Tag: strategy
Mitch McConnell

Senate Republicans Have A Candidate Quality Problem -- Again

Republicans failed to retake the Senate in the 2022 midterms, owing in large part to what GOP leader Mitch McConnell had identified before the election as a “candidate quality” problem. The strategy of running millionaire candidates who could self-fund and were handpicked by Donald Trump was a bust.

So did Republicans learn from that? Of course not.

The Senate map for 2024 is much more favorable for Republicans than in 2022, but in key battleground states and those with Democratic incumbents, GOP candidates are already trailing. Their hopes of picking off a vulnerable Democrat or two are complicated by that pesky “quality” problem yet again.

That could be part of the reason why Democrats are romping over their GOP opponents in fundraising so far, a fact that led Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo to take National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Steve Daines to task.

“Just about every Democrat running in competitive Senate races significantly outraised their GOP challenger in the first quarter of the year,” Bartiromo said. “And if things are going so well, how come you’re not keeping up with fundraising?”

Why indeed? Let’s take a look at those GOP candidates to figure it out.

Kari Lake, Arizona

Where to begin with Arizona’s Kari Lake? The former local news anchor and former Obama supporter turned ultra-MAGA conspiracy theorist and election denier is the GOP front-runner in the July 30 primary to replace independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema. She has already secured the endorsement of the Senate GOP’s campaign arm and has been embraced by Republican Senate leaders.

Lake spent much of 2023 declaring herself Arizona’s “lawful governor,” refusing to accept defeat to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the state’s gubernatorial election even as she was declaring her run for the Senate seat. She took her case challenging the use of electronic voting machines all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was quickly dismissed.

Lake seems intent on self-sabotage, knowing that she has to at least make an effort to mend fences with the state’s establishment GOP and to appeal to moderates, but she’s quickly reverting to her old self by hanging out with white nationalists and tweeting paranoid musings that Hillary Clinton is plotting to kill her. She recently exhorted her supporters to “strap on a Glock” ahead of the 2024 elections because Democrats are “going to come after us with everything. That’s why the next six months is going to be intense.”

But nothing has been more damaging to Lake than her dizzying array of responses to the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling to reinstate an 1864 abortion ban. Back in 2022, she applauded the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, saying she was “incredibly thrilled” that Arizona’s “great law that’s already on the books” could now be enforced.

Once the backlash to the decision kicked in, she wasn’t so keen on the old law.

“I oppose today's [state court] ruling,” she said, calling for state leaders to fix it.

Days later, she reversed her stance completely in an interview with a far-right media outlet in Idaho, bemoaning the fact that “the people running our state have said we're not going to enforce it.”

All of which is reportedly turning her from a Trump darling to a perceived liability. Multiple Trump insiders told The Washington Post last month that he’s worried that she’ll be a drag on his prospects for winning Arizona, and that she had been spending way too much time hanging around Mar-a-Lago.

Trump “gently suggested to Lake that she should leave the club and hit the campaign trail in Arizona, according to a person with direct knowledge of his comments,” the Post reported.

The GOP disillusionment with Lake isn’t limited to Trump. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell pointedly left Arizona off of his list of states where Trump has a chance of winning, Politico reports. The McConnell-aligned Senate Leadership Fund, the primary GOP Senate super PAC, has begun making ad reservation buys in other states, but not Arizona.

At the end of last quarter, Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego of Arizona had more than doubled Lake’s fundraising, with $7.5 million to her $3.6 million. There couldn’t be a stronger contrast to Lake than Gallego, who has been unwavering in his progressive politics from his first run for Congress a decade ago.

Tim Sheehy, Montana

On paper, Tim Sheehy is a Republican dream candidate. He’s got loads and loads of his own money, with a net worth of as much as $200 million. He’s a former Navy Seal. He built the aerial firefighting company Bridger Aerospace from the ground up. He owns a cattle ranch and has scrambled his way to the top. In his telling of his story, anyway.

“We bought our land, and we lived in a tent, literally, for months, and we built the barn that we lived in for four and a half years. And it was like bootstrap central,” Sheehy said in a podcast last fall, discussing how he built his Montana empire.

Except that when he says he “bootstrapped” his way to success—”I didn’t get a government loan, didn’t get a government handout”—he’s stretching the truth. In his own memoir, Sheehy details the hundreds of thousands of dollars he got from his wealthy parents and his brother, a financier in New York. His brother also helped him secure a deal with the Wall Street firm Blackstone Inc. to fund the $200 million acquisition of another company to grow his fleet of firefighting planes.

What’s more, the majority of income for Bridger Aerospace comes from government contracts. Sheehy’s company also took a $774,300 Paycheck Protection Program loan during the coronavirus pandemic, which he didn’t have to repay. He might not have started his business without government help—except for a Veterans Administration loan—but he’s sure profited from it.

So, not so much a rags to riches story for Sheehy. How about his status as a decorated war hero? That’s where it gets weird. Did Sheehy get shot by friendly fire in Afghanistan and not report it, still carrying the bullet in that old wound? Or is the bullet there because he mishandled his handgun—a big no-no in Montana’s gun culture—and shot himself on a visit to Glacier National Park? It’s not entirely clear. What is clear is that he’s been telling conflicting stories about it, as Montana Democrats helpfully illustrate.

Some part of what he’s said has to be a lie, both with that particular bullet wound as well as the service-involved injuries that he claims led to his medical discharge from the Navy. Again, the source that is contradicting Sheehy’s story is Sheehy’s own autobiography.

In campaign events and interviews, he’s said he “got wounded and injured a handful of times, so eventually was medically discharged from the military.”

In his book, however, Sheehy described facing the prospects of working a desk job until he healed up and could return to active duty, and instead choosing to leave. He also wrote that he was disillusioned by Obama-era “social initiatives” in the military, and that he “hated … the military’s constriction of your life and your path.”

So he either left voluntarily because he was tired of it, or the Navy discharged him as a wounded warrior.

Okay, his own varying histories as a Navy Seal might be a bit problematic, but at least he’s a cattle rancher. That might give him some traction against third-generation Montana dirt farmer, Democratic Sen. Jon Tester, right? Except for the part about how he’s one of the carpet-bagging millionaires who have flocked to Montana to gobble up huge tracts of land.

Sheehy spent his youth in a multimillion-dollar suburban lake house in Shoreview, Minnesota, which he used as his home address until 2016. So much for the story told to the Working Ranch Radio Podcast last fall about how he “grew up in rural Minnesota … in an old farmstead, and we were surrounded by farmland.”

That hollow appeal to rural Montana is not likely to paper over his potentially biggest sin. Sheehy’s Little Belt Cattle Company, which he has been expanding, contains prime elk-hunting ground that Montana hunters can’t access. Instead, he contracts with a hunting outfitter to bring in other super rich people on guided hunts that cost upward of $12,500 for five days. Not so much a ranch, then, as a wannabe cowboy fantasy island, complete with a gift shop.

Montana is a deep red state, where Trump won nearly 60 percent of the vote in 2020. But it’s also a place that demands authenticity and is particularly hostile to carpetbaggers. Daily Kos covered Tester’s first Senate campaign in 2006, when he was taking on powerful Republican incumbent Conrad Burns. Even though Burns had lived in Montana for 40 years—and been a senator for 18 of them—Montanans regularly talked about the fact that Burns was really from Missouri, and therefore not a Montanan at all.

A rhinestone cowboy from Minnesota who’s gobbling up Montana’s land and has a penchant for exaggerating the truth might have a rocky road from here to November.

David McCormick, Pennsylvania

Speaking of ultra-wealthy carpetbaggers, let’s talk about David McCormick. One would think that after 2022, when Pennsylvania rejected the millionaire transplant from New Jersey, Mehmet Oz, in favor of Democrat John Fetterman, the GOP would reconsider its approach to choosing candidates. Nope. Despite losing in the 2022 primary to Oz, McCormick is back, and so is his baggage.

After Oz lost, McCormick determined it was because the New Jersey millionaire is out of touch.

“People want to know that the person that they’re voting for ‘gets it,’” he said last spring. “And part of ‘getting it’ is understanding that you just didn’t come in yesterday.”

McCormick might be a Pennsylvanian by birth, but even now, in the midst of a second bid for the seat, the multimillionaire doesn’t live in the state, according to the Associated Press. In fact, he hadn’t voted in Pennsylvania for 16 years before his 2022 run.

Though he does own a $2.8 million home in Pittsburgh, he’s living in a rented mansion in Westport, Connecticut. The $16 million property, AP reports, “features a 1,500-bottle wine cellar, an elevator, and a ‘private waterfront resort’ overlooking Long Island Sound.”

That part of the state is known as the Gold Coast and has “one of the densest concentrations of wealth in America.”

McCormick also admits to conducting his campaign largely on the road.

“I am spending half my time with donors,” McCormick told students at the Tuck School of Business, according to audio obtained by the progressive news site Heartland Signal. “So, I’m everywhere across the country, mostly with really wealthy people, where you will all be in 20 years. Or many of you. And I also spend half my time in Pennsylvania, where the median income is $55-60K.”

While McCormick claims Pennsylvania native status, his personal history in the state has undergone some revisions, as Daily Kos Elections recently noted. In his first run in 2022, he claimed that he "started with nothing” as a Pennsylvania farm kid whose father was a humble teacher, a claim he reiterated this year in a tweet responding to a New York Times report about his privileged childhood.

Yes, there is a family farm, which has been rented out for the past few decades. But his father served as president of what's now Bloomsburg University and later became chancellor of higher education systems in both Pennsylvania and Minnesota. The family lived in the “president’s sprawling hilltop residence, which students called the president’s mansion,” the Times reported.

Today, McCormick and his wife Dina Powell, a former Trump administration official who had also been a partner at Goldman Sachs, have a combined net worth of between $61.6 and $183.6 million, according to the AP.

A good chunk of their millions can be attributed to McCormick’s tenure as the president and CEO of the world’s largest hedge fund, Bridgewater Associates, from 2009 to 2022. While serving as a treasury official in the George W. Bush administration, McCormick and Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio formed a cozy relationship as Dalio was setting himself up for a big win in the upcoming financial crisis, during which he made $780 million.

Tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians lost their jobs and homes in that crisis, but McCormick landed nicely in his new gig at Bridgewater, which had healthy profits even while other funds were suffering significant losses.

“You look at it right now, there are still pension funds that have not gotten fully back. There are hundreds and hundreds of thousands of union members whose pensions were literally wiped out or were taken to the point where they’re still not back. People are still struggling from that day,” Darrin Kelly, President of the Allegheny/Fayette County Labor Council told The Keystone.

Democratic incumbent Bob Casey Jr. is making sure Pennsylvanians know this about McCormick.

“He doesn’t live in Pennsylvania. He lied about living in Pennsylvania. We know that, and he continues to try to make that case that he’s living here,” Casey told supporters in April. “So here’s a candidate who’s an out-of-state candidate being supported by out of state billionaires. We don’t want a senator like that.”

Eric Hovde, Wisconsin

This one is on Mitch McConnell, who handpicked multimillionaire bank owner Eric Hovde, another self-funder, to take on Democrat Tammy Baldwin in November. Wisconsin’s primary isn’t until August, but Hovde is clearly the front-runner, thanks in no small part to all of that money, as The Nation delineates.

Hovde is very rich. In addition to serving as chairman and CEO of Utah-based Sunwest Bank, which has at least $2.7 billion in assets, he’s the president and CEO of H. Bancorp, a holding company that hails itself as “a $2.9 billion multibank holding company providing banking solutions to small and middle market businesses across the United States.” He’s also the president and CEO of Hovde Capital Advisors, LLC, an asset management group, and president, CEO, and chief investment officer of Hovde Private Equity Advisors, LLC, a private equity firm. And he’s CEO of Hovde Properties, a real estate development company with a substantial portfolio of commercial and residential buildings.

Despite having been born and raised in Wisconsin, Hovde’s current home is actually in California—a $7 million oceanfront mansion in Laguna Beach where he has an easy commute to his bank offices for what he calls “my main business.” Wisconsin Democrats have had a lot of fun with that:

Beyond being a filthy rich Californian, Hovde has been having a hard time keeping his foot out of his mouth. For example, he proclaimed on a radio show in April that people in nursing homes shouldn’t be voting, which feeds on the debunked Trump election fraud conspiracy theory stemming from the 2020 election.

“Well, if you’re in a nursing home, you only have five, six months life expectancy. Almost nobody in a nursing home is at a point to vote, and you had … adult children showing up and saying, ‘who voted for my 85- or 90-year-old father or mother?’” Hovde said.

Given the opportunity to clear that gaffe up in a later interview, Hovde doubled down, while insisting that he never said elderly people shouldn’t be voting, but that they are “totally incapable.”

“They either have dementia or at the very end stage of their life, they’re not capable of voting … a large percentage of those people are not in that mental capacity to do that,” he said.

That’s a fine attitude for someone who owns an assisted living and memory care facility, also in California. Last month, The New York Timesreported that his Sunwest bank has been named a co-defendant in a lawsuit against the Claremont Hacienda in Los Angeles County. The suit brought by the family of a deceased resident alleges elder abuse, negligence, and wrongful death.

Sunwest Bank is identified in the suit as one of the “owners, officers, administrators, managers, and/or members” of the facility. It might be a tenuous connection to Hovde himself, but his attitude toward older voters makes it an issue.

It isn’t just the elderly Hovde has a history of insulting. In an unsuccessful primary Senate run in 2012, Hovde said that people living with obesity have made a “personal choice” and should face the “consequence” of paying more for their healthcare.

He also attacked single mothers and low-income people by saying that they’re responsible for a breakdown of the country “socially and morally,” arguing that providing economic support for these families has to end.

Lawmakers should “do everything we can to support the family unit, and we have to stop government policies that reward those that are having children out of wedlock and harming people that are having children in marriage,” he said in a 2012 debate.

In 2016, Hovde showed he’s an equal opportunity misanthrope by bashing both women and men, but still succeeded in being anachronistically sexist.

“Most of the country, sadly, doesn’t know what the heck is going on … I like to say, sadly, with females, they spend too much time with what’s going on in Hollywood,” he said. “And with males, they engross themselves too much with sports. And now it’s not just sports, it’s fantasy sports.”

With all of that in mind, it isn’t surprising that Hovde has a history of making antisemitic slurs and embracing antisemitic conspiracy theories, according to a May 19 report by the Israeli news outlet Haaretz.

The Wisconsin Independent followed up on that report, citing Hovde’s repeated use of the dog-whistle word “shyster” during a 2023 Republican Women of Dane County luncheon and his embrace of the Great Reset conspiracy theory that arose out of the coronavirus pandemic.

In 2020, the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, called for countries to “act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”

“The Davos crowd, there’s no question they want the Great Reset,” Hovde has said about that conference. “They’re so blatant and open about it, they talk about it now. And they do believe that we want one central world government.”

“You know, people say, ‘Oh, that sounds [like a] conspiracy,’ [but] they’re very open about it and their whole views—and it’s a push toward socialism. It benefits the very elite in a global world order.”

In a 2020 article explaining the theory, the Anti-Defamation League said that “adherents warn that ‘global elites’ will use the pandemic to advance their interests and push forward a globalist plot to destroy American sovereignty and prosperity.”

“As is so often the case with conspiracy theories, one can find antisemitic sentiments in the Great Reset, with some believers going so far as to accuse Jews of orchestrating the plot or invoking George Soros and the Rothschild family,” the ADL explained.

At this rate, Hovde will have insulted just about every group of Wisconsin voters by the time the primary rolls around.

Meanwhile, Democrat Tammy Baldwin is handily outpacing Hovde in the money race. While he has plenty of his own money, he doesn’t have much in the way of appeal.

These are the marquee races the GOP is counting on to flip the Senate, with candidates chosen and favored by Trump and McConnell. Democrats can thank the gods for the favor of Republicans equating personal wealth with quality when it comes to vetting.

Keeping the Senate won’t be a cakewalk for Democrats in 2024, but this quartet of misfits will help.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Joe Biden

As Impeachment Fizzles, Republicans Struggle For Effective Attack

Tuesday’s House Judiciary Committee hearing with special counsel Robert Hur showcased Republican desperation to find some way to attack President Joe Biden.

Despite the release of a full transcript of the interview between Hur and Biden that showed complaints about the president’s memory to be exaggerated, if not outright lies, many Republicans continued to pursue the Biden-so-old route. Texas Rep. Nathaniel Moran went so far as to suggest that Biden should be placed under guardianship for diminished mental capabilities.

At the same time, committee Chair Jim Jordan was one of multiple Republican members who asked Hur to envision fantasy scenarios in which the president was 15 or 20 years younger. That was part of an extended, and sometimes laughably desperate, effort by Republicans to get Hur to say that somehow, somewhen, somewhere in the multiverse, he might have considered charging Biden. They did not succeed.

But the biggest reason for the Hur hearing wasn’t just to give a chance to alternate between asking whether Biden should be in a care facility or if he’s a criminal mastermind. The reason that the Republicans called in Hur is that their big impeachment scheme has fallen apart. Now they are madly searching for something, anything, that they can throw against the walls of the White House.

As Politico reported on Wednesday, the Republican plan to impeach Biden appears to be all but dead. That effort began as soon as Republicans had their hands on the machinery of the House, with Rep. James Comer chairing the House Oversight Committee running a parallel “investigation” with Jordan on the Judiciary Committee and Chairman Jason Smith on the Ways and Means Committee. It reached its ludicrous peak on Sep. 12, 2023, when then-Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy announced a formal impeachment inquiry in a blatant effort to hang onto his big office. That didn’t work.

By the time Hunter Biden made his way to a closed-door meeting of the inquiry on Feb. 28, 2024, it seemed clear Republicans were only spinning their wheels. Despite hundreds of interviews and thousands of documents, Republicans had produced nothing more than some truck payments, family loans, and a heavily debunked claim from an indicted foreign agent.

However, as the Politico article notes, Republicans see it as a high priority to “antagonize the White House.”

It might seem that getting some legislation passed after a session in which Republican infighting resulted in just 27 bills escaping the House (that includes renaming some Veterans Affairs clinics and issuing a commemorative coin). But Republicans are convinced that demonstrating competence in governing doesn’t matter to their voters.

So they are just going to throw crap against the walls of the Capitol in the hopes that some of it might stick.

Among the Republican Plan Bs under consideration are:

  • Sending criminal referrals for Hunter Biden to the Justice Department.
  • Keep investigating, but save any announcements for closer to Election Day.
  • Just keep investigating and making false claims—because that’s worked so well so far.

There’s also a plan to sue the Department of Justice, though it’s not clear why.

There’s even a suggestion that Republicans might do something that seems anathema to them so far—draft legislation. In this case, it would be legislation to tighten rules for financial reporting and foreign lobbying.

However, not only would this require them to break out a pencil stub and do the work they’ve resisted since taking control of the House in 2023, it would also mean drafting something that would pass the Senate. It could be exceedingly difficult to craft a bill on financial reporting that didn’t have a much bigger impact on Donald Trump than Biden. Ditto on issues of foreign lobbying.

The problem for Republicans is that Trump and his family did all the things they’ve been attributing to Biden and his family. Which would seem to make the legislative route difficult without netting the wrong fish.

Other options, like the idea of making a criminal referral on Hunter Biden, would be an obvious exercise in toothless grandstanding. But that hasn’t seemed to bother Republicans so far, so this is likely what they’ll do.

Republicans are reportedly so far away from mustering enough support for a Biden impeachment that even Speaker of the House Mike Johnson can see that such a move would fail. But they’re unwilling—and possibly incapable—of trying to dig their way back to respectability by passing legislation that addresses the nation’s needs.

So they’re going to sit among the ashes of their very fine impeachment inquiry and try to find something else ugly enough to please MAGA voters. So far, they’ve got nothing.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Analysis: Lessons For Democratic Strategists From 2014

Analysis: Lessons For Democratic Strategists From 2014

By Stuart Rothenberg,CQ Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — You could feel it from day one of this cycle. Senate Democratic strategists knew they were smarter than their Republican adversaries. They’d out-think them and out-work them.

Incumbent Democratic senators who run good campaigns rarely lose, I was reminded. Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to his seat, won a tough race in 2010. So did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. And Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill did the same in 2012.

This cycle, vulnerable Democratic incumbents in red states such as Alaska, Arkansas and Louisiana had great political names and deep connections to the voters. They knew how to win, just like Democrats Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana did two years ago. (Of course, Heitkamp and Donnelly won in a presidential year, with its different dynamic.)

How many times did I hear or read that Sen. Mark Pryor was no Blanche Lincoln? That comment was meant to highlight Pryor’s political strengths, but also to throw Lincoln (who lost re-election in 2010) under the bus so party strategists didn’t have to look at why she lost and how hostile the Arkansas terrain has become for any Democrat.

“They have their own brands,” I heard repeatedly about Pryor and Sens. Mark Begich in Alaska and Mary L. Landrieu in Louisiana from Democratic operatives and journalists.

But, Bennet, Reid, and McCaskill were victorious because the GOP nominated horrible candidates against them, not because the Democratic candidates had such untouchable brands, Democratic strategists had unique insights, or party operatives knew how to win tough races.

To some Democratic strategists, their candidates weren’t only smarter and better connected to voters. Their campaigns also knew how to identify their voters and turn them out. Democrats were miles ahead of the GOP when it came to “field,” the party’s highly touted ground-game.

I can’t count the number of times I heard or read about the vaunted Democratic field operation, whether in Little Rock or the most isolated areas of Alaska. Even I came to think it might matter.

I was told, for example, Democrats were registering and would boost turnout among African-Americans in Arkansas, which would change the arithmetic in that race and improve Pryor’s prospects.

I wondered why black voters who didn’t turn out for the first African-American president in history were going to flood to the polls for Pryor, or how Pryor would do well enough with whites for the party’s field program to matter. But Democratic Senate operatives had their charts and graphs to show how Pryor could survive the midterm.

As it turned out, African-Americans constituted 12 percent of the Arkansas electorate in 2014 according to the exit poll, the same percentage they constituted in 2008 and 1 point more than they constituted in 2010. (There was no exit poll in Arkansas in 2012.)

But while Democrats did a decent job turning out black voters this year, Pryor received virtually the same percentage of white voters as Lincoln did in 2010 (31 percent) and Obama did in 2008 (30 percent). Not surprisingly, Lincoln’s 2010 statewide performance, 37 percent, wasn’t much worse than Pryor’s 2014 showing or Obama’s 2008 statewide showing (both 39 percent).

And then there was the subject of Republican polling. Democrats seemed shocked that a thinking person would give any weight to GOP polling, which, they noted quite correctly, was seriously amiss in 2012. But Republicans took steps this cycle to correct their errors, and GOP polling often was more accurate than Democratic polling during the 2010 midterms.

At various times throughout the cycle I heard observers — sometimes Democrats, sometimes Republicans, often journalists — announce prematurely one of the GOP’s top-tier Senate challengers was toast, a victim of his or her own weakness or the Democrat’s brilliant campaign.

I heard it about Alaska, where Begich allegedly had localized his race successfully and would win re-election even in a Republican wave, and about North Carolina, where Democrats had defined and destroyed challenger Thom Tillis.

And, of course, there was Arkansas, where Republican Tom Cotton was, so boring, so serious and so charisma-challenged that he couldn’t possibly beat Pryor, who understood how to campaign in the South.

Interestingly, all of this smugness wasn’t apparent on the House Democratic side. Those folks seemed more realistic about their prospects from the start, possibly because House races are more susceptible to a partisan wave and the party was already in the minority.

It will be interesting to see whether Senate Democratic strategists sound more realistic during the 2015-16 cycle than they did over the past two years, as well as how Republicans operate when they don’t have the wind at their backs and a favorable map.

Republicans would be making a mistake to think that they have all the answers and have caught up with Democrats in all aspects of campaigning.

AFP Photo/Jewel Samad

Jihadists Face Growing Pressure As U.S. Mulls Strategy

Jihadists Face Growing Pressure As U.S. Mulls Strategy

Baghdad (AFP) — Elite Iraqi troops backed by U.S. jets battled jihadists near Baghdad Wednesday as Washington devised a strategy for expanded operations against the Islamic State group.

President Barack Obama prepared to meet with U.S. commanders to decide how to turn the tide on the powerful and brutal extremist organisation while keeping a promise not to drag America into another military quagmire.

The White House scrambled to play down a suggestion that deploying ground forces was an option but expanded air strikes were already turning up the heat on Islamic State group fighters.

According to Iraqi military and tribal leaders, U.S. jets struck three IS targets in an area just south of Baghdad dubbed the “triangle of death”, killing at least four militants.

A leader of the Janabi tribe in the flashpoint region of Jurf al-Sakhr, less than 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of Baghdad, said Iraqi soldiers had fought IS militants overnight until early Wednesday.

“The main focus was an area of Jurf al-Sakhr called Fadhiliya. They fought deep into the night but the Iraqi army was not able to enter the place,” he told AFP.

The U.S. military issued a statement late Tuesday that spoke of three air strikes southwest of Baghdad but did not specify where.

The Jurf al-Sakhr region is key because it sits on the Euphrates River between the major Sunni insurgent bastion of Fallujah, west of Baghdad, and the country’s most revered Shiite holy sites south of the capital.

– Ground forces? –

The tribal leader and an army lieutenant said the push was led by the Golden Brigade, which is widely recognized as the best force in the country.

Critics say it may be the only credible fighting force in what is sometimes derided as “a checkpoint army”.

The brigade, which spearheaded an offensive to retake the country’s largest dam north of Mosul last month, has been hopping from one key frontline to another.

The U.S. administration has said that its strategy in Iraq would involve helping to revamp an army it had not finished training when the eight-year occupation ended in 2011.

General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that US military advisers could “provide close-combat advising”.

But the White House insisted the idea of U.S. troops in battle was a “purely hypothetical scenario.”

The more than 160 air strikes launched by the U.S. since August 8 have achieved some results, apparently forcing top IS leaders to cross the border back into neighboring Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said Wednesday that nearly 50 people, including seven women and a child, had been killed since Monday in government air strikes on Talbisseh.

The town in the central Homs province has been under siege by the army ever since rebels seized it two year ago.

On Tuesday, Kurdish peshmerga forces — which have been receiving military equipment from Washington and some of its Western allies — retook seven Christian villages east of the second Iraqi city of Mosul with U.S. air support.

The villages had been emptied of their population during an IS offensive in August.

According to a senior Kurdish leader, Roj Nuri Shaways, a top IS military commander known as Abu Abdullah was killed in the fighting.

Calls have been mounting in Iraq for Washington to expand its air support to Sunni tribesmen fighting the jihadists, particularly in the town of Dhuluiyah, north of Baghdad.

– Global threat –

On Wednesday, Obama is to sit down with General Lloyd Austin, chief of U.S. Central Command, at his Florida headquarters.

The president will “discuss the plan for building an international coalition to degrade and destroy (IS),” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

British and French planes have already started surveillance missions over Iraq.

In Washington, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel told U.S. lawmakers Tuesday that plans were being laid to hit targets in Syria, where the IS group is holding Western hostages and has a stronghold in the city of Raqa.

“This plan includes targeted actions against ISIL safe havens in Syria, including its command and control, logistics capabilities, and infrastructure,” he said, using an alternative acronym for the militant group.

Over the past month, IS sparked global outrage by releasing video footage of the beheadings of two U.S. reporters and a British aid worker. It also warned it would take the battle to America and its allies.

A U.S. court on Tuesday indicted a Yemeni-born U.S. man for allegedly providing material support to IS by recruiting members for jihad in Syria.

Lawmakers in France — the top purveyor of Western jihadists — the same day approved a new anti-terror bill aimed at preventing potential jihadists from travelling to Iraq or Syria.

Six people, two of them minors, were arrested in the suburbs of the eastern city of Lyon on recruitment suspicions, a judicial source said Wednesday.

AFP Photo/Mohammed al-Shaikh

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