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Trump’s approval rating remains stable despite the week’s political storm: NBC/WSJ poll…John Harwood

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/26/trump-approva

In one survey mostly conducted before those developments, 46 percent of American voters approved of Trump’s job performance.
In an additional survey conducted entirely afterward, 44 percent approved, a decline that fell within the margin of error.

Felony convictions and guilty pleas by two close associates had little initial effect on President Donald Trump’s political standing, and Republicans remain in an uphill fight to keep control of Congress.

Those are the findings of new NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls, conducted both before and after bombshell legal developments in the federal investigations of Trump and his campaign. In one survey mostly conducted before those developments, 46 percent of American voters approved of Trump’s job performance; in an additional survey conducted entirely afterward, 44 percent approved, a decline that fell within the margin of error.

At the same time, Democrats held an 8 percentage point national lead over Republicans in the race for the House. Their 50 percent to 42 percent advantage puts Trump’s political adversaries in a promising position to gain the 23 seats they need for a House majority approaching the final two months of the mid-term election campaign.

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Millennials Are Breaking Free from the Thought Police By Karin McQuillan

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/26/millennials-are-breaking

Millennials have already changed our country. This generation was raised in groups starting in daycare. They are linked constantly via social media. They never experienced the classic freedom of American childhood, playing outside on their own for hours on end, and seem to lack an instinctual feel for freedom. They don’t know how to stand up to bullies. They’ve been shaped by their leftist teachers. They are far more vulnerable than other adults to the uncritical conformity dubbed “hive mind.”

Ominously for our country, young women, gays, and nonwhites have been separated out, and emotionally manipulated to fear and reject their white, heterosexual fellow citizens. Their bigotry against Christians and whites is sanitized and misrepresented as respect for diversity. Obama often boasted that our demographic destiny, as nonwhites approach a majority (already 44 percent among Millennials, the majority of our five-year-olds), would create a permanent one-party progressive rule. Obama’s legacy was to be protected by a vanguard of the young.

Obama’s activist army is still calling the shots for the Democrats, still loudly dominating the public sphere, but they have failed to completely cow Millennials. A narrow majority of white Millennials quietly voted for Romney. It was the minority kids, including other anointed victim groups such as feminists, our growing Muslim population, and LGBTQ voters, who gave us Barack Obama’s second term. These are precisely the kids herded into groups who are rewarded and exploited by identity politics. This situation means that the Democratic Party is far gone from the days of the New Deal Coalition. There’s no going back, no course correction. They march and scream under the false banner of financial inequality and social justice.

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David and Goliath in the Court of Public Opinion by Linda Goudsmit

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

The Goliath narrative in 1 Samuel 17 opens with the Philistine army gathered for war against Israel.

“Saul and the Israelites are facing the Philistines in the Valley of Elah. Twice a day for 40 days, morning and evening, Goliath, the champion of the Philistines, comes out between the lines and challenges the Israelites to send out a champion of their own to decide the outcome in single combat, but Saul is afraid. David, bringing food for his elder brothers, hears that Goliath has defied the armies of God and of the reward from Saul to the one who defeats him, and accepts the challenge. Saul reluctantly agrees and offers his armor, which David declines, taking only his staff, sling and five stones from a brook.”

David and Goliath, perhaps the greatest underdog story ever told, is the biblical saga of the young Israelite shepherd David challenging the giant Philistine Goliath. Tales of this long shot contest have thrilled audiences since biblical times because it features the arrogance of the unbeatable, armored “sure thing” against the boldness of the challenger armed only with a sling shot.

David is not intimidated when the towering, smug giant criticizes, taunts, insults, threatens, and laughs at him. So it is in politics!

Today the deep state giant Goliath has waged war against America and the only American with the courage to stand against this behemoth to preserve and protect the nation is unlikely combatant President Donald J. Trump.

Since announcing himself as a presidential candidate on June 15, 2016, President Trump has been the target of the well-defended, smug, seemingly indestructible deep state Goliath. The deep state and the colluding mainstream media have maligned him, criticized him, insulted him, threatened him, laughed at him, lied about him, lied to him, and now are desperately relying on philistine swamp-denizen Robert Mueller to provide a damning report – just before the midterm elections – that will finally succeed in destroying him.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How Anti-Trump Hyperbole Fosters Insanity By Roger Kimball

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/how-anti-trump-hyperbole-fosters-insanit

One the strangest features of our political life in the United States today is the reckless abandon of our rhetoric. “Oh, that’s because Donald Trump has debased political discourse,” you say. “He calls women ‘dogs,’ he refers to Kim Jong-un as ‘Rocket Man,’ he says the press is ‘fake news’ and the ‘enemy of the people,’” etc., etc.

But that’s not the whole story, is it? Some diligent scribe should do a little historical digging and tabulate where, in each case of rhetorical Trumpery, the insults and opprobrium started. Did Donald Trump start the abuse? Or did his targets open hostilities?

In many, maybe most (maybe all) cases I suspect you will find that Trump’s invectives were rejoinders, i.e., responses to earlier provocations and expressions of contempt. Trump made fun of “low-energy Jeb,” but wasn’t that after Jeb said some pretty disagreeable things about Trump?

In any event, however the matter of precedent shakes out, there is also the issue of extreme rhetoric feeding extreme feelings and extreme actions. Simply put, the anti-Trump chorus has worked itself into a frenzy of trembling rage and hysterical overstatement. Trump is Hitler (literally); his behavior is “treasonous” (or, as The New York Times put it, he is a “treasonous traitor”); he is a “fascist,” a “moron,” a “tyrant” who (as tyrants tend to do) is taking the United States down “the path to tyranny.” Et very much cetera.

Now in one sense this is just business as usual when a Republican is in office. Every GOP president

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: JOHN McCAIN

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

He was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy ….For this old soldier it is “ Anchors Away” “On seven seas we learn Navy’s stern call: Faith, courage, service true,
With honor, over honor, over all”.…..rsk

It was composed in 1906 by Charles A. Zimmermann with lyrics by Alfred Hart Miles. When he composed “Anchors Aweigh,” Zimmermann was a lieutenant and had been bandmaster of the United States Naval Academy Band since 1887.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Ankara Tries Turkish Cypriot Journalist for Criticizing Turkey by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12910/cyprus-journalists-prosecution

“The atrocities of the Turkish army included wholesale and repeated rapes of women of all ages, systematic torture, savage and humiliating treatment of hundreds of people, including children, women and pensioners during their detention by the Turkish forces, as well as looting and robbery on an extensive scale, by Turkish troops and Turkish Cypriots.” — The Cyprus Federation of America.

“You are hostile. Hostile to everything that is good, beautiful and right… You are not protesters, you are terrorists. You hit, broke, destroyed and attempted to murder us. You call that a protest? You are like the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, Boko Haram in Nigeria, and jihadist marauders who carry out beheadings in Syria.” — Şener Levent, the editor-in-chief of the Turkish-language daily newspaper Afrika in Cyprus, who is being tried by Turkey for two articles he recently wrote.

In an attempt to change the demographic structure of the area, thousands of illegal settlers have been brought from Turkey to the occupied part and around 43,000 Turkish occupation troops have been stationed there.

Turkey does not want any of its crimes against the island to be exposed — particularly by Turkish Cypriots. It appears that what is once again being targeted in these lawsuits against Afrika is not only Levent’s courageous journalism but also the freedom and sovereignty of Cyprus.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Peter O’Brien One Word: Paris

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/one-word-paris/

If Scott Morrison PM can’t see how carbonphobia is hurting Australia and wrecking the party he now leads, further voter desertions and electoral carnage are guaranteed. Yes, he’s preferable to his predecessor, but that’s not saying much — especially if current energy policy isn’t repudiated.

Well Malcolm Turnbull is gone, the blow to that monumental ego perhaps somewhat mitigated by the martyr’s canonisation being bestowed beneath the bylines of left-wing pundits who would never vote for him in a month of Sundays. He once famously vowed he wouldn’t “lead a party that’s not as committed to effective action on climate change as I am”. By ‘effective’ he meant, as Humpty Dumpty told Alice, whatever he wanted the word to mean. To Australians dreading their next power bills, the word translates as ‘cold homes and economy-destroying imposts’. It took a while but the party eventually and narrowly took him at his word and forced him to make good on that threat/promise. Full disclosure: I wanted Dutton to be the outcome of this process, for all the reasons outlined at Quadrant Online late last week. But it was not to be. So let me indulge in what is, admittedly, the lament of someone who has come reluctantly to accept that half a loaf is indeed better than none.

The myth now being sown and copiously fertilised by the effusions of Turnbull’s ABC and Fairfax admirers is that he was a colossus torn down by a party that never wanted him in their midst. The more ardent keyboard-ticklers seem almost to be suggesting that the Liberal Party, unworthy of such a leader, had failed him The irony, revealed most tellingly by Graeme Richardson, is that he had to direct his upward gaze via the party of Menzies because Labor wouldn’t have a bar of him. Labor has inflicted gross damage on Australia at various times, but such an appraisal indicates they are not entirely lacking in wits. As for the commentariat’s current line, that is hardly a surprise. It was their paeans that helped to persuade the Liberal party room in 2015 that this leather-jacketed wonder of a man was their natural-born leader. That and their campaign of endless abuse of Tony Abbott, of course.

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

Mark McGinness Leonard Bernstein: A Place for Him

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/08/leonard-bernstein-theres-place/

The first US conductor/composer to conquer Europe and the man who made ‘West Side Story’ the remarkable and enduring achievement it is, his passing prompted friend and fellow composer Ned Rorem to observe how ‘Lenny led four lives in one, so he was not 72, but 288’.

A century ago today, the most famous, the most influential, the most versatile, the most restless, the most extraordinary American musician of the twentieth century was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Louis Bernstein was soon to astound his Ukrainian Jewish parents, Jenny Resnick, and Samuel Bernstein, a Talmudic scholar and supplier of barber and beauty products. In 1927, Samuel acquired the only local licence to sell the Frederics Permanent Wave machine for curling hair. Of course, he hoped his eldest son would follow him into the family firm.

When Louis was ten, his Aunt Clara, enmeshed in divorce proceedings, sent her upright piano to his parents’ house for storage. He apparently took one look at the instrument, hit the keys and then proclaimed, “Ma, I want lessons.” By his early teens, the prodigy had mastered it. He staged operettas with friends; he performed as a jazz pianist; he played light classics on the radio. This medium, and especially its successor, television, brought to America and the world Leonard (Lenny), as he officially became at 16, after his grandmother’s death.

He received a B.A. in music from Harvard in 1939, then studied conducting with Fritz Reiner at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute. Reiner apparently gave Bernstein the only A he ever awarded. In the summers of 1940 and 1941, he was a student of Serge Koussevitzky at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, Massachusetts. Koussevitzky became a close friend when Bernstein joined in 1942 as his assistant. He would succeed him as head of conducting at Tanglewood in 1951 and returned there to conduct his last concert in 1990.

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TOM GROSS ON ANTI-ANTISEMITISM IN ENGLAND

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

https://wp.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/

In a tweet last week, Dan Hogan, who worked on the British Labour Party’s internal disciplinary inquiries (but has now quit), revealed the scale of allegations investigated. Hogan said: “I’ve done plenty of disciplinary cases against Labour members who compared Israel to the Nazis, peddled conspiracy theories about Israel, promoted Holocaust deniers, praised terrorists, and who questioned the Britishness or loyalty of British Jews.”

Other MPs from the party’s moderate wing said that the party does not have enough staff to handle all the anti-Semitic allegations coming in about Labour Party members.

This is another in an occasional series of dispatches about British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn, who continues to rise in some opinion polls (largely because of the government’s difficulties over Brexit) and is currently a favorite to be the next prime minister of the United Kingdom. The UK is, of course, a nuclear-armed power and a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

(This dispatch is primarily for readers in America and elsewhere since papers such as the New York Times have inadequately explained what is happening in the UK.)

The cover of yesterday’s Times of London comes is hardly surprising. The far left in many ways share the same anti-Semitic ideology of the extreme right. It led to the murder and persecution of Jews in Soviet Russia, for example. (Because there are laws against race hatred and anti-Semitism in many countries today, including the UK, they often disguise their anti-Semitism as anti-Zionism.)

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John McCain Dead at 81 By Julie Kelly

Posted By on August 26th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/25/john-mccai

Senator John McCain (R-Ariz) died of brain cancer today. His family announced on Friday that he would discontinue treatment for the deadly disease he has battled for more than a year. He was 81.

McCain has assumed many titles over the past 50 years, including prisoner-of-war, presidential candidate, political maverick, and senator. His lasting legacy might be his latest role: An ardent foe of President Donald Trump. The two have exchanged barbs for the past few years, and this week will feature many recriminations about what Trump has said about the former senator, and how “pro-Trump” outlets and pundits handle the news of McCain’s death. In many ways, the Trump-McCain battle represents the fault lines of the contemporary Republican Party.

But tonight, most of us are remembering the pain of losing someone we love—particularly a parent—at the hands of a cruel and destructive disease. No one is immune from cancer’s unrelenting, agonizing, and humiliating rampage. When you watch someone you think is invincible succumb to an unyielding physical monster that the smartest people in the world cannot stop, it humbles you in a way that nothing else can. No title and no amount of money can insulate you from the doom prescribed by the most potent forms of cancer.

There will be a time to evaluate John McCain’s record, his impact on the Republican Party, and influence on national politics. But tonight is not the night. Tonight is the night to pray for Cindy McCain and his entire family. Even if you aren’t the praying type, it’s a time to remember your loved ones who have suffered from this horrific disease. And toast the days that you—and those around you—are cancer-free.