What difference does it make now?

Thomas Sowell writes at National Review,

Many people may share Senator Bernie Sanders’s complaint that he was tired of hearing about Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. But the controversy is about issues far bigger than e-mails. One issue is the utter disaster created by the Obama administration’s foreign policy in Libya, carried out by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state.

One issue is the utter disaster created by the Obama administration’s foreign policy in Libya, carried out by Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. An even bigger issue is whether high officials of government can ignore the law and refuse to produce evidence when it is subpoenaed. If they can, then the whole separation of powers — the checks and balances in the Constitution — gives way to arbitrary government by corrupt officials who are accountable to no one.

This is not the first time Hillary Clinton has defied the law to cover up what she had done. When Bill Clinton was president, back in the 1990s, both he and Hillary developed the strategy of responding to charges of illegal actions on their part by stalling and stonewalling when either courts or Congress tried to get them to produce documents related to these charges.

Hillary claimed then, as now, that key documents had disappeared. Her more recent claim that many of her e-mails had been deleted was just Hillary 2.0. Only after three years of stalling and stonewalling on her part has the fact finally come out this year that those e-mails could be recovered, and now have been.

By this time, however, Hillary and her supporters used another tactic that both Clintons used back in the 1990s — namely, saying that this was old news, stuff that had already been investigated too long, that it was time to “move on.”

That was Hillary 1.0. More recently Hillary 2.0 said, melodramatically, “What difference, at this point, does it make?”

One of the things that the former secretary of state was now trying to cover up was the utter disaster of the Obama administration’s foreign policy that she carried out in Libya.

Having intervened in Libya to help overthrow the government of Moammar Qaddafi, who was no threat to America’s interests in the Middle East, the Obama administration was confronted with the fact that Qaddafi’s ouster simply threw the country into such chaos that Islamic terrorists were now able to operate freely in Libya.

Just how freely was shown in September 2012, when terrorists stormed the compound in Benghazi where the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, was staying. They murdered him and three other Americans who tried to defend him.

Moreover, the terrorists did not even have to go into hiding afterwards, and at least one of them was interviewed by journalists. That’s how chaotic Libya had become.

Meanwhile, there was an American presidential election campaign in 2012, and Barack Obama was presenting himself to the voters as someone who had defeated al-Qaeda and suppressed the terrorist threat in the Middle East.

Obviously the truth about this attack could have totally undermined the image that Obama was trying to project during the election campaign, and perhaps cost him the White House. So a lie was concocted instead.

The lie was that the attack was not by terrorists — who supposedly had been suppressed by Obama — but was a spontaneous protest demonstration against an American video insulting Islam, and that protest just got out of control.

Now that Hillary Clinton’s e-mails have finally been recovered and revealed, after three years of stalling and stonewalling, they showed explicitly that she knew from the outset that the attack that killed Ambassador Stevens and others was not a result of some video but was a coordinated terrorist operation.

Nevertheless, Hillary 2.0, along with President Obama and national security adviser Susan Rice, told the world in 2012 that the deaths in Benghazi were due to the video, not a terrorist organization that was now operating freely in Libya, thanks to the policy that got rid of the Qaddafi government.

Yet that key fact was treated by the media as old news, and what was exciting now was how well Hillary 2.0 outperformed the congressional committee on television. If the corruption and undermining of the American system of Constitutional government eventually costs us our freedom, will the media say, “What difference does it make now?”

John Kerry thinks it would be a swell idea to get Russia more involved in the Middle East

Jim Geraghty writes at National Review about a period of time when

...back when red lines really meant something. It’s fascinating to think that back in 1983, the United States ran nuclear first-strike simulations that began with Moscow increasing its military role in the Middle East, arming Syria, and so on.

...Now the administration is trying to get Moscow to take a bigger role in the Middle East. Really. Josh Rogin and Eli Lake report:

...The State Department is now quietly encouraging U.S. allies to engage with Moscow, as part of Secretary John Kerry’s quest to win Russian support for a political process in Syria.

Why, it’s almost as if Obama and Kerry either don’t know or don’t care that the Russian KGB was the incubator of all sorts of terrorist groups, from the Red Brigades to the Red Army Faction to the Palestine Liberation Organization, not to mention its giving assistance to Libya’s terrorist allies. When the KGB was operating at peak power around the world, anti-Western terrorism thrived.

And now Obama and Kerry are encouraging the Middle East to turn to a man who has been in the KGB for 40 years and was considered particularly ruthless by his peers. (You’re a fool if you think a KGB man ever really leaves.)

Read more here.

Will Donald Trump prove to be his own worst enemy?

Jim Geraghty writes at National Review,

You know how Donald Trump likes to bring up the polls in his speeches and remarks? I think he may shake that habit pretty soon.

Ben Carson has taken a narrow lead nationally in the Republican presidential campaign, dislodging Donald J. Trump from the top spot for the first time in months, according to a New York Times/CBS News survey released on Tuesday.

Mr. Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, is the choice of 26 percent of Republican primary voters, the poll found, while Mr. Trump now wins support from 22 percent, although the difference lies within the margin of sampling error.

The survey is the first time that Mr. Trump has not led all candidates since The Times and CBS News began measuring presidential preferences at the end of July.

So Donald will come out with metaphorical guns blazing in Wednesday night’s debate, right? It’s easy to imagine that backfiring. Ben Carson has the highest favorable numbers of any GOP candidate. He has an 84 percent favorable rating among Iowa Republicans. Trump already made an out-of-the-blue comment about Carson’s Seventh Day Adventist faith that some construed as a veiled criticism. Even people who aren’t supporting Carson generally like him and respect him; how will they respond if Trump harangues and belittles Carson for two hours?

For what it’s worth, Nate Silver said yesterday: “Iowans are paying more attention to the race than people elsewhere in the country, so they may be early adopters of trends we’ll see elsewhere. In other words, once Trump starts getting Iowa-type scrutiny in other states, he might fade.”

Read more here.

Are you looking for a job?

Bird Dog links to an article by Chris Southern on managing your job strengths.

Not only is “who you are” what you are selling, but (a) this is sometimes the root of why you lost your job and (b) something you need to know for your integrity and success in life.

What are you good at? What are you bad at? Do not underestimate what this means. Can you be thrown into situations requiring resolution of conflict? Can you write great software? Are you good with people and make them feel good about themselves? Will people follow your vision? Do you even have a vision or are you better at hearing an objective and getting it done? Are you a reliable performer? Do you get into negative spats with other people? And so on.

This will sound harsh, but in my experience what brings you to a job search has something subtle to do with what you are good at and not good at. In some subliminal way, your last job may have called for more from your weak spots than you were able to give. You need to ask yourself, very honestly, if your skills and weaknesses had anything to do with where you are now, and how should they influence what you would be successful doing next.

...Play to your strengths No one is good at everything, but you are good at some things. Don’t take a job that is about what you’re not good at. Do stuff you are good at.

...What do you want to do & Why? Sometimes you want to do what you used to do. But not always. People you meet will ask you this, not because they’re trying to expose you, but because they need to know. I was the head of IT. Maybe I still wanted to be the head of IT. Or maybe I wanted to advise clients. Or maybe I wanted to teach high school. Stop for a moment and see your life as a book. It will have several chapters. No matter what, you are about to write a new chapter. What will it be about?

...When asked about what you want to do, you need a crisp answer. It’s called the elevator speech. You have just moments to convey your goal and your contribution. I’m not kidding when I say to practice this in private. You will f* it up more times than you imagine. Practice it and get it right. In today’s world, you have 15 seconds to get anyone’s attention.

...You need to bring something to the party and have something obvious to contribute. And by nature, you should be a contributor, not a taker. The further you go in your career the more obvious it should be that you have broader, deeper knowledge and experience than others. It’s not easy to keep up to date, but there’s not much to be gained by not learning. I’ve often been happily amused by the advice “Knowledge comes at a price. Pay it.”

...A good resume takes intense editing but it gets noticed and stands out. Some principles are:

1. Quantifiable results are a must. Employers are not interested in a grocery list of duties. They’re drawn to significant accomplishments that are quantified with numbers, dollars, and percentages.

2. Please no clichés or unsubstantiated adaptive skills. The rule is to prove it. If you’re innovative, what would be evidence? Did you develop a program for inner-city youth that promoted a cooperative environment, reducing violent crime by 50%? If so, say it.

3. Tailor your resume to each job, when possible. Employers don’t want a one-fits-all resume that doesn’t address their needs or follow the job description.

4. Your resume needs to show relevance. Employers are interested in the past 10 or 15 years of your work history; in some cases less. Keep it to 2 pages and cut older stuff if you have to.

5. Keywords are essential for certain occupations that are technical in nature. They’re the difference between being found at the top of the list or not at all.

6. Size matters. Some employers are reading hundreds of resumés for one job, so do them a favor and don’t submit a resume that doesn’t warrant its length. The general rule is two pages are appropriate providing you have the experience and accomplishments to back it up. More than two pages requires extensive experience. In some cases a one-page resume will do the job.

7. No employer cares what you want. That’s right. Employers care about what they want and need. If you happen to be able to solve their problems, get along and make them look good, they’ll love you.

8. Start your CV with a punch. Below your name and contact information is your brand. Within 130 characters or so, you can capture the attention of the employer by stating what you do and in what capacity.

9. Make it easy to read. Your resume should not only be visually appealing, it should be visually readable.

• Accomplishments. These are bulleted under the company headers. They are one line each. One line. Not two. If it takes two, make it two bullets. Each line starts with a verb. You led, developed, built, facilitated, designed, produced, achieved, transformed, maintained, ruined, produced, sold, …

• Hobbies. No. Other interests. No. This is not a popularity contest. It’s business.

• Education. Sure, but it comes last. Because your resume reads newest downward to oldest. There is a debate if you want to include the years of your degrees. You must include it on your jobs, but if you put it on your degree, people will reverse engineer your age. Me, I say show the year of your degrees. It is what it is, and the older you are, the more guts it takes to put it out there.

Read much more here.

Do you have hope planted in the bottom of your soul?

Today at A Holy Experience Ann Voskamp tells us about planting bulbs with two of her children.

“I’m going to drop mine in now.” The boy’s holding his bulb poised, looking my way for assurance.

“No!” Little One wails. “Don’t put the flower so far down in the dark!” She tries to wrest the bulb from his hand. I scoop her angst all up close.

“But it has to go down in,” I brush the hair out of her eyes, kiss tip of that pug nose. Because sometimes, Child — hope’s waiting is dark.

She turns her face up towards mine and our cheeks brush.

“Will we have to dig them up to get the flowers after the snow?” I squeeze her tight.

“No, Girl. When He’s ready — all that beauty will come up through the black earth as if by themselves.”

We kneel down, drop a bulb into opening earth, then wait “for the forces above and below and beyond our control to work upon” all these things. The boy pats the earth down and over and the Girl, she watches.

We bury hope in a tomb of its own.

Like the faith diggers do every day. We bury our swollen prayers in Him who’s raised from the tomb.

We lay our hope, full and tender, into the depths of Him and wait in hope for God to resurrect something good.

Good always necessitates long waiting.

Every tulip only blossoms after cold months of winter wait. Every human ever unfurled into existence through nine long months of the womb waiting. And the only kingdom that will last for eternity still waits, this millennia-long, unwavering-hope for return of its King. Instead of chafing, we accept that waiting is a strand in the DNA of the Body of Christ.

That this waiting on God is the very real work of the people of God.

Every person needs hope planted at the bottom of their hole.

Because that is the thing:

Hope is what holds a breaking heart together.

Hope in a Big God is what frees from big fears.

Hope is a thing with keys…..

...because there’s an old and steadying wisdom cupped in the curve of just those two words, ‘Hope and Wait.”

Read more here.

To the Left, owning the winning narrative is all

Andrew Klavan writes at PJ Media,

Democrats have lied about the facts and have done so for scurrilous reasons. Hillary’s lies about Benghazi, for instance, were meant to protect her reputation and Obama’s re-election campaign talking points. The mainstream media have not only buried those Democrat lies and failed to report on them thoroughly, they have positively cheered the lying Democrats for lying well.

...The left cheered Hillary’s testimony as one of her best campaign appearances and “presidential,” not because she told the truth, not because her lies were plausible, but because her lies were well-delivered. Her performance was the sort of thing an ordinary stupid voter might fall for. So like… hooray.

Tapscott is right that lying is our biggest political and media problem — but only commentators on the right think it’s a problem at all. To those on the left, it’s a feature not a bug. The leftwing media are living in a post-modern world where words mean nothing, truth is relative and owning the winning narrative is all.

Read more here.

Latest poll: Carson now in the lead

It's about to get interesting.

Ben Carson has surpassed Donald Trump and now narrowly leads the Republican field in the race for the nomination in the latest national CBS News/New York Times Poll.

Twenty-six percent of Republican primary voters back Carson, giving him a four-point edge over Trump (22 percent). Support for Carson has quadrupled since August.

The rest of the Republican presidential candidates lag far behind in single digits. Marco Rubio is now in third place (eight percent), followed by Jeb Bush (seven percent) and Carly Fiorina (seven percent). All other candidates are at four percent or lower.

I see Carson and Trump as being very different men. Personally, I prefer Carson. But, one thing they surely have in common is that they both are outside the traditional Republican establishment.

I wonder if Trump will attack Carson in tomorrow night's debate. My guess is that he will.

Read more here.

Are you afraid to be interesting?

Seth Godin asks today,

Are you interesting?

More interesting than you realize.

An interesting person is interesting to us because she combines two things: Truth and surprise.

The truth: Not necessarily a law of physics, not necessarily a measurable truth in nature, but merely the truth of experience. "I believe this," or "I see that."

And surprise. Note that surprise is always local. Surprising to me, the audience. That's one reason that it's said that interesting people are interested—they are empathetic enough to realize about what might be surprising to the person in the room, and they care enough to deliver on that insight.

Everyone is capable of telling the truth. And everyone has been surprising at least once.

Which means that being an interesting person is a choice. We can choose to show up, to care enough to contribute our humanity to the next interaction.

It's a choice, but a difficult one, because being interesting feels risky. People are afraid to be interesting, not unable to be interesting.

You're not born uninteresting. But it's entirely possible you've persuaded yourself to be so frightened of the consequences that you no longer have the passion, the generosity or the guts to be interesting any longer.

Without a doubt, we need your interesting.

Russian leaders seem obsessed with the internet

Glyn Moody writes at Tech Dirt,

For some time, Techdirt has been reporting on Russia's efforts to control every aspect of online activity in the country. But it seems that the authorities there are still worried that its citizens will find ways around these measures. As a result, The Telegraph reports, the Russian government carried out a rather interesting experiment recently:

Russia's ministry of communications and Roskomnadzor, the national internet regulator, ordered communications hubs run by the main Russian internet providers to block traffic to foreign communications channels by using a traffic control system called DPI.

The objective was to see whether the Runet -- the informal name for the Russian internet -- could continue to function in isolation from the global internet.

Read more here.

US commandos and Kurdish soldiers free prisoners of ISIS.

What are Russian submarines up to?

David E. Sanger and Eric Schmitt report in the New York Times,

Russian submarines and spy ships are aggressively operating near the vital undersea cables that carry almost all global Internet communications, raising concerns among some American military and intelligence officials that the Russians might be planning to attack those lines in times of tension or conflict.

The issue goes beyond old Cold War worries that the Russians would tap into the cables — a task American intelligence agencies also mastered decades ago. The alarm today is deeper: The ultimate Russian hack on the United States could involve severing the fiber-optic cables at some of their hardest-to-access locations to halt the instant communications on which the West’s governments, economies and citizens have grown dependent.

While there is no evidence yet of any cable cutting, the concern is part of a growing wariness among senior American and allied military and intelligence officials over the accelerated activity by the Russian armed forces around the globe. At the same time, the internal debate in Washington illustrates how the United States is increasingly viewing every Russian move through a lens of deep distrust, reminiscent of the Cold War.

...Adm. James Stavridis, formerly NATO’s top military commander and now dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, said in an email last week that “this is yet another example of a highly assertive and aggressive regime seemingly reaching backwards for the tools of the Cold War, albeit with a high degree of technical improvement.”

...What worries Pentagon planners most is that the Russians appear to be looking at vulnerabilities at much greater depths, where the cables are hard to monitor and breaks are hard to find and repair.

...So important are undersea cables that the Department of Homeland Security lists their landing areas — mostly around New York, Miami and Los Angeles — at the top of its list of “critical infrastructure.”

Attention to underwater cables is not new. In October 1971, the American submarine Halibut entered the Sea of Okhotsk north of Japan, found a telecommunications cable used by Soviet nuclear forces, and succeeded in tapping its secrets. The mission, code-named Ivy Bells, was so secret that a vast majority of the submarine’s sailors had no idea what they had accomplished. The success led to a concealed world of cable-tapping.

And a decade ago, the United States Navy launched the submarine Jimmy Carter, which intelligence analysts say is able to tap undersea cables and eavesdrop on communications flowing through them.

Read more here.

Tragedy in Stillwater, Oklahoma

Here she is, Adacia Chambers, the girl who drove through the OSU homecoming parade, killing 4 and injuring many more.



Rick Rosen reports at Heavy,

Police say the 25-year-old Chambers drove her car through the parade, sending “bodies flying” and killing four bystanders before crashing up onto curb. Chambers is being charged with DUI by police. Twenty-two injured bystanders, eight of whom are in critical condition, were taken to Stillwater Medical Center for treatment.

Read more here.

Mrs. Robinson

A very catchy tune, for sure. Performed flawlessly by Simon and Garfunkel. But did anyone in that adoring crowd get a meaningful message from the lyrics? If so, what was it?

Why is the Middle East falling apart?

Stuart Scheiderman writes at Had Enough Therapy,

The Middle East is falling apart because it failed to modernize, failed to adopt free enterprise solutions to its economic problems and failed to function according to the rules and norms of a liberal democracy.

... Such is the issue in the Middle East, where Israel’s neighbors take its success to be the problem. They would do better to see Israel as a beacon showing them the way to improve their societies and their living conditions.

Now, however, many of these people do not know how to deal with the shame they feel when they see how Israelis live. They believe that Israeli success shows them to be failures and they believe that they must destroy it to restore their self-esteem. After all, this is a culture that believes that best way to restore family honor when a teenage daughter is caught holding hands with a boy is to murder her. They hold to fanatical beliefs, not because they do not feel connected to others within their community, but because the world seems to have passed them by. They cannot accept that their culture and their religion need a serious reformation.

Read more here.

Obama approves a natural gas export terminal in Florida

Hold on to your hats: I'm about to report something President Obama did that was good for America! Andrew Follett reports at theDaily Caller,

The Department of Energy gave final approval for a Palm Beach, Fla. natural gas export terminal to send U.S. gas abroad after studies determined the terminal wouldn’t significantly impact the environment.

The Palm Beach terminal will add to the local property tax base, create construction jobs, and improve trade relations with friendly governments, according to the Department of Energy. The DOE gave no exact estimates for how many jobs the Palm Beach export terminal would create, but a previously approved Maryland export facility is expected to create 14,600 jobs and reduced the trade deficit by $7 billion every year.

America’s natural gas production has boomed in recent years and encouraged companies to look for international markets to send cheap gas. But it’s been a bumpy road for gas companies.

The Obama administration has historically been slow to process permits for natural gas export, making some projects wait up to four years for a permit. Democratic Sens. Barbara Boxer  of California, Al Franken  of Minnesota and Ed Markey of Massachusetts, along with independent Sen. Bernard Sanders  of Vermont, introduced legislation to slow the approval process down even further.

Global demand for natural gas is expected to be 50 percent higher by 2035 than it is now, but shipping gas to European or Asian markets requires liquefying or compressing the fuel — a costly process. But companies are willing to pay up now in order to sell gas abroad where prices are much higher.

In Japan, for example, natural gas prices are nearly three times higher than in America, so companies are looking to export there. Japan’s appetite for gas is only going to increase, especially since the country scaled back its nuclear power plant fleet after the Fukushima Daiichi disaster.

In Europe, American gas exports are the only major alternative to Russian gas. European officials fear Russia’s grip on energy markets could be used to achieve political goals. Russia has used its natural gas to manipulate politics in the past. Indeed, Europe was initially hesitant to rebuke Russia’s annexation of the Crimean peninsula because of its control over natural gas pipelines.

h/t Texan 99

Does anyone care?

Grim writes at Grim's Hall,

So, just how many state secrets were lost to Russia and China because of Mrs. Clinton's gross negligence? The odds favor "lots."

If you sent emails through foreign telecoms that contained classified material, you can be sure they had a copy. She did. If you set up an email server without a digital certificate, you've ignored the most basic part of internet security. She did. And that doesn't touch the physical security of the servers, which were apparently kept in a bathroom closet at the mom and pop shop (albeit politically well-connected shop) that she hired to do all this.

No one would believe this story if you wrote it into a novel or a movie.

Did you know that Hillary Clinton did not have a computer at the State Department?

John Hinderaker writes at PowerLine,

One of the weirdest moments in today’s House committee hearing came when Hillary Clinton testified that she did not have a computer in her State Department office:

If you were to be in my office in the State Department, I didn’t have a computer, I did not do the vast is majority of the work on my e-mail.

Whoa. So the Secretary of State’s office is one of the last in the world that contains no computer. This was so strange that a reporter asked about it during today’s State Department briefing by Mark Toner:

QUESTION: Secretary Clinton speaks of not having a computer at the State Department. Is that an unusual thing, for the Secretary to not have a computer within their [sic] office at the State Department?

Good question! Toner bobs and weaves. Computers are such a new technology, apparently, that it’s hard to say:

MR TONER: It’s – I mean, unusual – I mean, look. I mean, we’ve only had – email’s a relatively new beast, shall we say, and – or a new creation. And so I think each secretary’s a little bit different in how they get information. And certainly that evolves as technology is developed over time. And frankly, it’s one of the more central aspects of the whole email FOIA requests that we talk about a lot, which is – as we developed along these – and get a clear understanding of how secretaries are communicating and how that’s changing with technology, that it raises all kinds of questions that we’re trying to deal with in terms of record keeping and that kind of thing.

So I’m not – it’s hard for me to say whether that’s unusual. There’s – I would have to refer you to previous secretaries.

In other words: it is totally bizarre.

...Given her detachment from official means of communication, one wonders whether Hillary was ever really Secretary of State at all. Did she make any decisions? If so, what were they? We know that she plotted politically to make the overthrow of Qaddafi the centerpiece of her tenure at State, but we only know this because of her enraptured, off-the-record correspondence with Sidney Blumenthal and other sycophants.

If she ever had a strategy, if she ever engaged in diplomacy, if she ever made a decision, it seems to have left no trace. Maybe she didn’t need a State Department computer because she was never really Secretary of State at all. Maybe she thought the position was honorary, like being First Lady. Just one more rung on her ladder to the top. All she had to do was fly around on airplanes for photo-ops. The tragedy is that four Americans paid with their lives for Hillary Clinton’s incompetence and fecklessness, and all of us have suffered from the lack of an effective foreign policy during the last seven years.

Read more here.

Love and friendship across the sex divide

Grim posts at Grim's Hall on the Glenn Reynolds piece in USA Today on the subject of feminism in the West.

we who consider ourselves men in the West are in favor of women leading decent lives. We take them seriously even where our interests strongly diverge, out of love. But we also hold them to certain standards, also out of love, because to violate those standards would be to fall.

So I don't think that feminism works in the West because 'leadership by fathers' is dead. I think it works because the leadership in the West is exercised in love. What Glenn Reynolds is advocating for is men-against-women, rather than men-for-women. What I think I'd like to see more of is women-for-men rather than women-against-men, and that combined with men-for-women. Speaking as a husband and father, that dynamic of friendship and reinforcement has been of tremendous importance to me.

Of course, I don't want a paternalistic government -- no more, and perhaps less, than a patriarchal one. It might be well, though, if our civil society better embodied the idea of love and friendship across the sex divide. We ought to take care of each other, and lift each other up.

Read more here.

A prayer we can expect will be answered

Mushroom writes at Fungle Jungle,

My prayer today -- truly every day, is that the Lord will sift through the contents of my life and separate the wheat from the chaff, casting away the false, the useless, and the wicked and marking down and keeping what is good.

The most amazing thing is that we can expect Him to hear and answer that prayer, not because we have done so much that is good but simply because He loves us freely. Is that not a wonderful thought?

Read more here.

Can Republicans win minority votes and still stand on principles?

Daniel Greenfield writes at Front Page Magazine,

Republicans court the minority vote by making two major mistakes.

The first mistake is assuming that a minority group is a single collective whose members all think the same. Yes, they may vote the same way, but that’s the outcome of a process combining everything from community organizing to media control which created a Democratic political identity for that group.

The second mistake is then aiming outreach at the organizations that form that political identity. That is like Coke trying to get Pepsi executives to drink Coke. It sounds stupid, but Republican outreach that involves the NAACP or Univision appearances are just as stupid. Those are arms of the Democratic Party. The only thing that outreach to them accomplishes is to reinforce their communal power while letting them set the narrative. The outreach ends with Republicans being told about the importance of embracing Democratic policies. And some Republicans are even stupid enough to fall for it.

Republicans are not going to win a majority of their votes any time soon, but they can win a minority of theirs votes without compromising their principles.

And they can do it while weakening the Democratic political identity within that group.

Democrats consistently lose the white vote, but combine high percentages of the minority vote with a minority of the white vote. The Republican model should focus on increasing its share of the white vote, increasing white voter turnout and adding enough minority votes to weaken the Democratic coalition.

Instead of imitating the Democratic Party’s broad spectrum targeting of minorities, Republicans should look at subgroups where they do better than the average within that group. For example, among Asian voters, Republicans perform better with Japanese and Vietnamese Americans than with Chinese or Indian voters. Among Jews, Republicans do better with religious Jews rather than secular Jews.

Bloomberg split the Latino vote in 2001. When he faced a Latino candidate in the New York City mayoral election four years later, he didn’t panic. His opponent was Puerto Rican and so his campaign aimed at the city’s growing Mexican population who felt overlooked and he won a third of Latino voters.

Instead of writing off an entire group as one collective whole, he drilled down to a subgroup.

... 60 percent of Jews who attend weekly religious services disapprove of Obama. 58 percent of Jews who rarely attend approve of him.

...Likewise, instead of pandering to #BlackLivesMatters, Republicans should address black voters worried about crime and gang violence. They’re not going to get the #BlackLivesMatter vote anyway, but they might make some inroads among black voters looking to clean up their neighborhoods.

... Instead of liberalizing their positions to appeal to minority voters, Republicans should target conservative issues within segments of minority groups concerned about those issues.

Instead of competing to be better Democrats, they should distinguish themselves as Republicans.

...The “inoffensive Republican” candidate is a failed legacy of another era that should not have survived the Reagan years.

Being inoffensive does not win elections. Engaging the base by focusing on the compelling issues that they care about does.

Republicans should not back amnesty. That’s stupid and suicidal. Neither should they completely write off the Hispanic vote. They should not endorse pro-crime policies, but neither should they completely write off the black vote. Those are false choices manufactured by the left to push the GOP against a wall.

...The first time, Giuliani won by increasing white voter turnout. The second time, he turned out a larger number of minority voters who were willing to support him while maintaining his existing white support.

...The Republicans can’t compete on pro-crime policies, amnesty or the welfare state with the left anyway. When they try, they lose their own base. But there are plenty of Asian voters angry about affirmative action, black voters angry about crack dealers in their neighborhoods and middle class Hispanic small business owners who are angry about the welfare state. Instead of chasing minority voters that the GOP can’t get, it should connect on traditional conservative issues with those it can get.

Read more here.