THE SEAN HANNITY SHOW

Fiorina: "I'm not afraid" Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina again backed a government shutdown to defund Planned Parenthood and said she wasn't "afraid" to be the rising star in the GOP field. Fiorina, who joined Sean on the NewsMaker Hotline, said "I'm not afraid, I've battled cancer. I've buried a child." Fiorina vaulted into second place in a CNN/ ORC International poll released Sunday, after a strong debate performance Wednesday night. LISTEN: Sean's interview with Carly Fiorina She barely qualified for the CNN main debate of top-10 candidates and had until now often polled in the single digits. Fiorina will have to continue to defend her corporate record, including her tenure at Hewlett-Packard, from 1999 to 2005, during which she laid off 30,000 employees and outsourced jobs. She was fired by the company's board of directors amid sharply declining stock prices. Fiorina says she navigated the company through the most tumultuous time in U.S. history for the tech industry. Carson: "No Muslim President" Dr. Ben Carson is under attack for suggesting that the president should not be a Muslim. On "Meet the Press with Chuck Todd" Carson said, "I would not advocate putting a Muslim in charge of this country." The presidential candidate continued by suggesting Congress is a different story and that he would take that more on a case by case basis. Bernie Sanders was the first to go after Carson, "It took us too long to overcome the prejudice against electing a Catholic or an African-American president. People should be elected to office based on their ideas, not their religion or the color of their skin." Congressman Keith Ellison, the nation's first Muslim congressman, released a similar statement. "For Ben Carson, Donald Trump, or any other Republican politician to suggest that someone of any faith is unfit for office is out of touch with who we are as a people." We're in mid-September politics now where struggling campaigns are desperate to turn things around and the top campaigns are jockeying for position. It's important that we focus on the things that matter; national security, jobs, taxes, education, securing our borders and healthcare costs. These distractions are just that, distractions.