• Pragerisms

    For a more comprehensive list of Pragerisms visit
    Dennis Prager Wisdom.

    • "The left is far more interested in gaining power than in creating wealth."
    • "Without wisdom, goodness is worthless."
    • "I prefer clarity to agreement."
    • "First tell the truth, then state your opinion."
    • "Being on the Left means never having to say you're sorry."
    • "If you don't fight evil, you fight gobal warming."
    • "There are things that are so dumb, you have to learn them."
  • Liberalism’s Seven Deadly Sins

    • Sexism
    • Intolerance
    • Xenophobia
    • Racism
    • Islamophobia
    • Bigotry
    • Homophobia

    A liberal need only accuse you of one of the above in order to end all discussion and excuse himself from further elucidation of his position.

  • Glenn’s Reading List for Die-Hard Pragerites

    • Bolton, John - Surrender is not an Option
    • Bruce, Tammy - The Thought Police; The New American Revolution; The Death of Right and Wrong
    • Charen, Mona - DoGooders:How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help
    • Coulter, Ann - If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans; Slander
    • Dalrymple, Theodore - In Praise of Prejudice; Our Culture, What's Left of It
    • Doyle, William - Inside the Oval Office
    • Elder, Larry - Stupid Black Men: How to Play the Race Card--and Lose
    • Frankl, Victor - Man's Search for Meaning
    • Flynn, Daniel - Intellectual Morons
    • Fund, John - Stealing Elections
    • Friedman, George - America's Secret War
    • Goldberg, Bernard - Bias; Arrogance
    • Goldberg, Jonah - Liberal Fascism
    • Herson, James - Tales from the Left Coast
    • Horowitz, David - Left Illusions; The Professors
    • Klein, Edward - The Truth about Hillary
    • Mnookin, Seth - Hard News: Twenty-one Brutal Months at The New York Times and How They Changed the American Media
    • Morris, Dick - Because He Could; Rewriting History
    • O'Beirne, Kate - Women Who Make the World Worse
    • Olson, Barbara - The Final Days: The Last, Desperate Abuses of Power by the Clinton White House
    • O'Neill, John - Unfit For Command
    • Piereson, James - Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism
    • Prager, Dennis - Think A Second Time
    • Sharansky, Natan - The Case for Democracy
    • Stein, Ben - Can America Survive? The Rage of the Left, the Truth, and What to Do About It
    • Steyn, Mark - America Alone
    • Stephanopolous, George - All Too Human
    • Thomas, Clarence - My Grandfather's Son
    • Timmerman, Kenneth - Shadow Warriors
    • Williams, Juan - Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America--and What We Can Do About It
    • Wright, Lawrence - The Looming Tower

Will Iran Finally Shred its Fascist Ayatollah World ?

WILL TRUMP TOPPLE THE AYATOLLAH?

by John Hinderaker  at  PowerLine:

Barack Obama pursued the fantasy of a U.S.-Iran alliance and sought to build up Iran as a regional power. Beyond sheer perversity, it was hard to see a rationale for this strategy. President Trump has sensibly reversed it. Seeing Iran’s mullahs has our bitter enemies–let’s not overthink this, “Death to America” does not lend itself to a subtle, counterintuitive interpretation–Trump has sought to weaken them both externally and internally.

This Reuters report suggests that he may be succeeding far better than I, for one, imagined:

Mounting pressure from the Trump administration combined with discontent among many Iranians at the state of the economy are rattling the Islamic Republic, with little sign that its leaders have the answers, officials and analysts say.

Three days of protests broke out on Sunday in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar, with hundreds of angry shopkeepers denouncing a sharp fall in the value of the Iranian currency.
***
However, the weekend protests quickly acquired a political edge, with people shouting slogans against Iran’s ultimate authority, Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials, calling them thieves who should step down.

I confess I was unaware that the rial has dropped 40% in value. Odd that this hasn’t been more widely reported:

The rial has lost 40 per cent of its value since last month, when President Donald Trump pulled out of Iran’s 2015 nuclear accord and announced draconian sanctions on Tehran.

These include an attempt to shut down the international sale of Iranian oil, Tehran’s main source of revenue, a threat that has cast a chill over the economy.
***
The full impact of Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal and Washington’s move to stop foreign countries from doing business with Iran, may not be clear for months.
***
Already French companies Total and Peugeot, for example, have said they will pull out of Iran rather than risk being shut out of the U.S. financial system, as Washington threatens to use the dollar’s reserve currency status to punish anyone who gets in the way of its ramped-up Iran policy.

“Sanctions cannot be blamed for all the internal problems. They have yet to be implemented,” said a second official, familiar with Iran’s decision-making process.

To pile on the pain, Washington says all countries must end crude imports from Iran by Nov. 4, hitting the oil sales that generate 60 percent of the country’s income. Iran says this level of cuts will never happen.

Demonstrations against the regime continue in various cities around Iran. Reuters says that “analysts and insiders” expect the mullahs to weather the storm. Likely so, for now. But tyrannical regimes generally appear secure until the day comes, to the surprise of analysts and insiders, when the seemingly solid edifice crumbles, often with stunning rapidity. That’s something for the mullahs to think about. And in the meantime, the likelihood of foreign adventurism should be much diminished.

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/will-trump-topple-the-ayatollah.php

The Mueller Dance Continues

Rudy Giuliani is turning the Mueller probe on its head

Trump is resurgent as the prospect of a collusion case seems dimmer than ever.

by Byron York at Spectator USA:

Donald Trump got bad reviews in the press — no surprise — when he announced that Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and federal prosecutor, would join his legal team in the Trump-Russia special counsel investigation. The 74-year-old Giuliani is not as sharp as he was, some said, and isn’t really a practising lawyer any more. How can you effectively defend the President by slipping out of fatcat dinners at New York steakhouses for quick hits on Fox News?

That was then. Now, it appears hiring Giuliani was a key part of a new and effective Trump strategy. Just a few months ago, Trump was cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, mostly refraining from attacking him directly, and hoping the investigation would somehow go away. Now, Trump is waging and, if the polls are correct, winning a political war on him. ‘He has turned this investigation on its head,’ one Trump campaign veteran said recently, with much admiration. 

Trump’s resurgence happens to coincide with the growing realisation that Mueller might never make his much-anticipated collusion case against the President — the charge that the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia to rig the 2016 election. And that, in turn, is creating political ripples: Democrats who were hoping Mueller would hand them a ready-to-use case against Trump are worried that appearing overly eager to bring down the President could cost them in November’s midterm elections. 

There’s no doubt Trump’s first strategy for dealing with the Mueller investigation was not working. Although talking heads spent hours speculating on whether the President would fire the special counsel, the White House plan for dealing with Mueller was mostly focused on cooperating with him. Over the years, previous presidents have made all sorts of creative efforts to resist subpoenas from investigators. Trump didn’t do that; instead, he obediently turned over reams of documents to Mueller. 

By all reports, Trump’s lawyers, Washington veterans Ty Cobb and John Dowd, urged the President to cooperate and led him to believe that Mueller would likely wrap up his investigation by the beginning of this year. Problem was, 2018 arrived and Mueller was still going strong. Dowd left Trump’s legal team, followed by Cobb. 

In their place, Trump brought in new people and adopted a two-track strategy. For the inside track, he hired a well-respected Washington legal veteran, Emmet Flood, who was part of Bill Clinton’s defence team in the late 1990s. Crafting the President’s next legal moves, Flood has not said a word in public since he took the job.

 For the outside track — the lawyer who would make the President’s case on television — Trump chose Giuliani. The former mayor created controversy almost immediately with a TV appearance in which he mangled some of the facts of the Stormy Daniels affair. But as the days and weeks wore on, Giuliani breathed life into the President’s public defence. Powered by a barrage of Trump tweets, Giuliani’s daily stream of attacks on Mueller raised questions in the public’s mind about the special counsel’s fairness and competence.

It’s working. A new Harvard-Harris poll shows that 58 per cent of Americans say Mueller should finish up his investigation within six months. (Most would actually like to see him done in three months.) A Marist poll asked respondents whether Mueller has been fair to Trump and found that just 45 per cent agreed — down from 53 per cent a few months ago. And a Monmouth poll found that the number of Americans who believe Mueller’s investigation should continue has dropped from 62 per cent last year to 54 per cent now. 

Trump’s new strategy is not really new, of course. He has basically adopted the course Clinton chose back in 1998 when faced with independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation into whether the former president lied about a sexual relationship with a former White House intern. Clinton had a simple plan — attack the prosecutor — and his surrogates did it every day. To take one example, look at a New York Times front-page headline from February 1998: ‘President’s Aides Expand Offensive to Counter Starr; Urging Inquiry on Leaks; Prosecutor is Denounced as “Corrupt” and Accused of Leading “Witch Hunt”.’ 

Note the main points of the story —White House attacks prosecutor, calls for investigator to be investigated, calls prosecutor corrupt, calls the probe a witch hunt. That is exactly — exactly — what Trump is doing now. And from Trump’s perspective, of course, the important thing to remember is that it worked for Clinton.

As luck would have it, Trump’s resurgence has come at a time when the prospects of Mueller making a collusion case seem dimmer than ever. It’s always possible the special counsel has some big indictments he is ready to unveil (he has caught people by surprise in the past) but some Trump partisans have become increasingly confident the big collusion charges just aren’t coming.

The reason they think so is that while they don’t know what Mueller will do in the future, they do know what he has already done. And they look at the Trump campaign figures who have been indicted or pleaded guilty: former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, former campaign deputy Rick Gates, former national security adviser Michael Flynn, and temporary volunteer foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos. None has been charged with any crime involving collusion. Manafort and Gates were charged with financial crimes, some of which went back a decade before the 2016 campaign; Flynn and Papadopoulos with lying to the FBI.

But there’s been nothing from Mueller alleging a scheme between the Trump campaign and Russia to swing the election. If there were a collusion scheme, Trump supporters reason, wouldn’t Manafort — with his extensive dealings with pro-Russian Ukrainians — have been part of it? The same for Gates, who was neck deep in Manafort’s business. Flynn, too, had dealings with Russia. What kind of collusion scheme could have existed without those men being part of it? And yet Mueller has investigated and charged each of them, and none of the charges alleged collusion.

Then there is the Democrats’ dilemma. Despite the desire of many to see Trump behind bars in an orange jumpsuit, it appears Mueller shares the widely held opinion that a sitting president cannot be indicted. The proper, constitutionally prescribed remedy for presidential misconduct is impeachment, a process that begins in the House of Representatives and, if the House votes to impeach, moves to the Senate for trial.

What that means is that whatever Mueller finds involving Trump — whether it is evidence of collusion or evidence that Trump attempted to obstruct the investigation — he will likely write up in a final report that will make its way to Congress. Some Democrats have openly hoped a Mueller report will be a road map for impeachment. And they are ready: last December, House Democrats forced a test vote on articles of impeachment, and 58 Democrats supported it.

The party’s base is even more eager. A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 71 per cent of Democratic voters want to see Trump impeached if Democrats win control of the House. 

But that’s just Democrats. When Republicans and Independents are added to the count, just 38 per cent support impeachment. That number might be higher than Trump wants, but it is nowhere near high enough for the House to act — much less the Senate, which would require a two-thirds vote to remove the President.

It would be an understatement to say that Democratic leaders, caught between their anti-Trump base and the larger electorate, are nervous. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader who hopes to become Speaker again, remembers well the situation in the midterm elections of 2006, when Democrats sought to win control of the House at the same time some members wanted to impeach George W. Bush on charges of lying to get the US into a war in Iraq. There was little public support for that, and Pelosi saw a campaign pledge to impeach Bush as political suicide. She openly declared that impeachment was ‘off the table’ and went on to win the election.

Can Pelosi say that today to the 71 per cent of her voters who want Trump’s head? It won’t be easy. The White House appears to be perfectly happy to let Democrats twist themselves into a pretzel over impeachment. This autumn Republicans will argue that, under Trump, unemployment is down, wages are up, the economy is humming, the world is safer — and all Democrats want to talk about is getting rid of the President. 

Meanwhile, Trump’s defenders will take every opportunity to make the case that impeachment, should it come, will be illegitimate. In a recent TV appearance, Giuliani freely admitted that when he discusses the newly revealed fact that an FBI informant tried to insinuate himself into the Trump campaign, he’s doing it to undermine public support for Mueller in anticipation of impeachment. ‘We have to do it in defending the President… because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach, not impeach,’ Giuliani explained. ‘So our jury… is the American people.’

Of course, everything depends on the results of the Mueller investigation; if he reveals some new blockbuster evidence, that could change everything. But today, as the campaign season approaches, it’s entirely possible that it could be Democrats who are on the defensive about impeachment and the Trump-Russia investigation — a situation no one could have imagined just a few months ago.

https://usa.spectator.co.uk/2018/05/rudy-giuliani-is-turning-the-mueller-probe-on-its-head/

Goodness, Even in Paris, Collects a Crowd and Hero

Le Spiderman? Hero Saves Toddler Hanging From Paris Balcony

by Ed Morrissey  at HotAir:

A Malian immigrant may have a new job with the Paris fire department, and an official new nationality. Parisians have already taken Mamoudou Gassama to their hearts after his brave, reckless rescue of a toddler hanging off a balcony in the 18th Arrondissement. Instead of waiting for help to arrive, Gassama instead climbed up four stories on balconies to recover the child, who gamely held while two different men attempted his rescue.

Be sure to view the video of the rescue below:

 

https://hotair.com/archives/2018/05/28/le-spiderman-hero-saves-toddler-hanging-paris-balcony/

The Ignorance of Today’s American Fascist CNN Left…. They ARE Animals!

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/05/21/no_one_is_an_animal_137080.html

WASHINGTON — It’s never right to call other human beings “animals.” It’s not something we should even have to debate. No matter how debased the behavior of a given individual or group, no matter how much legitimate anger genuinely evil actions might inspire, dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.

This is why we need to reflect on the controversy over exactly whom President Trump was referring to as “animals” during a roundtable discussion last week at the White House with state and local officials from California on so-called sanctuary laws.

 

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/05/22/why_the_left_wont_call_anyone_animals_137089.html

“If you want to understand the moral sickness at the heart of leftism, read the first paragraph of the most recent column by Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne:

“It’s never right to call other human beings ‘animals.’ It’s not something we should even have to debate. No matter how debased the behavior of a given individual or group, no matter how much legitimate anger that genuinely evil actions might inspire, dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.”

Let’s begin with the first sentence: “It’s never right to call other human beings ‘animals.'”

This is so self-evident to Dionne that he adds, “It’s not something we should even have to debate.”

Only someone who has never debated the issue could make such a claim.

So allow me to debate the assertion.

My view is the antithesis of Dionne’s. As I see it, it is not right to never call another human being an “animal.”

Calling the cruelest among us names such as “animal” or any other “dehumanizing” epithet actually protects humans. The word “beastly” exists for a reason and is frequently applied to human beings. By rhetorically reading certain despicable people out of the human race, we elevate the human race. We have declared certain behaviors out of line with being human.

Biologically, of course, we are all human. But if “human” is to mean anything moral — anything beyond the purely biological — then some people who have committed particularly heinous acts of evil against other human beings are not to be considered human. Otherwise “human” has no moral being. We should then not retain the word “inhumane.” What is the difference between “he is inhumane” and “he is an animal”? Both imply actions that render the person no longer human.

Dionne provides his answer at the end of the paragraph: “dehumanizing others always leads us down a dangerous path.”

He provides not a single argument or illustration for this truly absurd comment.

Anyone who refuses to “dehumanize” the Nazi physicians — who, with no anesthesia, froze naked people for hours and then dropped them in boiling water to rewarm them; put people in depressurized rooms where their eardrums burst, driving them out of their minds from pain; rubbed wood shavings and ground glass into infected wounds, etc. — is, to put it very gently, profoundly morally confused.

What would Dionne have us call those Nazi physicians — “not nice,” “badly flawed,” “evil”? Why is rhetorically ostracizing them from the human race “a dangerous path”? He doesn’t have an answer because he lives in the left’s world of moral-sounding platitudes. Leftism consists almost entirely of moral-sounding platitudes — statements meant to make the person making them feel morally sophisticated. But based on their relative reactions to the sadists of the MS-13 gangs, I trust Donald Trump’s moral compass more than E. J. Dionne’s.

It is ever dangerous to use dehumanizing rhetoric on people? Of course — when it is directed at people based on their race, religion, ethnicity, nationality or any other immutable physical characteristic. The Nazis did what they did to Jews and others because they dehumanized them based on their religious/ethnic/racial identity. That’s why racism is evil. But why is it dangerous to use such rhetoric on people based on their behavior? By equating labeling the cruelest among us “animals” with labeling Jews “animals,” Dionne cheapens the fight against real evil.

I once asked Rabbi Leon Radzik, a Holocaust survivor who had been in Auschwitz, what word he would use to characterize the sadistic guards in the camp. I will never forget his response: “They were monsters with a human face.”

Incredibly, Dionne would not agree with him.”

 

Commentary:   E. J. Dionne, like 99% of  today’s America’s newsprint propagandists apparently has never been educated in things “science” or “arithmetic”, such as “two plus two equals four”…..unless the feminized are overcome with emotion.

Dionne has been around these feminized a long, long time.  What else can be expected at today’s Obama New York Times, Washington Post, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, Harvard and Yale, and your local high schools of lower learnings.

Thank you Dennis Prager for your courage to remind collapsing Americana that there is still meaning to the word “Truth” even in this world of today’s Schumer Democrat Party of fascistic persuasion from ignorance.

Time for John McCain to do HIS COUNTRY A FAVOR AGAIN….RESIGN!!!

It’s Time For McCain To Resign

by Steven Hayward at HotAir:

Even California’s Senator Claire Engel, suffering from a similar brain tumor in the summer of 1964, managed to have himself wheeled onto the Senate floor to cast a dramatic vote in favor of the fiercely contested Civil Rights Act by pointing to his eye (for “Aye”) during the roll-call vote, because he was unable to speak. (Sen. Engel died just a couple weeks later.) By contrast, McCain is out in Arizona, and unable even to make an appearance for a crucial vote on anything, with no indication that a return to Washington is possible or likely.

McCain should resign, and allow Arizona’s Republican governor to appoint a replacement so that the Senate is back to full strength. This is especially appropriate given the narrow Republican majority in the Senate. His absence is causing majority leader Mitch McConnell significant difficulties on close votes. (By the way, Arizona’s current Republican governor, Doug Ducey, is up for re-election this November. What if he were to lose? Then McCain’s seat might be flipped to Democrats if he passes away after the first of next year.)

The cause of this is easy to see. McCain’s extreme vanity gets in the way of putting the public interest ahead of his towering ego.

https://hotair.com/headlines/archives/2018/05/time-mccain-resign/

Comment, ghr.  John McCain, a hero to his country some two generations ago, won’t resign because at least for the past twenty years in Washington, he’s been a reliable first class jerk from Arizona.  Awkward, temper driven, hot headed, publicity hound publicly, politically unsmooth, he is not well known for domestic  bliss.

Yet, I admit that if he were Republican Senator from my state, I would have voted for him too, for his heroism, his courage, strength, and bravery as a downed American pilot being tortured in Hanoi.

He seems to be  a trouble maker as a conservative.  He is  remote and arrogant.  He seems to love being in the headlines….bossy, and not much of a party man….

He’s not going to resign no matter how remote he may become in his dying days in the United States Senate.

Hero Challenges Today’s Leftist Enslavement of Black Americans

THE REBELLION SPREADS

 

by John Hinderaker  at PowerLine:

This righteous Twitter rant was retweeted by Candace Owens. I have no idea who this guy is, but he endorses Kanye West’s call for blacks to think for themselves. He is wearing a “MAGA” hat and he understands where the real genocide is taking place. And while he has problems, he is sane enough to realize that being a slave is not one of them.

Warning: Really, really bad language. But this guy is smart and his message is sound:

 

Henry Davis@Henryhahadavis
 May God Bless this young man for his courage and daring to speak the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth in his lecture above!

 

 

 

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/05/the-rebellion-spreads.php

Welcome Kanye West!!

Poll: Kanye West Now Four Times More Popular Among Trump Voters Than Hillary Voters

by Allahpundit   at HotAir:

The most surprising number here, actually, is how unpopular Kanye was among Democrats even before he went full MAGA. I can understand them turning against him once he put his Trump cap on, just as I can understand Republicans gaining newfound appreciation for him because of it. Especially since Trump’s been tweeting about him too.

But why were they anti-Kanye three years ago? Today he’s at 13/68 among Dems; in 2015 he was at 17/64. Basically no difference. The guy told the country during a nationally televised telethon that George W. Bush didn’t care about black people. What more can a liberal ask of him?

He’s at 34/43 among Republicans today, up from 11/74(!) in 2015. You don’t see many people gain 54 net points in their favorable rating very often, particularly when we’re measuring celebrities and polling right-wing audiences. When you tweak the sample to ask people their feelings on Kanye based on how they voted in 2016, the left/right divide becomes even starker.

To break that down for you, that’s nine percent of Clinton voters who are strongly or somewhat favorable of West (and 74 percent who are strongly or somewhat unfavorable) versus 36 percent of Trump voters who are strongly or somewhat favorable (and 40 percent who are strongly or somewhat unfavorable). Basically, Hillary fans now hate Kanye almost as much as they hate Trump while Trump voters are at about break-even on him. Assuming that most of Kanye’s fans lean Democratic, that means either Kim Kardashian is the new breadwinner in the family or Kanye had better invent the genre of country-rap and tour only red states in the future.

Relatedly, the Daily Caller made an interesting catch in a different new poll, this one from Reuters:

A poll taken on April 22, 2018 had Trump’s approval rating among black men at 11 percent, while the same poll on April 29, 2018 pegged the approval rating at 22 percent. It should be noted that Reuters only sampled slightly under 200 black males each week and slightly under 3,000 people overall…

Black males were also far more likely to say that they had “mixed feelings” about the president. On the 22nd, 1.5 percent said they had mixed feelings, while 7.1 percent said the same on the 29th.

Maybe that’s a “Kanye dividend” for Trump thanks to his Twitter lovefest with West on April 25. Or maybe it’s a Korea-summit dividend, part of a national trend. An 11-point jump is a big jump, though, for a foreign-policy development in which the United States isn’t directly involved (yet).

And so maybe it’s time for a different kind of peace summit:

The White House is exploring plans to host multiple summits on race between prominent athletes and artists and President Donald Trump, according to the outside adviser spearheading the effort…

[Pastor Darrell] Scott said the summits would be open to artists and athletes of all backgrounds and political persuasions. He added that “of course” West would be invited and that he was in the process of reaching out to the artist through an intermediary.

What America really needs is a Trump/LeBron summit to heal the pain from last year’s “unpleasantness.” Watching Kanye’s numbers soar among righties after a few days of flattery about Trump, I wonder if Trump himself would have had a tougher time catching on in 2015 if Republican voters regularly got more love from celebrities. Righties love to posture about hating Hollywood elites (shut up and sing, etc) but any time a B- or C-lister murmurs something sympathetic about them it’s news. It’s been said many times of Trump himself that part of his populism comes from the fact that no matter how much money he makes and how famous he gets, the left-leaning elite class looks down its nose at him. (Most famously at the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner, which allegedly inspired him to make his mark politically and show ’em.) I think there’s something to that on the broader right. A little more validation from Kanye and comrades in the entertainment industry and maybe GOP voters wouldn’t have savored the validation they got from Trump as much. Or maybe not: They’d still want a 30-foot wall on the Mexican border, right? Well, only one Republican was going to promise them that.

Speaking of celebrities showing affection to Trumpers, your exit quotation from Roseanne Barr: “@kanyewest is telling the truth about Rahm’s Chicago. Ppl do not want to hear the truth-that Chicago could be a better city for its citizens, but the establishment is corrupted.” She’ll regret saying that when she’s running against Kanye in the Republican primaries in 2024.

https://hotair.com/archives/2018/05/03/poll-kanye-west-now-four-times-popular-among-trump-voters-hillary-voters/

Will Our Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar Sabotage “Secretary of State” Mike Pompeo This Week?

Minnesota’s Senator Amy Klobuchar is one of the very few civilized Democrats still alive  in our today’s American Congress, a daughter of a very difficult Jim Klobuchar of   gopherland sports world around a half a  century ago..

She is naturally civilized,  quiet,  politely straight forward, and very reserved……from Gopherland’s  Iron Range blood.

I am in the landscape garden business and served as her landscaper  before she began to push her political buttons years ago.   Pleasant, quiet, appreciating,  thanking, paying on time with a pleasant smile, so foreign from the habits of contemporary  fascist Dem uglies performing  in Congress, television, and newspapers these days.   One might also guess she’s actually religious, as well!

She was interviewed  on BBC Television that evening our Donald defeated that Hillary, February 8, 2016 and made my local roots very proud of her winsome adulthood.

She has an opportunity to demonstrate before her state and country, true honor and wisdom by voting for Mike Pompeo at Secretary of State this coming week.   I don’t think she could be damaged by the fanatic  leftist wing of her Democrat Party if she thought of her country first and so,  voted American for Mr. Pompeo!!

 

My, WHAT A GAL!…..the Pilot of Flight 1380!

Pilot Who Safely Landed Southwest Flight 1380 Had ‘Nerves Of Steel’

by John Sexton    at  HotAir:

 

You’ve probably read about the near-disaster of Southwest Airlines flight 1380, which had to make an emergency landing after an engine exploded at 32,000 feet. It will be months before the NTSB releases a final report, but investigators are already saying one of the blades on a fan inside the engine had broken off. Some piece of shrapnel set loose by the broken blade struck a window leading it to shatter. That led to decompression of the cabin which sucked one woman, Jennifer Riordan, partly out of the plane. Passengers rushed to pull her back inside and then provided CPR but she was later pronounced dead.

Meanwhile, the plane’s captain, a former Navy fighter pilot, remained extremely calm, quickly dropping the plane to an altitude where passengers could breath without masks and asking for a new heading to the nearest airport. From the NY Times:

In an instant, Captain Shults found herself in a situation most pilots face only during training: having to land a plane after an engine goes out.

For the next 40 minutes, she displayed what one passenger later called “nerves of steel,” maneuvering the plane, which had been on its way from La Guardia Airport in New York to Dallas Love Field, toward Philadelphia for an emergency landing.

In the seats behind her, passengers sent goodbye text messages to loved ones, tightened oxygen masks around their faces and braced for impact. Flight attendants frantically performed CPR on the critically injured passenger, who later died at a hospital.

But Captain Shults, 56, was in control. She learned to fly as one of the first female fighter pilots in the Navy three decades ago, piloting the F/A-18 Hornet in an era when women were barred from combat missions.

“Can you have the medical meet us there on the runway,” Captain Shults calmly told air traffic controllers in Philadelphia. “They said there’s a hole and, uh, someone went out.”

If you think maybe that “nerves of steel” line is some kind of exaggerated praise, it’s not. The audio traffic between the plane and the ground shows zero indication in Captain Shults’ voice that she is in an emergency situation. In fact, if you listen to the entire clip, you can hear some stress creeping into the voices of the other air traffic controllers but Shults remains polite and calm throughout.

https://hotair.com/archives/2018/04/18/pilot-safely-landed-southwest-flight-1380-nerves-steel/

 

American Hero, David Horowitz, Explains the Fascist Left

David Horowitz Explains the Ruling Ideas of the Left

by Richare Baehr   at  American Thinker:

The Black Book of the American Left

The Collected Conservative Writings of David Horowitz

Volume IX: Ruling Ideas (purchase here)

(Note from Glenn.  I have known David Horowitz via news print for nearly sixty years……since those long ago  days when he was an aggressive, open public salesman of neocommunism.   I looked forward to reading his articles.   He was literate and  the least irrational fascist-Communist activist writer among  his comrades whose  writings, the bad and the violent,  were  sold at the  leftist kiosk post at the University of Minnesota campus during  my post graduate years when I was   teaching Russian at the University of Minnesota’s  High School at that time.

I was born male and therefore driven to  endure the drug of curiosity especially when trying to understand the human story and its struggle.

I used to subscribe to both Soviet State Communist  Pravda and Izvestia newsprint of the day…..sent directly from Moscow to my rental housing on Erie St. near the University’s campus.  (Today’s leftists at campus and the  FBI   are almost  as intolerant and fascistic as the USSR Soviets were in the late 1950s, but our gulags haven’t been built yet…..we do have leftist Zuckerberg-Facebook, where N.Y.  lefty Charlie Schumer’s daughter is head of the department of thought control…..I wish I were kidding!

David Horowitz converted to freedom through knowledge during our country’s street wars of violence and  murder led by leftist communists, black racists and the sex anarchists of the 1968-1975 period.   He has been an esteemed disciple and teacher of Freedom Loving America ever since.)   Please read the article below:

“Many people I know grew up in liberal households, and at some point in their lives, they gravitated to the right politically.  Many others were nurtured in conservative homes and moved left politically.  These shifts are not too surprising.  What made someone start in one place and move one way or the other is a function of many things, including the political thinking of one’s spouse or partner; the community where one lives; the schools one attended; the company where one works; the political environment of the country, which has shifted left and right at different times; and whether someone was religiously observant and became more secular or moved in the other direction.  In general, most people are not obsessed with politics.  They may have strong political views, but they don’t choose politics as a career path or live and breathe it to the exclusion of other interests or passions.

David Horowitz has had a fundamentally different life experience.  He grew up in a communist household with parents who were true believers in the superiority of Marxist-Leninist thinking and the model of the Soviet Union as a pathway to a better world for those who could break the bonds that held them captive to ruling-class capitalist ideology and government.  Horowitz’s parents were committed ideologues whose allegiance to the hard left never wavered.  While they were momentarily upset with the revelations in 1956 of the mass murders committed by Stalin’s government in previous decades, they considered this at worst an aberration, not a reflection of the tyranny and destruction routinely associated with Marxist regimes.  Their lives were too tightly wound in the narrative of the communist collective in the Queens neighborhood where they lived as public school teachers to allow themselves to rethink or reconsider their ideological faith.

David Horowitz, on the other hand questioned things from the start of his politically conscious years.  While he remained on the left for another two decades after the news of Stalin’s crimes, his allegiance was never so tight or his mind so closed as to be unable to challenge his belief system when presented with new evidence or arguments.

Horowitz’s path from left to right, and then his role as a spokesman for conservative ideas, has been documented through his enormous collection of articles and books, a full bibliography of which totals 56 pages in this ninth and final volume of his Black Book of the Left.  The Horowitz catalog includes nearly 80 books authored, co-authored, or edited.  While David Horowitz once enjoyed critical acclaim from the book-reviewers of America’s elite newspapers and magazines, since his shift to the right, his books are never even considered for review.  Why would the New York Times Book Review waste time finding a reviewer to combat Horowitz’s arguments when it is so much easier to fill pages with laudatory reviews of those who have stayed on the left’s plantation and parrot its talking points?  Ignoring someone is also a way to say that such person and his views do not matter. And certainly no left-wing media outlet cares to encourage apostasy by others.

This last volume in Horowitz’s series of books on the American left reinforces his central argument that the left is different from the right in the totality of its commitment to advancing its agenda and destroying its enemies.  Conservatives are conservative not only in political orientation, but in how they do battle.  Preservation of what is good requires a different kind of motivation and energy from revolution or upheaval. The battle is not between two sides who agree on ends, but see different ways of getting there.  The left, according to Horowitz, is ruthless both in pursuit of victory and when given the reins of authority.

Naturally, there are gradations on the left as there are on the right.  There are moderate, centrist Democrats, a declining group for sure, who remain committed to some of the same things as many on the right.  These “collaborationists” are despised by the true believers on the left.  The energy and the firepower on the left belong to more absolutist types, who accept far less of any consensus view of what American represents, its uniqueness, the trajectory of its history, and what needs to be preserved or destroyed.  There is little or no pride in America on the left, since so much remains to be fixed and so much power remains in the wrong hands.  The resistance to Donald Trump is a reflection of how grating the concept of American greatness is to the left.

Volume 9 of the Black Book series contains four chapters written by Horowitz and one chapter by Jamie Glazov, which provides a history of Horowitz’s political evolution as seen through his writings.  The longest chapter, “The Fate of the Marxist Idea,” includes two letters Horowitz wrote to former friends and mentors in the communist movement, and were initially published in 1998.  The first is to a member of the Sunnyside, Queens collective whose parents worshiped communism in the same “church” as David’s parents.

Horowitz’s former friend chose not to attend the memorial service after the death of David’s father in 1987, seeking to ignore any need to debate any of the political ideas that both had once absorbed and that Horowitz had since abandoned.  Instead, she wrote a short letter saying the personal and the political cannot be separated, that socialism is better than capitalism, that she had abandoned Stalinism (what courage!) and socialism had not really been tried, the real reason why it had “not worked” so far.  And then she added the insults, accusing Horowitz of having lost the compassion and humanism of his youth, which always motivated their parents, evidenced by his support of Ronald Reagan’s vile policies.  Horowitz’s lengthy point-by-point refutation of her letter was never answered except by threat of a lawsuit.

A more comprehensive analysis of the failures of the left was sent to Ralph Milliband, a Marxist writer who was a mentor to Horowitz when he lived in London in the ’60s.  The letter outlines the cold reality of communist-socialist rule wherever it had been tried and the enormous death toll attributable to the tyrannies and tyrants associated with these regimes – whether in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Venezuela, North Korea, or Cuba among others.  These countries are not and were not similar to the social welfare states of Western Europe that emerged after World War 2.  These states have moved much farther along the continuum toward higher taxes, and a larger government share, and bureaucratic control of the economy than in the United States, but they still sustain a reasonable commitment to preserving the political freedoms of individuals and the belief in democracy and a free people.

The true believers on the left say they want nothing more than equality and better lives for the masses, but communist equality has always meant equalizing the suffering, reducing living standards, and eliminating dissent or political opposition.  Milliband also ignored engaging with Horowitz, obviously a lost cause in his eyes as far as rejoining the legions on the left.

Horowitz devotes two chapters to issues concerning black Americans.  The first provides a commentary on the campaign for reparations, advanced by Randall Robinson, among others, 15 years back, and now getting new life from support by the likes of Ta-Nehisi Coates, the current black intellectual designee by the major media and their partners in universities.  Coates is the author of a commentary on the 9-11 attacks that concluded that the police and firefighters who died “were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could – with no justification – shatter my body.”  So the men and women who entered burning buildings, and climbed dozens of flights of stairs with 75 pounds of equipment on their backs to try to get people out of the buildings before they collapsed, were really just biding their time until they could get on to their real task of destroying black bodies.  This is what qualifies one as a thought leader in elite circles these days.

Horowitz destroys the argument for reparations, and in a second chapter, he challenges the victimization logic that offers white racism as the excuse for any “underperformance” by the black community.  There is no one alive today who held any slaves or personally was a slave.  Many black Americans in the country today have no ancestors in America who were slaves.  A majority of Americans are descended from people who came to the United States after the Civil War and bear no guilt for the ugly practice in one region of the United States two centuries ago.  Those who are descended from people who lived in the states that did not join the Confederacy have 400,000 dead Union soldiers, plus many hundreds of thousands injured, as their sacrifice to liberating the slaves and preserving the Union.  Reparations for Japanese-Americans in the United States or Holocaust survivors in Europe were paid to people who had themselves lived through specific horrors or criminal behavior by governments.  Must all Americans today pay for something that ended over 150 years ago and for which a bloody war was fought?  Are all African-Americans equally entitled to compensation for something that impacted some of their ancestors seven generations back?

The victimization theme – that white racism is solely responsible for the economic situation of black Americans, their higher crime rates and poor academic performance, eliminates any agency for individuals to beat the odds or take advantage of the increased opportunities that are now available, including trillions spent on social welfare programs over the past half-century, much of that designed to address the needs of African-Americans.  These programs include affirmative action admissions to universities and similar approaches to hiring by corporations and other firms.  Martin Luther King was aware that racism and discrimination were present in 1960s America, as was segregation in large parts of the country, but he believed that these should not be an excuse for black American behavior that only worsened their plight.  Charlatans and race-hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have dominated the civil rights movement since King’s death, always pushing the white racism bogeyman, while those more in line with King’s legacy, including Jason Riley, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, and Glen Loury, are ignored or condemned as sell-outs.  Arguing that cultural norms within a community can be damaging to the success of future generations is simply a forbidden theme – witness the recent campaign against University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax.

Horowitz’s final chapter is a review of Christopher Hitchens’s book Hitch-22 and the British author’s political path from a Trotskyite of sorts to something a bit more nuanced and sane.  Horowitz is clearly disappointed that Hitchens’s movement did not follow his own trajectory, which resulted in abandonment of the left and a commitment to fighting it.  Instead, Hitchens’s politics at the time of his death from cancer was something of a confused palette: anger at Islamic extremism and hostility to Israel, appreciation for American uniqueness but fondness for the collectivist ideal.  Hitchens tried to hold a place in two camps – not an easy task, and one that can lead to incoherence.  Most people would not get too upset or frustrated about someone who moved some way toward their worldview, but Horowitz’s life experience has been consumed with politics, first from the left, and for the last three decades from the right, and he prefers enlightenment to cautious mush.

There is a passion among the politically most active, and when their politics shift, they often have a story to tell about the illusions and lies they encountered and addressed that motivated the change in allegiance.  The nine-volume series, The Black Book of the America Left, including this final volume, is a unique outline, filled with many chapters and verses, about why the left has been consistently wrong and produced so much destruction in its wake.  Someone who never started on the left, and did not understand its convictions, its messaging, and its tactics, could not have written such a series.

 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/04/david_horowitz_explains_the_ruling_ideas_of_the_left.html