Today Show Trump town hall today: Trump said Kaitlin Jenner could use any bathroom he chooses at Trump Tower. Also says Republican platform should be changed on abortion to include exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

Men who claim to be women can now use the women's bathrooms at Target

Warner Todd Huston reports for Breitbart that

The Target department store chain has jumped into the transgender bathroom debate by declaring that men who claim to be women may use whatever bathroom or changing room they choose.

“Inclusivity is a core belief at Target,” a new company statement reads. “It’s something we celebrate. We stand for equality and equity, and strive to make our guests and team members feel accepted, respected and welcomed in our stores and workplaces every day.”

The retailer added, “We welcome transgender team members and guests to use the restroom or fitting room facility that corresponds with their gender identity.”

“Everyone deserves to feel like they belong,” the statement concluded. “You’ll always be accepted, respected and welcomed at Target.”

Read more here.

ESPN fires Curt Schilling for being politically incorrect

Richars Sandomir reports for the New York Times,

Curt Schilling, a former All-Star pitcher and one of the highest-profile baseball analysts on ESPN, was fired from the network Wednesday...

Schilling, who had worked for the network since 2010 and most recently offered analysis on “Monday Night Baseball,” was dismissed after sharing a Facebook post this week that appeared to respond to the North Carolina law that bars transgender people from using bathrooms and locker rooms that do not correspond with their birth genders.

The post showed an overweight man wearing a wig and women’s clothing with parts of the T-shirt cut out to expose his breasts. It says: “LET HIM IN! to the restroom with your daughter or else you’re a narrow-minded, judgmental, unloving racist bigot who needs to die.”

To that, Schilling added: “A man is a man no matter what they call themselves. I don’t care what they are, who they sleep with, men’s room was designed for the penis, women’s not so much. Now you need laws telling us differently? Pathetic.”

“ESPN is an inclusive company,” ESPN said in a statement. “Curt Schilling has been advised that his conduct was unacceptable and his employment with ESPN has been terminated.”

...Schilling, a six-time All-Star, was one of baseball’s top pitchers over a 20-year career and compiled a record of 216-146 while pitching for the Baltimore Orioles, the Houston Astros, the Philadelphia Phillies, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Boston Red Sox. He was even better in the postseason, with an 11-2 record and a 2.23 E.R.A.

He is perhaps best known for pitching in the 2004 American League Championship Series against the Yankees with his right sock bloody from a procedure that had been used to secure a dislocated tendon in his right ankle. Schilling pitched seven innings, and the Red Sox won, 4-2. Boston went on to win Game 7 and then the World Series.

Read more here.

Protecting citizens from the mob electorate that would crown an "elected king"

D.C. McAllister writes at Conservative Review,

...Trump and his surrogates say the popular vote is what should count and delegates should simply act like proxies. If that doesn’t happen, Trump argues, if the delegates decide for themselves--as most of them were elected to do--then the people are disenfranchised, and the voice of the people is silenced. What Trump and others who think this way are missing is that we live in a republic, but this doesn’t mean the voice of the people is not heard or even that we don’t have democratic elements within our system.

We have three elective offices in our national government: representatives, senators, and the president. As it stands today, two of these are elected by the popular vote. The House of Representatives has always been the most purely democratic part of our system. So, yes, the people do have a direct vote and their voice is heard loud and clear. Democracy is alive and well in our system.

Our founders, however, believed in a balance of powers. The Electoral College, as well as the convention system, that we use to elect the president might be messy and the rules change, but it’s born out of the understanding that the presidency should not be won by a direct vote. It is the least democratic part of our government, and that’s important in a balanced republican system.

The presidency was always meant to be distant from the people—with the pathway to victory running through electors and the Electoral College, as well as delegates. The founders understood that, when it came to electing the president, voters would be a larger group and more spread out. They would also be more easily misinformed and manipulated through propaganda. It was important, therefore, to protect citizens from this “mob electorate” that would crown an “elected king.”

These protections are not necessary with the House of Representatives and now the Senate—though it used to be that they were chosen by the states. It’s in Congress that we have representatives who are closer to the people. It’s a more local process where people aren’t as easily manipulated because they know one another and receive information on a smaller scale. Democracy thrives in this environment and functions in a healthy way. People know their congressmen better and are more informed. Because of this, they can elect them directly. This is not the case with the presidency, which is more distant and more easily corrupted. In the election of a president, we have many layers to keep “bad candidates” out and bring stability to the system. If this is abandoned for a popular and more national vote, then the president would be chosen like a congressman but without the same intimate knowledge and accountability. - See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/trumps-whining-proves-he-doesnt-get-our-republic-at-all#sthash.9h9Id4gr.dpuf

- See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/trumps-whining-proves-he-doesnt-get-our-republic-at-all#sthash.9h9Id4gr.dpuf



- See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/trumps-whining-proves-he-doesnt-get-our-republic-at-all#sthash.9h9Id4gr.dpuf - See more at: https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/04/trumps-whining-proves-he-doesnt-get-our-republic-at-all#sthash.9h9Id4gr.dpuf

We will need each other soon!

Randy Corporan writes,

Trump supporters (the sane, thoughtful, liberty warriors I know and love; the rest of you: pffffffttttt!): better help your candidate remember #1237. Don't engage in the vitriol. We will need each other soon.

Cruz supporters: #1237 has been required for over a century. Trump won't get there. Stay strong. Don't engage in the vitriol. We will need each other soon.

Let's act like adults, patriots, and citizens fighting to save our Republic.
Remember who the enemies of liberty, security and prosperity are. Their names are neither Trump nor Cruz.

21st century madness

At Hot Air Jazz Shaw brings us the news that

In England, the city of Brighton and Hove is making history in terms of political correctness. Parents of children preparing to enter the school system received a letter informing them that they needed to be cautious when filling out their child’s registration forms and not rush into anything complicated like identifying whether they were boys or girls. You see, that’s a really complicated question these days and you need to help your children “pick” which gender they want to be. And no… I’m not even kidding. (Mashable)

A city council has sent a letter to thousands of parents asking them to support the gender their children “most identify with” when confirming school places.

The letter, sent this week, requested that parents help their children “choose” their gender identity, asking them to leave the gender section of the form blank if their child is non-binary.

“We recognise that not all children and young people identify with the gender they were assigned at birth or may identify as a gender other than male or female, however the current systems (set nationally) only record gender as male or female,” read the letter.

“Please support your child to choose the gender they most identify with.”

Shaw writes,

Look… these are kindergarten aged children. If they’re at the point where they’re fretting over whether or not they are Trigender before they find out where the sandbox is at school there is a much bigger problem to be tackled and it involves calling Child Protective Services and getting them out of whatever warped, psychotic madhouse they are trapped in at home.

Read more here.

If he didn't exist, the Trumpians would have had to invent him!

Who's benefiting from a rigged system now?

John Podoretz writes,

According to Trump's logic, he should actually have only 38 percent of the GOP delegates awarded thus far rather than 47 percent, because he's only won 38 percent of the aggregate GOP vote. So who's benefiting from a rigged system now? The man is a lying, conniving piece of shit. And I say that with the highest respect, because I don't like to talk about people.

But hey, we are eco-aware and gender malleable!

Jim Geraghty argues in National Review that America needs to take a big step to the right. Why?

Crime is coming back.

Geraghty links to a piece by Heather Mac Donald at City Journal, which explains,

In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot up—homicides in the largest 50 cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015. And the Left is once again denouncing the police—this time for not doing enough policing. King now accuses police in Chicago of not “doing their job,” as a result of which “people are dying.” Stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot in the first ten days of 2016. King scoffs at the suggestion that a new 70-question street-stop form imposed on the CPD by the ACLU is partly responsible for the drop-off in engagement. If American police “refuse to do their jobs [i.e., make stops] when more paperwork is required,” he retorts, “it’s symptomatic of an entirely broken system in need of an overhaul.” This is the same King who as recently as October fumed that “nothing happening in this country appears to be slowing [the police] down.”

She is referring to Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King.

Geraghty continues,

Some corners of our government take border security and immigration law very seriously; others don’t and refuse to enforce the law: “124 illegal immigrant criminals released from jail by the Obama administration since 2010 have been subsequently charged with murder . . . In 2014, ICE released 30,558 criminal aliens who had been convicted of 92,347 crimes. Only 3 percent have been deported.”

The world’s most dangerous and hostile regimes are getting more aggressive:

Geraghty links to a piece by Claudia Rosett at PJ Media:

Years ago, looking out at the Pacific surf from a beach in Chile, a friend -- alert to the ways of tsunamis -- gave me some advice about what to do if suddenly the water all went away. "Run. Run for your life. Because it's all coming back."

That advice has come to mind all too often since President Obama made his 2012 reelection campaign proclamations about the receding tide of war. Not that the tide of war has receded anywhere except perhaps in the fantasies of Obama and his followers. But after more than seven years of U.S. policy predicated on such propaganda, it's getting ever harder to read the daily headlines without the sense that there's a deluge coming our way.

Just a modest sampling of some of the latest warning signs:

-- Russian warplanes have been demonstrating that they can with impunity buzz our military aircraft and ships. Which is by now no surprise, because Russian President Vladimir Putin has already learned -- in the flexible era of the Obama "reset" -- that the U.S. is no serious obstacle to such stunts as Russia swiping the entire territory of Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and offering fugitive Edward Snowden a home after the grand hack of the National Security Agency.

-- China, while brushing off U.S. protests, keeps pushing its power plays and territorial grabs in East Asia -- and has just landed a military jet on an island it has built, complete with runway, in the South China Sea.

-- Iran, having pocketed the Obama-legacy rotten nuclear deal, has continued testing ballistic missiles, with Iran's Fars News Agency advertising that two of the missiles launched just last month were emblazoned in Hebrew with the phrase "Israel must be wiped out." Presumably these missiles are being developed just in case Iran feels a need to propel toward a target some highly unpeaceful products of its "exclusively peaceful" nuclear program? Meantime, Iran is wielding the nuclear agreement itself as a threat. Just this past week, we had the head of Iran's Central Bank in Washington threatening that Iran will walk away from Obama's cherished nuclear deal unless the Obama administration provides yet more concessions -- in this instance, a U.S. welcome mat for Iran's banking transactions, so Iran, the world's leading state sponsor of terrorism, can avail itself of easy access to dollars.

-- Saudi authorities have been threatening that if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for any part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they will dump hundreds of billions worth of U.S. assets. (What's most arresting here is less the prospect of a self-defeating Saudi fire sale on U.S. assets than the reality that the Saudis -- beset by everything from relatively low oil prices to regional tumult, including an aggressively expansionist Iran -- feel free to try to bully the U.S.).

That's before we even get to the carnage and refugee flows spilling out of such places as Syria and Libya; such terrorist outfits and networks as ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, al Qaeda...and the mix-and-match extent to which various states not entirely friendly to the U.S. tend to officially deplore terrorism while also sponsoring or abetting it, as convenient.

Obama likes to lecture us that all these things are transient problems, speed bumps on the road to wherever that utopian arc of history finally bends toward some great big pot of justice at the end of the rainbow. In his view, as he told NBC's Matt Lauer this past January, "there are no existential threats" confronting the U.S. today. Thus, as Fox News reported earlier this month in a superb documentary on "Rising Threats, Shrinking Military," Obama is both gutting the U.S. military and reshaping it, the priorities here being not to win wars, but to be, above all, eco-aware and gender malleable.

Read more here.

Geraghty is not through listing concerns:

Higher education has become an expensive joke, failing to prepare young people for careers and, it seems in many cases, facilitating an inability to cope with the routine challenges of adult life.




It’s April 20, 4-20. It’s Pot Day to a lot of people. It’s also a day with a grim history: the anniversary of the collapse of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Columbine High School massacre, the Deepwater Horizon explosion, and Hitler’s birthday. This is a week that has been fraught with danger in not-so-distant history: the Boston Marathon bombing anniversary was April 15; the Virginia Tech shooting anniversary was April 16; the Oklahoma City bombing anniversary was April 19. Maybe T.S. Eliot was right; maybe April really is the cruelest month.

The Road Ahead for Trump Might Be Almost as Friendly as New York
No point in disputing it; Trump needed a big win in New York yesterday and he got it. Yes, there will be some chuckling that he lost the GOP primary in Manhattan to a guy who eats pizza with a fork, But he needed as many of those delegates as he could possibly get, and he won 90 out of 95.

The New York Times treats him like Alexander the Great, fresh from a sweeping conquest:

If Mr. Trump’s opponents hoped for even scattered signs of voters recoiling from his candidacy, there were none to be seen. He won voters of every age, race and income level, and he prevailed with two groups -- college-educated voters and women -- who have often rejected him. That adds up to a considerable show of strength for a candidate who still faces a narrow path to clinching the Republican nomination, even after a sweep or near sweep of his home state’s 95 delegates.

Let’s also keep in mind that twice as many Democrats voted in the New York primary than Republicans. If Bernie Sanders voters had voted in the GOP primary, the Vermont senator would have won by 230,000 votes.

For what it’s worth, John Kasich knocked 214,000 votes off his 500,000 vote margin behind Marco Rubio.

Henry Olsen argues that Trump’s win is a matter of demographics . . .

Trump’s massive strength should also come as no surprise. He has always been doing better in states with large numbers of non-religious and Catholic voters, and New York’s GOP electorate have large shares of both. He also does much better with moderates and somewhat conservatives than with very conservative Republicans, and New York’s Republicans are decidedly to the left of the national party. Simple demographic analysis would always have suggested he would win with well over 40 percent of the vote; add in the home state advantage and you get the landslide margins that are about to unfold.

But this means a week from now, Trump might be having an even better night, winning big in a bunch of demographically similar states where rivals won’t be able to hand-wave it away as a reflection of a home-state advantage. In Connecticut, it’s easy to see him winning 20something out of the 28 delegates. In Maryland, maybe Kasich competes well in the D.C. suburbs, maybe not. It certainly doesn’t seem like natural Cruz territory. But give Trump another 20something out of 32. There’s no polling in Delaware, which is winner-take-all; let’s assume Trump wins that and takes all 16. In Rhode Island, the rules are particularly complicated because the state’s delegates are “proportionally bound” to the finishes in the congressional districts (the state only has two) and statewide. Unless someone wins big (more than two-thirds of the vote) or abysmal (less than 10 percent) the three delegates that are apportioned to finish in each congressional district are going to split 1-1-1. Out of the 19, let’s say Trump gets 15 at most, maybe fewer.

Pennsylvania is complicated with a whole bunch of unbound delegates, three from each congressional district; but the clearer portion is that 17 delegates are bound on the first ballot to the statewide winner. You have to figure this is the state that Cruz and Kasich will see as the most-friendly territory, and put the most time and effort into winning.

Even if you throw out Pennsylvania, Trump will probably wake up April 27 with another 80some delegates.

America Needs a Big Step to the Right, and Trump Is Likely to Hinder That

(Good news, Trump fans. There’s kind-of, sort-of a compliment to your guy, deep in here, if you read far enough.)

What ails America? Take your pick.

Crime is coming back.

In response to the incessant accusations of racism and the heightened hostility in the streets that has followed the Michael Brown shooting, officers have pulled back from making investigatory stops and enforcing low-level offenses in many urban areas. As a result, violent crime in cities with large black populations has shot up—homicides in the largest 50 cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015. And the Left is once again denouncing the police—this time for not doing enough policing. [Shawn] King now accuses police in Chicago of not “doing their job,” as a result of which “people are dying.” Stops in Chicago are down nearly 90 percent this year through the end of March, compared with the same period in 2015; shootings were up 78 percent and homicides up 62 percent through April 10. Over 100 people were shot in the first ten days of 2016. King scoffs at the suggestion that a new 70-question street-stop form imposed on the CPD by the ACLU is partly responsible for the drop-off in engagement. If American police “refuse to do their jobs [i.e., make stops] when more paperwork is required,” he retorts, “it’s symptomatic of an entirely broken system in need of an overhaul.” This is the same King who as recently as October fumed that “nothing happening in this country appears to be slowing [the police] down.”

Some corners of our government take border security and immigration law very seriously; others don’t and refuse to enforce the law: “124 illegal immigrant criminals released from jail by the Obama administration since 2010 have been subsequently charged with murder . . . In 2014, ICE released 30,558 criminal aliens who had been convicted of 92,347 crimes. Only 3 percent have been deported.”

The world’s most dangerous and hostile regimes are getting more aggressive:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has already learned -- in the flexible era of the Obama “reset” -- that the U.S. is no serious obstacle to such stunts as Russia swiping the entire territory of Crimea from Ukraine, moving back into the Middle East, propping up Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and offering fugitive Edward Snowden a home after the grand hack of the National Security Agency.

-- China, while brushing off U.S. protests, keeps pushing its power plays and territorial grabs in East Asia -- and has just landed a military jet on an island it has built, complete with runway, in the South China Sea.

-- Iran, having pocketed the Obama-legacy rotten nuclear deal, has continued testing ballistic missiles, with Iran’s Fars News Agency advertising that two of the missiles launched just last month were emblazoned in Hebrew with the phrase “Israel must be wiped out.” Presumably these missiles are being developed just in case Iran feels a need to propel toward a target some highly unpeaceful products of its “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program? Meantime, Iran is wielding the nuclear agreement itself as a threat. Just this past week, we had the head of Iran’s Central Bank in Washington threatening that Iran will walk away from Obama’s cherished nuclear deal unless the Obama administration provides yet more concessions -- in this instance, a U.S. welcome mat for Iran’s banking transactions, so Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, can avail itself of easy access to dollars.

-- Saudi authorities have been threatening that if Congress passes a bill allowing the Saudi government to be held responsible for any part in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, they will dump hundreds of billions worth of U.S. assets. (What’s most arresting here is less the prospect of a self-defeating Saudi fire sale on U.S. assets than the reality that the Saudis -- beset by everything from relatively low oil prices to regional tumult, including an aggressively expansionist Iran -- feel free to try to bully the U.S.).

-- And oh, by the way, North Korea, has been visibly preparing for a fifth nuclear test. If they carry it out during the grand window of opportunity provided by Obama’s final nine months in office, this would be the fourth North Korean nuclear test on Obama’s watch. That’s not a good trend, especially given North Korea’s history of marketing its weapons and nuclear know-how to places such as the Middle East.

That’s before we even get to the carnage and refugee flows spilling out of such places as Syria and Libya; such terrorist outfits and networks as ISIS, the Taliban, Hezbollah, al Qaeda . . .

Higher education has become an expensive joke, failing to prepare young people for careers and, it seems in many cases, facilitating an inability to cope with the routine challenges of adult life:

There’s been much talk on the campaign trail about helping students pay for college and not enough about exactly what they’re buying. It’s ludicrous that student debt has passed $1 trillion and that nearly 20 percent of the undergraduates who borrowed for college are in default on their student loans.

Where is the money going? It’s going to multimillion-dollar pay packages for college presidents, country-club campus amenities and, increasingly, an expanding army of administrators tasked with micromanaging the drinking habits, sex lives and sensitivities of people who in any other American context would be considered adults.

In these cases, the conservative movement, the Republican party, and most of the American people have a ballpark sense of what the solution is.

-Cops need to be able to do their jobs and get violent criminals off the streets, without fear that their actions will be misinterpreted and twisted by demagogues to start a riot.

-Those crossing the U.S. border illegally need to be caught, prosecuted, and deported -- particularly those involved in non-immigration crimes.

-The U.S. military needs to be larger, stronger, and more technologically advanced, our allies need to be reassured, and our hostile rivals need a bit of a brush-back pitch to remind them of the consequences of provoking the United States or threatening our people.

-Universities and colleges need to stop thinking that their job is to fundamentally transform American society and its values and get back to the basic job of preparing young people to work for a living. (Maybe every college student should study abroad, somewhere in the Third World, to ensure they return with a newfound appreciation for America’s blessings.)

Law and order, a return to a strong, confident approach to threats, a complete dismissal of the dictates of political correctness -- the good news is these are all elements of the Trump campaign. If he wasn’t an incoherent populist authoritarian demagogue, it would be a lot easier to jump on the bandwagon. The problem is that Trump is such a crass, deliberately-obnoxious, incendiary, policy-detail-ignorant, thin-skinned, women-repellent misogynist that he’s going to taint these positions by associating himself with them.

Read more here.

Will Iran pay?

Associated Press reports,

The Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a judgment allowing families of victims of Iranian-sponsored terrorism to collect nearly $2 billion.

The court on Wednesday ruled 6-2 in favor of relatives of the 241 Marines who died in a 1983 terrorist attack in Beirut and victims of other attacks that courts have linked to Iran.

But here is the kicker:

Congress has repeatedly changed the law in the past 20 years to make it easier for victims to sue over state-sponsored terrorism; federal courts have ruled for the victims. But Iran has refused to comply with the judgments, leading lawyers to hunt for Iranian assets in the United States.

Read more here.

Hillary versus Trump?

John Podhoretz suggest we resign ourselves to his depressing reality: It's going to be Trump v. Clinton this fall. Speaking of yesterday's New York primary, Podhoretz writes in the New York Post,

It’s a glorious night for Trumpkins for the same reason it’s a sobering night for those of us who believe a Trump nomination would be disastrous for the party and the country.

...John Kasich beat Cruz here. Now, Kasich may be a better fit for New York than the very conservative Texan — indeed, Kasich won in Manhattan — but that wouldn’t have happened if Cruz had come even remotely close to making the sale with Republicans who don’t want Trump to be the nominee.

And there are a lot of them here in New York.

Cruz is running a tight, disciplined campaign focused on maximizing his delegate count through mastery of the rules governing delegates at the state level. But he’s running a mediocre campaign when it comes to winning over masses of voters.

Cruz is now saying it is not about choosing a presidential candidate. It is about each of us making a choice: will we continue to live in the past with what we know no longer works, or will we move forward to a new and better place?



However, Podhoretz has a warning for Cruz:

He (and Kasich) may succeed in denying Trump the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a first-ballot victory at the convention in Cleveland. But the idea Cruz can take the nomination away from Trump on the second ballot at the convention if the Texan ends this primary season with a string of defeats flies in the face of everything we know about politics and political psychology.

The more Cruz loses, the more he will look like a loser. He’d better start winning, or he won’t have a case to make, and those private assurances he has of support on the second ballot will remain private and will cease being assured.

Read more here.

Is it only our own sins that we ask forgiveness for?

At A Holy Experience Ann Voskamp asks,

...who hasn’t been cheated on, talked down, lied about, pierced right through and left heart-broken on some beaten-down back road?

I have bowed and said it aloud for decades.“Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Who lives this?

If we only got into the Christ-faith through the door of forgiveness, how can we claim Christ as our home if we aren’t people who forgive?

Words and ideology on a page are cheap. Grace and incarnating the love of Christ isn’t.

If forgiveness isn’t central to our faith, is our faith really Christian?

Does “love your enemies” have any loop holes? How far can forgiveness go?

Read more here.

How two media outlets report the same story

Justin Holcomb reports at Town Hall that

UC Berkeley Forced to Cut 500 Jobs After $15 Minimum Wage Hike

Nanette Asimov reports at SF Gate,

Chancellor Nicholas Dirks sent a memo to employees Monday informing them of the job reductions and said they will amount to “a modest reduction of 6 percent of our staff workforce.”

Berkeley employs about 8,500 staffers, from custodians to administrators. Faculty members will not be affected. Dirks said the reductions will be done in part through attrition and did not mention layoffs.

But the campus is in the process of laying off about 60 employees, spokesman Dan Mogulof said without identifying the departments they’re from.

Cruz gets under Trump-supporter Hannity's skin

Sean Hannity is confused. Ted Cruz is unable to help him. Hannity then loses his temper and demands of Cruz,

“Senator, why do you do this? Every single time––no, you gotta stop! Every time I have you on the air and I ask you a legitimate question, you try to throw this in my face, I’m getting sick of it!”

Then, in denial of his own anger, Hannity accuses of Cruz of being angry when Cruz explains what he believes are the issues of concern to voters.

Bulldozers battle in the street in China

Maybe China isn't such a bad place after all! Watch six bulldozers battling in a street in the city of Hebei.

Marijuana news

Sneha Susan John reports in Nature World News,

A recent study has proven that heavy use of cannabis can lead to a compromised dopamine system. Decreased release was found in the striatum, which is the part of the brain that helps in paying attention and memory.

Earlier research has proven that drugs like cocaine and heroin have a major effect on the dopamine release in the brain. However, it is for the first time research proved similar effects on marijuana. Unfortunately, unlike heroin and cocaine, marijuana has been widely accepted in many parts of the world especially among the youth.

...Decrease in an individual's dopamine level can result in many problems. First, it leads to an addiction. Deficient dopamine release can also result to Parkinson'a disease. Since dopamine is what controls the brain's pleasure centers, it can also affect an individual's emotional response to things. Heavy use of marijuana can change one's learning ability and behavior.

Read more here.

For information about how legalization of marijuana has impacted Colorado, here is an exhaustive 182 page report.

Will the Saudis risk ruining their economy if Congress votes to demand release of 28 pages of the 9-11 report?

Upwards of $750,000. That is how much money Saudi Arabia is threatening to dump from its holdings of US debt. Obama is going there on Wednesday. Matt Egan and John Defterios report for CNN Money,

Sources told CNN that Saudi Arabia recently threatened to sell off American assets if Congress passes a bill that would allow 9/11 victims to sue foreign governments.

A source familiar with the Saudi asset portfolio told CNNMoney the government is "serious" about this. "If Congress goes ahead with passage of that legislation, there has to be a response," the source said.

...Terry Strada, whose husband died in the 9/11 attacks, believes the Saudi asset dump threat speaks volumes.
"They would be ruining their entire economy to just not have what's in the 28 pages released? It tells you they're a little bit afraid of what's in there," Strada told CNN.

Read more here.

Time for the United States government to come clean with the American people

Even though Andrew McCarthy was the successful prosecuter of the jihadists who conducted the first World Trade Center bombing, he has long had a gnawing sense of failure. Here's how he puts it in National Review,

Yes, the conviction of the Blind Sheikh and his henchmen was a great law-enforcement success. Throughout the long trial and in the years that followed, though, I came to appreciate that national security is principally about keeping Americans safe, not winning court cases. Sure, winning in this instance meant justice was done and some terrorists were incarcerated. How safe, though, had we really kept Americans?

For all the effort and expense, the number of jihadists neutralized was negligible compared to the overall threat. The attacks kept coming, as one might expect when one side detonates bombs and the other responds with subpoenas. As the years passed, the tally of casualties far outstripped that of convicted terrorists. When 9/11 finally happened, killing nearly 3,000 of our fellow Americans, al-Qaeda credited none other than the Blind Sheikh with issuing the fatwa — the sharia edict — that authorized the attack. We had imprisoned him, but we had not stopped him.

That is mainly why I finally wrote the memoir in 2008. I called it Willful Blindness . . . and not just because my infamous defendant was both blind and willful. American counterterrorism, even seven years after 9/11 (and fully 15 years after the jihadists declared war by bombing the World Trade Center), had bored its head ever deeper in the sand. It consciously avoided the central truths driving the terrorist threat against the United States.

The most significant of these is that violent jihadism is the inexorable result of the vibrance in Islam of sharia supremacism — a scripturally-rooted summons to Muslims to strive for conquest over infidels until Allah’s law (sharia) is established everywhere on earth.

This ideology — also referred to as “Islamism,” “Islamic supremacism,” “radical Islam,” “political Islam,” and other descriptors that endeavor to distinguish it from Islam (and to imply that such a distinction should be drawn) — is not the only way of interpreting Islam. Indeed, it is rejected by millions of Muslims. The conquest for which it strives, moreover, is not necessarily to be achieved by violence. Sharia supremacism is, nevertheless, a mainstream interpretation of Islam. Inevitably, it leads some believers to carry out jihadist violence, and an even greater number of believers to support the jihadists’ objectives, if not their methods.

This is why it is time — it is long, long past time — for the United States government to come clean with the American people, and with the families of Americans slaughtered on 9/11 by 19 jihadists, 15 of them Saudis. The government must disclose the 28 pages of the 2002 congressional report on the 9/11 attacks that it has shamefully withheld from the public for 14 years. Those pages outline Saudi complicity in the jihad.

...there are disturbing Saudi government fingerprints all over the journey Saudi hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar made between arriving in Southern California in early 2000 and plowing American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11.

...there are disturbing Saudi government fingerprints all over the journey Saudi hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar made between arriving in Southern California in early 2000 and plowing American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon on 9/11.

...The point of the post-9/11 investigations was to hold every culpable actor and negligent government agency accountable. No American citizen or government official, not even the sitting president, was spared. It is time for Washington to stop running interference for the Saudis while the Saudis run interference for the jihadists. At long last, let’s see the 28 pages.

Read more here, where McCarthy names names and gives details of Saudi involvement in 9-11.

Are we stupider than ever?

h/t Jon Agard

Her truth

h/t Manhattan Infidel, who has an interview with her here.