As we have been noting in our Twitter Channel Earlier, President Putin of Russia has ordered Russian Troops to withdraw from Syria. He has said that Russian Troops have achieved their objectives--although troops will continue to remain in bases throughout Syria. This is as a perilous truce holds and as the Nusra Front and #Daesh continue their onslaught throughout Syria. This was released to the Russian Presidency Website earlier today:
Meeting with Sergei Lavrov and Sergei Shoigu
Beyond Syria, there is the US Primary season. A number of key states are voting tomorrow that would determine the fate of the nomination process. We will be monitoring the key states and will have updates on Wednesday especially as the controversy around Donald Trump continues in the aftermath of the violence in Chicago and Dayton. Geoff Colvin reflected upon @RealDonaldTrump today:
 | March 14, 2016 | |
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| Breaking with my nearly unswerving policy of looking forward in these ramblings, I want to glance briefly backward this morning in hopes of discovering one or two valuable lessons.
-I was wrong about Donald Trump’s motivations in running for president, I learned in yesterday’s New York Times. I had long held that his run was a publicity move that got out of hand. Trump’s great business innovation was the concept of branded luxury residential real estate, and the brand is his name. So for 40 years he has been finding ways to get the media to pay attention to him, thus growing more famous and building the brand. Running for president, a notion he has toyed with before, fit the pattern perfectly. My hypothesis suggested that he never intended to become the nominee, and I found that real estate veterans who know him agreed.
But he did intend to win, in fact wanted to win more desperately than virtually anyone but a close circle of advisers realized, as the Times makes clear in a substantial article. It pegs the decisive moment as the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, which Trump attended and at which President Obama gave a speech filled with jokes at Trump’s expense. We’ll never know whether that humiliation was the spark – Trump denies it – but it coincided with the launch of a well coordinated four-year offensive, involving pollsters, strategists, and others, focused on getting him where he is today. Even back then, an adviser envisioned on his website “a Trump candidacy steamrolling to the nomination, powered by wall-to-wall media attention,” the article reports.
This goes a long way toward explaining the Trump phenomenon and answering the great question of why his opponents and Republican Party leaders didn’t take him seriously sooner. The answer is that, first, they assumed his outrageous statements would doom him, and second, that in any case he didn’t actually want to be president. It all made sense, which is why no one looked deeper or discovered that an intensely serious campaign apparatus – and more important, a burning desire – was driving him. |
We found it quite interesting how Morning Joe's Joe Scarborough noted how there is literally no campaign infrastructure exists beyond his immediate team out there. This is as Donald Trump deflected criticism of the violence--as the poll numbers continue to hold firm as reflected in the RealClear Politics Daily Average Today:
Battle for the White HouseRCP Poll Averages
Some are suggesting this is 1968 all over again as the rhetoric continues with the insults continuing on all sides.
Today's Wall Street Journal underscored how it is the responsibility of all leaders to ensure a sense of civility on its' editorial page. The question in our view is whether civility will prevail or not?
(Update: As we await the results, this came thru courtesy of politico as Kasich remains optimistic despite all the controversy over the Trump Campaign that came to a head with this from the founder of Humans of New York that is probably going to get a hard hitting response from Donald Trump:
![Sunday's blast in Ankara occurred two days after US embassy issued a warning of a possible attack [Tumay Berkin/Reuters]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sigG966l8QAk7CvjZenWllyCZyyX8fPUfTlLcIhuBTGh5A9QtqRqOA0hTq26kpstrJjo2D4KvyFvYOWMRDWkerGi_QSanrRIwie7A3uCqwm8X0CIPDSUZF-bFg_N1KHKwnTP7ulP7JDtl0vVjqe9xd-MaNvaI3bAR2bOPZEdx-m_2Fdl3wFjiWALi5BYwUGnSexQ6Um7YQ2Mcx=s0-d)