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EXCLUSIVE: Trump insists Israel should keep building West Bank settlements as he says Netanyahu should ‘keep moving forward’ because Palestinians fired ‘thousands of missiles’ at Jewish state

In interview with DailyMail.com, Donald Trump says Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu should continue building West Bank settlements
Rejects call for a pause in settlements as a precursor to peace talks with Palestinians
‘I don’t think there should be a pause,’ Trump said; ‘Look: Missiles were launched into Israel’
The billionaire GOP front-runner said of Netanyahu: ‘I don’t know him that well, but I think I’d have a very good relationship with him’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3571403/Trump-insists-Israel-building-West-Bank-settlements-says-Netanyahu-moving-forward-Palestinians-fired-thousands-missiles-Jewish-state.html#ixzz47fti572A

Hillary Clinton ventured into Appalachia this week, seeking forgiveness for promising to destroy the carbon-based economy. Her 53%-47% loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana suggests she’ll need it, especially among working-class voters, even if she still maintains a commanding delegate lead.

Mrs. Clinton calls her swing through West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio a “Breaking Down Barriers” tour—but the truth is that President Obama’s green agenda broke down coal country, and Mrs. Clinton is promising to preserve these barriers to the region’s economic revival.

The presumptive Democratic nominee told out-of-work coal miners in Williamson, West Virginia that she felt their pain, promising to “do more to see how we can get coal to be a fuel that can continue to be sold and continue to be mined.” In a perfect Clintonian non-apology, she added that “I do feel a little bit sad and sorry that I gave folks the reason and the excuse to be so upset with me because that is not what I intended at all,” referring to her remarks in March.

Mrs. Clinton claimed those remarks were “totally taken out of context,” so here’s the full context: “I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” CONTINUE AT SITE

With Ted Cruz’s withdrawal from the race after his loss Tuesday, Donald Trump should be well on the road to the 1,237 delegates needed to secure a nomination majority in advance of the convention.

Mr. Trump’s Tuesday victory in Indiana shows that he was able to transform his wins in the recent eastern primaries into momentum that overwhelmed Mr. Cruz, despite a strong effort from the Senator in the Hoosier State. It wasn’t enough to overcome the consolidation of Republican support by the New York businessman.

While by no means minimizing Mr. Trump’s considerable achievement here, we must ask again why Senator Cruz made so little effort to expand his appeal beyond the slice of very conservative voters who were his target from the start. The time to do that was after his Wisconsin victory, but the broadening never came, and Mr. Trump continued to siphon away the greater share of the GOP primary vote.

Mr. Trump won Indiana among most demographic, income and ideological groups, while Mr. Cruz carried “very conservative” voters and people with post-graduate degrees. Mr. Trump won 46% of women to Mr. Cruz’s 42%.

Now as the presumptive nominee for the Republican Party, it is past time for Mr. Trump to start acting like it. He says that it’s time for the GOP to “unify.” But most of the responsibility for unification is now his. CONTINUE AT SITE

Only The Simpsons got it right: not a single pundit or political scientist guessed that Donald Trump had the ghost of a chance at the Republican nomination, yet there he stood tonight in Indiana with a trail of corpses behind him and a clear road ahead of him. Welcome to the Zero Sum World, where you have to lose for me to win. The facts have been recited often enough: real median household income is still 8% below the 1999 high water mark, real GDP is 10% below the long-term trendline, 10% fewer Americans own their own homes than in 2007, more business have closed since the 2008 crash than opened, and the jobs on offer mainly involve changing bedpans and flipping burgers.

Republican voters bought Trump’s message that the wicked Chinese and the feckless Mexicans have stolen jobs and wealth that rightfully belonged to Americans, and that he, Donald Trump, with his world-class negotiating skills, would go out and get them back.

Don’t hold your breath.

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There’s nothing to negotiate, no pie to re-divide, no Chinese hoard to bring home. World exports are down by 12% year-on-year in terms of price and dead flat in terms of volume, something that happens during recessions. The world economy is dead in the water. The US economy grew at an annual rate of just half a percent during the first quarter, which is a recession in all but name. Japan shrank, and Europe grew by 1.6% (and has only just regained its overall output level of 2007). China is growing, but too slowly to move the needle elsewhere.

The trouble is that everyone already has had the same idea as Mr. Trump. The Bank of Japan and the European Central Bank have imposed negative interest rates on their money markets. If you buy a 10-year Japanese government bond or a 5-year German government bond, you get back less than you paid for it: you pay the government to hold your money. When it costs money to save, financial markets lose their reason to exist. The Europeans and Japanese have done this to try to keep their currencies cheap and get a bit more of the stagnant volume of world trade. Now that the Federal Reserve has backed off from raising interest rates in the face of uniformly depressing economic data, the dollar is falling, despite the best efforts of the Europeans and Japanese to cheapen their currencies.

Columnists assured us that Donald Trump’s campaign would implode after he cheaply besmirched war hero John McCain. They assured us again after he crudely dismissed Fox News’s star anchor and heartthrob, Megyn Kelly. And again after his schoolboy rumor-mongering about Senator Ted Cruz’s wife. And on and on.

Yet such nonstop insults and gaffes have had little effect on the Trump candidacy. Actually, they have had no effect at all. Zero. Zilch.

Political operatives insisted that Trump would fade, given that he had no real organization on the ground. My God, they said, he has no handlers, and not a position paper in sight. Where is his internal polling? Where are the senior Wise Men to advise him on the demographics of state primaries? Yet Trump garnered more free publicity, interviews, and attention from the liberal media than did any well-handled candidate, Democrat or Republican.

The commentators on the weekend talk shows employed adverbs like “finally” and “at last” to characterize each of the latest outrages likely to end Trump’s campaign. Trump broke his promise about releasing his income-tax returns (was he hiding a whittled-down 13 percent tax rate in Bernie Sanders fashion?). He fibs nonstop about opposing the Iraq war from the beginning. And he continuously exaggerates his net worth, as if the public were a lender that he was conning.

Each of those fudgings earned pronouncements from the experts about a “turning point” in his fate. How many times has someone on a Sunday-morning show pronounced, in somber tones, “Trump has gone too far this time” — without defining “too far”?

These periodic Trump obituaries were often instead followed by upticks in Trump’s popularity. A Trump orgasm is to have someone in a suit and makeup, or with a title before his name, pontificate that Trump should be and is through — a Trump pleasure surpassed only by a shouting young anti-Trump disrupter shown on the news with a placard, “Make America Mexico Again.”

The so-called “mainstream” national media has developed a penchant for focusing on violence originating from certain quarters while all but ignoring hooliganism emanating from others. The disparity in treatment is due primarily to an agenda being pushed by leftist elements within the media establishment, including, but not limited to, MSNBC and the New York Times.

Violence emanating from Trump supporters buttresses a false narrative that many within the establishment media wish to propagate; namely that Trump’s immigration and border policies are laced with racist undertones. The issue is not framed within the context of securing borders, protecting U.S. citizens from crime and terrorism and curtailing an already overburdened entitlement system for illegals. Rather, Trump’s opponents and their allies in the media have succeeded in framing the issue as one involving racial divisiveness and incitement.

That narrative, displayed over and over again in print as well as social media has succeeded in fueling extreme left-wing violence at Trump rallies far outweighing the violence exhibited by a very limited number of Trump supporters. Yet violence by Trump supporters is still given prominence despite its limited scope and scale. Isolated incidents involving violence at Trump gatherings are given disproportionate coverage far beyond their importance.

Consider the side-by-side contrast of media coverage in two separate instances of violence at Trump rallies. On March 10, a 78-year old senior citizen punched an anti-Trump demonstrator in the face at a Trump rally in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The action was inexcusable and the perpetrator was arrested and rightfully charged with misdemeanor assault while his victim required no medical attention.

On Thursday and Friday, a large unruly mob of anti-Trump hooligans, some of whom displayed Mexican flags, assembled at the Orange County Fairgrounds in California where a pro-Trump rally was held. The mob quickly resorted to violence, blocking traffic, throwing bricks, ransacking police cars and attacking policemen. One bystander, who had the misfortune of wearing a Trump T-shirt was slugged in the face, knocked to the ground and required several unsightly stitches to close his wound. Several police cars were damaged and a police horse was injured. The resulting damage will reportedly cost the fairgrounds tens of thousands of dollars.

When it was announced that Harriet Tubman would displace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, there were two sets of dramatically different reactions among Republicans on social media.

One group passed around links to a National Review piece celebrating the decision to “tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.”

“If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares?” it asked.

Much of the Republican base, the other group, cared. Donald Trump noticed and denounced the move as “pure political correctness”.

Political correctness is the defining element of the culture war today. It’s also one of the driving forces of Trump’s candidacy. Republicans and conservatives who ignore the backlash to it do so at their own peril.

When the left exploited the Charleston church shooting to begin a purge of Confederate flags that extended all the way into reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, Republicans failed to defy the lynch mobs and even cheered the takedowns, some of which took place under Republican governors, as progress. Congresswoman Candice Miller, a Republican, announced recently that state flags in the Capitol featuring confederate insignia will be taken down due to the “controversy surrounding Confederate imagery”. The “controversy” is another term for the left’s manufactured political correctness.

There are legitimate positions on both sides when it comes to the Confederate flag, but the historical debate is not the issue. Just as it doesn’t matter very much that Harriet Tubman was a Republican. It matters far more that both moves were driven by the social media mobs of political correctness.

Culture wars are not about actual historical facts, but a tribal conflict over culture between clashing groups. This is a conflict in which it mattered a great deal that northeastern elites were lining up to get $400 tickets to see Hamilton, a hip-hop musical praised by many of the same Republicans who wouldn’t be caught dead watching reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. That New York theater trend led to Southerner Andrew Jackson being displaced on the currency instead of New York’s own Alexander Hamilton.

Some conservatives would argue that Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party while Hamilton, a longtime foe of its political forebears, would likely have aligned with the modern Republican Party. And like Tubman on the $20 bill, they would be completely missing the forest for the factoid.

Susan Mulcahy remembers the 1980s, when she was writing for and editing the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column:

Trump seemed an ideal subject for us, as apt a symbol of the gaudy 1980s as a Christian Lacroix pouf skirt—and just as shiny and inflated. Lacroix at least used excellent materials. Trump turned out to be the king of ersatz. Not just fake, but false. He lied about everything, with gusto. But that was not immediately apparent. Not to me, anyway.

…

It should be simple to write about publicity hounds, and often it is, because they’ll do anything to earn the attention they crave. Trump had a different way of doing things. He wanted attention, but he could not control his pathological lying. Which made him, as story subjects go, a lot of work. Every statement he uttered required more than the usual amount of fact-checking. If Trump said, “Good morning,” you could be pretty sure it was five o’clock in the afternoon.

I once received a tip that Trump and Richard Nixon had had a lengthy meeting in Trump’s office. Trump said he knew nothing about it. I ran the story, not only because I had an excellent source, but also because a Nixon aide confirmed it. Nixon, who was shopping for a condo the day he met with Trump, may have had issues with credibility in his time, but over Trump, I’d have believed him any day. Trump was such a pretender he even used to fake being his own spokesman, as I learned recently, though I never heard from the faux flack he called John Barron. My Trump items came from all over the place—never Trump himself—and when I called to check on something, he usually lied to me directly.

Denying facts was almost a sport for Trump, and extended even to mundane matters.

Read the whole thing, although this next bit is far more depressing than any of Trump’s endless lies: CONTINUE AT SITE

A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing up. Another guy comes up to him, pulls a long face, shakes his head and says: ‘I know just what you mean.’ ”

The joke is supposed to be about life in Czechoslovakia under communism, circa 1977. It conveys exactly what I feel about the moral and mental state of the Republican Party, circa 2016.

Last week, Donald Trump delivered his big foreign-policy speech, built around the theme of “America First.” The term seems to have been planted in his brain by New York Times reporter David Sanger, who asked the Republican front-runner in late March whether it was fair to sum up his foreign policy as “something of an ‘America First’ kind of approach.”

Trump: “Correct, okay? That’s fine.”

Sanger: “Okay? Am I describing this correctly here?”

Trump: “I’ll tell you—you’re getting close. . . . I’m not an isolationist, but I am ‘America First.’ So I like the expression. I’m ‘America First.’ ”

Did Mr. Trump know anything about the history of the America First Committee before he seized on the phrase? Did anyone in his inner circle advise him that it might be unwise to associate himself with a movement whose principal aim was to prevent the United States from helping Winston Churchill fight the Nazis during the Battle of the Atlantic? Once he learned of it—assuming he did—was he at least privately embarrassed? Or was he that much more pleased with himself?

With Mr. Trump it’s hard to say: He has a way of blurring the line between ignorance and provocation, using one as an alibi when he’s accused of the other. Is he Rodney Dangerfield, the lovable American everyman pleading for a bit of respect? Or is he Lenny Bruce, poking his middle finger in the eye of respectable opinion?

Whichever way, the conclusion isn’t flattering. Either Mr. Trump stumbled upon his worldview through a dense fog of historical ignorance. Or he is seriously attempting to resurrect the most disastrous and discredited strain of American foreign policy for a new generation of American ignoramuses.

And now he’s about to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, assuming a win in Tuesday’s Indiana primary. CONTINUE AT SITE

It is one of the great ironies of the 2016 campaign that Donald Trump, who has run as the immigration scourge, is actually the amnesty candidate.

Trump has expressly vowed to give legal status to millions of illegal aliens. For any other candidate, such a promise would have been the campaign death knell. To compare, John Kasich, who is openly pro-amnesty, has lost 38 of 39 primaries (the sole exception being his own state) and has never been a plausible contestant. When it comes to Trump, however, it seems that the all-important amnesty fine-print of his immigration position has been overlooked, no doubt due to his consciously controversial rhetoric: his fixation about building a wall on the Mexican border, his oft-repeated commitment to mass-deportation of illegal aliens, his disparaging comments about Mexicans, and his proposed moratorium on Muslim immigration.

Yet, Trump is the amnesty candidate. What’s more, the amnesty component of his immigration plan is the only one that has a realistic chance of happening….

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