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Will Trump Convince Hoosiers to Dump Donnelly? By Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/05/will-trump-convince

President Trump travels to Indiana again today—his second visit to the Hoosier State in three days. The president is pushing hard to make sure Mike Braun, the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, wins on Tuesday. If Braun snatches away this critical seat from the Democrats, he could help widen the GOP’s majority in the Senate (if Democrats don’t add any seats) and turn this already-red state even redder.

But there could be a bigger reason why Trump wants Braun in the Senate: the desire to have a fellow political novice and successful business owner on his side.

“I believe Trump showed you can come from outside the political farm system and gain the most powerful spot in the world,” Braun told me Thursday morning on his way to a campaign stop in South Bend. “More and more people will enter politics from the business world, bringing a new dynamic. We can get rid of career politicians, at least I hope that’s the case.”

Braun, 64, is taking on Democratic incumbent Senator Joe Donnelly, who is finishing his first term. The race is considered a toss-up; recent polls suggest it’s a dead heat—and an expensive one. Outside groups have spent nearly $65 million in Indiana since May, compared to $45 million on the state’s 2016 Senate race between Evan Bayh and incumbent Republican Todd Young.

A two-term state legislator, Braun is the founder and chief executive officer of Meyer Distributing, an automotive parts distributor with locations across the country. “There are some feisty entrepreneurs in Congress,” Braun said. “We need some in the Senate, too. I turned a little company into a national one, and if I win and Rick Scott wins and Mitt Romney wins, we will double the number of businessmen in the Senate.”

Trump lauded Braun’s business background during a campaign event in Indianapolis on Friday night, where the president was joined by legendary former Indiana University basketball coach Bobby Knight.

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Rationalizing Our Surrender The War on Free Speech by Mark Steyn

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.steynonline.com/8969/rationalizing-our-surrender

Following The Mark Steyn Show’s Free Speech Forum, many readers have asked me to comment on the recent decision by the European Court of Human Rights, summarized in this headline:

Calling Prophet Muhammad a Pedophile Does Not Fall Within Freedom of Speech: European Court

And yet, oddly, calling Muhammad a prophet now seems to be binding on non-Muslim headline writers. I don’t really have anything to say about this case that I haven’t said a decade and a half back and at great length in my book America Alone (personally autographed copies of which, etc, etc) – to whit, absent any reversal of the demographic trends, some of the oldest nations in Christendom would soon beginning making their accommodations with an ever more assertive Islam.

But, alas, nobody who matters listened to me, and thus “soon” has now arrived – which is why the most powerful European institutions (courts, media, police, bureaucracy) are increasingly eager to shovel core western liberties into the landfill.

With regard to this particular case, I wrote it about it at the time – seven long years ago:

Consider the case of Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a Viennese housewife who has lived in several Muslim countries. She was hauled into an Austrian court for calling Mohammed a pedophile on the grounds that he consummated his marriage when his bride, Aisha, was nine years old. Mrs. Sabbaditsch-Wolff was found guilty and fined 480 euros. The judge’s reasoning was fascinating: ‘Paedophilia is factually incorrect, since paedophilia is a sexual preference which solely or mainly is directed towards children. Nevertheless, it does not apply to Mohammad. He was still married to Aisha when she was 18.’

Ah, gotcha. So, under Austrian law, you’re not a pedophile if you deflower the kid in fourth grade but keep her around till high school. There’s a useful tip if you’re planning a hiking holiday in the Alps this fall. Or is this another of those dispensations that is not of universal application?

We now know the answer to that question. For the record, I have met Mrs Sabaditsch-Wolff just once – at the European Parliament a few years back. She is a most forceful and engaging personality. You get no sense of that from the Court’s decision, of course, where the appellant has degenerated to a mere set of initials – “E S”. One of the revolting aspects of Continental “justice” is the way the police and media preference for the non-identification of “victims” has expanded to a general denial of the specific humanity of those who come before the courts. I had cause the other day, over a recent filing re that litigious CRTV tosser Cary Katz, to recall the ancient legal principle that the public has the right to every man’s evidence. But, increasingly, not in Europe. So Mrs Sabaditsch-Wolff is now “E S”.

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MY SAY: ELECTION NOVEMBER 6, 2018

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

I keep humming a song…..rsk

“To the right, ever to the right

Never to the left, forever to the right

We have gold, a market that will hold

Tradition that is old, a reluctance to be bold.”—

“Cool, Cool, Considerate Men,” from 1776, book by Peter Stone, music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards (1969)

It had been included in the original Broadway show, but didn’t make it into the finished film.

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The Breaking Factors that Will Determine the Election By Richard Baehr

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/11/the_breaking_factors_that_will_determine_the_election.html

As I have done every two years for quite some time, here are my predictions for the midterms.

House of Representatives

There are several dozen House races and five Senate races where one candidate or the other has a lead of 2 points or less in the most recent survey. Picking individual winners in these House races is hazardous since there are few public polls of these districts . Another few dozen House seats show a candidate leading by five points or less. The great majority of the close House races are Republican-held seats, hence their vulnerability to Democrats taking over the House, where a net pickup of 23 seats is required.

Most every analyst — Larry Sabato, Stuart Rothenberg, the Cook Political Report, the Real Clear Politics average, Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Cohn in the upshot in the New York Times — is predicting a pickup for the Democrats of more than the 23 seats needed. Several have increased their range of the likely pickup in the last week to the 30 to 40 seat range.

Polling is becoming more difficult with ever lower response rates to telephone surveys with live callers. . There are sometimes higher response rates to automated surveys, whether by phone or online (though not much higher), and there are issues related to whether such surveys reach a representative sample of likely voters.

Rasmussen, an automated survey, shows Trump with a positive approval score, and most other surveys show him 8-12 or more points net negative. The generic ballot for which party voters prefer control Congress has consistently shown large margins for the Democrats, currently over 7 points on average, though a few surveys have shown smaller margins this week.

The Democrats seem poised for significant gains in the House delegation in Pennsylvania , due to court-ordered redistricting. Democrats should also net big gains in California, New Jersey, and possibly Florida and Virginia, where a weak (or in California, nonexistent) GOP Senate candidate could drag down GOP House candidates. There are many other states where there are 1 or 2 endangered GOP held seats.

RCP has placed 15 GOP-held House seats in the lean or likely Democratic column, and two Democratic held seats in the lean or likely Republican column. That accounts for a net 13 of the 23 needed. Add to that 31 GOP-held seats regarded as tossups, and 26 more as Lean GOP. That makes 57 GOP held seats that are tossups or only slight margins for Republicans in which Democrats need to pick up a net 10. There are another 18 Likely GOP seats, which are not really safe this year. Only 6 Democrat-held seats are regarded as tossups. Given these daunting numbers, it is very difficult to see how Republicans hold the House and easier to see a possibility of a significant Democratic gain or 30 or more.

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CNN’s Existential War With Trump By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/04/cnns-existential

It may be unwise or monotonous for President Trump to harp on CNN as a purveyor of “fake news.” And the constant refrain “enemy of the people” should not be used of a media outlet, even one as prejudicial as CNN.

Yet Trump’s obsessions with CNN are largely reactive, not preemptive.

After just 100 days in office, before his own agendas could even be enacted, the liberal Shorenstein Center at Harvard reported that 93 percent of CNN’s coverage of the Trump Administration was already negative. Just one in every 13 CNN stories proved positive. That radically asymmetrical pattern (shared by NBC/MSNBC) had never been seen before in the history of comparable media analytics. No one at CNN sought to explain the imbalance, leaving the impression that the news organization had more or less joined the progressive opposition.

In his serial pushbacks against CNN, if Trump has perhaps surpassed the invective of Barack Obama’s own periodic dismissals of Fox News, he has clearly not ordered his Justice Department to monitor the communications of any CNN reporter, in the manner of Eric Holder’s surveillance of Fox News journalist James Rosen. Associated Press journalists are not being monitored by the administration as they were during the Obama years. That difference is oddly never cited by CNN reporters who are want to decry their own treatment by the administration, but who were not particularly vocal when their professional colleagues were once placed under electronic surveillance.

Naming Names
But most importantly, both Chris Cillizza and White House correspondent Jim Acosta are quite mistaken in their most recent denials of CNN reporters as purveyors of fake news, and, even more so, in dismissing such accusations as “just empty rhetoric.”

Cillizza complains without irony that White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders “can’t name specific outlets or specific people who are enemies of the people or purveyors of fake news because the whole thing is just empty rhetoric solely designed to motivate base voters.” Acosta went further, challenging Sanders to “have the guts” to “state which outlets, which journalists are the enemy of the people.”

Didn’t CNN reporter Manu Raju in December 2017 falsely assert that Donald Trump, Jr. had advanced access to the hacked WikiLeaks documents? Such a false charge smeared Trump, Jr. and it may have spawned all sort of subsidiary rumors that he was on the verge of a Mueller indictment. What were Raju’s sources for such an inaccurate charge?

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Pinko Nostalgia The dean of Queer Studies misses being oppressed. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271822/pinko-nostalgia-bruce-bawer

Full disclosure: the one time I met Martin Duberman – who, now aged 88, could arguably be identified as the dean of Queer Studies – he was a jerk. It was 1994, and he was already a “distinguished gay historian,” and I was this young upstart who, the year before, had published a successful book, A Place at the Table, that challenged the longtime effort by Duberman and others to keep the wagon of gay rights forever hitched to the mule of the far left. We met on the set of Charlie Rose’s program, where we took part in an episode commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots. He was unconscionably rude and condescending. Re-watching that episode recently – on which Duberman’s most memorable line was something about “celebrating diversity” in a “conformist society” – I was reminded of what an intellectual lightweight he is.

Not that you’d know it from his list of accomplishments and accolades. The founder of CUNY’s Center for Gay and Lesbian Studies, he’s won a bushel full of awards and honorary degrees. His two dozen or more books include a reverential biography of the Stalinist singer Paul Robeson and an equally reverential biography of another full-fledged Commie, Howard Zinn (whose People’s History of the United States is more responsible than any other single book for the contempt in which many young Americans today hold their own country). As those last couple of items might suggest, Duberman is a hard leftist. And it’s his stubborn refusal to grow beyond the fatuous politics of his youth and middle age that forms the foundation of his new book, Has the Gay Movement Failed?

It should really be entitled Has the Gay Movement Failed the Left? Or maybe, since the author is so staggeringly self-absorbed: Has the Gay Movement Failed Me? Duberman’s answer: you betcha. A quarter of a century ago, along with the rest of the gay left, he deliberately presented straight Americans with an image of gays as marginal, promiscuous rebels – unalterably hostile to capitalism, the family, religion, and every other bourgeois convention. For Duberman and friends, the unforgivable thing about gays like me was that we told straight America – correctly – that most gay Americans were ordinary, politically moderate, law-abiding folks who just wanted to be able to lead our lives in peace.

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Democrat Activist Charged with Vandalizing New York Synagogue CNN goes into typical leftist “downplay” mode. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271853/democrat-activist-charged-vandalizing-new-york-lloyd-billingsley

On Friday, just days after 11 people were murdered in a Pittsburgh synagogue, New York City police arrested James Polite, a Democrat, for vandalizing a New York synagogue with anti-Semitic messages.

“Die Jew rats we are here,” read one message, along with “Jews better be ready,” and “Hitler.”

The next day, CNN failed to report that Polite, 26, was a Democrat activist who had worked on the Obama campaign in 2008. CNN described him as a “Brooklyn man” arrested and charged with a hate crime for the anti-Semitic messages and “criminal mischief and making graffiti.” Other reports found more background on the Democrat, who had been identified through surveillance footage.

The Daily Caller found that the New York Times had profiled Polite last year, noting that he had been the “adopted child” of Manhattan Democrat Christine Quinn, then speaker of the New York city council, and the entire city council staff. Polite worked on Quinn’s reelection campaign in 2009 and pitched in with Quinn’s mayoral bid in 2013. Polite’s Facebook profile was more revealing.

On November 1, a day before the synagogue vandalism, he posted a photo of a burning American flag captioned “Sometimes things take a lil heat to grow.” CBS reported that police believed Polite had “set fires outside seven shuls and yeshivas in Williamsburg overnight,” and also captured on security cameras. In other Facebook posts, the Daily Caller reported,

“Polite rails against Israel and posts about Palestinian causes.”

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Peter Smith: Losing with Dignity is Still Losing -Daniel Hannan on Identity politics

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/losing-dignity-still-losing/

Daniel Hannan delivered a terrific, uplifting address the other night — until the topic of Trump prompted a stream of disdainful regret that such a vulgarian is in the White House. Yes, his manners could use a good polishing, but in the meantime he keeps winning and winning big.

I attended the Centre for Independent Studies 2018 John Bonython lecture the other evening. Daniel Hannan was the speaker. A preamble: I watched the BBC immediately after the Brexit vote and found myself shouting at the tele when Hannan, who was an important part of the Leave campaign, seemed to go to water and preach compromise. Nevertheless, we can’t afford to remove prominent people from the good-guy side because of occasional lapses. So, I looked forward to his address on “How Identity Politics Are Undoing the Enlightenment.”

Let me say without qualification that Hannan’s speech was magnificent in content and in delivery. It was the best speech I have ever heard on identity politics and among the best speeches I have ever heard on any topic. It deserves to be celebrated, published and distributed in written and audio form to all schools and universities and, most assuredly, to all journalists and politicians. I’d love a copy. Maybe the CIS will publish it. I hope so.

Have you ever attended a movie or play or anything when things go pear-shape in the second half? It is though the director or writer or participants simply ran out of steam. An evening in two halves applied to my experience. It was going so well and my spirits were lifted; even the FAQ wine tasted like a fine vintage. Question time arrived. This was all done via on-stage dialogue, with Tom Switzer leading the questioning. I forget how exactly, but, alas, Hannan was given a platform to disparage Donald Trump and boy did he go on and on. And, but for that, it could have ended so well.

Hannan is an archetypal elitist anti-Trumper. As public-school boy and Oxford graduate, he is offended by Trump’s style. Sorry, being the son of a motor mechanic and trade unionist in the working-class town of Liverpool, my shoulder chip is showing. But there is a point in there. Trump appeals to ‘deplorables’. They are the ones who have suffered as a result of thoughtless free-trade deals which have taken no account of localised effects; of mass low-skilled, culturally-clashing, immigration; and of the latest fad of global warming. Elitists who have orchestrated or been complicit in this globalist bombardment of Western civilisation haven’t suffered in the slightest. They have their precious principles and the common folk can go hang.

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Canadian Doctors Get Ready for Child Euthanasia By Wesley J. Smith

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/canada-euthanasia-assisted-suicide-children/

In the United States’ most culturally aligned nation, a race toward the once-unthinkable accelerates.

It never made any sense. The assurance that active euthanasia would always be limited to terminally ill, competent adults just never made any sense. Here’s the problem: Once a society widely supports eliminating suffering by eliminating the sufferer and redefines as a “medical treatment” the act whereby doctors kill seriously ill patients, there is no logical argument for limiting euthanasia to adults with legal decision-making capacity. After all, children suffer too, so how can they be logically refused “medical aid in dying” — or MAID, the current euphemism for euthanasia and assisted suicide — only because of their age?

The short answer, of course, is that they can’t and they won’t be, once a society generally embraces euthanasia consciousness, as is demonstrated by the three countries where lethal-jab euthanasia has been legalized and now has popular support. Belgium legalized euthanasia in 2002 for anyone age twelve and older. In 2014, it eliminated all age restrictions. A recent report published by Belgian authorities reveals that three children were euthanized legally in 2016–17 — the youngest at age nine — with the two others at ages eleven and 17, respectively. Their maladies? Cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, and a brain tumor.

Euthanasia has popular support in the Netherlands as well. There children down to age twelve are permitted to be euthanized, with parental permission required until age 17. Infanticide is also practiced openly by Dutch doctors, even though it is technically illegal. Indeed, the “Groningen Protocol,” a bureaucratic checklist published by Dutch pediatricians, describes which terminally ill and seriously disabled babies can be put down.

When these horrors are brought up in euthanasia debates in the United States, assisted-suicide advocates wave off the concern as mere slippery-slope advocacy and sniff that whatever policies Belgium and Netherlands have adopted, those countries are very different culturally from the United States. Now that blithe assurance is poised to become inoperable, as Canada appears on the verge of allowing children to be euthanized.

The Canadian Supreme Court in 2015 created a right to be euthanized, followed by enabling legislation in the national and provincial parliaments. The law basically guarantees the availability of euthanasia to adults experiencing intractable suffering — as defined by the patient — in circumstances where death is reasonably foreseeable. Serious discussions are now underway to expand that license to children. That development is especially alarming for the United States, given that Canada is our closest cultural cousin.

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The Middle East “Truce”: Why Hamas Cannot Be Trusted by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on November 5th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13240/hamas-truce-trust

These benefits for Hamas are exactly why the proposed truce is dangerous and sends the wrong message to Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists. A truce now says that if you engage in violent, extortionistic acts, you get what you want.

This victory for Hamas will, of course, only increase the terrorists’ appetite and motivation to continue their attempts to kill as many Jews as possible. They will see any truce as a retreat on the part of Israel in the face of violence and terrorism.

Hamas will now have more time to prepare for the next war against Israel. The proposed truce will give Hamas breathing space to smuggle more weapons into the Gaza Strip, dig new tunnels and recruit thousands of Palestinians to its ranks.

A real truce between Israel and the Gaza Strip will be achieved only after the jihadi terrorists are removed from power, and not rewarded for violence and threats.

It is no secret that most of the Arab countries do not trust Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist group. President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, for instance, as well as many Palestinians, do not have any confidence in Hamas, particularly after the summer of 2007, when the Islamist movement violently seized control of the Gaza Strip. Earlier this year, Abbas threatened that “shoes will be pouring” onto the heads of Hamas leaders.