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Saturday, June 20, 2015

Why Your Cat Thinks You’re a Huge, Unpredictable Ape



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Why Your Cat Thinks You’re a Huge, Unpredictable Ape

by Nick Stockton

Oct. 27, 2014



Shingles isn’t my condition; he’s my cat. I love him like crazy, but he gets under my skin.

I’m not alone as a conflicted cat fancier. Tony Buffington is a veterinarian at Ohio State University, and he recently told me many cat owners are constantly frustrated by their feline companions. Even though we feed them, clean up after them, and pet, hug, and hold them, Buffington says that few of us know how to listen to our cats. This can make things more frustrating for them than for us. That’s because no matter how much we love them, cats are our captives, domesticated aliens with no way of explaining their customs, or of interpreting ours.

Dr. Buffington (a great name for your next kitten, by the way) sat down with me to explain how to listen to cats. These aren’t just tricks to score more cuddle time, but ways to create a more harmonious home that could improve your cat’s health. For years, he’s been studying the root causes of interstitial cystitis, a painful and chronic inflammation of feline bladder tissue. His research indicates a stressful home environment may cause the condition, and perhaps other chronic cat diseases as well. He believes the best cure is learning to listen to your cat, giving him choices, and reducing the environmental factors that trigger his stress response.

You are a huge, unpredictable ape

You hear the unmistakable sound of claws on couch. You snap, shout, squirt water, and maybe even throw a pillow. It’s all futile, because eventually he’s at it again. Your cat isn’t ignoring you, Buffington says. He just doesn’t know how to connect your negative reinforcement with his behavior. This is because cats evolved as solitary hunters with little need for reading social cues, especially those for behavior modification.

“How the hell is your cat supposed to know that you’re yelling at him because you want him to stop scratching the couch?” Buffington says. Without the cognitive ability to connect your outburst to their scratching, cats see only chaotic aggression. “To the cat, you’re this crazy primate who is attacking him for no reason,” he says.

Instead of discouraging the act, you become an object of fear. What’s more, your cat becomes frustrated, and eventually stressed, because you constantly interrupt natural feline activities like raking his claws or jumping on something high. “Cats get sick when they want to express their natural behaviors and they can’t,” he said, and will continue to do the thing when you aren’t around.

“The way to train a cat is through their environment,” Buffington said. For example, put two-sided tape on the corner of your couch, or tinfoil on the kitchen counter. Then, put the now-more-attractive alternative nearby: A scratching post covered with catnip, or the awesome cat tree you built from scavenged driftwood. When your cat does the thing you want her do to, reward her with a treat, or affection. “You let the house provide the negative reinforcement, while you provide the positive reinforcement,” Buffington said.

Feline feng shui

In those few hours each day where he isn’t sleeping, your cat is a little bundle of energy that wants to move through your home as harmoniously as possible. But you’ve disrupted his flow by placing the food dish next to the refrigerator, the litter box by the dryer, and his favorite cardboard box alongside the sliding glass door leading to the yard.

You might be deaf to the fridge fan or the spin cycle. But Buffington says it sounds like a monster growling at them while they eat or poop. Put the dish and the litter box in quiet, calm places where kitty has an escape route if he feels threatened (i.e., not in a closet).

Sights also can be stressful. Cats are curious about other animals, but if there is no visual barrier between the dogs, cats, goats, horses, or alpacas outside, the cat will feel threatened. “Cats don’t understand glass, but they do understand height,” Buffington says. Give your cat access to high places, like a cat tree or bookshelf, where she can observe in peace.

Leave Fluffy’s tummy alone

Sights and sounds aren’t the only things in your house that assault your cat’s senses. Humans are much more touchy-feely than cats, and we sometimes find their fluffiness irresistible. But cats, like us, want some say in how they’re handled. “Would you appreciate it if someone was always picking you up, hugging you, rubbing you?” Buffington says.

The best bet is to let Fluffy guide the interaction. If she’s rubbing some part of her body against you, she’s given you permission to pet that part of her.



Other feline behaviors are tricky, because they appear to be an invitation for petting. The classic is when Fluffy exposes her belly. When you go in for a rub, she bites and scratches you. “Exposing her belly is not a trap the cat is setting,” Buffington says. “The cat is biting you because they feel violated and afraid.” A cat’s belly is its most vulnerable body part, and exposing it is the cat letting you know she trusts you—not that she wants a belly rub.

That’s not the only place that’s off limits. Have you ever been petting your cat and all of a sudden she slinks off to the other side of the room, cowers behind something, and stares at you?

“If your cat is acting weird, then something probably triggered this behavior,” Buffington says. Perhaps you kept petting the base of her tail, because she kept raising her butt. This area is filled with nerves, and being pet there can be overstimulating, much like being tickled is to us. Also, being cradled is not normal for cats. If your cat is curled up in your lap, it’s not necessarily an invitation to be picked up.

What’s that? Your cat is totally fine with you picking her up, snuggling her, and rubbing her angel-soft belly? That’s fine. Nobody’s jealous. Just stop talking about it.

You want your cats to be friends more than they do

Shingles and I recently moved into a house with two other cats, and my roommate and I have been trying for months to get them to play. It hasn’t been going well. Time and again, we put them in the living room and watch as mild curiosity turns into panic and fighting.



Buffington says we’re doing this all wrong. Start slow, he says, by rubbing each cat in turn with the same dry towel to get them used to each others’ scent. Before introducing them, make sure each cat has eaten, pooped, and received affection from their respective owners. In other words, ensure they are comfortable. Once the cats are together, let your cat know you have its back by giving it lots of affection. Don’t pressure them to mingle, and make sure each has an unimpeded escape route.

And if your cat isn’t feeling the play date and decides to bail, let him go. Buffington says one of our biggest misconceptions is that cats need to be around other cats. In the wild, cats hunt alone, and they don’t share. Other cats aren’t friends; they’re competition.

Your cat cares about you

Your cat is not as indifferent about you as she may seem. She wants to bond, and the best way to do so are with petting, food, and play. If your cat doesn’t like to play, you might be doing it wrong. If you’re using a laser pointer, don’t wave it like you’re at a rave. Move it at natural speeds and let the cat catch it occasionally. The same rule applies with the feather-on-a-string toy.

Shingles used to cry incessantly whenever I left for the day, and I worried that leaving him home alone was making him neurotic. Buffington suggests I create little rituals for coming and going. “Before you leave, you can call to the cat, give him some affection and let him know you are saying good bye,” Buffington says. And he says to have a similar ritual for coming home. “Some married couples survive on less than an hour a day of contact. Your relationship with your cat can survive on 10 minutes a day, as long as it’s really quality,” Buffington says.


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Puppyhood



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If this doesn’t make you feel good …




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Sunday, May 10, 2015

Republican Presidential Candidate Marco Rubio’s Billionaire Benefactor



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Billionaire Lifts Marco Rubio, Politically and Personally


MAY 9, 2015

MIAMI — One day in the State Capitol in Tallahassee, Marco Rubio, the young speaker of the House, strayed from the legislative proceedings to single out a lanky, silver-haired man seated in the balcony: a billionaire auto dealer named Norman Braman.



This man, Mr. Rubio said in effusive remarks in 2008, was no ordinary billionaire, hoarding his cash or using it to pursue selfish passions.

“He’s used it,” Mr. Rubio said, “to enrich the lives of so many people whose names you will never know.” As it turned out, one of the people enriched was Mr. Rubio himself.

As Mr. Rubio has ascended in the ranks of Republican politics, Mr. Braman has emerged as a remarkable and unique patron. He has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s campaigns. He has financed Mr. Rubio’s legislative agenda. And, at the same time, he has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s personal finances, as the rising politician and his wife grappled with heavy debt and big swings in their income.

Now, with Mr. Rubio vaulting ahead of much of the Republican presidential field, Mr. Braman is poised to play an even larger part and become Mr. Rubio’s single biggest campaign donor, with an expected outlay of approximately $10 million for the senator’s pursuit of the White House.

A detailed review of their relationship shows that Mr. Braman, 82, has left few corners of Mr. Rubio’s world untouched. He hired Mr. Rubio, then a Senate candidate, as a lawyer; employed his wife to advise the Braman family’s philanthropic foundation; helped cover the cost of Mr. Rubio’s salary as an instructor at a Miami college; and gave Mr. Rubio access to his private plane.

The money has flowed both ways. Mr. Rubio has steered taxpayer funds to Mr. Braman’s favored causes, successfully pushing for an $80 million state grant to finance a genomics center at a private university and securing $5 million for cancer research at a Miami institute for which Mr. Braman is a major donor.

Even in an era dominated by super-wealthy donors, Mr. Braman stands out, given how integral he has been not only to Mr. Rubio’s political aspirations but also to his personal finances.

Mr. Rubio, 43, is unabashed in acknowledging the influence of Mr. Braman, a commanding and litigious figure with so much clout in Miami that he almost single-handedly recalled a sitting mayor.

In an interview, Mr. Rubio described Mr. Braman as a father figure who had given him advice on everything from what books to read to how to manage a staff. After Mr. Rubio’s father died in 2010, Mr. Braman called every other day to check in.

Pressed on his financial ties to Mr. Braman, Mr. Rubio said in an interview that he saw no ethical issue. “What is the conflict?” he asked. “I don’t ever recall Norman Braman ever asking for anything for himself.”

He acknowledged that Mr. Braman had approached him about state aid for projects, such as funding for cancer research, but said that he had supported the proposals on their merits.

The reliance on Mr. Braman is likely to put a spotlight on the finances of Mr. Rubio, who ranks among the least-wealthy candidates in the emerging Republican field. Mr. Rubio left the Florida House of Representatives in 2008 with a net worth of $8,351, multiple mortgages and $115,000 in student debt. In his latest financial disclosure form, for 2013, he reported at least $450,000 in liabilities, including two mortgages and a line of credit.

Mr. Braman and aides to Mr. Rubio have declined to say how much personal financial assistance he has provided to Mr. Rubio and his wife, directly or indirectly, but it appears to total in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In a series of interviews at his office in downtown Miami, above showrooms of shiny BMWs and Rolls-Royces (he also sells Cadillacs, Audis and Bugattis), Mr. Braman praised the Rubios. He recounted what he described as “excellent service from them” over the years, and said he wanted nothing in return for his financial help.

“I’m not going to be an ambassador or anything like that,” he said.

Mr. Braman — a former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles; the chairman of Art Basel, which stages art shows; and a collector who owns works by Andy Warhol, Alexander Calder and Picasso — emphasized that there were limits to the friendship.

“I also have a yacht,” Mr. Braman said, “that Senator Rubio has never seen.”

Mr. Braman has the manner of a man accustomed to getting what he wants. He was vacationing in France one summer when the mayor of Miami — not the one he had recalled from office — informed him that he would seek to raise taxes. Mr. Braman hung up the phone, turned to his wife and declared: “Goodbye, I’m heading back to Miami to fight this.” He returned home and led a successful campaign to block the increase.

“If you’re going to do something, you do it all the way,” he said.

As early as 2008, Mr. Braman made a bold prediction, captured in a video tribute to his friend: Mr. Rubio would be the first Hispanic president of the United States. Seeing that through in 2016, Mr. Braman said in one of the interviews, is “part of my legacy.”

The partnership began in the early 2000s when a Miami lawmaker introduced them. Mr. Braman, himself the son of immigrants, was instantly drawn to the story of Mr. Rubio, a child of struggling Cuban refugees. By 2004, Mr. Braman and his wife had donated $1,000 to Mr. Rubio’s State House campaign, the first of many contributions.

Mr. Rubio quickly emerged as a dogged champion of Mr. Braman’s most cherished cause: state funding for a Miami cancer institute that bears the Braman family name.

Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, had vetoed the funding in 2004, incurring Mr. Braman’s public fury. “Frankly, as a very active Republican, I’m ashamed of him,” Mr. Braman said then of Mr. Bush.

Mr. Rubio did not let it happen again. The next year, he secured the cancer funding over Mr. Bush’s objections. “Marco,” Mr. Bush wrote in a somewhat grudging email to a lobbyist at the time, “strongly wanted the Braman Cancer money.”

Soon, Mr. Rubio became a regular visitor to Mr. Braman’s office on Biscayne Boulevard. By the time Mr. Rubio was elected speaker of the House, the youngest in Florida’s history, Mr. Braman felt close enough to show up at the 2005 celebration in Tallahassee and deliver a memorable — and valuable — token of affection: a framed Revolutionary War-era American flag. It hung, on loan, in Mr. Rubio’s office for the entirety of his tenure as speaker.

In Mr. Braman, a Republican with a strong distaste for wasteful government spending, an ardent commitment to Israel and a seemingly limitless bank account, Mr. Rubio found a devoted sponsor.

When Mr. Rubio geared up for re-election to the House, more than a dozen individuals and companies linked to Mr. Braman, including his Honda and Cadillac dealerships, gave Mr. Rubio $500 each, the maximum donation allowed under Florida law.

When Mr. Rubio decided to write a book laying out a conservative vision for Florida’s future, Mr. Braman said, he chipped in money to pay for its publication.

When Mr. Rubio announced his signature legislative goal, an initiative to slash property taxes and raise the sales tax, Mr. Braman contributed $255,000 to the advocacy group lobbying for the changes, becoming by far its largest donor.

Mr. Rubio said the flow of donations from Mr. Braman had no effect on his decision-making as House speaker, adding that he would never give preferential treatment to a donor. But in 2008, when Mr. Braman sought the $80 million for the genomics institute at the University of Miami, a large taxpayer grant to a private college, Mr. Rubio delivered the opposite message: Mr. Braman’s request, he said, had tilted the scales.

Usually, Mr. Rubio said at a news conference at the time, he would have laughed off such an eye-popping pitch. “But when Norman Braman brings it to you,” Mr. Rubio said, “you take it seriously.”

Later that year, when Mr. Rubio left state government, determined to shore up his finances before running for the United States Senate, he landed a teaching job at Florida International University, agreeing to raise much of his salary through private donations.

Mr. Braman gave $100,000, according to records he shared with The New York Times. Dario Moreno, who oversaw the university center where Mr. Rubio worked and who taught classes with him, confirmed that Mr. Rubio had raised the money from Mr. Braman.

In the spring of 2010, as Mr. Braman was donating heavily to Mr. Rubio’s Senate campaign, his company, Braman Management, hired Mr. Rubio as a lawyer for seven months. According to records provided by Mr. Braman, the company paid Mr. Rubio until a week before he was sworn in as a senator.

Four months after Mr. Rubio left the payroll, Mr. Braman hired Mr. Rubio’s wife, Jeanette, who had little professional experience in philanthropy, and her company, JDR Events, to advise the Braman foundation. Mr. Braman declined to discuss her compensation.

Mr. Rubio said the offers of work from Mr. Braman had a simple motivation: “We are close personal friends. They trust us.”

Mrs. Rubio’s job, fielding and vetting requests for donations to one of Miami’s biggest charitable foundations, has given her a major profile in the world of Florida philanthropy.

An internal Braman foundation document makes clear that Mrs. Rubio has become a crucial gatekeeper. “On hold,” read a notation next to a pending donation. “Wait to hear from Jeanette.”
At times, the foundation’s work has coincided with Mr. Rubio’s own globe-trotting political needs. In 2013, when Mr. Rubio traveled to the Middle East, Mrs. Rubio joined him, with the Braman foundation paying for her travel. According to Mr. Rubio’s aides, she was conducting work for the foundation abroad.

On four occasions, Mr. Rubio has traveled on Mr. Braman’s private plane, reimbursing him each time.

Mr. Braman acknowledged seeking the occasional “small favor” from Mr. Rubio’s Senate office. There was the daughter of the woman who does his nails, Mr. Braman recalled, who had an immigration problem, and the student from Tampa who wanted a shot at military school. In both cases, he said, Mr. Rubio’s staff was quick to respond. (Mr. Rubio’s staff said it had decided not to recommend the Tampa student.)

Mr. Braman seemed conflicted about his reputation as civic power broker, at once boasting of his ability to draw a high-ranking Miami official to his office with a single phone call and seeming anxious that he not be viewed as entitled.

“I don’t consider myself a fat cat,” he said. “Don’t make me out to be a fat cat.”

As he spoke in his office, an aide interrupted, presenting Mr. Braman with a yellow sticky note. The Florida Senate was about to vote on a bill he had sought, granting auto dealers like himself greater leverage over car manufacturers.

“That was fast,” Mr. Braman said.

Moments later, another adviser popped his head in, declaring victory. “Thirty to four,” he said of the vote, with a fist pump.


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Thursday, May 7, 2015

Free Speech vs. Hate Speech



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Free Speech vs. Hate Speech

by The Editorial Board
May 6, 2015

There is no question that images ridiculing religion, however offensive they may be to believers, qualify as protected free speech in the United States and most Western democracies. There is also no question that however offensive the images, they do not justify murder, and that it is incumbent on leaders of all religious faiths to make this clear to their followers.

But it is equally clear that the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland, Tex., was not really about free speech. It was an exercise in bigotry and hatred posing as a blow for freedom.

That distinction is critical because the conflicts that have erupted over depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, most notably the massacre of staff members at the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo in January by two Muslim brothers, have generated a furious and often confused debate about free speech versus hate speech. The current dispute at the American chapter of the PEN literary organization over its selection of Charlie Hebdo for a freedom of expression courage award is a case in point — hundreds of PEN’s members have opposed the selection for “valorizing selectively offensive material.”



Charlie Hebdo is a publication whose stock in trade has always been graphic satires of politicians and religions, whether Catholic, Jewish or Muslim. By contrast, Pamela Geller, the anti-Islam campaigner behind the Texas event, has a long history of declarations and actions motivated purely by hatred for Muslims.

Whether fighting against a planned mosque near ground zero, posting to her venomous blog Atlas Shrugs or organizing the event in Garland, Ms. Geller revels in assailing Islam in terms reminiscent of virulent racism or anti-Semitism. She achieved her provocative goal in Garland — the event was attacked by two Muslims who were shot to death by a traffic officer before they killed anyone.

Those two men were would-be murderers. But their thwarted attack, or the murderous rampage of the Charlie Hebdo killers, or even the greater threat posed by the barbaric killers of the Islamic State or Al Qaeda, cannot justify blatantly Islamophobic provocations like the Garland event. These can serve only to exacerbate tensions and to give extremists more fuel.

Some of those who draw cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad may earnestly believe that they are striking a blow for freedom of expression, though it is hard to see how that goal is advanced by inflicting deliberate anguish on millions of devout Muslims who have nothing to do with terrorism. As for the Garland event, to pretend that it was motivated by anything other than hate is simply hogwash.


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Wednesday, May 6, 2015

The GOP Fringe Gets Fringier for 2016



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Pushing the limits on the fringe

May 3, 2015

Carly Fiorina says environmentalists created California’s drought. Mike Huckabee’s urging would-be recruits to boycott the military until President Barack Obama leaves office. Ben Carson compared gay marriage to bestiality and pedophilia.

This week, they’re all going to become official candidates for president, and the fringes of the Republican field will get notably fringier.

From Herman Cain to Tom Tancredo, long-shot candidates have invoked uncompromising stances on issues backed up by ultra-strong rhetoric to draw attention to their causes and, mostly, themselves. But this time around, with a dozen more-plausible Republican candidates competing for attention and a digital media landscape that always finds room for spectacle, long-shot candidates are working harder than ever to make names for themselves with eyebrow-raising statements that drive clicks and cable segments.

“In a world without cable or the Internet, everybody writes a fun story about Donald Trump running for president and then they go back to work,” said Dan Schnur, a former Republican political strategist and the director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California. Marginal candidates couldn’t expect sustained coverage, he said. “There just wasn’t room in The Washington Post for them.”

Now, said Schnur, “Even a little bit of media attention is enough oxygen for a race that wouldn’t have existed a quarter-century ago.” In just the past couple of weeks, Trump, who has hired staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire but not announced a run, has made headlines for tweeting, “Nobody but Donald Trump will save Israel,” and “Our great African American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” and retweeting, then deleting, a crack about Hillary Clinton being unable to satisfy her husband (he blamed a staffer for that one).

The incentives for these candidacies have never been stronger. Hopeless candidates have always run for vanity, pet issues or a spot on the bottom of a ticket. Now, for no-shot candidates who can call attention to themselves, running for president has become an attractive business and lifestyle proposition. Book sales, media gigs and speaking invitations roll in for years to come.

Cain’s brief run for the Republican nomination in 2011, cut short by a sexual harassment scandal, set a new standard for this kind of run. The former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza briefly led in national polls despite having never held elective office. What he did do was make attention-grabbing statements: insisting that China was “trying to develop nuclear capability” 40 years after the country got the bomb, saying that American communities could ban the building of mosques, and promising, “When they ask me who is the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan I’m going to say, ‘You know, I don’t know.’” After achieving national celebrity, Cain got a radio show, became a Fox News contributor and wrote a book.

“People like me were kind of appalled that he was treated like a serious candidate and a credible person,” said Fergus Cullen, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican party at the time. “People like you had to write articles that took him seriously. … So all that does is encourage more, right? There’s no price to be paid for running for president.”

This cycle, anyone who wants to follow Cain’s playbook faces a tougher task. There are more candidates — and more credible candidates — in the Republican field than at any time in recent memory. In Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, there’s a plausible, if still long-shot, contender for the nomination who plays to the party’s right wing and possesses a special talent for winning the spotlight with incendiary statements of his own. Try topping Cruz’s message to Republicans who would give up the fight to defund Obamacare: “Look, we saw in Britain, Neville Chamberlain, who told the British people, ‘Accept the Nazis. Yes, they’ll dominate the continent of Europe, but that’s not our problem. Let’s appease them. Why? Because it can’t be done. We can’t possibly stand against them.’”

In circumstances like this, marginal members of the field risk getting lost in the mix. “I was surprised at the [New Hampshire GOP Republican Leadership Summit] cattle call in Nashua a couple weeks ago that more of the candidates didn’t do anything that was calculated to get a rise, and as a result I think a lot of them blended together,” said Cullen. The next weekend, Fiorina, a former Hewlett Packard CEO and failed California Senate candidate who’s never held office, declared at a Republican summit in Iowa that she’s got as much foreign policy experience as Hillary Clinton — and made news by doing it.

The last time Mike Huckabee ran for president, in 2008, he had just finished two terms as a popular governor in Arkansas, and he parlayed evangelical support into a first-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Huckabee didn’t hold back from expressing his staunch social conservative views then, but “this time around,” said Cullen, “there doesn’t seem to be any pretense that he’s doing this as a serious person.” In infomercials, Huckabee’s been hawking a diabetes treatment described as “dubious” by The New York Times.

He’s had to leave his gig as a Fox News analyst as he explores a run, but the station’s still been a forum for him to up the ante and get attention. “Everything he does is against what Christians stand for, and he’s against the Jews in Israel,” Huckabee said of Obama on “Fox & Friends” in February. “The one group of people that can know they have his undying, unfailing support would be the Muslim community. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the radical Muslim community or the more moderate Muslim community.”

Huckabee and anyone else who keeps their name in national headlines can expect more money-making opportunities to await them when they reach the end of their line, even if they don’t win many votes.

Carson, who jumped the gun Sunday on his own kickoff announcement by disclosing his candidacy to an Ohio TV station, became a darling of right-wing media and a celebrity after he touted a flat tax and health savings accounts in Obama’s presence at the 2013 National Prayer Breakfast.

Carson’s low-key style is a marked departure from the flamboyance of Trump or Cain, and he often seems surprised when his statements on gay marriage, or on the admirable side of the Islamic State group, prompt firestorms. But those firestorms only help keep his following alive.

Carson will officially announce in Detroit on Monday. Fiorina will also announce Monday — in an online video. Huckabee will announce Tuesday in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas. What Trump will do and say next is anybody’s guess.


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