Sebastian Gorka and Sheriff David Clarke on #Hannity (VIDEO)

Two great guys.

They're not blinded by political correctness, thank goodness.

From last night's Hannity:



And ICYMI, "'Extreme Vetting' — Donald Trump's Terrorism Plan Calls for Limits on Immigration (VIDEO)."

Poll: Zogby Analytics Has Hillary Clinton Up 2-Points Over Donald Trump, 38 to 36 Percent

I have no idea about the reliability of Zogby's polling.

Paul Bedard's making a big deal out of it, though. At the Washington Examiner, "Pow: It's just a 2-point race, Clinton 38%, Trump 36%" (via Memeorandum).

It's an online survey, which the Trump campaign prefers, apparently believing that anonymous polls are more reliable because respondents feel free to state their true feelings. I'm not sure how you measure that, although it's an interesting hypothesis. I guess the ultimate test will be on November 8th, when everyone votes.

In any case, go straight to Zogby, "Clinton and Trump in Statistical Tie; Trump Has Closed the Gap Among Older Millennials:

Trump has kept the race close by winning Independents. He is winning Independents 32% to 26% and has also closed the gap among older Millennials. Trump is tied with Clinton at 30% among 25-34 year old voters. Another interesting development is over the years we have tracked voting habits among NASCAR fans and Weekly WalMart shoppers. Ten years ago these groups tended to slant conservative and Republican. That trend has been reversed during the Obama Presidency, and these consumers tend to be more liberal and supporters of Democrats today. Trump has reversed this trend. Both NASCAR fans and WalMart shoppers favor Trump over Clinton. Donald Trump is winning NASCAR fans (44% to 36%) and weekly WalMart shoppers 41% to 36%.

Heh.

The crucial "Weekly Walmart" demographic lol.

This election's the best ever, no matter what happens.

I don't see head-to-head match-up numbers excluding the third party candidates at Zogby.

The Los Angeles Times "Daybreak" election poll now has Hillary up by roughly three of points, just about within the margin of error, 45.5 to 42.1.

Still, Hillary's still up by 6.7 percent in RCP presidential polling average. When that average comes back down to a couple of points or so, I'll give Zogby and the "Daybreak" poll a little more credibility.

'Extreme Vetting' — Donald Trump's Terrorism Plan Calls for Limits on Immigration (VIDEO)

Following-up from earlier, "In New National Security Speech, Donald Trump to Call for Ideological Screening for Terrorists."

As I wrote there, "Of course, he'll be savaged by the Islamo-coddling left-wing media."

Yep, it turns out one Politico hack claims Trump's plan will make the U.S. less safe. I know, leftist logic is just impeccable, heh.

And there's all kinds of left-wing rejoinders at Memeorandum.

Frankly, this "extreme vetting" plan is the best thing yet!

At LAT, "Donald Trump calls for 'extreme vetting' and an ideological test for would-be immigrants":

Since Donald Trump called for temporarily banning Muslims from entering the U.S., he has tried to expand, narrow or otherwise redefine the polarizing proposal that helped win him the Republican primary but has posed a greater challenge in the general election campaign.

On Monday, he added a phrase to his policy lexicon: “extreme vetting.”

To Trump, that means ensuring anyone entering the country shares American values.

The newest addition to Trump’s immigration policy came during a major speech on national security in Youngstown, Ohio, that featured an unusually subdued Trump reading uneasily at times from a teleprompter and repeating several false claims, including his assertion that he was early to oppose the Iraq invasion and the unsubstantiated pronouncement that the San Bernardino shooters’ neighbor saw bombs in their apartment before the attacks.

It followed days of criticism over Trump’s insistence that President Obama and Hillary Clinton founded Islamic State. Those comments, and other unscripted and unforced controversies, have helped distract from Trump’s core economic and anti-terrorism messages, push down his standing in polls and lead Republicans to once again urge him to curtail his improvisational style of campaigning.

Trump did not explicitly back down from his December proposal, still on his campaign website, for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on.”

He did not mention it, instead calling on the departments of State and Homeland Security "to identify a list of regions where adequate screening cannot take place," which would then be referred to to temporarily halt visas.

Trump spent more of his speech defining what he said was a new ideological test for those entering the U.S., comparing his plan to Cold War-era screening.

"We should only admit into this country those who share our values and respect our people," he said. "In addition to screening out all members or sympathizers of terrorist groups, we must also screen out any who have hostile attitudes towards our country or its principles – or who believe that Sharia law should supplant American law. Those who do not believe in our Constitution, or who support bigotry and hatred, will not be admitted."

Keep reading.

You can see how leftist media reports are highly critical, but of course Trump's plan is exactly what we need.

It's a great start.

On this issue alone I'd vote for Trump in a heartbeat. It's the crucial issue facing the country. We're at the crossroads. It's existential.

Leftists are going to hate it, obviously. The left is simple incapable of protecting American national security. If Trump's not elected, these issues are not going away. No doubt other candidates will again raise the prospect of "extreme vetting" to save the country.

It's a breath of fresh air.

NBC Battleground Map: Clinton Surges Past 270 Electoral Votes

Well, it's something to think about at least.

Here, "Clinton Surges Past 270 Electoral Votes in NBC News Battleground Map."

Interesting that Florida, Nevada, Iowa, and Ohio are all "toss-up" states.

Latest @NBCNews battleground map shows a tough road for Trump. pic.twitter.com/fDDxhEoZad

— Ali Vitali (@alivitali) August 15, 2016

Well, compare to Sabato's Crystal Ball, which doesn't list any toss-up states, thus giving Donald Trump 191 electors. Either way, Trump's got a lot of ground to make up.

Here is our current Electoral College map. We've been at 347 Safe/Likely/Lean Clinton, 191 S/L/L Trump since March pic.twitter.com/7l8IpOGWwt

— Larry Sabato (@LarrySabato) August 11, 2016

Donald Trump Course Correction

A sober editorial, at the Wall Street Journal:

WSJ lays down the gauntlet: either Trump course corrects now or he should drop out. https://t.co/Ly2FBnqHqp pic.twitter.com/mkEvDElT3c

— Matt McDermott (@mattmfm) August 15, 2016

In New National Security Speech, Donald Trump to Call for Ideological Screening for Terrorists

Well good.

Of course, he'll be savaged by the Islamo-coddling left-wing media.

But this is great.

Via Jennifer Jacobs, at Bloomberg:

Trump will call for "screening test to admit only those who support US laws and values,” his aides say. https://t.co/btxhwbeU9M @kevcirilli

— Jennifer Jacobs (@JenniferJJacobs) August 15, 2016

The Road Ahead for Populism

Some folks think Trump's powerful populism has already petered out. Many no longer support him, but they don't like Hillary either.

From Salena Zito, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

“I am going to shut my eyes, hold my nose, vote, and then go home and disinfect myself,” https://t.co/CulEZ23ZkQ

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZito) August 15, 2016

Young Voters Flee Donald Trump

Well, he doesn't need to win a majority of young people, but still. He's only getting 20 percent of their support.

At USA Today:

ICYMI: New Millennials poll shows Clinton consolidating the support, if not the enthusiasm, of Sanders' voters: https://t.co/7lu4kTqcNl

— Susan Page (@SusanPage) August 15, 2016

The Meaning of the 2016 Election

From Francis Fukuyama, at Foreign Affairs, "American Political Decay or Renewal?":

Trump’s policy pronouncements are confused and contradictory, coming as they do from a narcissistic media manipulator with no clear underlying ideology. But the common theme that has made him attractive to so many Republican primary voters is one that he shares to some extent with Sanders: an economic nationalist agenda designed to protect and restore the jobs of American workers. This explains both his opposition to immigration—not just illegal immigration but also skilled workers coming in on H1B visas—and his condemnation of American companies that move plants abroad to save on labor costs. He has criticized not only China for its currency manipulation but also friendly countries such as Japan and South Korea for undermining the United States’ manufacturing base. And of course he is dead set against further trade liberalization, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership in Asia and the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with Europe.

All of this sounds like total heresy to anyone who has taken a basic college-level course in trade theory, where models from the Ricardian one of comparative advantage to the Heckscher-Ohlin factor endow­ment theory tell you that free trade is a win-win for trading partners, increasing all countries’ aggregate incomes. And indeed, global output has exploded over the past two generations, as world trade and investment have been liberalized under the broad framework of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and then the World Trade Organization, increasing fourfold between 1970 and 2008. Globalization has been responsible for lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in countries such as China and India and has generated unfathomable amounts of wealth in the United States.

Yet this consensus on the benefits of economic liberalization, shared by elites in both political parties, is not immune from criticism. Built into all the existing trade models is the conclusion that trade liberalization, while boosting aggregate income, will have potentially adverse distributional consequences—it will, in other words, create winners and losers. One recent study estimated that import competition from China was responsible for the loss of between two million and 2.4 million U.S. jobs from 1999 to 2011.

The standard response from trade economists is to argue that the gains from trade are sufficient to more than adequately compensate the losers, ideally through job training that will equip them with new skills. And thus, every major piece of trade legislation has been accompanied by a host of worker-retraining measures, as well as a phasing in of new rules to allow workers time to adjust.

In practice, however, this adjustment has often failed to materialize. The U.S. government has run 47 uncoordinated federal job-retraining programs (since consolidated into about a dozen), in addition to countless state-level ones. These have collectively failed to move large numbers of workers into higher-skilled positions. This is partly a failure of implementation, but it is also a failure of concept: it is not clear what kind of training can transform a 55-year-old assembly-line worker into a computer programmer or a Web designer. Nor does standard trade theory take account of the political economy of investment. Capital has always had collective-action advantages over labor, because it is more concentrated and easier to coordinate. This was one of the early arguments in favor of trade unionism, which has been severely eroded in the United States since the 1980s. And capital’s advantages only increase with the high degree of capital mobility that has arisen in today’s globalized world. Labor has become more mobile as well, but it is far more constrained. The bargaining advantages of unions are quickly undermined by employers who can threaten to relocate not just to a right-to-work state but also to a completely different country.

Labor-cost differentials between the United States and many developing countries are so great that it is hard to imagine what sorts of policies could ultimately have protected the mass of low-skilled jobs. Perhaps not even Trump believes that shoes and shirts should still be made in America. Every industrialized nation in the world, including those that are much more committed to protecting their manufacturing bases, such as Germany and Japan, has seen a decline in the relative share of manufacturing over the past few decades. And even China itself is beginning to lose jobs to automation and to lower-cost producers in places such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

And yet the experience of a country such as Germany suggests that the path followed by the United States was not inevitable. German business elites never sought to undermine the power of their trade unions; to this day, wages are set across the German economy through government-sponsored negotiations between employers and unions. As a result, German labor costs are about 25 percent higher than their American counterparts. And yet Germany remains the third-largest exporter in the world, and the share of manufacturing employment in Germany, although declining, has remained consistently higher than that in the United States. Unlike the French and the Italians, the Germans have not sought to protect existing jobs through a thicket of labor laws; under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Agenda 2010 reforms, it became easier to lay off redundant workers. And yet the country has invested heavily in improving working-class skills through its apprenticeship program and other active labor-market interventions. The Germans also sought to protect more of the country’s supply chain from endless outsourcing, connecting its fabled Mittelstand, that is, its small and medium-size businesses, to its large employers.

In the United States, in contrast, economists and public intellectuals portrayed the shift from a manufacturing economy to a postindustrial service-based one as inevitable, even something to be welcomed and hastened. Like the buggy whip makers of old, supposedly, manufac­turing workers would retool themselves, becoming knowledge workers in a flexible, outsourced, part-time new economy, where their new skills would earn them higher wages. Despite occasional gestures, however, neither political party took the retooling agenda seriously, as the centerpiece of a necessary adjustment process, nor did they invest in social programs designed to cushion the working class as it tried to adjust. And so white workers, like African Americans in earlier decades, were on their own...

It's not just Trump who's agitating for a nationalist economic policy. The Democrats have been pushing protectionist proposals for some time, and Bernie Sanders was pretty much in sync with Donald Trump on the issues. Fukuyama broaches this, but he's a leftist, so won't give Trump any credit.

The winds of change are in the air, either way. The anti-globalist movement's just getting started, frankly.

But keep reading.

Pat Condell: Europe's Leaders Are Importing War (VIDEO)

Angela Merkel especially, but all the poxy "leader" scabs are implicated, especially the scum of the European Union.

Once again, the inimitable Pat Condell:

John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, eds., Alternatives to Economic Globalization [BUMPED]

Here's some additional contrarian literature, considering today's economic news.

At Amazon, John Cavanagh and Jerry Mander, eds., Alternatives to Economic Globalization: A Better World is Possible.

And ICYMI, Ian Fletcher, Free Trade Doesn't Work: What Should Replace It and Why.

Xenophobia and Islamophobia on the Rise in Great Britain

Actually, they're not. It's just that leftists have nothing left in the quiver to push back against righteous populist nationalism.

But see Zaheer Kazmi, at Foreign Affairs, FWIW, "Islamophobia and the New Britishness: How Brexit Revealed the Conservative Establishment's Intolerance."

Frankly, this guy Zaheer's recycling a lot of lies surrounding the Brexit debate, but this is what passes for "informed comment" on the left.

Pathetic.

Xenophobia and Islamophobia are on the rise in the United Kingdom: https://t.co/hjuHxmeHGC

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) August 5, 2016

David Cameron Hums a Tune as He Heads Into 10 Downing Street (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Andrea Leadsom Quits Leadership Race (VIDEO)," and "U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May Set to Become Britain's Prime Minister (VIDEO)."

Watch, via Sky News, "David Cameron Hums a Tune After Resigning."

More, at Telegraph U.K.:

From being booed on Centre Court to bidding farewell to Downing Street: David Cameron's final 72 hours as Prime… https://t.co/65OvTyPvE7

— Telegraph News (@TelegraphNews) July 11, 2016

U.K. Home Secretary Theresa May Set to Become Britain's Prime Minister (VIDEO)

Following-up, "Andrea Leadsom Quits Leadership Race (VIDEO)."

At the Telegraph U.K., "Live - 'Together we will build a better Britain': New Tory leader Theresa May delivers vision for the country ahead of coronation as Prime Minister on Wednesday":

Theresa May will become Britain's second female prime minister on Wednesday evening after David Cameron makes his final Commons appearance as premier.

Mr Cameron hailed his successor as "strong and competent" as he announced he would go to Buckingham Palace to offer his resignation to the Queen following Prime Minister's Questions.

Mrs May's coronation follows rival Andrea Leadsom's shock decision to pull out of the Tory leadership race.

The Prime Minister said he was "delighted" that the Home Secretary would succeed him in Downing Street.

Mr Cameron will chair his last Cabinet meeting on Tuesday morning and will take his final Prime Minister's Questions at noon on Wednesday.

In a statement outside the Commons following her election as Tory party leader, Mrs May praised May Cameron for his stewardship of the party and country.

Mrs May also hailed Andrea Leadsom, whose shock decision to pull out of the Tory leadership race paved the way for her coronation, for the "dignity" she had shown...

Still more.

Andrea Leadsom Quits Leadership Race (VIDEO)

Leadsom cried in an interview with the Telegraph on Sunday. There's no crying in politics!

Maybe that's why she quit?

I'll check, but meanwhile, at the New York Times, via Memeorandum, "Theresa May Poised to Be Britain's Next Premier as Andrea Leadsom Quits Race."

Pat Condell on #Brexit (VIDEO)

Saving Britain's democracy.

Italian Coast Guard and Navy Intercept 4,500 Refugees During Operations in the Mediterranean (VIDEO)

They should pick up these "refugees" and dump them in Germany, and the chancellor's office.

Via Ruptly:

Theresa May Once Called the Tories the 'Nasty Party' (VIDEO)

Interesting.

Watch, at the Telegraph UK, "Theresa May in 90 Seconds: Who is the woman bidding to be the next Prime Minister?"

And ICYMI, "Theresa May Wins First Round of Conservative Party Leadership Vote."

Theresa May Wins First Round of Conservative Party Leadership Vote

I thought I liked her, until I found out that she praised Islamic sharia.

See the Telegraph UK, "Theresa May hails ‘benefits’ of Sharia as inquiry set up into ‘misuse’ of Islamic law."

That's a terrifying statement, actually. And to think, David Cameron was shamelessly politically correct as well. Won't be much of improvement on the Tory front-bench then.

And she's not well like among the "Leave" partisans, it turns out:

Bet this won't get reported on BBC, the British ppl would finish the Tories. They will never be in government again. pic.twitter.com/5PfzhDYeia

— Denise (@LittleMissFoxyy) July 5, 2016

@LouiseMensch May would be worst decision. Need to ensure PM is a leave candidate and a strong one at that.

— Laura Katherine' (@LauraK2610) July 5, 2016

Whoever the Leave nominee is will have all of our FULLEST backing against Theresa May https://t.co/AA0Oict82Y

— Louise Mensch (@LouiseMensch) July 5, 2016

In any case, back to the Telegraph, "Conservative leadership election: Theresa May wins more than half of MPs' votes as Liam Fox is knocked out of race."

Immigration is the Key

From Professor Michael Curtis, at the New English Review:

The Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin once said, “There are decades when nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen.” He might have been talking of the UK in June 2016 with the events connected with the referendum on June 23, 2016 on British membership of or Brexit, exit, from the European Union.

Britain has innumerable problems concerning its membership of the EU and the issues of freedom of movement of goods, capital, services, and people, and about the right of EU citizens to live and work in any EU state.  Yet, whether voiced openly or not, at the heart of the events is the widespread public concern about the increasing immigration into the country.

Those events resemble a film noir or a Shakespearean play, say Julius Caesar, with its political turmoil, its incorrect assumptions and unexpected outcome of the referendum, its undisguised ambitions not made of sterner stuff, its intrigues and betrayals of leading political figures supposed to be friends and allies.

Among the star events in this continuing serio-comical drama are the resignation of David Cameron as Prime Minister, the turmoil for leadership of the Conservative Party, the resignation of Nigel Farage, from his position as leader of the anti-immigrant party UKIP (UK Independence Party), and the stubbornness of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party in refusing to heed the sizable vote of his parliamentary colleagues calling on him to resign.

Yet, all interested in the present U.S. presidential election should take account of the British events and possible parallel between the two counties. There is a distinct resemblance regarding pertinent issues and popular anxieties. Similar factors are said to trouble citizens: the impact of globalization; the free trade economy; the decline in jobs and wages; the weakening of national dignity and esteem.

In both countries a considerable part of the electorate appears disgruntled, antagonistic to established power institutions, and concerned with what they regard as a decline in the status and popularity of their country. If the disgruntled in the UK want to throw off the shackles of the supposed tyranny of the European Union and the detached bureaucracy in Brussels, supporters of Donald Trump want to end the tyranny of established authorities in Washington, D.C.

Keep reading.