Looking ahead to tonight's Republican debate

How GOP Candidates are Preparing for Tonight’s Debate

Beating Up on Ben Carson  "The first salvo was an attack on his wife Candy Carson's appearance – her clothes, her hairstyle, and her lack of make-up.  I thought it was the right waging the "war on women."  Turns out the left is waging one, particularly against women the left disagrees with politically."

Seven Storylines to Watch at Tonight’s GOP Debate

One of which is "curtain call for Carly"

GOP Debate: Rivals Hope Substance Will Stop Trump, Carson Rise

"Seasoned U.S. politicians trailing Donald Trump and Ben Carson for the Republican presidential nomination are eager to shift the campaign focus to the economy and policy in Wednesday's debate and expose what they see as weaknesses in the two front-runners.
"Jeb Bush and other candidates are trying to turn the tide in a campaign that is dominated so far by provocative rhetoric that has played to the strengths of Trump, a bombastic reality television star and developer, and Carson, a soft-spoken surgeon who has been gaining support in opinion polls.
The two-hour debate, moderated in Boulder, Colorado, by business network CNBC, will begin at 8 p.m. EDT/0000 GMT Wednesday.

"With Trump and Carson holding a firm grip on the race in polls of likely Republican voters for the November 2016 election, the forum comes at an increasingly perilous time for lower-ranking candidates." . . .

Follow the debate on Powerline

Power Line  . . . "It will be televised on CNBC. What better way to watch it than with a few hundred (or thousand) fellow conservatives? The audience for the debate will be big, and it could be a make or break event for several candidates.

"So: plan to sign in to Power Line Live as you watch the debate. To get into Power Line Live, click on the “Live” link above or simply click here.

"You will be asked to log in. Logging in is easy. When you arrive at Power Line Live, you’ll be invited to enter a nickname. Enter anything you like, but keep it civil, of course. You’ll instantly be in the chat!

"You can also click the button that says “Log in or sign up now!” This lets you use your Facebook account to log in. In this case, you won’t have to pick a nickname; we’ll get it from your Facebook profile. Click the Facebook logo, and then authorize Facebook to connect with chat. Once you do this, you’ll be in the chat. You can comment on the action and see what your fellow conservatives are saying.

Weasel of the Week Nominees

Nice Deb   "It’s time once again for the Watcher’s Council’s ‘Weasel Of The Week’ nominations, where we pick our choices to compete for the award of the famed Golden Weasel to a public figure who particularly deserves to be slimed and mocked for his or her dastardly deeds during the week. Every Tuesday morning, tune in for the Weasel of the Week nominations!

"Here are this weeks’ nominees….

Democrat Front Runner Hillary Clinton!

"The Independent Sentinel : How do you beat Hillary -lied her butt off Thursday and did it so well!"

The Democrats On The Benghazi Committee!

" . . .because they were so eager to circle the wagons around the obviously corrupt and dishonest Hillary Clinton.. What makes them especially repulsive weasels is their gross (yet routine) left-wing projection – accusing the GOP of politicizing the Benghazi investigation as they themselves very blatantly politicize the proceedings."

Violent  Film Maker And Cop Hater Quentin Tarantino!

"Officer Holder is the third law enforcement officer to die this month in the line of duty or from injuries that occurred in the line of duty and the fourth NYPD officer killed in the line of duty in the past eleven months giving those calling for the death of law enforcement reason to celebrate and celebrate they did."

"Hard worker" is a racist term? Who knew?

This could be posted under "American Silliness"

Althouse  "Now, what could possibly be wrong with the description 'hard worker'?" A"sks Greta Van Susteren before playing video of Melissa Harris-Perry calling out a guest for saying that Paul Ryan is a "hard worker."

"This is Harris-Perry's stern warning:  "I want us to be super-careful when we use the language 'hard worker,' because I actually keep an image of folks working in cotton fields on my office wall, because it is a reminder about what hard work looks like."

"Oh, so the slave is the idealized "hard worker"? Then why, just a couple weeks ago did a textbook publisher, McGraw-Hill, have to apologize and agree to change a geography textbook that referred to slaves as "workers"?

On reading a caption in his geography textbook that described slaves as “workers”, Coby Burren sent a photo and an annoyed message to his mother. "We was real hard workers wasn’t we," he wrote.

Good grief.

Again:  Her comments sparked online backlash with many calling them ridiculous    

Chaffetz, House move to impeach Obama's IRS chief

polforumblogroll

Wayne Dupree  . . . "Chaffetz argued that Koskinen lied to Congress when he said they were turning over all of Lois Lerner’s emails. In reality, the IRS was in the process of destroying the backup files that contained these emails.

"Chaffetz and his colleagues claim that the IRS knew that some of Lerner’s emails were missing in February of 2014 and that they then destroyed backup tapes a month later. Koskinen, however, didn’t admit any of this to Congress until June.

“The chain of command all the way down has changed,” Koskinen told the Senate earlier Tuesday, claiming that he had cleaned up his agency. “There are new people that have gone through, and we’ve pursued appropriate disciplinary review as needed.”

"Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch told Koskinen today that many of his efforts appear to have been misdirected." . . .

Andrea Tantaros slams NYT over what she calls "sexist garbage" on Carly Fiorina

Obviously posted by a sexist, chauvinist source.

Oops...wait! This is from Victory Girls Blog!

Fox Host Andrea Tantaros Slams NYT for “Sexist Garbage” Article on Carly Fiorina

by Jodi Giddings

"On the heels of crowning Hillary Clinton “The Queen of Everything” last week following her debate “win” against the other four dimwits on stage with her, and her magnificent performance—and I stress the word “performance”—at the House Benghazi Hearing, the New York Times is again doing precisely what it and countless other Leftist rags do with predictable regularity: practicing shameless hypocrisy. Here’s what the “news”paper ran yesterday on GOP presidential candidate, Carly Fiorina:" . . .

Signs that the deaths of our Benghazi defenders weighs heavily on Hillary

The last exodus like this was Jews trying to get out of Nazi Germany

These refugees grew up on a steady diet of this  You didn't think only Palestinian children were taught these things, did you? And they are all headed for the West.

"Palestinians have been stabbing random Israelis daily for weeks, and on cue myriad foreign commentators have been trotting out the usual "root causes" arguments to explain their actions: Israeli settlements, Palestinians' collective despair, the Netanyahu government's policies.

"Then again, we could just as well blame Farfour." . . .

Our allies suffer the foreign policy of Obama and his lifetime mentors

And America will be the worse for it.

Afghanistan Turns To Russia Because America Is Untrustworthy

Afghanistan and Russia are set to sign a deal for the delivery of Mi-35 gunship helicopters.

"Atmar is asking for U.S. help, but Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is calling on someone more serious: Russia's Vladimir Putin. Ghani wants helicopter gunships and artillery from Moscow.

" . . .

" 'Russia is seizing the opportunity," a U.S. official told the Wall Street Journal. And, remarkably, Putin had just warned at a Kazakhstan summit of regional Asian leaders earlier this month that he was ready to get involved, ostensibly to prevent Islamists from destabilizing central Asia. Moscow this year also sold four chopper gunships to Pakistan, another U.S. ally whose eyes have been forced to wander.

"It just doesn't pay to be a friend of the U.S. these days.". . .

US rejected Israeli request for hardware to raid Iranian nuclear facility – report

"Israel wanted to send commandos to break into the Fordo nuclear facility in Iran and sabotage it from the inside, WSJ reports. The US considered it a suicide mission and refused to sell Israel military hardware that could be used in such a raid."

Allies scorned by Obama continue turn to Russia

. . . "In a major strategic shift, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said during a visit to Moscow on Monday that Israel and Russia had agreed to coordinate military moves in Syria to avoid the possibility of the two countries accidentally trading fire."

. . .

Saudi Arabia: "Since the signing of the nuclear deal with Iran, there have been widespread reports of plans by Russia and the Saudis to possibly step up cooperation on energy policies." . . .

Egypt, Jordan: . . . "The Obama administration has been cool to the secular, moderate government of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, which ousted the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies, led my Mohamed Morsi in 2013." . . .

Israel: ". . . And now, under the Obama administration, the U.S.-Israel alliance, the linchpin of America’s Mideast foreign policy, is under historic strain." . . .

Hillary's Breathtaking Mendacity*

*Mendacity: 

1. The condition of being mendacious; untruthfulness.

2. A lie; a falsehood.

Just as she looked Charles Woods in the eye three years ago, while his son’s remains and those of three other Americans killed by jihadists lay nearby, so did Hillary Clinton look America in the eye during Thursday’s testimony. Both times, she seemed earnest, composed and determined as only a pathological liar can in the execution of a high-stakes fraud.

Andrew C. McCarthy at National Review   "We’ve seen the heavy assault on our post in Benghazi that took the lives of those brave men. We’ve seen rage and violence directed at American embassies over an awful Internet video that we had nothing to do with.”

"Those words, depraved words, were spoken by then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton, with President Obama by her side, on September 14, 2012. This was at Joint Base Andrews, during the most sacred of rites: the return of the remains of Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods, and Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, all slain in the line of duty in Benghazi.

"And all slain, it must never be forgotten, by jihadists carrying out what Clinton, Obama, and high-ranking national-security officials throughout the United States government knew full well was a planned terrorist attack, not a “protest” run amok and incited by “an awful Internet video.”

"That obvious fact is now explicit after Mrs. Clinton’s galling testimony on Thursday before the House select committee investigating the Benghazi massacre.

"Not only had the siege occurred on the eleventh anniversary of al-Qaeda’s 9/11 atrocities. Not only was Obama informed in the first minutes that a terrorist attack was underway. Not only had terrorist attacks in Benghazi been threatened and executed for months. Not only were mortars deployed by trained jihadists. Not only had Gregory Hicks, the senior State Department official on the ground in Libya after Ambassador Stevens was killed, directly briefed then-secretary Clinton about the then-ongoing terrorist attack — the same Gregory Hicks who would later testify that the anti-Muslim Internet video was a “non-event” in Benghazi."

You think Kissinger was heartless? What about Obama?

Niall Ferguson: Think Kissinger was the heartless grandmaster of realpolitik? What about Obama?

. . . "Having spent much of the last decade writing a life of Kissinger, I no longer think of the former secretary of State as the heartless grandmaster of realpolitik. (That's a caricature.) But after reading countless critiques of his record, not least the late Christopher Hitchens' influential "Trial of Henry Kissinger," I also find myself asking another question: Where are the equivalent critiques of Obama?" . . .

"There is disenchantment with Obama's foreign policy these days. In recent polls, nearly half of Americans (49.3%) disapprove of it, compared with fewer than 38% who approve. I suspect, however, that many disapprove for the wrong reasons. The president is widely seen, especially on the right, as weak. In my view, his strategy is flawed, but there is no doubting his ruthlessness when it comes to executing it.

"As Hitchens surely would observe if he were still around, a great many liberals today apply a double standard when they judge the foreign policies of Nobel Peace Prize laureates Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. If you think Kissinger didn't deserve his Nobel, then neither did Obama."
Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and senior fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is the author, most recently, of "Kissinger 1923-1968: The Idealist."

"Fings Just Ain't Wot They Used T'Be"

Mark Steyn  "Christian bakers have to bake gay wedding cakes, but Muslim truckers don't have to transport alcohol. Gotcha.
"I'm sure Anthony Kennedy can explain it, but wouldn't it be quicker just to load America onto the truck and drive it off the cliff?". . .

But here is Steyn's money question:
"Well, maybe. But he shouted "Allahu Akbar!" and "Itbah al-Yahud!" ("Kill the Jews!") So how exactly do you tell the difference between a "mentally unstable" "drunk" and a healthy, well-adjusted Jew-hating Muslim? Ask Germany's "security experts":

Germany's security experts have rounded on the country's leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, warning that her immigration policy will "produce extremists", and stating that the country is importing "Islamist extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, [and] national and ethnic conflicts of other nations".

"For the most part, the Continental media are content to downplay stabbed Jews. But what happens when all the Jews are dead or fled, and there's no one left to stab but Pierre and Fritz?"

Woodward: It better bother us that Hillary told such conflicting stories to the committee

http://terrellaftermath.com/ 

To paraphrase Mark Twain

Hillary Clinton in House testimony Thursday cited her trips as Secretary of State to Israel and the West Bank as examples of her successful tenure. For four years she lectured Palestinians and the Israelis on how to live side by side, even though they hate each other. No one has more experience.

Comedian Argus Hamilton

Bob Woodward: It better bother us that Hillary told conflicting stories on Benghazi
"Bob Woodward disagrees with Judy Woodruff of taxpayer funded PBS and most of the Democratic Party, and thinks that it matters when a secretary of state and prospective commander in chief says different things publicly and privately over a major terror attack." . . .

Hillary's Worst Crime Was Against the 'Filmmaker'  . . . "It would be as ethically bankrupt for the Democrats to nominate Hillary Clinton after Benghazi as it would have been for the Republicans to nominate Richard Nixon after the Watergate hearings.

"More bankrupt actually. No one died at Watergate, and the only people who went to prison were the ones who committed the crimes. At Benghazi, of course, four Americans died, and the only American who went to prison did so to help Hillary sell a lie." . . .

Hillary Clinton: American Royalty 2015 Style  "Not since Senator Ted Kennedy went on prime time television in a neck brace to spin the reasons for the Chappaquiddick accident have I felt so manipulated by a politician as I did by Hillary Clinton in her testimony before the House Benghazi Committee. As it turns out these two incidents have more in common than one might think." . . .