Schmucks!

Yesterday Nancy Pelosi did what Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio, and Mitt Romney have not done: condemn AntiFa!
Read her statement here.

CZ455 replies on Twitter:
Hold on
Antifa would not have been there
If Nancy Pelosi had not called the Patriot Prayer Event/Organizers Nazi's & White Sumpremacist

"Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman."

Ann Coulter writes at Town Hall,

Apparently, as long as violent leftists label their victims “fascists,” they are free to set fires, smash windows and beat civilians bloody. No police officer will stop them. They have carte blanche to physically assault anyone they disapprove of, including Charles Murray, Heather Mac Donald, Ben Shapiro, me and Milo Yiannopoulos, as well as anyone who wanted to hear us speak.

...Thank God Donald J. Trump is our president, and not Mitt Romney, not Marco Rubio and not that nasty woman.

Read more here.

A game?

Senator Marco Rubio speaks out against Obama's trip to Cuba:

...one of the most disgraceful trips ever taken by a U.S. president anywhere in the world. This is an Obama presidential trip whose ultimate results will be giving away legitimacy and money to an anti-American regime that actively undermines our national security interests and acts against our values every single day. President Obama’s entourage will sleep in hotels controlled by the Cuban military that were confiscated by the regime and are among the $7 billion in unpaid legal claims owed to American property owners. When President Obama arrives in Havana on Sunday, he will visit Catholic Church sights and church officials, yet he’s inexplicably expected to skip St. Rita Church, where the Ladies In White have shed much blood and received routine beatings at the hands of the Castro regime for simply demanding their loved ones’ freedom.

...On Monday, President Obama will showcase the most damaging part of his Cuba policy: the lawless, one-sided weakening of the LIBERTAD Act that seeks to enrich American businesses and the Castro regime’s police state, without any concessions from Cuba that lead to greater freedoms for the Cuban people.

...“On Tuesday, the irony should not be lost on anyone that President Obama will be giving a speech at yet another property confiscated by the Castro regime. President Obama’s decision to end his trip at a baseball game is a fitting symbol of this trip and of his entire Cuba policy: he thinks this is a game. What’s not a game is the repression, intimidation and exploitation Cuba’s baseball players face and that has led to many of them defecting the first chance they get, and that would probably lead some of them, should they be able to meet and speak freely with President Obama, to ask him directly for asylum and a flight to freedom on Air Force One.

“As a whole, President Obama’s trip to Cuba and his policy of one-sided concessions to this regime are as naïve as his world view and as misguided as his foreign policy affecting other parts of the world. America should be standing with our allies and democracy advocates around the world, not embracing, enriching and empowering our enemies, the way President Obama is about to do in Cuba.”

Read more here.

I miss you already, Marco.

Street fight

Steve Deace is all in for Ted Cruz. I just caught a few minutes of Deace's radio show tonight. He is beginning to wonder if Ted Cruz understands the "game" that he is in with Donald Trump. Deace says it is a street fight, and "you can't have a debate at a street fight." He wants Cruz to throw down.

What do you think? Marco Rubio tried it, and in short time he was out of the street fight. Although, I found myself liking Rubio much better these last two or three weeks.

Trump is used to street fights. He doesn't win them all, but if his opponent does not understand how to win a street fight, he can't win a street fight.

Who will get media coverage this week?

Nate Silver writes at Five Thirty Eight,

But in terms of the media coverage of the next few weeks of the campaign, notching a win somewhere could be important for Cruz. My guess is that Kasich will get a lot of attention for having won Ohio, despite it being his home state and his not really having a path to the nomination before the convention. Trump got big wins in Florida and Illinois, meanwhile, while Rubio will make headlines by having dropped out. That’s not a lot of news cycles left for Cruz, who will need to make up some ground to claim winner-take-all Arizona next week.

Anti-Trump divided vote gives Trump Illinois

Harry Enten writes at

Five Thirty Eight

,

ABC News and NBC News have called Illinois for Trump. Call it a case of the anti-Trump vote being divided. Trump leads with 40 percent, while Cruz is at 26 percent, Kasich is at 22 percent and Rubio is at 10 percent.

Play-fascisim versus real fascism

Dennis Prager writes in Town Hall that lefts may just inadvertently give us President Trump!

...the truth is that the left-wing attack on Trump's Chicago rally had little, if anything, to do with what the incendiary comments Donald Trump has made about attacking protestors at his events. Leftist mobs attack and shut down events with which they differ as a matter of course. They do so regularly on American college campuses, where conservative speakers -- on the rare occasion they are invited -- are routinely shouted down by left-wing students (and sometimes faculty) or simply disinvited as a result of leftist pressure on the college administration.

...Yet the mainstream media simply ignore this left-wing thuggery -- while reporting that the shutting down of a pro-Trump rally is all Trump's fault for his comments encouraging roughing up protestors at his events.

That the left shuts down people with whom it differs is a rule in every leftist society. The left -- not classical liberals, I hasten to note -- is totalitarian by nature. In the 20th century, the century of totalitarianism, virtually every totalitarian regime in the world was a leftist regime. And the contemporary American university -- run entirely by the left -- is becoming a totalitarian state, where only left-wing ideas are tolerated.

Tens of millions of Americans look at what the left is doing to universities, and what it has done to the news and entertainment media, and see its contempt for the First Amendment's protection of free speech. They see Donald Trump attacked by this left, and immediately assume that only Trump will take on, in the title words of Jonah Goldberg's modern classic, "Liberal Fascism."

And if these millions had any doubt that Trump alone will confront left-wing fascism, Trump's opponents seemed to provide proof. Like the mainstream media, the three remaining Republican candidates for president -- John Kasich, the most and Marco Rubio the least -- blamed Trump for the left-wing hooligans more than they blamed the left. It is possible that in doing so Senators Cruz and Rubio and Governor Kasich effectively ended their campaigns and ensured the nomination of Trump as the Republican candidate for president. The combination of left-wing violence and the use of it by the other GOP candidates to wound Trump rather than label the left as the mortal threat to liberty that it is may clinch Trump's nomination.

And if the left continues to violently disrupt Trump rallies, they -- along with the total absence of condemnation by the Democratic Party and its presidential candidate -- may well ensure that Donald Trump is elected president. Between the play-Fascism of Trump and the real Fascism of the left, most Americans will know which one to fear most.

Dream scenario

Here's Ace on Rubio and Cruz doubleteaming on Trump last night:

What Mario just did to the Donald is illegal in 28 states. I have to give it to the Robot: When Robots go berserk, they can do a tremendous amount of damage, and Rubio the Robot just went into Terminator mode.

He had people laughing at Trump. That's a tough thing. You can absorb a criticism, but you can't easily absorb being made a figure of amusement. Especially someone like Trump, who's entire strategy is to project invincibility and inevitability to disguise the fact he really has no idea what he's talking about.

Puncture that, and you've mortally wounded him.

Of course, it's pretty obvious now that Cruz and Rubio agreed beforehand to double-team Trump. They have him in the Malachi Crunch, and Trump is no Fonzie. He's trying to escape the crunch, but he's getting smashed to hell.

The Champ had a glass jaw all along. The key, it turns out, was that you just couldn't have one guy punching at it. Trump's quick-answer-bluster was enough of a defense against one punch.

But not against two.

...My dream scenario is this: Trump finally starts going after Rubio, on immigration and amnesty, badly hurts Rubio (as Cruz was badly hurt the last couple of weeks), but Trump himself is also hurt by this performance, and My Man Ted sneaks up in the polls.

Read more here.

Pushing a narrative

Ace writes,

Narrative for breakfast, Narrative for lunch, Narrative for dinner.

The Establishment and the Rubio camp-- but I repeat myself -- have cooked up a narrative that Cruz just "lies" all the time.

This, despite the fact that Rubio and his supporters dissemble every time Rubio's actual position and statements on amnesty, DACA, and border security come up.

But that's the Narrative. It's a tissue of lies, but so are most Narratives.

Cruz's campaign spokesman fed into this Narrative by stupidly pushing out a dumb claim that Rubio "demeaned" the Bible.

This based on misheard audio in a video.

...But Cruz communications director Rick Tyler did push this absurd claim out, thereby fragging his own candidate, and so you're damn right Cruz should ask him to resign. Indeed, I think he should be fired, assuming he was the one who made the call.

Political people should just generally stop making preposterous claims, I guess except for Trump, for whom preposterous, risible gibberish is the stock in trade.

But if we're going to talk about dissembling candidates and campaigns, yes, let's check the record on Rubio's preposterous claims about his past positions on amnesty and DACA.

The clock is ticking...

Will Mitt Romney hurry on over to Nevada to endorse Marco Rubio tomorrow now that Jeb Bush is out of the race?


CHARLES DHARAPAK/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Scott Conroy breaks the story at Huffington Puffington. The Nevada Republican caucuses are Tuesday in Nevada, which were won by Romney in both 2008 and 2012. Conroy writes,

Romney’s backing will provide Rubio with the highest-profile endorsement of the 2016 race and is the clearest signal yet that the party’s establishment is ready to coalesce around the Florida senator as its last best chance to defeat GOP front-runner Donald Trump.

Read more here.

Single-issue constituencies

Mona Charen writes at Ricochet,

Religious observance, like marriage, is a good predictor of political preference. Adults with no religion lean Democrat by 36 points. Young, white evangelical Protestants lean strongly Republican. The more religious identification sags, the fewer young Republicans there are.

Similarly, married adults tend to vote Republican, while singles, especially single women, lean heavily Democrat. Fifty-three percent of married women voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 (there is also overlap between religious identification and the tendency to wed). But marriage is declining. Whereas 65 percent of American adults were married in 1980, just 51 percent of adults were married in 2012. Among the 20 to 34 year old cohort, 57 percent are never marrieds.

Republicans who imagine that these changes don’t affect voting might want to look at party ID. Between 1992 and 2014, the number of adults who said they were Democrats fell from 33 to 32 percent. The number who called themselves independent rose from 36 to 39 percent. And the number who identified as Republicans dropped from 28 to 23.

The 2016 election is an opportunity for many voters who would naturally be inclined to vote Democrat due to their age, ethnicity, region, lack of religious commitment, and marital status to consider a Republican. It’s always difficult for the same party to hold the White House for three consecutive terms, and Hillary Clinton is widely mistrusted.

But the Republican Party, judging by the polls so far, seems more determined to “send a message” than to choose a candidate who can win. Marco Rubio is practically conjured from central casting to win this election. He carries a big swing state, he has a great immigrant story, he is deeply knowledgeable on the issues, he’s a superb debater, a Tea Party favorite, and (with the exception of immigration – if you accept the premise that building a wall and deporting illegals is the conservative position), he is a firm conservative. Unlike Trump or Cruz, he articulates conservative ideas without needlessly antagonizing or frightening independents.

Portions of the Republican base are ferociously determined to punish Rubio for his immigration stance (though it differed only slightly from Senator Cruz’s – as for Trump’s views, name the day). But the new Republican establishments: talk radio, Twitter, Heritage Action, are single-issue constituencies – and they seem to be in the driver’s seat.

Read more here.

Are we anger addicts?

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal is a writer I usually love to read. This week, though, he gets sarcastic, and belittles the Republican base:

Dear fellow conservatives:

Let us now pledge to elect Hillary Clinton as the 45th president of the United States.

Let’s skip the petty dramas of primaries and caucuses, the debate histrionics, the sour spectacle of the convention in Cleveland. Let’s fast-forward past that sinking October feeling when we belatedly realize we’re going to lose—and lose badly.

Let’s move straight to that first Tuesday in November, when we grimly pull the lever for the candidate who has passed all the Conservative Purity Tests (CPTs), meaning we’ve upheld the honor of our politically hopeless cause. Let’s stop pretending we want to be governed by someone we agree with much of the time, when we can have the easy and total satisfaction of a president we can loathe and revile all the time.

Let’s do this because it’s what we want. Maybe secretly, maybe unconsciously, but desperately. We want four—and probably eight—more years of cable-news neuralgia. We want to drive ourselves to work as Mark Levin or Laura Ingraham scratch our ideological itches until they bleed a little. We want the refiner’s fire that is our righteous indignation at a country we claim no longer to recognize—ruled by impostors and overrun by foreigners.

...Now the party of Lincoln has as its front-runner an insult machine whose political business is to tell Mexicans, Muslims, physically impaired journalists, astute Jewish negotiators and others who cross his sullen gaze that he has no use for them or their political correctness.

...And while we’re building a wall around our party, let’s also take the opportunity to throw out a few impostors in our midst. Like that hack, George Will. Or John Boehner, Eric Cantor, Mitch McConnell, Jeb Bush and every other Republican In Name Only. Or Marco Rubio, who didn’t chicken out on immigration reform quite as quickly or convincingly as Ted Cruz did. Or the Republican “Establishment” and “elite”—like the editorial board of this newspaper — who want to flood the country with cheap foreign labor so they can enrich their Wall Street pals.

...What’s a lost election cycle or two when the soul of movement conservatism is at stake?

As for what the soul of that movement is supposed to be, we can figure that out later. Donald Trump is a candidate of impulses, not ideas. (If you can hire people to write your books you can also hire them to do your thinking.) This doesn’t seem to have perturbed his supporters in the slightest. Mr. Cruz is happy to be on any side of an issue so long as he can paint himself as a “real Republican”—the implicit goal here being the automatic excommunication of anyone who disagrees with him. Naturally, he’s rising.

What we won’t accept, however, is a standard-bearer whose convictions or personality might conceivably appeal to those wavering voters who usually decide elections in this country. Of all the reasons to dislike Mr. Rubio, surely the greatest is that he’s the only Republican who consistently outpolls Mrs. Clinton in general election matchups.

Didn’t we already mention that our subliminal goal is to lose this election?

Of course we’ll tell ourselves that the polls don’t matter, that a congenital liar like Mrs. Clinton can’t possibly win, that all we have to do is turn out the hidden Republican base that supposedly didn’t show up to the polls for Mitt Romney. We’ll convince ourselves, too, that those voting blocs we’ve spent the past decade alienating—not just Hispanics, or Asian-Americans or gays and lesbians, but also moderates turned off by loudmouth vulgarians, oleaginous debate champs or ostentatiously pious Christians—don’t matter either.

Deep down, though, we know the political math doesn’t add up for us. We just don’t care. Because we’ve turned even the appearance of moderation, or the amenability to compromise, into a four-letter word. Oh, did we mention House Speaker Paul Ryan is another sell-out?

Years ago, the late columnist Michael Kelly wrote of American liberalism that it was “an ideology of self-styled saints, a philosophy of determined perversity. Its animating impulse is to marginalize itself and then enjoy its own company. And to make itself as unattractive to as many people as possible: If it were a person, it would pierce its tongue.”

On current trend, this will soon better describe American conservatism, which is going the way of the Democratic Party circa 1972. So let’s skip the non-suspense of next year’s campaign cycle, gird ourselves for a McGovern-style debacle, and elect Hillary Rodham Clinton now.

Merry Christmas!

Update: Mark Levin reacted angrily to Stephens' post about anger addicts:

Funny. Last week I posted that Fox's attacks on conservatives are going to elect Hillary. Next thing you know, a WSJ editorial page staffer, paid by Murdoch who also owns Fox, accuses me of the same thing. Bret Stephens is a mouthpiece for amnesty, like the rest of the amnesty ideologues at the WSJ. And he's a jester for big government Republicans and corporatists. He's part of the same lame crowd that trashed the Tea Party over the debt. That would be the Tea Party that delivered the GOP both houses of Congress and record state legislative and gubernatorial victories. Conversely, Stephens and his ilk backed Boehner to the end as they back McConnell and Ryan now. Even Ryan is criticizing the Boehner budget process. And the WSJ helped deliver us two terms of Obama with their early and constant propaganda for McCain and Romney.

Meanwhile, the GOP and Stephens celebrate one of the lousiest budgets in modern times and, of course, attack conservative critics as purest hellbent on electing Hillary. Does it get any dumber than these guys? Delusional. Unprincipled. Cronies. I'll have more to say upon my return to the airwaves early next year.

h/t Paul Bedard
Read more here.

Hugging Rubio to death

Allahpundit reports at Hot Air that Senator Chuck Schumer is showing how to stab a guy with ostensibly friendly words of praise. "Month after month..." "His fingerprints are all over the bill..."

Read more here.

Is Rubio a puppet for Silicon Valley?

One of the low moments in Wednesday debate for Donald Trump was when he was questioned about his relationship with Mark Zuckerberg and the issue of immigration. Trump granted Breitbart News an interview to discuss his immigration views, and to try to recover from his debate gaffe.

BNN: Hundreds of workers at Disney were forced to train their foreign replacements. But while Florida Senator Nelson rallied to their cause, Senator Rubio did not. While Nelson has called for an investigation, Rubio has not. While Nelson has called to reduce H-1Bs, Rubio has demanded more. Senator Rubio has been the top promoter in Congress for expanding the H-1B program even though millions American tech workers are out of jobs. Rubio’s new bill triples H-1Bs and has zero protections for American workers. Advocates for tech workers said Rubio’s bill would “destroy” the U.S. tech workforce. Rubio’s bill is even endorsed by the CEO of Disney. What do you think of Rubio’s bill?

DT: It’s a disaster. It would allow any company in America to replace any worker with cheaper foreign labor. It legalizes job theft. It gives companies the legal right to pass over Americans, displace Americans, or directly replace Americans for good-paying middle class jobs. More than 80 percent of these H-1Bs are paid less than the average wage. Senator Rubio works for the lobbyists, not for Americans. That is why he is receiving more money from Silicon Valley than any other candidate in this race. He is their puppet.

BNN: During the debate, Senator Rubio listed several protections he thought American workers should receive. But the New York Times said Rubio’s bill would does the opposite of what he said, and does not contain a single one of the protections he mentioned. Instead, his bill simply triples the number of H-1B visas given as low-wage substitutes to corporations. Does Rubio have a problem with the truth?

DT: Yes, Senator Rubio is incapable of telling the truth. He should be disqualified for dishonesty alone.

BNN: Do you agree with Senator Rubio that there is a shortage of talented Americans?

DT: Rubio is dead wrong. America produces the best and brightest in the world. It’s time to stand up for own students–many of whom are racked with terrible, terrible debt and facing a disastrous job market. We are graduating two times more students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) than find jobs in those fields every year. We have a surplus of talented Americans and we need them to get jobs first.

BNN: What should happen with the Florida workers who have been replaced?

DT: I am calling TODAY on Disney to hire back every one of the workers they replaced, and I am calling on Rubio to immediately rescind his sponsorship of the I-Squared bill and apologize to every Floridian for endorsing it. I am further calling on Rubio to return the money he has received from Silicon Valley CEOs and to donate the money to a charity helping unemployed Americans whose jobs Rubio has helped to destroy.

Are we now down to four?

Roger L. Simon writes at PJ Media,

The big story — the A-story — on Wednesday night — the actual full blown, clumsily-executed seppuku — was CNBC. The network will never seem the same. Their moderators — Becky Quick, John Harwood, and Carl Quintanilla — were so obviously biased you would have thought it was a parody, if you hadn’t known it was real, a kind of black comic nightmare out of a leftwing theatre of the absurd. Ted Cruz superbly caught the temper of the evening when he called them out, specifying how they had attempted to poleax each of the candidates one-by-one. This turned the already alienated audience completely against the moderators with the candidates abandoning their competition and joining forces as well against the moderators in a red versus blue color war. It was fascinating to watch and quite amusing.

But more than that, the debate revealed something I had thought about before, but never seen so clearly — how bias can affect the brain, almost make it dysfunctional. I assume John Howard is an intelligent man. He writes for the New York Times. (Make of that what you will, but I did write for that newspaper myself once upon a time, so mind your manners.) Nevertheless, Harwood did something extraordinary. He lied about Rubio’s tax plan in the exact same way not once but twice — once at the debate and once about two weeks before the debate. What made it extraordinary was that Harwood had apologized for that same lie the first time on Twitter on October 14 and then lied again Wednesday night as if he didn’t remember his own apology and correction. (The Federalist has the full story with the tweet – Surprise! John Harwood Lied About Rubio’s Tax Plan…)

Cognitive disorder? Quite possibly. I submit that media bias (and the moral narcissism from which it stems) can be so strong that it is akin to a brain disease. It literally renders you stupid or makes you disbelieve what you know to be true. Bias has hallucinogenic properties. Who knew?

...It’s hard to see how Jeb Bush recovers from his self-inflected wound at Wednesday’s CNBC Republican debate in Boulder when he went after Marco Rubio just after the young senator had hit one out of the park. Rubio was defending himself from an editorial in the Sun Sentinel calling on Marco to stop “ripping off” the public and quit the Senate because of his poor attendance record. Rubio responded that John Kerry and Barack Obama had been even more truant from the Senate while running for president and the paper had not only ignored that, but given these men their endorsement. It was an example of liberal media bias at its most obvious. The crowd erupted in its first ovation of the night. Advantage Rubio.

Clueless, Bush jumped in as if nothing had happened, taking the paper’s side and schoolmarmishly doubling down on Marco. He got his head handed to him by Rubio (politely) and the audience. It was so mishandled on Bush’s part, such an obvious case of self-sabotage, it left you wondering whether Jeb really wants to be president. You didn’t have to be a Freudian to think his unconscious had gotten the better of him — well, unconscious mixed with envy mixed with entitlement mixed with who knows. During the break you heard what Ross Perot famously called ”the giant sucking sound,” but this time it was of pledged Bush supporters calling their bundlers.

But that’s just, as we say in H-wood, the B-story. Everyone already knows Jeb Bush’s financial backers have been nervous for some time about his campaign. I think it is effectively over after Wednesday night, as are those of almost all the other candidates but four — Trump, Carson, Rubio and Cruz.

Read more here.

The amnesty gang

Have you been hearing about "the gang of eight?" Here is a little history about their activities.

Bush, Romney and Rubio criticize Trump

Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney and Marco Rubio have now all spoken out against comments made by Donald Trump about criminal illegal immigrants. Ted Cruz was supportive of Trump. Read more here.