The Democrats are winning the war of planting questioners at town hall meetings

Hot Air  "Jeb Bush had yet another uncomfortable moment at a town hall in South Carolina yesterday. While he was trying to fend off questions about The Donald and get out his message on economic growth and jobs, a questioner (who was a white guy, by the way) stood up and tagged him with something completely out of left field. (Washington Post)"
. . .

"It’s not the first time this has happened this cycle. The now infamous “Muslim Question Guy” at Trump’s rally earlier in the month turned out to be a dedicated Democrat supporter. It’s a pretty good tactic if you think about it, but having seen it rolled out multiple times the GOP candidates need to be prepped and ready for these tricks. (I’m not saying we need to be doing it ourselves… but then again, I’m not saying we shouldn’t, either.) It’s nearly impossible to completely vet every single person who shows up for a rally without making the place look like an internment camp, which carries its own set of PR problems. But if you suspect that such a stunt is coming your way your staff should be getting you ready to deflect those questions and defuse the situation.

"Thus far the Republican field seems to be failing that test. This is war and the other side is in no mood to take prisoners, so the GOP needs to get ahead of the curve and be ready for these shenanigans." . . .  

EXCLUSIVE: Liberal Group Publicized Trump ‘Muslim Question’ Guy Years Ago
. . . "The man was depicted participating in a rally holding a sign that read “Impeach the Muslim Marxist.” The photo spread on left-wing message boards.

“Glenn Beck Is My Hero,” the man’s shirt read.

"The photo has been used as a stock image by liberal sites including The Daily Banter and Forward Progressives.

If you like your nuclear program you can keep it. Period

US offer of anti-Iran bomb lands as a dud in Israel

. . . "Instead, Israel is believed to be focused on acquiring one more squadron of F-15 and F-35 fighter jets, Tomahawk cruise missiles and a bump in annual US military aid from $3 billion to $5 billion as part of upcoming negotiations over a new 10-year Memorandum of Understanding when the current one expires in 2017.

"Despite those reservations, the Israeli air force is not expected to pass up out-of-hand the chance to get its hands on powerful new toys. Others say they like the political message that would be sent if the United States demonstrated that it was conserving its military options against Iran in deeds rather than words.

"And at least one former Israeli Defense Forces chief of staff likes the idea.

"The former top military official told Al-Monitor that the delivery of the massive bombs — and the US aircraft to fly them — would mean an actual US military presence in Israel, sending a strong signal not only to Tehran but to the Russians as well as they increase their military presence in Syria. With US assistance, the former official said, there’s no reason why Israel couldn’t build the necessary infrastructure for the weapons.

"The idea of sharing the bunker-busters with Israel has been bandied about for the past several years, ever since the Pentagon declared them ready for action two years ago. The bombs are seen as a logical addition to the Israeli arsenal because of their alleged ability to destroy Iran’s most heavily fortified nuclear site at Fordow — the very mission for which they were designed." . . .

Islamic hit list of bloggers

Islamic Radicals Publish Hit List on Bloggers

"Islamists in Bangladesh have published a hit list of bloggers and writers which includes people in Europe and America. The image above is of people in Bangladesh protesting the murder of a blogger earlier this year.

"Jethro Mullen of CNN reports:

Extremists in Bangladesh publish global hit list of bloggers and writers
Islamic extremists in Bangladesh appear to be taking their war on secular writers and bloggers beyond the South Asian country’s borders.
A hit list purporting to be from the militant group Ansarullah Bangla Team has been sent out threatening people in Europe and North America.
“Let Bangladesh revoke the citizenship of these enemies of Islam,” a statement accompanying the list says. “If not, we will hunt them down in whatever part of God’s world we find them and kill them right there.”
The list contains nine people in the United Kingdom, eight in Germany, two in the United States, one in Canada and one in Sweden. CNN isn’t reporting any of the names on the list.

"If this sounds familiar it’s because we’ve been down this road before:

The brutal killings of the four bloggers this year have shocked many people in Bangladesh and beyond.

In February, Roy, a Bangladesh-born American blogger, was killed with machetes and knives as he walked back from a book fair in Dhaka.
A month later, Washiqur Rahman, 27, was savaged by two men with knives and meat cleavers just outside his house as he headed to work at a travel agency in the capital.
Das, 32, was set upon with cleavers and machetes in May as he left his home on his way to work at a bank in northeastern Bangladesh. And less than two weeks ago, Neel was hacked to death in his Dhaka apartment.

The Guardian has more on the group behind the current threat:

Democrats' problem with Hillary is not that she is a liar; it's that she is such a bad one.

Democrats Wake Up to How Bad a Liar Hillary Is

"The biggest liability Hillary Clinton faces in getting the Democratic nomination may be that too many of her fellow Democrats don’t believe she is a good liar.

"A new Fox News poll this week found that by 58 to 32 percent, Americans don’t think Hillary is telling the truth about her e-mail scandal. Surprisingly, 31 percent of Democrats and almost two-thirds of independents share that view. Perhaps most ominous for her is that 47 percent of Democrats (and 62 percent of all voters) “are worried that scandals would be a problem for a Clinton administration were she elected.”

" Clinton loyalists are convinced that polls showing that majorities of voters find Hillary dishonest and untrustworthy will be irrelevant when it actually comes time to vote. One top Clintion adviser told Ron Fournier of the National Journal last spring: “Trust doesn’t matter.” Other aides point out that the day Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 with 49 percent of the vote, a majority of Americans didn’t think he was honest or trustworthy — and that was before the Lewinsky scandal."   Read more

Another big fat Hillary lie exposed  "Hillary Clinton has been caught in another lie. She claimed that she was “not directly involved” in her close aide Huma Abedin gaining approval for a suspicious, conflict of interest-redolent job arrangement, but a document has just surfaced putting the lie to that claim. Rachel Bade of Politico reports:" . . .

Consider this before welcoming those refugees into the US

FIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS: Take A Wrong Turn Into Muslim Neighborhood, Barely Survive…


"Are you still convinced that Islam is a religion of peace?

A Palestinian man saved five American yeshiva students from Brooklyn from being lynched in Hebron after they took a wrong turn Thursday on their way to the Cave of the Patriarchs.
The students entered the Palestinian neighborhood of Jabal Johar after having been misdirected there by the navigational system Waze, according to security sources.
Palestinians on the street who saw their car immediately threw stones and a firebomb at the vehicle. The yeshiva students were able to escape from the car before the Palestinians torched it.
A Palestinian resident of the neighborhood helped rescue them and sheltered them in his apartment.

Read more: J Post:

Palestinian prevents lynching of 5 lost American yeshiva students in Hebron  Video

. . . "A spokesman for the Hebron Jewish community, Noam Arnon, said the IDF used to have a checkpoint at the entry to the neighborhood, but last week handed it over to the Palestinian security forces, Arnon said. He called on the army to restore the checkpoint.

“ 'The fact that Jews had to be miraculously rescued shows that handing over territory to terrorists always leads to a disaster,” he said. "

Pray for the safety of that heroic Palestinian hero.

Should Black Lives Matter be designated a terrorist organization?

Black Lives Matter supporter arrested after calls to murder police, white people

"On Thursday, Atlanta news channel WSB reported that Latausha Nedd, a supporter of Black Lives Matter who goes by the name “Eye Empress Sekhmet,” was arrested after she reportedly posted

"YouTube videos calling for a war on white people and police. The videos, WSB said, "are filled with profanity and hate for white people."

"Nedd also called for activists to "take over" police stations. In one video removed by YouTube, she is seen issuing threats against white people, declaring "open season" on "crackas," a racist term referring to whites. "I say let's have a take a gun day, and start walking up on these untrained (expletive deleted) and stealing their weapons," she said in another video.

"WSB said it was the only media outlet present as officers from the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service and a joint terrorism task force moved in Thursday. According to the report, Nedd was watching WSB at the time of the arrest.

""We had just aired a report about her videos," WSB's Tom Jones said. Jones also approached Nedd as she was being brought out of her house in handcuffs.

"“You really want people to kill cops?” Jones asked. "I never said that," Nedd replied, shaking her head. Police, however, say her gun-waving rants posted on YouTube tell a much different story. A sheepish Nedd told Jones that she's seen worse videos on YouTube.

"Nedd claimed she was only telling people to defend themselves. Again, the videos indicated otherwise. According to the report, authorities acted on an anonymous tip, concerned about the nature of her comments." . . .

Weasel of the Week

Nice Deb     
"Yes, once again, It’s time to present this week’s statuette of shame, The Golden Weasel!!

"Every Tuesday, the Council nominates some of the slimiest, most despicable characters in public life for some deed of evil, cowardice or corruption they’ve performed. Then we vote to single out one particular Weasel for special mention, to whom we award the statuette of shame, our special, 100% plastic Golden Weasel. This week’s nominees were particularly slimy and despicable, but the votes are in and we have our winner…the envelope please…

Major General Kenneth Dahl  (No relation to Barbie)

. . . "Maj. Gen. Kenneth Dahl, the senior officer who carried out an investigation of Bowe Bergdahl’s desertion case. They’re all doing their best, no doubt at the Obama Administration’s orders to get Bergdahl off with a slap on the wrist. But I’m going with Dahl because even as an Obama promoted General, he ought to know better and have some sense of honor."

. . . "Meanwhile. Our Dear Leader released five dangerous Taliban commanders for this creep, and the word is out to get Bergdahl off, even though six far better men died trying to find him.

"General Dahl knows that very well. But he has apparently decided to click his heels, salute and follow orders.

"General Dahl is obviously just another symbol of what President Barack Hussein Obama is doing to ‘recreate’ what’s left of our Army. After all, the general owes this president his promotion, so who cares what this does to the rank and file’s moral./ Who care’s really about the families of the men who died trying to find this deserter,  or the casualties suffered from the activities of the five top Taliban commanders the president released to bring him back? Bergdahl getting justly punished for what he did embarrasses the regime politically, so the Pentagon has it’s orders to pull out all the stops, paint Bergdahl as a victim and get him off with a slap on the wrist.

Coulter on "Useless Idiots"

Ann Coulter
. . . "This is the problem with using the word "elites" to refer to Republican Party apparatchiks: They're all such utter mediocrities.

"I don't mean to be unkind. It's simply a fact.

 "Trump graduated from the Wharton School of Business and went on to make $11 billion. Carson went from Yale to the University of Michigan Medical School and was the first man to separate twins conjoined at the brain. Fiorina graduated from Stanford University and then earned $80 million in business.

"By contrast, look up the educational achievement of the average pundit sneering at Trump’s idiocy and the ordinariness of his supporters. I won’t be as nasty as they are, but wow! – people who went to bush league schools shouldn’t throw stones. There's nothing wrong with attending a bush-league college. But maybe ease up on holding yourself out as a great intellectual appalled by the dirty masses if you went to a third-rate college in the era of need-blind admissions.

"These guys damn well better be good at what they do. But, to the contrary, Republican insiders are the Washington Generals to the Democrats' Harlem Globetrotters. They enjoy being good losers. That's their job.

"The consultant class wants a neat, static world, where nothing ever changes. They produce an occasional tepid victory to create the illusion of a two-party system. But like Arafat with the PLO, Republican insiders don't actually want to govern. The organization itself has become the cause -- not the purported goals of the organization. Just keep the donations rolling in.

"A majority of elected Republicans, their advisers, conservative magazines and newspapers are nothing but junior partners to the left. They go on TV and repeat prepackaged conventional wisdom, hoping to get at least a small ovation. Trump is popular because we now live in a Kardashian nation and are one big cult of celebrity!

. . .

" Once the Democrats get the voters they want through immigration, they will be like kids in a candy store. What will they do first? Ban private ownership of guns? Strip Christian churches of their tax exemptions for being "homophobic"? Release criminals from prison? Imprison the police? It will be the LBJ and Carter administrations rolled into one for all time, without end.

"All the debates we have now on talk radio and cable news will be completely irrelevant. The most left-wing policies imaginable will be enacted, with no opposition -- as they are today in California.

"You might think California would wake up even the utter mediocrities in the Republican Party. But their predictable little lives have been disrupted. That's why Trump has them in a panic."

The Post-Indiana Future for Christians

The American Conservative

. . . "What prompted his reaching out to me? “I’m very worried,” he said, of events of the last week. “The constituency for religious liberty just isn’t there anymore.”

"Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“ 'Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

"But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.' ” . . .

Why colleges cave to the demands of student activists

"Barbarians at the Campus Gates"

Thomas Sowell   "An all-too-familiar scene was enacted on the campus of Swarthmore College during a meeting on May 4 to discuss demands by student activists for the college to divest itself of its investments in companies that deal in fossil fuels. As a speaker was beginning a presentation to show how many millions of dollars such a disinvestment would cost the college, student activists invaded the meeting, seized the microphone, and shouted down a student who rose in the audience to object.

"Although there were professors and administrators in the room — including the college president — apparently nobody had the guts to put a stop to these storm-trooper tactics. Nor is it likely that there will be any punishment of those who put their own desires above the rights of others. On the contrary, these students went on to demand mandatory campus “teach-ins,” and the administration caved on that demand. Among their other demands are that courses on ethnic studies, and on gender and sexuality, be made a requirement for graduation.

"Just what is it that academics have to fear if they stand up for common decency, instead of letting campus barbarians run amok? At a prestigious college like Swarthmore, every student who trampled on other people’s rights could be expelled and there would be plenty of prospective students available to take their places. Although colleges and universities across the country have been giving in to storm-trooper tactics ever since the nationwide campus disruptions of the 1960s, not all have. " . . .
 

Trump insists half empty room was full

Jammie Wearing Fool

"He’s crossed over now from mildly deranged to completely psychotic.

“It was sort of interesting yesterday. Your reporter in South Carolina who was absolutely terrible,” Trump said, referring to CNN’s Randi Kaye, who covered Trump’s speech in Charleston. “I made a speech to the African American Chamber of Commerce in South Carolina. Wonderful people. And the room was full, every seat was full. . . .

Is Trump Ready for Truman’s Kitchen?  ". . . Truman was one tough dude.  He was, it’s worth remembering, the man who told us of politics and the presidency, “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.”  He also opined, “If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.”  Wise words those.

"Barack Obama has been a kind of anti-Truman, hardly ever living up to his word.  Two easy examples are the phony red line to Assad regarding chemical weapons and the now silly-seeming claim that the Iranians would have to allow “anytime, anywhere” inspections in order for us to sign the Iran deal.  Compared to Harry, Barack’s a wimp. That Putin has (literally) pushed him all over the map — first Ukraine, now Syria — is no accident.

"So where does The Donald fit in this equation? Superficially, he seems a macho guy, but I’m not sure Truman would approve of his thin skin.

Trump Feuds with Fox News, Refuses to Appear on Network ‘for the Foreseeable Future’

“When coverage doesn’t go his way, he engages in personal attacks on our anchors and hosts, which has grown stale and tiresome,” the Fox News spokesperson said.”He doesn’t seem to grasp that candidates telling journalists what to ask is not how the media works in this country.”

Pope visits with Little Sisters of the Poor, who are suing over ObamaCare

" . . .President Obama said the United States "stands" with Francis "in defense of religious freedom."

Pope to meet with nuns challenging Obamacare contraception mandate
. . . "The symbolism of this visit cannot be overstated.  It is a direct challenge to the administration and their bogus "workaround" for people of conscience.  The "compromise" is fine if you don't mind compromising your principles.  But those without strong religious beliefs cannot fathom why the workaround isn't acceptable.  It is beyond the ken of their understanding, hence they believe that resistance is petty and unnecessary.

"The pope may not have intended this challenge to be political, but he must have understood the political perception of his gesture.  It makes his speech this afternoon before a joint session of Congress even more interesting than it would have been. 

Pope Francis Met Little Sisters Of The Poor In Quiet Protest Of Obamacare

. . . "According to Vatican spokesman Fr. Federico Lombardi, the pope made an unscheduled stop to meet with the Little Sisters. The order, which operates health care centers for the impoverished elderly, is fighting the Affordable Care Act’s requirement for employers to pay for their employees’ contraception despite the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control. The case may go to the Supreme Court in the coming judicial term." . . .