tackle — entrapped by them. There are stories of black civil rights leaders and white allies like Walter Reuther, leader of the United Auto Workers as well as confidant of presidents Kennedy and Johnson.

And, best of all, there are numerous stories and vignettes involving Berry Gordy and his Motown stars, in the year when a rising company became an industry giant.

Explaining how the Motown miracle happened, Maraniss notes the city’s gospel and blues heritage.

But he also points out that Detroit was once home to the country’s largest retail music emporium, a large black working class with disposable income, a solid stock of single-family housing into which pianos could easily be moved and an excellent public education system, with strong music teachers and programs.

Like Motown itself, they’re all now gone. But they won’t be forgotten, thanks to moving books like this one — commemorating the great city that once was and underscoring all we lose, when we allow such cities to die.

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