Selling his political soul for a seat on the Trump Train

Jonah Goldberg writes in National Review,

‘Let no one be mistaken: Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded,” former Texas governor Rick Perry declared ten months ago. Trump’s candidacy, Perry added, represents “a toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican party to perdition if pursued.”

Lest you’re thrown off by the alliteration, “perdition” means eternal damnation in Hell.

Perry has since had an epiphany, selling his political soul for a seat on the Trump Train. He even says he’s open to being Trump’s running mate, which would make him a co-pilot (or co-conductor?) leading us down the tracks to Hell. (“Can I blow the whistle, Mr. Trump?”)

Perry is far from alone in his hypocrisy. With the exception of Senator Ben Sasse, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and a handful of others (including, I hope, Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio), the Republican aristocracy is for the most part bending its knee to the new king, proving that much of the “establishment” is exactly as craven as Trump always claimed.

Those who do not yield can hear the executioner’s axe sharpening against the wheel. Trump has dispatched one of his top minions, Sarah Palin, to punish Ryan for his effrontery in second-guessing Trump’s commitment to conservatism. She said she’ll work to defeat Ryan’s reelection bid this fall. “His political career is over,” Palin said on CNN. She’ll probably fail, but the message is clear. The litmus test in the new Republican party boils down to loyalty, not to a principle or conviction, but to a man: Trump.

The GOP platform can now be written on a bumper sticker: “In Trump We Trust.”

...As for his adamantine principles, there is only one: The limelight belongs to him alone. (That is why Trump is reportedly considering speaking every night at the GOP convention.)

...Conservatives who still have the courage of Perry’s former convictions have no role in the party so long as Trump’s running it. He has admitted that he doesn’t want or need Reaganite conservatives; he’d rather rely on the rank-and-file supporters of a socialist instead.

For conservatives, party unity is another way of saying “suicide pact.” I will never vote for Hillary Clinton because she believes things I can never support. I will never vote for Donald Trump because he’s a bullying fool who believes in nothing but himself. The conservative movement can wait out a Clinton presidency intact. But Perry was right. A Trump presidency is a ride straight to perdition, with a capital H.

Read more here.

Hoping Benghazi will just go away

Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review,

In a terse submission to the federal district court in Washington, D.C., the Obama Justice Department has announced that it will not seek the death penalty against Ahmed Abu Khatallah. He is the only terrorist charged in the Benghazi massacre of September 11, 2012, in which U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other American officials were killed in an attack carried out by dozens of jihadists.

...On the face of it, Khatallah is a textbook case for capital punishment. The Benghazi indictment alleges that he willfully and maliciously caused the death of Americans in a terrorist attack that he helped coordinate. The facts of his offense check several of the “aggravating factor” boxes in federal death-penalty law. There is, moreover, a national-security component, inherent not only in the Benghazi atrocity itself but in the perverse incentive that the government’s failure to seek an available death sentence would create for others considering mass-murder attacks against American installations overseas.

In addition, terrorists imprisoned by the United States after being prosecuted for successful attacks against America become iconic figures in the jihad. As long as they live, they can and do inspire more attacks, recruitment, and fundraising.

Thus, legal and national-security considerations militate in favor of seeking capital punishment. Remember, Mr. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979. An attack on our ambassador and on sovereign American facilities abroad is an act of war against the United States. Since national security is the core responsibility of the federal government, there can be no federal offense more worthy of capital treatment.

...if the government had sought the death penalty, Khatallah would have been entitled, during the sentencing phase, to attempt to show that he was just a minor player; that there are other, more culpable actors who are not even being prosecuted, much less subjected to the death penalty; that the government’s own missteps — its own support of jihadists — played a role.

...a death-penalty prosecution would call into question many aspects of Benghazi that the Obama administration has long sought to keep under wraps: how Obama-administration policy empowered the jihadists who carried out the attack; how those jihadists were linked to al-Qaeda, which the president was then ludicrously claiming to have defeated; how those jihadists attacked Western targets in Benghazi several times before September 11, 2012; how, despite that fact, the State Department led by Hillary Clinton reduced security at its Benghazi facility; how there has been no explanation why the State Department had a facility in Benghazi, one of the most dangerous places in the world for Americans; how there were American military assets in place that might have been able to rescue at least some of those killed and wounded in Benghazi, yet they were not used.

...al-Qaeda was very much on the offensive. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail falsely assuring Americans that the terror network had been “decimated.” Obama’s decision to back Libyan “rebels” against Moammar Qaddafi had resulted in the arming of anti-American jihadists and the teetering of Libya on the brink of collapse. Obama, however, was on the campaign trail pronouncing his Libya policy a boon for regional stability.

...when the September 11 siege occurred, the Obama administration knew from the first moments that it was a terrorist attack of the sort that any competent assessment of the red-blinking intelligence would have predicted. Obama and Hillary Clinton, however, colluded in an elaborate scheme to convince the public that the atrocity was not an al-Qaeda-connected terrorist attack but a spontaneous protest run amok, provoked by an anti-Muslim video.

This last point is worth emphasizing. We now know, thanks to the belated disclosure of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, that even as she and the administration were fraudulently telling the American people that the attack was a video-inspired protest that spun out of control, she was frankly discussing with foreign government officials (and her daughter, Chelsea) that it was a terrorist attack involving al-Qaeda affiliated jihadists.

...By opting not to seek the death penalty, the Justice Department is in a stronger position to argue to the court that the only narrow issue for the jury is whether Khatallah’s conduct makes him guilty of the specific charges in the indictment. Prosecutors have a far better chance of preventing the trial from becoming a free-wheeling inquiry into what happened in Benghazi, and why. And now, if the administration could just get Khatallah to plead guilty to a count or two, maybe it could make the whole thing go away.

Read more here.

Trump is good on the Second Amendment

Here is one position taken by Donald Trump that makes sense to me.

Donald J. Trump on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms:

The Second Amendment to our Constitution is clear. The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period.

The Second Amendment guarantees a fundamental right that belongs to all law-abiding Americans. The Constitution doesn’t create that right – it ensures that the government can’t take it away. Our Founding Fathers knew, and our Supreme Court has upheld, that the Second Amendment’s purpose is to guarantee our right to defend ourselves and our families. This is about self-defense, plain and simple.

It’s been said that the Second Amendment is America’s first freedom. That’s because the Right to Keep and Bear Arms protects all our other rights. We are the only country in the world that has a Second Amendment. Protecting that freedom is imperative. Here’s how we will do that:

Enforce The Laws On The Books

We need to get serious about prosecuting violent criminals. The Obama administration’s record on that is abysmal. Violent crime in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and many others is out of control. Drug dealers and gang members are given a slap on the wrist and turned loose on the street. This needs to stop.

Several years ago there was a tremendous program in Richmond, Virginia called Project Exile. It said that if a violent felon uses a gun to commit a crime, you will be prosecuted in federal court and go to prison for five years – no parole or early release. Obama’s former Attorney General, Eric Holder, called that a “cookie cutter” program. That’s ridiculous. I call that program a success. Murders committed with guns in Richmond decreased by over 60% when Project Exile was in place – in the first two years of the program alone, 350 armed felons were taken off the street.

Why does that matter to law-abiding gun owners? Because they’re the ones who anti-gun politicians and the media blame when criminals misuse guns. We need to bring back and expand programs like Project Exile and get gang members and drug dealers off the street. When we do, crime will go down and our cities and communities will be safer places to live.

Here’s another important way to fight crime – empower law-abiding gun owners to defend themselves. Law enforcement is great, they do a tremendous job, but they can’t be everywhere all of the time. Our personal protection is ultimately up to us. That’s why I’m a gun owner, that’s why I have a concealed carry permit, and that’s why tens of millions of Americans have concealed carry permits as well. It’s just common sense. To make America great again, we’re going to go after criminals and put the law back on the side of the law-abiding.

Fix Our Broken Mental Health System

Let’s be clear about this. Our mental health system is broken. It needs to be fixed. Too many politicians have ignored this problem for too long.

All of the tragic mass murders that occurred in the past several years have something in common – there were red flags that were ignored. We can’t allow that to continue. We need to expand treatment programs, because most people with mental health problems aren’t violent, they just need help. But for those who are violent, a danger to themselves or others, we need to get them off the street before they can terrorize our communities. This is just common sense.

And why does this matter to law-abiding gun owners? Once again, because they get blamed by anti-gun politicians, gun control groups and the media for the acts of deranged madmen. When one of these tragedies occurs, we can count on two things: one, that opponents of gun rights will immediately exploit it to push their political agenda; and two, that none of their so-called “solutions” would have prevented the tragedy in the first place. They’ve even admitted it.

We need real solutions to address real problems. Not grandstanding or political agendas.

Defend The Rights of Law-Abiding Gun Owners

GUN AND MAGAZINE BANS. Gun and magazine bans are a total failure. That’s been proven every time it’s been tried. Opponents of gun rights try to come up with scary sounding phrases like “assault weapons”, “military-style weapons” and “high capacity magazines” to confuse people. What they’re really talking about are popular semi-automatic rifles and standard magazines that are owned by tens of millions of Americans. Law-abiding people should be allowed to own the firearm of their choice. The government has no business dictating what types of firearms good, honest people are allowed to own.

BACKGROUND CHECKS. There has been a national background check system in place since 1998. Every time a person buys a gun from a federally licensed gun dealer – which is the overwhelming majority of all gun purchases – they go through a federal background check. Study after study has shown that very few criminals are stupid enough to try and pass a background check – they get their guns from friends/family members or by stealing them. So the overwhelming majority of people who go through background checks are law-abiding gun owners. When the system was created, gun owners were promised that it would be instant, accurate and fair. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case today. Too many states are failing to put criminal and mental health records into the system – and it should go without saying that a system’s only going to be as effective as the records that are put into it. What we need to do is fix the system we have and make it work as intended. What we don’t need to do is expand a broken system.

NATIONAL RIGHT TO CARRY. The right of self-defense doesn’t stop at the end of your driveway. That’s why I have a concealed carry permit and why tens of millions of Americans do too. That permit should be valid in all 50 states. A driver’s license works in every state, so it’s common sense that a concealed carry permit should work in every state. If we can do that for driving – which is a privilege, not a right – then surely we can do that for concealed carry, which is a right, not a privilege.

MILITARY BASES AND RECRUITING CENTERS. Banning our military from carrying firearms on bases and at recruiting centers is ridiculous. We train our military how to safely and responsibly use firearms, but our current policies leave them defenseless. To make America great again, we need a strong military. To have a strong military, we need to allow them to defend themselves.

How many planets are there?

This artist's concept depicts select planetary discoveries made to date by NASA's Kepler space telescope.
Credits: NASA/W. Stenzel
I remember being taught in school that there are nine planets. What's the total now, more than 2000? Read more here.

A victory lap

Ben Rhodes is President Barack Obama's deputy national security adviser for strategic communications. So why did Ben Rhodes attack allies in the media who helped the White House push through Obama's signature foreign policy accomplishment? Lee Smith writes at The Weekly Standard

For the same reason that anonymous White House officials called the prime minister of Israel "chickenshit." For the same reason that Obama called American partners "free riders." For the same reason Obama shamed the leaders of two of America's closest allies, France and the United Kingdom, in public. Because that's what this president and this White House is about, humiliating allies and friends. Why would it treat its own Iran Deal echo chamber any better?

...Lots of people don't know why the administration let Rhodes pull back the curtain. Because the White House won the Iran Deal is why. They wanted to take a victory lap.

Read more here.

Which bully do you want to buckle up to?

Ace of Spades considers Ben Sasse's idea that we need a third party to run against Trump and Hillary.

Sasse's point is that much of America didn't choose these two, and that part of America is not duty-bound to follow the folly of others. If there are still things permitted to be done -- like run a third party challenge -- why should they not be done?

The usual math on this is that a third party run would be disastrous and would deliver the election to Hillary. Many #NeverTrumpers, and I'm edging into that group myself, find this a weak objection in this case: Trump himself will inevitably be demolished, so there's no threat of "throwing the election." It already has been thrown.

Second, Trump represents an very stupid and dangerous form of authoritarianism. Everything with him is force and bullying. Riots at the convention if he doesn't get his way. His online trolls actively threatening people's physical safety.

I don't get it -- I'm supposed to be outraged by Lois Lerner, yet amused by this? Why? Because this will only be visited upon my enemies? First, that's not principled, that's just stupid tribalism,, and second, it's not true -- the gentle persuasions of authoritarian You Will Be Made to Buckle are already being visited on us, and by "us," I mean non-Democrats.

I personally didn't oppose the thuggishness of the left just to be bullied by a new thuggishness of the alt-right.

Some alt-righter (I imagine) drifted in to the comments -- a n00b -- to say "Wow this site is really spineless."

No, this site is showing spine -- by resisting your attempts to bend spines for Trump.

Apparently "courage" is now defined, alt-rightishly, as buckling to the right set of pressures and bullyings.

So the fire of my usual resistance to a third party is well snuffed by the two facts of our situation: 1, Trump's going to lose anyway, so we might as well have a 3rd party that can at least represent a moral... well, not victory, for it will not be victorious, but let's say a moral route of resistance.

And 2, My primary politics is anti-authoritarian. I don't like the left because they wish to be meddlesome in private economic affairs, dictatorial as to what you can do with your wealth (you can only spend you money on government-approved activities that support social justice) and increasingly fascist when it comes to speech and belief.

Many of Trump's supporters are authoritarians -- not all, mind you, some just want the wall, or to "teach DC a lesson" -- but many are thrilled by the Second Look at Authoritarianism Trump promises. The left has similarly become thrilled and dizzy at the idea of just forcing people to knuckle under.

About seven months ago I noticed, and said on the blog: Trump never talks about limiting the power of government, or freedom. Never. He's Government Action Man-- the government can do and do and do for "the people."

That's not some minor ideological complaint. That's not some esoteric bit of political dogma.

Authoritarianism is just a version of collectivism. Or, more accurately: It is the version of collectivism, for every authoritarian needs be a collectivist, and every collectivist needs be an authoritarian.

I'm not saying I definitely couldn't support Trump -- it would depend on which of these tinpot authoritarians wished to control me less. They both want to control me, but we'll see who promises to control me less.

Trump could earn my vote, by finally understanding other people's aspirations to not have a second boss in their lives called The US Government.

But so far he has proven highly resistant to learning of any kind.

Until he does, count me in with Ben Sasse as being interested in a third party, one that will leave me the hell alone.

Or at least that would leave me the hell alone more than the other alternatives.

Read more here.

IRS defends giving refunds to illegal immigrants

Greta Van Sustern has the story in this videotaped interview with Congressman Jim Jordan.

The worst of both sexes?

Mona Charen writes at National Review,

The greatest failures of the past generation concern men, women, and sex — and there could not be two more awful representatives of what has gone wrong than Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Clinton uses feminism the way she has used people, ideas, and institutions throughout her long career — merely as instruments of her own advancement. When it’s convenient, she is the feminist role model. When her husband is being accused (accurately) of sexually harassing a cavalcade of women, she becomes the Wife Enforcer. The women who accused Bill Clinton were “trash,” she assured the world. Monica Lewinsky was a “narcissistic loony tune.”

...There are fewer and fewer ways for men in our society to gain ratification for their masculinity. Football may be the last socially acceptable expression of manliness. The busy natural energy of boys is labeled pathological. The role of father and husband is disparaged, while single motherhood is everywhere praised as noble and heroic. To be a white male is to be scolded at every turn for your “privilege” — even if you come from a broken home of high-school dropouts. Colleges presume young men guilty of rape even when both parties are drunk and irresponsible. Our schools and workplaces continue to provide material and psychological support to girls and women — even as women outpace men in education and income growth. The Democrats’ persistent recycling of the fraudulent “79” cents myth about women’s earnings angers everyone: Those who are deceived by it and those who know it’s a lie.

Trump brings his own peculiar baggage to this cultural confusion and appeals to men in the worst ways. He is not manly — he is a caricature of a manly man. He makes physical threats to protesters at his rallies — “I wish someone would punch him in the face” — from behind the cordon of Secret Service officers. He avoided the draft and disparages the heroism of those who served and suffered. Despite his many wives and concubines, he finds femininity itself confusing and threatening. He is made uncomfortable by the idea of menstruation — something most boys get over about the age of 14. He found Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate “disgusting.” He isn’t able to say accurately what Supreme Court justices do (he thinks they “sign bills”), but he is ready and eager to pass judgment on the appearance of women — especially accomplished women such as Carly Fiorina and Heidi Cruz — who come within his orbit. Like misogynists everywhere, Trump is ready to defame the women he’s mistreated. Hillary Clinton called Monica Lewinsky a liar. Trump did the same to Michelle Fields.

Trump is no more a manly man than Clinton is a feminist model. Both use the gender wars to advance their own bottomless personal vanity and ambition. Plague. Houses.

Read more here.

Presentism

Tom Krannawitter writes,

Those who don't know the past don't know how much human thinking changed to get the ideas and thoughts we have today.

That makes it difficult for those who don't know the past to imagine any ideas and thoughts other than what is popular today -- which tempts them to think that the ideas and thoughts popular today are all there are, all that's possible.
They have difficulty imagining that ideas and thoughts might change in the future, because they've never known any ideas other than what is thought now.
* * * * *
Not knowing the past thereby fuels a faith that whatever the thought-leaders of today say is true, must be true.
Not knowing the past inclines one to have faith that science truly can be and is settled.

Those who don't the past are likely to be followers. And they don't have many criteria to judge who they faithfully follow, or why, because they don't know how they came to where they are.

Not knowing the past is the beginning of Presentism, the belief that what is popular in the present is synonymous with truth, perhaps the fastest growing religion in the United States today.

A convenient half-truth

Tom Krannawitter writes,

This half-truth has been explained, refuted, debunked more times than anyone can count. Yet it keeps reappearing in our politics, used by everyone who wants to use government power to control others.

Yes, ALL currently employed women, combined, on average, earn less than ALL currently employed men, combined and averaged.

Because many women drop out of the professional workplace for some spot of time, either to raise children or for other reasons. And because many women choose lower-paying career paths than men.

If we compare men and women who work professionally continuously for similar amounts of time, in the same industry, with the same training and qualifications -- men and women who seek the same kinds of opportunities, take the same kinds of risks, aggressively pursue the same kinds of promotions and professional advances -- the significant earning difference evaporates.

Compare women in any industry who work 25 years without a break in their career to men in the same industry who work 25 years without a break in their career, and we find they earn about the same.

In some industries, women with similar professional career records OUT-earn the men in their industry.

But compare women who work professionally for five years after college, then quit their jobs and stay home to raise children for the next twenty years or so, then go back to work in the professional realm in their forties, and GUESS WHAT? -- those women will be earning significantly LESS than the men who started working in that same industry straight out of college and never stopped working, earning raises and promotions and advances along the way.
Not only is this NOT a problem, it's not even interesting! It is shameful that some still use this simple fact of life to promote more government control over us. Shameful. Embarrassingly so. Yet, apparently, it helps Mrs. Clinton raise more money. What a convenient half-truth.

Moral convictions

My fourteen-year-old son remarked yesterday that he believes it is just a matter of time before maybe one-half of young adults will regard themselves as bi-sexual.

What is the essence of Christian sexual morality? Sally Thomas wrote at First Things,

...consider the responses of students in an evangelical college here, in a class taught by one of my husband’s friends, who decided to poll the students on their views of Christian sexual morality. He was taken aback, to put it mildly, to discover that the sole moral conviction held by an overwhelming majority was that it was wrong for Christians to judge other people’s behaviors.

...Some people worry about the state of the schools; I tend to worry about the state of the American neighborhood. In an age of working parents and before-and-after-care, most middle-class neighborhoods effectively become ghost towns between 6:30 in the morning and 6:30 at night. Our societal habits suggest that, when we say community , we mean something we leave home to find: at work, at the coffeehouse, at the gym, at school. Home is where we go when we’re sick of everyone else. We go inside, we shut the door, we turn on the television. Walk down a typical residential street at twilight and you’ll see cars in the driveways, but the houses look deserted: curtains drawn, lights off, the blue glow of the television the only evidence of habitation.

Sally writes about homeschooling here.

Scientists find flash of light at the moment of conception

Sarah Knapton writes at The Telegraph,

Human life begins in bright flash of light as a sperm meets an egg, scientists have shown for the first time, after capturing the astonishing ‘fireworks’ on film.

An explosion of tiny sparks erupts from the egg at the exact moment of conception.

Scientists had seen the phenomenon occur in other animals but it is the first time is has been also shown to happen in humans.

Not only is it an incredible spectacle, highlighting the very moment that a new life begins, the size of the flash can be used to determine the quality of the fertilised egg.

Researchers from Northwestern University, in Chicago, noticed that some of the eggs burn brighter than others, showing that they are more likely to produce a healthy baby.

Not only is it an incredible spectacle, highlighting the very moment that a new life begins, the size of the flash can be used to determine the quality of the fertilised egg.

Researchers from Northwestern University, in Chicago, noticed that some of the eggs burn brighter than others, showing that they are more likely to produce a healthy baby.



The bright flash occurs because when sperm enters an egg it leads to a surge of calcium which triggers the release of zinc from the egg. As the zinc shoots out, it binds to small molecules which emit a fluorescence which can be picked up by camera microscopes.

Read more here.

h/t Webutante

You're next, suburbs!

Paul Sperry writes in the New York Post that Obama's last act is to force suburbs to be less white and less wealthy.

Hillary’s rumored running mate, Housing Secretary Julian Castro, is cooking up a scheme to reallocate funding for Section 8 housing to punish suburbs for being too white and too wealthy.

The scheme involves super-sizing vouchers to help urban poor afford higher rents in pricey areas, such as Westchester County, while assigning them government real estate agents called “mobility counselors” to secure housing in the exurbs.

Castro plans to launch the Section 8 reboot this fall, even though a similar program tested a few years ago in Dallas has been blamed for shifting violent crime to affluent neighborhoods.

photo of Dallas from Getty Images

...Anticipating NIMBY resistance, Castro last month threatened to sue suburban landlords for discrimination if they refuse even Section 8 tenants with criminal records. And last year, he implemented a powerful new regulation — “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” — that pressures all suburban counties taking federal grant money to change local zoning laws to build more low-income housing (landlords of such properties are required to accept Section 8 vouchers).

Castro is expected to finalize the new regulation, known as “Small-Area Fair Market Rents” (SAFMR), this October, in the last days of the Obama presidency.

Read more here.

Obama lowered the bar, and Trump skipped over it

Victor Davis Hanson writes at PJ Media,

It is now old wisdom that Barack Obama created Trump — as in the idea of a national pushback to Obama’s out-of-the-mainstream agendas and the unconstitutional way in which he pursued them. Forgotten is the insulation that Obama has also provided for the excesses of Trump as a candidate and, especially, if he were to be president.

Last week, in sober and judicious tones Obama all but warned Americans that they cannot seriously support Trump, who, he implied, is little more than a reality-TV conman. But such admonitions come from a president whose chief foreign policy advisor, a failed fiction writer and D.C. insider, just bragged how he deceived the media and Washington’s insider world by feeding amateurish journalists misleading talking points. Is it serious or in the spirit of reality TV for a president to invite to the White House a rapper whose court-ordered ankle monitor goes off in a presidential ceremony, or to give an exclusive interview with YouTube personality GloZell, noted for her selfies of eating breakfast cereal floating about her in a bathtub? Obama has lectured the media that they have to vent Trump, this from a candidate who never released his medical or college records, whose speech in praise of Rashid Khalidi was suppressed by the media, and whose entire memoir was only belatedly found out to be impressionistic fiction. Obama lowered the bar and Trump skipped over it.

Can Trump mislead much more than did Obama, who assured Americans that they would never lose their doctor or health plan but rather save money and have better care, and that pulling peacekeepers from Iraq would ensure a stable and self-reliant country? Obama, remember, also bragged abroad that he had all but closed Guantanamo within a year and would stop the Bush habit of piling up more debt? After Ben Rhodes and Jonathan Gruber, what exactly are the presidential standards on veracity that we must hold Trump to?

Can Trump act any less constitutionally than has Obama? Will he scan existing law, and order his attorney general to enforce some statutes but ignore others? Will he boast that “I won” and thus has a pen and a phone to sign treaties with foreign countries without Senate ratification? Will Trump, in Obama fashion, threaten to cut off federal funds to cities that believe in biologically identified male/female restrooms, while encouraging other cities to defy federal immigration law? Sanctuary cities in California, but not in North Carolina? Are we back to 1860 and state nullification of federal law if and when the president wishes it?

How can the media fault Trump as uniquely dense for lacking even basic familiarity with geography or foreign affairs, when they shrugged after the current president of the United States variously believed there are 57 states, there is an Austrian-speaking Austria, and the Maldives islands are the Falklands? When a president declares that Hawaii is in Asia, certainly the media cannot be surprised that Trump is not embarrassed about being clueless about the nuclear triad.

Trump is certainly vicious, but after 2009 viciousness is no longer a mortal sin in presidential politics. If it were, Obama would have been through for his thuggish language, after advising supporters to “get in their faces,” take “a gun to a knife fight” and “punish our enemies.” Trump often ridicules the helpless. But he if stoops to make fun of the Special Olympics or jokes about vaporizing people with Predator drones, what will the New York Times or NPR do? Obama ridiculed the wealthy, who did not build their own businesses, or did not know when to stop profiting, or were clueless about the point at which they had made enough money or needed their money spread around. But then again, Obama made fun of the lower middle classes as well, who clung to their religion and guns and were stereotyped as xenophobes and nativists.

Trump can be polarizing on matters of race, but here again by what standard—when the president and his team have established new lows of racial discourse? Does Trump comment on ongoing criminal cases by suggesting one of the involved might look like one of his possible white offspring? Did Trump smear illegal aliens further by suggesting that they were “typical Mexican persons”? Would he appoint an attorney general who might refer to whites as “my people” and accuse the country of being a “nation of cowards”? Would Trump stoop to wink and nod about shared white racial solidarity with a redneck comedian who shouted out to a President Trump, “Yo, Donny, you did it, my cracker, you did it”? After Obama, there are no rules about racial discourse—and no media sensitivity to racially coarse and offensive language.

Trump, as the media has shown, is certainly a crude narcissist. But will he learn to boast as a smooth egoist that he can lower the seas and cool the planet? Does he insist that he is a better political handler and speechwriter than his handlers and speechwriters? Does he claim that he will be the fourth best president in U.S. history—albeit in an outer-borough accent rather than in an Ivy League mellifluous patois? “I,”“me” “mine” and “my” are now the normal baggage of a presidential speech.

As for the supposed fanatical Trumpsters, have they gone berserk with wild praise of Trump in near divine terms? Has a Laura Ingraham or Charles Hurt, or any other columnist, historian, talk show host, or journalist said that Trump’s neat pant crease presages that he will be a great president or that Trump makes his leg tingle, or confessed that Trump is a god, or assured that Trump would be the smartest president in the history of the office? So far, I have not read any such embarrassment in the Washington Times or American Conservative. After Obama, biased deification of a presidential candidate is old hat.

Trump certainly has wacky ideas. But will he promise to ensure that the coal industry goes out of business, or electric rates will skyrocket, or will his energy czar hope that our gas prices reach European levels? Does he plan to double the national debt in eight years or dismantle the existing health care system? Will Trump praise and subsidize a failing coal company as iconic of the country’s future in the manner that Obama coronated the soon-to-be-bankrupt Solyndra? Will he brag that setting and then ignoring red lines for Syria were among his greatest foreign policy moments?

The point is not to whitewash Trump’s crudity and outlandishness, but to explain why it so far has not eliminated him as a candidate. Obama’s outright destruction of presidential protocols created candidate Trump. The media, which in Faustian fashion mortgaged its soul to empower Obama, has now lost all credibility as a legitimate critic and arbiter of the dangers of narcissism, half-educated pop knowledge, polarizing politics, and demonization of one’s critics.

...There may be reasons to vote against Trump, but at least spare us the outrage that he is somehow uniquely demagogic, crude, or ill-informed in a manner that we have not seen over the last eight years from Trump’s greatest enabler.

Read more here.

The man holding the match

Ben Shapiro writes in The Daily Wire,

...Trump’s “something new” is something quite old, and quite un-American. If conservatives want a future, they must stand against him and his corrupt, bankrupt philosophy.

2016 could have been a time to reap the harvest of conservatism. Instead, Trump burned down the field.

It's time to plant anew. We should do so with alacrity rather than embracing the man holding the match.

Read more here.

The better of two bad choices

Bobby Jindal writes today in the Wall Street Journal that he is voting Trump.

I was one of the earliest and loudest critics of Mr. Trump. I mocked his appearance, demeanor, ideology and ego in the strongest language I have ever used to publicly criticize anyone in politics. I worked harder than most, with little apparent effect, to stop his ascendancy. I have not experienced a sudden epiphany and am not here to detail an evolution in my perspective.

I believe this presidential election cycle favors Republicans, due more to President Obama’s shortcomings than to any of our virtues or cleverness. I also believe that Donald Trump will have the hardest time of any of the Republican candidates in winning. He has stubbornly stuck to the same outlandish behavior and tactics that have served him so well to date. Mr. Trump continues to have the last laugh at the expense of his critics and competitors, myself included.

I think electing Donald Trump would be the second-worst thing we could do this November, better only than electing Hillary Clinton to serve as the third term for the Obama administration’s radical policies. I am not pretending that Mr. Trump has suddenly become a conservative champion or even a reliable Republican: He is completely unpredictable. The problem is that Hillary is predictably liberal.

There will be none of her husband’s triangulation. Republicans are fooling themselves if they think this President Clinton would sign into law policies like Nafta, the crime bill, welfare reform, or the deficit reduction packages that marked Bill’s tenure. While Bill felt compelled to confront Sister Souljah—and less directly Jesse Jackson—to appeal to moderate voters, Hillary is more responsive to pressure from Black Lives Matter and the far left. I have no idea what Mr. Trump might do, while Mrs. Clinton is predictable. Both are scary, the former less so.

The next president will make a critical appointment to the Supreme Court, who will cast the tiebreaking vote in important cases that will set precedents for years to come. Issues like the sanctity of innocent human life, constitutional protections for religious liberty and Second Amendment rights, and limits on the unelected federal bureaucracy hang in the balance.

In my lifetime, no Democrat in the White House has ever appointed a Supreme Court justice who surprised the nation by becoming more conservative, while the opposite certainly cannot be said for Republican appointments. Mr. Trump might not support a constitutionalist conservative focused on original intent and limits on the court’s powers. He may be more likely to appoint Judge Judy. However, there is only a chance that a President Trump would nominate a bad justice, while Mrs. Clinton certainly would.

...If elected, Mrs. Clinton will continue hindering affordable domestic energy, increasing dependence on government and the growth of welfare programs, growing the nation’s debt and weakening America abroad. She will more firmly establish a culture of victimhood and identity politics, further dividing Americans rather than uniting us, and will continue promoting redistribution and government interference rather than growth and freedom.

I do not pretend Donald Trump is the Reaganesque leader we so desperately need, but he is certainly the better of two bad choices. Hardly an inspiring slogan, I know. It would be better to vote for a candidate rather than simply against one. If current trends hold, I will be among the many complaining this fall about my choices.

I understand why so many of my Republican friends are in denial, while many of my Democratic friends gleefully anticipate and applaud defections. The media is poised to reward those “courageous” Republicans ready to do the “right thing” and endorse Hillary. Count me out.

Read more here.

A neutral pipeline for news? Hardly.

Illustration: Jim Cooke

Well, what do you know? Michael Nunez reports at Gizmodo,

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

...it is in stark contrast to the company’s claims that the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

...Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

...the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

...the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as a neutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Ten reasons why this Town Hall writer has switched to Trump

At Town Hall, Coloradan John Andrews tries to persuade us to jump on the Trump train. Of the ten points he tries to put forward, numbers 7 and 9 are most persuasive to me, but I'm still not on the train. How about you?

Buckle up, America. It’s one of those times that try men’s souls. In a few months we have to choose between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as chief executive of our government and leader of the free world. A third choice is less likely than a comet hitting you. We have those two options, period. So what to do?

As a Reagan-Goldwater-Buckley conservative, active in presidential races since 1960, I started out preferring Gov. Scott Walker or Sen. Ted Cruz. I know both men, and either would make an outstanding president. As for Donald Trump, he initially struck me as unsuited for the White House. I vowed on national radio last year that I couldn't ever vote for him. Case closed, or so it then seemed.

Today, however, with the GOP primary electorate having supported Trump in record numbers, making his nomination all but certain, and as we now face the stark choice between him and Hillary — essentially a fifth term for the Clinton-Obama leftists — I have switched. Without hesitation, in fact with enthusiasm, I am on board with Trump for President. Here are ten reasons why:

1. Party Priorities: Whereas Democrats in their heart care more about perfecting America, Republicans care more about protecting America. At this hour of peril, both domestically and internationally, it’s protecting us that matters most. That warrants voting a straight GOP ticket.

2. Congress: For this reason, the U.S. House and Senate must remain in Republican hands. Rallying to Trump as presidential standard-bearer won’t ensure they will. But breaking ranks and starting to eat our own can only ensure they will not. It’s hang together or hang separately.

3. Supreme Court: One of those “nine old men” (and women) that FDR talked about has already passed from the scene, and others will before 2020. Under Mrs. Clinton we’d see the likes of Justice Barack Obama and Justice Eric Holder donning robes to radicalize the court. Under Trump, no way.

4. America First: Donald Trump has dared speak the long-avoided truth that our country never wins any more. His inclination toward less going abroad in search of monsters to destroy, in the John Quincy Adams mode, points to a better chance of peace through strength in the Reagan mode.

5. Counter Jihad: After the mad evasions of Bush and Obama under threat from a global movement of jihad and sharia bent on destroying the United States, it’s time for a president who sees the danger and takes the obvious sane precaution: a temporary halt in Muslim immigration.

6. Immigration: A nation unwilling to control its borders can no longer claim nationhood at all. Here too, decades of spineless bipartisan inaction cry out for a president who will finally reassert our sovereignty and common culture by building the Wall and stemming the silent invasion.

7. Identity Politics: Whether it’s “I’m Hispanic so I deserve amnesty” or “I’m female so I deserve the White House,” governance by grievance is killing our free society. Impolite it may be, but Trump’s defiance of the soft Marxism known as political correctness and group rights is a lifeline for liberty.

8. Energy: How crazy, how cruel, to brainwash the world into believing that reduced energy use will lead to higher living standards. It’s a hoax on the poor especially. But Clinton and the party of the left want to do just that, in thrall to their green religion. Trump and the party of the right aren’t having it.

9. Corruption: No racket, no syndicate in American history has ever been so brazen in its pay-to-play methods or so flush with its hundreds of millions in shakedown money as the Clinton Inc. machine built by Hillary and Bill since 2001. Her email security hemophilia is one side effect. Just say no!

10. Government isn’t God: We’re electing a constitutional president, not a divine king. The job description is limited, and moral paragon’s not on it. Americans can do without pious goodness or magic powers in our politicians. But would you rather have coffee with him or her? Trump any day.

Did I go through some denial? Sure. Wept in my Starbucks, bummed that all my top choices won’t be on the 2016 ballot. Then I got a grip and switched to Trump. When the only menu is either socialist malnutrition or populist porridge, “Let them eat cake” isn’t an adult solution. Reflect that President Hillary would be as imperious and out of touch as the late queen who coined that bon mot, and I bet you’ll switch too.

The Real Problem

No wonder Americans feel less safe — they are.

Lee Smith has written an important article in The Weekly Standard:

So that's it. For the last seven years the American public has been living through a postmodern narrative crafted by an extremely gifted and unspeakably cynical political operative whose job is to wage digital information campaigns designed to dismantle a several-decade old security architecture while lying about the nature of the Iranian regime. No wonder Americans feel less safe — they are.

Ace of Spades also devotes much space to this scandal today and adds,

So we have lies, schemes to deceive, willing stooges in the media eager to transmit those lies (as they have no expertise of their own to offer, except what the failed novelist Ben Rhodes puts in their heads), and all over an inarguably major subject -- foreign policy, and specifically, the nukes Obama gave Iran.

Where.

The Fuck.

Is the Media?

As usual -- covering up for their dirty-dealing colleagues.

Read more here.

Manipulating the press

David Samuels writes in the New York Times about Ben Rhodes, The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama's Foreign Policy Guru.

He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press.

Ace of Spades goes back and forth between the Times article and his own thoughts.

Ace:

The left's favorite headline opening? Actually, America Retreating from the World Isn't a Sign of Weakness...

Samuels:

This is something different from old-fashioned spin... Now the most effectively weaponized 140-character idea or quote will almost always carry the day, and it is very difficult for even good reporters to necessarily know where the spin is coming from or why.

Ace:

The decayed Imperial swells of the capital probably began bragging about how easily they manipulated the dummies of Rome, too -- right before the barbarians tore the place apart.

Five points being used to persuade conservatives to vote for Trump

At The Daily Wire Ben Shapiro lists five common arguments people use to persuade others to vote for Trump. They are:

1. But Hillary's Worse!, 2. But Trump Will Change! 3. But Trump Will Work With Republicans! 4. But The Supreme Court! and 5. But Sitting Out Is Moral Cowardice!

Go here to read Shapiro's thoughts on each of these points.

He doesn't like Trump, but did he support Cruz?

United States Senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse, writes an open letter to Majority America. He goes to his local Walmart at Fremont, Nebraska and engages in unsolicited conversations with four people: a retired union Democrat meat packer, a young evangelical mom, a middle aged Republican male, and a Trump supporter. Then he returns home, goes down to the Platte River, and relfects on these and other conversations, and a myriad of emails telling him to support Trump because the only choice we have is Hillary or Trump. His open letter asks WHY is Hillary v. Trump our only choice?

1. Washington isn’t fooling anyone -- Neither political party works. They bicker like children about tiny things, and yet they can’t even identify the biggest issues we face. They’re like a couple arguing about what color to paint the living room, and meanwhile, their house is on fire. They resort to character attacks as step one because they think voters are too dumb for a real debate. They very often prioritize the agendas of lobbyists (for whom many of them will eventually work) over the urgent needs of Main Street America. I signed up for the Party of Abraham Lincoln -- and I will work to reform and restore the GOP -- but let’s tell the plain truth that right now both parties lack vision.

2.As a result, normal Americans don’t like either party. If you ask Americans if they identify as Democrat or Republican, almost half of the nation interrupts to say: “Neither.”

3.Young people despise the two parties even more than the general electorate. And why shouldn’t they? The main thing that unites most Democrats is being anti-Republican; the main thing that unites most Republicans is being anti-Democrat. No one knows what either party is for -- but almost everyone knows neither party has any solutions for our problems. “Unproductive” doesn’t begin to summarize how messed up this is.

4.Our problems are huge right now, but one of the most obvious is that we’ve not passed along the meaning of America to the next generation. If we don’t get them to re-engage -- thinking about how we defend a free society in the face of global jihadis, or how we balance our budgets after baby boomers have dishonestly over-promised for decades, or how we protect First Amendment values in the face of the safe-space movement – then all will indeed have been lost. One of the bright spots with the rising generation, though, is that they really would like to rethink the often knee-jerk partisanship of their parents and grandparents. We should encourage this rethinking.

5.These two national political parties are enough of a mess that I believe they will come apart. It might not happen fully in 2016 – and I’ll continue fighting to revive the GOP with ideas -- but when people’s needs aren’t being met, they ultimately find other solutions.

6.In the history of polling, we’ve basically never had a candidate viewed negatively by half of the electorate. This year, we have two. In fact, we now have the two most unpopular candidates ever – Hillary by a little, and Trump by miles (including now 3 out of 4 women – who vote more and influence more votes than men). There are dumpster fires in my town more popular than these two “leaders.”

7.With Clinton and Trump, the fix is in. Heads, they win; tails, you lose. Why are we confined to these two terrible options? This is America. If both choices stink, we reject them and go bigger. That’s what we do.

8.Remember: our Founders didn’t want entrenched political parties. So why should we accept this terrible choice?

9.So...let’s have a thought experiment for a few weeks: Why shouldn’t America draft an honest leader who will focus on 70% solutions for the next four years? You know...an adult?
(Two notes for reporters:
**Such a leader should be able to campaign 24/7 for the next six months. Therefore he/she likely can’t be an engaged parent with little kids.
**Although I’m one of the most conservative members of the Senate, I'm not interested in an ideological purity test, because even a genuine consensus candidate would almost certainly be more conservative than either of the two dishonest liberals now leading the two national parties.)

10.Imagine if we had a candidate:
...who hadn’t spent his/her life in politics either buying politicians or being bought
…who didn’t want to stitch together a coalition based on anger but wanted to take a whole nation forward
…who pledged to serve for only one term, as a care-taker problem-solver for this messy moment
…who knew that Washington isn’t competent to micromanage the lives of free people, but instead wanted to SERVE by focusing on 3 or 4 big national problems,
such as:
A. A national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad;
B. Honest budgeting/entitlement reform so that we stop stealing from future generations;
C. Empowering states and local governments to improve K-12 education, and letting Washington figure out how to update federal programs to adjust to now needing lifelong learners in an age where folks are obviously not going to work at a single job for a lifetime anymore; and
D. Retiring career politicians by ending all the incumbency protections, special rules, and revolving door opportunities for folks who should be public “servants,” not masters.
This really shouldn’t be that hard.
The oath I took is to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. In brief, that means I’m for limited government.
And there is no reason to believe that either of these two national frontrunners believe in limiting anything about DC’s power.
I believe that most Americans can still be for limited government again -- if they were given a winsome candidate who wanted Washington to focus on a small number of really important, urgent things -- in a way that tried to bring people together instead of driving us apart.
I think there is room – an appetite – for such a candidate.
What am I missing?
More importantly, what are the people at the Fremont Wal-Mart missing?
Because I don’t think they are wrong. They deserve better. They deserve a Congress that tackles the biggest policy problems facing the nation. And they deserve a president who knows that his or her job is not to “reign,” but to serve as commander-in-chief and to “faithfully execute” the laws – not to claim imperial powers to rewrite them with his pen and phone.
The sun is mostly set on the Platte River -- and the kids need baths. So g’night.
Ben

Read more here.

One question: I don't recall this Senator supporting Ted Cruz, do you?

Are you "over it"?

C. Edmund Wright at The American Thinker is not "over it".

But no, I am not over the Constitution, although apparently many are, because they have thrown in with a man who never mentions it and often runs afoul of it. Donald Trump was born "over" the Constitution and still is. He's never been concerned with it. New York values don’t intersect with the Constitution. No, I am not over the idea of liberty, and thus I'm not quite over the fact that the Republican nominee is a man totally unfamiliar with this concept and a man who never ever looks at increased liberty as the answer for out of control government. Ever.

Please, show me where I am wrong on that.

Nor am I over the related concept of limited government. Nothing, not a single syllable out of Donald Trump's mouth, has uttered a whiff of anything to do with limited government. When Carrier and Ford are forced offshore because of out of control government, what does Donald do? He threatens even more government power as the solution. It never even dawns on the Orange One or his followers to perhaps remove some of the government obstacles in the way of Carrier, Ford and other once free companies. What an idea!

When crony capitalism is destroying our free market, does Donald want to stop government from picking winners and losers? NO! He doubles down on ethanol subsidies. He obfuscates the issue of eminent domain. And he rails against trade, not even considering the obvious conclusion that the big stick of tariffs is centralized planning and government picking winners and losers on steroids.

...the notion that Trump is this great wrecking ball to the establishment would be laughable if it weren't so serious.

Trump is the establishment. His big check to party boss and establishment poster child Mitch McConnell has barely even cleared yet -- a donation he followed up by insulting on Twitter those stupid Kentuckians who were willing to forgo McConnell's crony gravy train to his home state in favor of a principled man like Matt Bevin. Trump brags he has been giving to Republicans lately, but these donations are to establishment Republicans running against outsiders!

So no, I'm not over this kind of House of Cards attitude, and if you are, then you were never really in the fight to begin with. You've been conned.

Alexander Hamilton said “if we must have an enemy at the head of Government, let it be one whom we can oppose, and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.” He was right. Many of you have not heeded that lesson. I have, and I am proudly not over the nomination of big government New York liberal Donald J Trump.

Read more here.

"The choice is two reprehensible, corrupt, and immoral demagogues"

David Harsanyi writes in The Federalist,

...it was the constitutional idealism of the Tea Party that held back Democrats and establishment GOPers from working together to expand the reach of government. A turn to white identity politics and anger is a turn away from that idealism.

...when the choice is two reprehensible, corrupt, and immoral demagogues, you can always pick the ethical way out and say none of the above. The republic will survive an election cycle.

The Republican Party is a different story, however. For those who are idealists about the Constitution–and there are probably far fewer than some of us like to imagine–there are a number of reasons to sabotage The Party of Trump, even if it ends with a Hillary presidency. The first is salvaging some of your own dignity and principles. But there are other, long-term political advantages to beating back an authoritarian populist who peddles conspiracy theories and big-government schemes and doesn’t have a freshman-level comprehension about the basic workings of American governance.

Read more here.

Could both of our political parties lose their rationale for existence?

Jonah Goldberg writes in USA Today,

...“During Obama's eight years in office, the Democrats have lost more House, Senate, state legislative and governors seats than under any other president,” writes NPR’s Mara Liasson. She adds, "Democrats currently hold fewer elected offices nationwide than at any time since the 1920s."

There are many reasons for this, but one is particularly relevant. Obama lost the traditional heart of the Democratic Party: the white working class. In fairness, the Democrats’ trouble with blue-collar whites pre-dates Obama, but Obama accelerated the process. In 2012, he lost this group by 26 points (62%-36%). Trump is winning with those votes.

... Moderate and centrist Democrats have been effectively purged from the party. Hillary Clinton might look like a somewhat conservative Democrat to some, but that’s mostly because she has been hounded for months by an avowed democratic socialist.

If the GOP actually did implode tomorrow, it would spell both a short-term bonanza for the Democrats and a long-term existential crisis. People forget that beyond policy and philosophy, what sustains both parties is a kind of team sport. The Democrats run on being anti-GOP, and the Republicans campaign on being anti-Democrat. Take away one dance partner, and the one left on the floor has no idea what to do next.

And dancing with Donald Trump won't be anything like dancing with Ted Cruz, who has suspended his campaign. The Democrats have no idea how to tango with a new GOP that also promises to maintain or expand entitlement programs, raise trade barriers and tax the wealthy. If the Republican Party under Trump joins Democrats in wanting to fund Planned Parenthood, how will we tell who is leading and who is following?

Whether Trump destroys or merely transforms the GOP, the net effect could be the same: Both parties could lose their reliable rationale for existence. That kind of creative destruction could leave a vacuum for one or more new parties to fill the void.

True story

How likely was it?

Jim Geraghty asks at National Review,

...How likely was it that Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Ann Coulter, Sarah Palin, and Matt Drudge would not merely tolerate Trump’s previous liberal views but excuse them or conclude they were irrelevant to the 2016 discussion? How likely was it that they would look at Trump’s recent declarations that he’s pro-life and pro-gun and they would believe him?

The most common defense of Trump was that he, alone, was willing to take on the issue of illegal immigration in the bold, direct way so many Americans wanted. But these same people who declared the supremacy of this issue never seemed bothered by Trump’s past hiring of illegal immigrants, his extensive use of foreign workers, his flip-flopping on H-1B visas, and the “touchback amnesty” aspect of his plan, where illegal immigrants could apply for citizenship after they returned to their own country. If illegal immigration was such a defining issue, why did so few Trump voters want to explore these parts of Trump’s record and plan?

Read more here.

#Always Constitution

I heard a little bit of Glenn Beck's radio show tonight. Glenn was magnificent. He does not identify himself as #Never Trump. He identifies as #Always Constitution!

Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg writes at National Review,

Indeed, this is what unites Clintonism, Sandersism, and Trumpism: the idea that the government in Washington is too weak. Get the right person in the White House and they’ll fix all our problems by bringing the malefactors to heel. They also all believe, as Trump says about health care, that the federal government has to “take care of everybody.”

All of these ideas and impulses have popular support. Millennials, recent polls show, are remarkably cool to capitalism and dismayingly receptive to socialism. The demographic base of the GOP — older white voters — agrees with Trump that entitlements should be left alone.

...Although they have different goals, leading Republicans and Democrats alike want to go back to the way things were — and they think they can take us there from Washington. Trump says he’ll cut deals in the Oval Office that will make America great again; Clinton promises “universal” everything (education, retirement, health care) to restore the American Dream.

What would be so terrible about letting diverse communities decide how they want to live and spend their tax dollars? The culture wars would still rage, but at least the winners would have to look the losers in the eye. As it stands now, the federal government, mostly through unelected judges and bureaucrats, thinks it can best determine how more than 300 million people should live. The cure for powerlessness is power, not ceding even more of it to Washington. This is the only way to cut the Gordian knot choking our politics, and the best path forward for opponents of statism — in all parties.

Read more here.

An elected servant

This reminder from Tom Krannawitter might make you feel better:

I know it's hard for many people to shake old habits, but let's not forget: The President of the United States, whoever it might be at a given time, emphatically is NOT the "leader" of the world.

A world of billions of free wills and rational minds is far too complex to be "led" by anyone.
For that matter, the President of the United States, whoever it might be, is not even the "leader" of the United States. Or his/her political party.

Human beings, with their free wills and rational minds, have no need for a "leader." We are not sheep. Therefore we are in need of no shepherd.... much less a "führer," which is the German word for "leader."

A President, and all other politicians in the United States, are our agents. We are their principals. We decide who among them we offer permission to serve us. We decide what powers they have and don't have. We decide when it's time for them to leave the office to which we appointed them.

That's not a "leader." That's an elected servant. That's an agent. Let not forget that in these heady times.

Guilty of thinking while black

Ace of Spades reports that this man is guilty of thinking while black. Jason Riley wrote a book entitled Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Riley has been disinvited from giving a scheduled lecture at Virginia Tech. Ace writes,

The left no longer believes in free speech. They are having wild, passionate sex with censorship. The sex is hotter because it's illicit and forbidden.

Yet, the community still expects them to pretend they believe in fidelity to free speech. They might feel a certain obligation to pretend to still believe in it.

But they don't.

They're censors. What they believe in is #SafeSpaces and #RecoveryPlayDoh.

But they still have to put on this sugar-wouldn't-melt-in-our-mouths purity act about giving a shit about free speech.

Our universities are now the most hostile place in the country to actual thought.

What can't go on, will not.

Read more here and here.

Submit, or Resist? I'll take the latter!

Ace of Spades writes,

...But the fact that a clear social liberal, who practically no one believes is "pro-life" or even pro-gun, is the runaway favorite for the GOP nomination is a fact with major implications for the party going forward. If Trump's liberalism can be accepted, why can't the liberalism of Giuliani (or a Giuliani type to be named later) be accepted?

I had thought a whole bunch of things were non-negotiable demand points from an important part of the coalition.

Now it seems they either are plenty negotiable, or that part of the coalition isn't as important as I thought.

Ace links to this article by John Frum in the Atlantic:

...not perhaps since George McGovern in 1972 has a presumptive nominee so signally failed to carry the most committed members of his party with him.

...Donald Trump spoke to genuinely underrepresented people. Concerned that the GOP was captured by theocratic Southerners? Where Republicans are most secular and supposedly most moderate—the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—Trump has done best. By all indications, he’ll do crushingly well in California, too. It’s where Republicans are least moderate that he was most resisted: Texas, Utah, and wherever party activists gather in caucuses and conventions. That’s where an Independent candidacy would be most effectively aimed.

To what end? Those conservatives who like Trump least presumably dislike Hillary Clinton most. Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, why won’t they line up behind him? The larger part of their most trusted sources of information, talk radio and Fox News, are already cheerleading for him. Those who still balk will likely follow eventually: After all, the real enemy is “the Left” ... and Hillary Clinton leads “the Left,” as everyone knows.

Resistance now means something more—and more dangerous—than tapping out #NeverTrump on Twitter. It means working to defeat Trump even knowing that the almost certain beneficiary will be Hillary Clinton.

Oh, a certain kind of pundit may speculate that an Independent candidacy will electrify the country, winning enough of the vote to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, the Republican majority could—in some apocalyptic remake of Bush v. Gore—defy the popular vote and bestow the presidency this time on the third-place finisher. But this is fantasy, not politics. Theodore Roosevelt was the most successful vote-getter between the Civil War and World War I. Even he could not cast the 1912 election into the House, and if he cannot, some retired Marine general non-uniformed Americans have never heard of will surely not be able to. And if, against all odds, the scenario did unfold, the so-called winner would have no legitimacy.

What can more credibly be imagined, however, is an Independent candidacy that peels away 7-8 percent of the vote from a Trump-led GOP ticket, as John Anderson peeled votes away from Jimmy Carter in 1980, aiding Ronald Reagan.

2016 was the year that the great American center actually did rise up against the extremism of the corrupt two-party duopoly and actually did disrupt outdated ideologies.
Independent candidacies like Anderson’s allow political partisans to accept an outcome they cannot endorse. It’s the same thought process President Lincoln described in a favorite joke. A temperance preacher doing his rounds of the hot and dusty roads of Illinois stopped at the house of a more broadminded friend. The preacher asked for a glass of lemonade. The friend offered to put a shot of something stronger into the drink. The preacher refused on principle, but added: “If you could manage to put a drop in unbeknownst to me, I guess it wouldn’t hurt too much.” Lincoln told that joke to Generals Grant and Sherman in March 1865. When they asked whether they should try to catch Jefferson Davis when he fled Richmond. Lincoln added: “I’m bound to oppose the escape of Jeff Davis, but if you could let him slip away unbeknownst to me, I guess it wouldn’t hurt too much.” Some anti-Trump conservatives will feel bound to oppose the election of Hillary Clinton—but they guess it wouldn’t hurt too much compared to the Trump alternative.

So: If an Independent candidacy, what kind?

To date, talk of third-party candidates has been the sport of TV green rooms and conferences in pleasant locations. The old-line parties are too extreme, the complaint goes, and what’s needed is an Independent candidate to bust the corrupt duopoly, disrupt outdated ideologies, and at last represent the great American center. The people who advance this notion imagine the great American as looking very much like themselves: socially liberal, at ease with globalization, committed to sensible moderate problem-solving ideas like reducing entitlements, liberalizing immigration, keeping guns out of the wrong hands, and campaign-finance reforms. These are the people who talk about a Michael Bloomberg candidacy, as before that they talked about a Colin Powell candidacy.

The trouble is: 2016 was the year that the great American center actually did rise up against the extremism of the corrupt two-party duopoly and actually did disrupt outdated ideologies. A secular businessman who backed both parties, who denounced big money in politics, who promised to do deals and bring back jobs—isn’t that what you had in mind? No? And if, like J. Alfred Prufrock, you murmur, “That is not it at all, That is not what I meant, at all” then it’s time to reckon with the fact that the great American center wasn’t what you imagined it was at all either.

The people who like Michael Bloomberg are the least underrepresented people in American life. They don’t always get their way—who does?—but it’s not for lack of candidates eager to take their money and voice their views. Hillary Clinton is almost as perfect a candidate as the Davos consensus could wish, and to the extent she deviates from that consensus—favoring somewhat higher taxes, expressing rather more skepticism about the benignity of large financial institutions—it can be pardoned as a necessary concession to political reality.

Donald Trump spoke to genuinely underrepresented people. Concerned that the GOP was captured by theocratic Southerners? Where Republicans are most secular and supposedly most moderate—the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic—Trump has done best. By all indications, he’ll do crushingly well in California, too. It’s where Republicans are least moderate that he was most resisted: Texas, Utah, and wherever party activists gather in caucuses and conventions. That’s where an Independent candidacy would be most effectively aimed.

To what end? Those conservatives who like Trump least presumably dislike Hillary Clinton most. Now that he’s the presumptive nominee, why won’t they line up behind him? The larger part of their most trusted sources of information, talk radio and Fox News, are already cheerleading for him. Those who still balk will likely follow eventually: After all, the real enemy is “the Left” ... and Hillary Clinton leads “the Left,” as everyone knows.

Yet here’s something that traditional ideological conservatives will want to consider: Trump rose by shoving them aside. Trump’s rise exposed the weakness of social conservatives in particular. For a third of a century, social conservatives imposed a pro-life litmus test on Republican nominees for both presidency and vice presidency. They pulled the party into confrontations over sexuality and religion that many Republican elected leaders would have preferred to avoid. And then, abruptly, poof: The social conservative veto has vanished. New York values have prevailed, with a mighty assist from Jerry Falwell Jr. and other evangelical leaders. It seems unlikely the religious right will return in anything like its awesome previous form. A visibly conscientious objector to the culture wars easily defeated candidates who elevated the defunding of Planned Parenthood to the top of their agenda. That lesson, once demonstrated, won’t soon be forgotten.

Trump’s almost certain failure in November will likewise drag after him other conservative causes, notably immigration restriction. Republican elites will be quick to blame a Trump loss on his immigration message. The way would then be cleared for a President Clinton and Speaker Ryan to do the immigration deal that congressional leaders wanted to do with President Obama in 2013. And if, by some freak chance, Donald Trump were to win the presidency, immigration restrictionists would discover—as so many have discovered before them—how little a Donald Trump commitment is worth.

The big internal conservative struggle of 2017 will be the fight to write the narrative of how Trump emerged and why he lost. Anti-Trump conservatives will want to say that Trump lost because he wasn’t a “true conservative.” But 2016 to date is proposing that “true conservatives” constitute only a pitiful minority of the Republican Party, never mind the country as a whole. Why should any practical politician care about them ever again? To regain respect after their humiliation by Trump and the pro-Trump talkers on radio and TV, those who regard themselves as “true conservatives” will have to mount a show of force. “Maybe we can’t win on our own … but you can’t win without us.” And that means contributing—and being seen to contribute—to a Trump defeat.

...If the former Republican leadership had been more responsive to the needs of its voters and less swayed by the demands of its donors, the party might have changed from within. Now it’s the target of a hostile takeover that will stamp the TRUMP brand as indelibly upon it as it was once stamped upon the cityscape of Atlantic City. That branding ended in ruin for Atlantic City, and the GOP is unlikely to fare better.

Read more here.

Trump's "ridiculous, shameful, uncorroborated" claims about Cruz's father

CNN's Jake Tapper called out Donald Trump for making shameful accusations about Ted Cruz's father this morning. Tré Goins-Phillips writes at The Blaze,

At the start of his program Tuesday, CNN host Jake Tapper debunked Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s “ridiculous” and “shameful” claim that Ted Cruz’s father was connected to Lee Harvey Oswald, the assassin who killed President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Trump’s claim came during a phone-in interview on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends” Tuesday morning, when the billionaire businessman mentioned a recent tabloid story claiming the mystery man in a 1963 photo of Oswald and others is actually Cruz’s father, Rafael.

“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot. I mean, the whole thing is ridiculous,” Trump said. “What is this, right prior to his being shot, and nobody even brings it up. They don’t even talk about that. That was reported, and nobody talks about it.”

Tapper responded to the front-runner’s comments, telling viewers that the report Trump pushed is both “bizarre” and “completely uncorroborated.” The report was originally published by The National Enquirer, which has endorsed Trump and is published by a close friend of the New York real estate mogul.

It is important to note there is no evidence to suggest the photo does, in fact, feature Cruz’s father and, in addition, Cruz’s dad has said the man in the picture is not him.

“I cannot believe I need to say the following,” Tapper said, “but here it goes: There is no corroborated evidence that Ted Cruz’s father ever met Lee Harvey Oswald, or, for that matter, any other presidential assassin. We in the media don’t talk about it because there’s no evidence of it.”

He continued, “Any suggestion that Cruz’s father played a role in the Kennedy assassination is ridiculous and, frankly, shameful. Now, that’s not an anti-Trump position or a pro-Cruz position — it’s a pro-truth position.”

Watch Tapper here.

Some statistics

Harry Enten writes at Five Thirty Eight blog,

We often talk about the “base” of the Republican primary. I don’t know what the base exactly is, but I’ve often heard it described as the ideological base (i.e. very conservative voters). Well, that base is not in love with Trump. Even as he wins easily in Indiana, he’s losing self-described very conservative Republican primary voters 54 percent to 41 percent. Moreover, Trump is losing those who attend church at least once a week 63 percent to 28 percent. It’ll be interesting to see how these very conservative and very religious voters react to Trump’s nomination. Cruz himself gave them little direction in his speech this evening.

At the same blog Carl Bialik adds,

Trump’s challenge getting the support of women voters continued in Indiana. He won just 47 percent of women, according to the exit polls, compared to 59 percent of men. He still won the plurality of women voters, but his lead was just 6 percentage points over Cruz, compared to a lead of 26 percentage points over Cruz among men.

Ted Cruz is ending his campaign

At the Five Thirty Eight blog, there is this: Patrick Svitek ✔ ‎@PatrickSvitek
Just in: @TedCruz is ending his presidential campaign, campaign manager Jeff Roe tells me.

Update from the Five Thirty Eight's proprietor Nate Silver:

Cruz is about to drop out of the Republican race, according to an array of well-sourced reporters on Twitter. Mathematically, that makes sense. After Trump’s huge win in Indiana tonight, Cruz’s delegate math was extremely daunting. National polls have also turned further against him, and most Republicans don’t want a contested convention, which was Cruz’s only chance at winning. I’m going to hold off on further comment until I hear more of Cruz’s speech, and watch whether he hints about an endorsement of Trump, or stays neutral or negative toward Trump in an effort to position himself toward 2020.

Reality 2016

Here is something very depressing from Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post.

And here's the underlying math. If Clinton wins the 19 states (and D.C.) that every Democratic nominee has won from 1992 to 2012, she has 242 electoral votes. Add Florida's 29 and you get 271. Game over.

The Republican map — whether with Trump, Cruz or the ideal Republican nominee (Paul Ryan?) as the standard-bearer — is decidedly less friendly. There are 13 states that have gone for the GOP presidential nominee in each of the last six elections. But they only total 102 electorate votes. That means the eventual nominee has to find, at least, 168 more electoral votes to get to 270. Which is a hell of a lot harder than finding 28 electoral votes.

Owning the identities of American voters

Michael Cavna writes in the Washington Post about comic book writer Scott Adams. Adams is a certified hypnotist, and he believes he understands why Donald Trump is doing so well among GOP voters. He knows psychology, and he knows how to appeal to our emotions. Adams says we are primarily emotional beings, not rational beings. Here are some excerpts from the piece:

Writes Adams: “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.

“If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?”

Loving the life that you are actually living right now

At A Holy Experience guest blogger Alexandra Kuykendall writes,

He comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, He brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times --

so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us. ~ 2 Corinthians 1:3-4 (The Msg)

I ask myself: What can I do in this moment that will make a difference? What can I offer her with what I have right now?

My truest calling as a follower of Jesus is to love God fully and others fully. How much more to show that than giving them my full attention when present with them?

Because this is the place where our lives and God’s purposes intersect.

This one life we’ve been given. How will we use it today?

...It is here in our innermost places that we relish that we are made as image bearers and we live out of that creative genius. It is here that we make our mark on the world — one conversation, one help, one prayer at a time.

...So I look at them honestly, these parts that make up my every day, and I am grateful for the good. And I even work to be grateful for the difficult because I know, though painful, it can shape me for the better. So in all things I give thanks.

...So yes, I want to love these days, hours, minutes I have here and I want to draw closer to the One who breathes life in.

Because I want to know I’ve done my best with this one life when I pass from it to the next.

Read more here.

An anti-American agenda

Greg Campbell writes at Politistick that Obama's nominee for the Supreme Court vacancy Merrick

Garland has had the opportunity to support the Second Amendment on four important cases and in all four cases, he has opted to vote against affirming the right that protects all others.

Go here to read the details on all four cases.

How many pied pipers are we going to follow off to parts unknown?

Thomas Sowell asks,

...Does Trump have conservative principles? Does he have any principles at all, other than promoting Donald Trump? A smorgasbord of political positions — none of them indicating any serious thought about complicated issues — is not a principle. Nor is cheering for himself and boasting about all the great things he is going to do as President.

Haven't we seen this movie before? Wasn't Barack Obama going to heal the racial divide, end the partisan bickering in Washington, have the most transparent administration ever, lower the cost of health care and let you keep your own doctor?

...There was absolutely nothing in Obama's track record that should have led anyone to think that he would even try to do any of the things he declared he was going to do. But why spoil a great vision, and soaring rhetoric, by checking track records?

It was bad enough for the voters to make the colossal mistake of being taken in by appearances and ignoring realities. But to repeat that very same mistake with Trump, immediately after the Obama administration, is truly staggering. How many pied pipers are we going to follow off to parts unknown?

The many betrayals of the voters by the Republican establishment, year after year, no doubt set the stage. And Trump is a great theatrical performer on any stage.

But is that enough? It has been enough politically to put some of the great demagogues of history in power, especially after the existing establishment has discredited itself.

The discredited Weimar Republic in Germany was vulnerable to the verbal attacks by Adolf Hitler that brought him to power. Now we know, too late, that Hitler turned out to be a bigger catastrophe — for Germany and the world — than the Weimar Republic.

Donald Trump is not an evil man like Hitler. But his headstrong shallowness and fecklessness make him a dangerous man to have in the White House, with our enemies around the world on the march, and developing intercontinental missiles that can deliver nuclear bombs.

For conservatives especially, there is finally a real choice for a change — and a sharp contrast with Donald Trump. Senator Ted Cruz has a track record that leaves no doubt as to his adherence to conservative principles. And he is as thoroughly versed in the issues facing this country as anyone who has run for President since Ronald Reagan.

...The outcome of this Tuesday's primaries may tell us whether the voters want to vent their feelings or to choose someone to lead the nation in a time of dangers, at home and abroad.

Read more here

Perpetuating a lie

Kristina Cook writes about the lie promulgated by Donald Trump about people not getting to vote in Colorado:

Those of you perpetuating this lie that you did not get to vote at caucus do realize that you are advocating for mandatory voting, right? Because your same logic says that those who receive a ballot in the mail and don't take the effort to turn it in also did not get to vote.

You did have the opportunity to vote - I myself cast 4 votes during the caucus process: at my precinct, my house district at county, my CD and at state. Every registered Republican has the right to participate - choosing not to do so because it isn't convenient does not mean you didn't get to vote. You had an opportunity to vote, and chose not to.

For most of the history of our country, people had to travel to vote on polling day, some of them traveling many miles to do so. And they did, because it was important to them to be involved in the process. It's only in this age of mail in balloting, this effort to facilitate drive-by politics, that anyone could state with a straight face that they were denied the right to vote by having to inconvenience themselves for one night.