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Ruth King

McCain and Trump The late Vietnam War hero made enormous sacrifices for our country. His handling of rumors about the President wasn’t one of them. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/mccain-and-trump-11552939031

President Donald Trump is receiving the usual media condemnation for his weekend tweeting, including for his inaccurate commentary about the late Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.) But reporters should acknowledge that an accurate recounting of the facts also shows ample grounds to criticize McCain’s actions during his final years in office.

On Twitter, Mr. Trump criticized McCain for the 2017 breaking of his promise to support repeal of the Affordable Care Act and also for McCain’s role in circulating the unverified Steele dossier with its claims of Trump-Russia collusion.

Mr. Trump tweeted that McCain embraced the dossier before the 2016 election when recent testimony suggests it was just after the election. Also, Mr. Trump claimed on Twitter that McCain finished last in his class at the U.S. Naval Academy when most reports indicate McCain actually finished fifth from the bottom.

Let’s hope for more accuracy from the President in the future, but he and many other Americans seem to have every right to be angry. On Thursday Rowan Scarborough reported for the Washington Times:

Dutch shooting: Utrecht police arrest suspect after three killed

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47615231
“Mr Tanis was known to Dutch police, the prosecutor added.A local businessman told BBC Turkish that Gokmen Tanis had previously fought in Russia’s republic of Chechnya.Jihadist groups, including those aligned with the Islamic State (IS) group, have long operated in the region.”He was arrested because of his connections with [IS] but released later,” the businessman told the BBC.”

A man has been arrested following a shooting on a tram in the Dutch city of Utrecht which left three people dead, police say.

Five others were injured in the incident, and authorities say the attacker’s motive remains unclear.

Gokmen Tanis, a 37-year-old Turkish man, was detained several hours after the attack. It is not yet clear where he was arrested.

The incident sparked a city-wide manhunt and the closure of schools.

What happened on Monday?

At about 10:45 local time (09:45 GMT), police were called to reports of a shooting on board one of the city’s trams at the 24 Oktoberplein junction.

One witness told local media that “a man started shooting wildly”.

Several of the injured are in a critical condition.

Another witness told Dutch public broadcaster NOS that he had helped an injured woman when the tram came to an emergency stop.

Beto O’Rourke raises staggering $6.1 million after announcing 2020 run By Emily Tillett

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/beto-orourke-raises-staggering-6-1-million-after-announcing-2020-run/

Beto O’Rourke, the latest Democrat to jump into the packed 2020 presidential primary field, has raised a staggering $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of his presidential campaign, joining a list of fellow record fundraisers. The O’Rourke campaign said that the candidate received online contributions from “every state and territory in the nation.”

“In just 24 hours, Americans across this country came together to prove that it is possible to run a true grassroots campaign for president — a campaign by all of us for all of us that answers not to the PACs, corporations and special interests but to the people,” said O’Rourke in a statement on Monday.

The fundraising milestone comes after O’Rourke formally kicked off his campaign on Thursday with an online video, telling supporters that he plans to travel the country and “listen to those who I seek to serve, to understand from your perspective how we can best meet these challenges.”

“At this moment of maximum peril and maximum potential let’s show ourselves and those who will succeed us in this great country just who we are and what we can do.”

College Admissions: How to Jump to the Head of the Line Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/03/18/college_admissions_how_to_jump_to_the_head_of_the_line_469259.html

To understand how this whole college admissions scam worked, I asked a friend who knew about it first-hand. Here is what Dee Seaver told me:

Sure, I wanted to go to Southern Cal. But would USC be impressed by climbing Mount Everest barefooted or herding unicorns with Peruvian peasants? Those items on my application might not be enough. That’s why Dad turned to Rick Singer as a “college adviser.” What a guy! He suggested I highlight my summer charity work building carbon-neutral air conditioning for every Nigerian. Dad’s friends in the hedge fund industry also put in the good word for me. Even better, they donated funds for the school’s new Pilates Studio and Sauna. I got in!

I knew there was zero chance of flunking out. That’s a secret most folks don’t know about elite colleges. All I had to do was pick the right major, regurgitate the teacher’s crazed ideology, and avoid any courses in math and science. My plan: stick to writing papers about gender fluidity in Jane Austen. If you show up occasionally for class and take the exams, then B-minus is the closest you’ll come to a failing grade. Just don’t major in astrophysics, my friend, and you’ll sail through.

With this sweet setup, I can focus on my primary interests: social inequality and the evils of capitalism. Fortunately, there is still plenty of time for drinking, partying, and getting horizontal. People who say “College is just not worth it” are completely clueless. I f*#kin’ love it.

When Presidential Character Once Mattered By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/17/when-presidential-character-once-mattered/

Here’s why I did not vote for Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Ronald Reagan—despite their records.

1944: Sorry, I am not voting for a fourth term for Franklin D. Roosevelt. He’s a vindictive character and has brought disrepute into the White House. When he didn’t get his way, he pouted and tried to pack the Supreme Court. When critics went after him, he threatened them with targeted regulations and taxes to silence them. He signed the order putting Japanese-Americans in internment camps—another one of his “executive orders” that he so often has abused.

Then there are those rumors. Have we ever had a president who used his own daughter as a conduit to conduct an affair while in the White House? And who knows what Eleanor was doing at the time? Why hide the truth about his health? Anybody who sees or hears the president, knows his army of conspiratorial aides are lying about his ailments as they always do. We’ve known all along that he was paralyzed—and not simply partially disabled, when his braces and aides staged his standing up to make us believe he could almost walk.

The president is now wasting away. Rumors are that his blood pressure is dangerously high and won’t go down. It’s Woodrow Wilson all over again, when they lied that his stroke was never serious, even as the guy was near comatose as his wife ran the country. FDR’s advisors know that he won’t make it six months if elected a fourth time. (What president before has even run for a third term?) They are hiding that fact to make sure the Democrats keep control of the presidency once he dies in office. There should be a constitutional amendment or something to remove an incapacitated president.

I cannot vote for a candidate who flat out deceives the American people. Character is destiny, and without it policy means nothing. Storming Normandy was a brilliant success, but it should not come at cost of endorsing an adulterous president. Even if FDR is leading us to global victory, his record is stained by his mendacity.

ILHAN OMAR’S BAD WEEK VIDEOS

Americans Have Spoken: Ocasio-Cortez Loses It After Unfavorability Rating Buries Her
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xoz39GXp6_o

Ex-AOC Aide Comes Forward & Confirms Terrifying Plan for America
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8n_kH8X1wA8

Ilhan Omar Just Got Massive Bad News from Back Home
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syLQFYMDqak

Did Rep. Ilhan Omar Commit Immigration Fraud?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7zw1gx9Uc4

Jewish Rabbi: Nancy Pelosi ‘Failed Us’ in Condemning Antisemitism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkTDPgMa1AI

The Ilhan Omar controversy: what do young American Jews think?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2QjSGHrw4k

California Drug Legalization Leads to Political Corruption Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/273194/california-drug-legalization-leads-political-daniel-greenfield

I’m shocked. Shocked.

In the more than two years since California voters approved the licensed growing and sale of recreational marijuana, the state has seen a half-dozen government corruption cases as black-market operators try to game the system, through bribery and other means. The cases are tarnishing an already troubled roll-out of the state permitting of pot businesses as provided for when voters approved Proposition 64 in November 2016…

“There is no doubt in my mind that the multi-billion-dollar nature of the marijuana industry is corrupting public officials,” said Lopey, a 41-year veteran of law enforcement who began his full-time career as a California Highway Patrol officer stationed in East Los Angeles.

California is going full narcosocialist and there’s a price to pay for that. The price is deeper corruption and criminality.

That case is just one of several that have involved cannabis sellers and growers allegedly bribing or trying to bribe government officials, or public officials acting illegally to get rich from marijuana.

Last year, Jermaine Wright, then the mayor pro tem of Adelanto, was charged with agreeing to accept a bribe to fast-track a marijuana business. Wright’s trial is scheduled for August. In May, FBI agents served search warrants at the home of Rich Kerr, who was mayor of Adelanto at the time, as well as at City Hall and a marijuana retailer.

Fake Newsom San Francisco Democrat comes out as a pro-criminal autocrat. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273165/fake-newsom-lloyd-billingsley

“Gavin Newsom’s real ambition is not California’s governor seat,” University of San Francisco political science professor James Taylor told the San Francisco Chronicle, “it’s the presidency of the United States.” In similar style, Tad Friend of the New Yorker touts Newsom’s Bobby Kennedy look, as “Newsom seeks to embody Kennedy’s grainy glamour, to provide moral clarity in a bewildering hour.” For their part, Californians are now bewildered by the governor’s benevolence to the state’s worst criminals.

As the Sacramento Bee reported, Gov. Newsom “plans to sign an executive order Wednesday morning granting reprieves to all 737 Californians awaiting executions.” The governor’s action comes “three years after California voters rejected an initiative to end the death penalty, instead passing a measure to speed up executions.”

Newsom claims the death penalty system has “discriminated against mentally ill defendants and people of color,” while not making the state safer and wasting “billions of taxpayer dollars.”

According to the Bee, the governor’s moratorium invites a “vitriolic” response from death penalty proponents and “some of the families of murder victims in the state.” The piece cites no family members of those murdered by recipients of the governor’s reprieve.

The initial story of the San Jose Mercury News was in effect a press release for Newsom, citing Natasha Minsker of the ACLU, the state’s major criminals’ lobby, that Newsom was showing “bold leadership.” The piece also failed to name or quote any relatives of murder victims.

Trump Vetoes Congressional Effort to Kill the Border Emergency The president throws down the gauntlet against leftists, NeverTrumpers, and weak-kneed Republicans. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273183/trump-vetoes-congressional-effort-kill-border-matthew-vadum

After Congress voted to overturn President Trump’s emergency declaration to divert federal funds to build a wall on the nation’s porous border with Mexico, the president issued the first-ever veto of his administration to keep the declaration intact.

The veto is Trump’s effort to defend the emergency he declared Feb. 15 under the National Emergencies Act of 1976.

Trump invoked the act as Congress gave final approval to a $333 billion omnibus spending bill. The legislation provides $1.375 billion for 55 miles of border barriers in Texas, well below the $5.7 billion Trump sought for a border wall and the $25 billion he originally said was needed. The emergency declaration moves around $6.7 billion in funding that was previously appropriated for other projects, largely for military construction. In his new fiscal 2020 budgetary blueprint provided to Congress March 11, the president is seeking another $8.6 billion to build the border wall.

On March 14 the Republican-dominated Senate approved a resolution 59-41 disapproving of Trump’s emergency declaration as 12 GOP senators joined Democrats. On Feb. 26 the Democrat-controlled House approved the disapproval resolution introduced by leftist Congressman Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) on a vote of 245 to 182.

The vetoed resolution now heads back to Congress where hostile lawmakers probably won’t be able to get the two-thirds supermajority in both chambers needed to override Trump’s veto and invalidate the emergency declaration.

But that won’t stop the open-borders crowd from trying.

Stop Calling Her AOC By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/trending/stop-calling-her-aoc/
The new Democratic congresswoman does not deserve the stature that the acronym conveys.
As Michael Connelly’s bristly no-nonsense detective Harry Bosch says in The Black Echo, fed up to the gills with the infinite cascade of public acronyms for every conceivable police file, unit, task force, and department, acronyms give a sense of “eliteness,” of special authority, to the routine and humdrum business of professional practice and institutional procedure.

Obviously, ciphers, abbreviations, and alphabetical contractions facilitate ordinary communication. They operate as a form of shorthand to convey messages without bogging down in wordy prolongations that may lose the thread of an argument or send our interlocutors to sleep. As such, they perform a necessary function. Thus we are comfortable using alphabetical elisions for institutions, offices, programs and titles like FBI, CIA, DoJ, NATO, the UN, KFC, SNL, NYT, WSJ, NBC, CEO, and so on, or phrasal compressions like ASAP, AWOL, aka, TLC, LOL, WTF, IMO, ad infinitum.

The same applies to individuals, especially to names of famous people—e.g., MLK—or of presidents who may, or may not, have earned the sobriquet, for example: FDR, JFK, LBJ or GWB (the latter tinseled by the nickname “Dubya). This makes sense since they are referred to in political discourse with relative frequency.

An article in Slate for June 11, 2012, ruminates on the growing ubiquity of “the three-initial formulation,” which it sees as generic forms of compression trimmed for newspaper convenience. But as the article also suggests, there is more to it. Lyndon Baines Johnson understood the power of the triple initial; as Robert Caro reports in The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Johnson said, “What I want is for them to start thinking of me in terms of initials.” This is understandable. Three initials are a reputation enhancer.