Guys, Trump is at or above 60 percent in every state so far. This is not what was expected.
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 27, 2016
It is safe to say that Trump is outperforming any benchmark based on his past performances, like our demog. model. Extremely strong showing
— Nate Cohn (@Nate_Cohn) April 27, 2016
Donald Trump stacked up five more wins Tuesday, sweeping the East Coast primaries in a decisive showing that moved him significantly closer to capturing the Republican presidential nomination and avoiding a bruising fight at the party's convention this summer.More.
Trump's victories — in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island — were by commanding margins, giving him the overwhelming majority of 172 delegates at stake.
Speaking in New York City, at the gilded office and condominium tower that bears his name, Trump declared the fight for the GOP nomination ended — “I consider myself the presumptive nominee, absolutely” — and said his rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, should immediately stand aside.
“As far as I'm concerned, it's over,” he said.
“We should heal the Republican Party,” continued Trump, who cited his business success as proof he is the only one qualified to do so. “I'm a unifier.”
The Manhattan real estate mogul, who won his home state of New York last week in a landslide, had been expected to do well Tuesday in the heavily urbanized Atlantic corridor.
Even so, and “even if you don't like Donald Trump, it's hard to deny the magnitude of his victories,” said Stuart Rothenberg, an independent campaign analyst.
Trump's dominating performance was important from both practical and psychological standpoints, pushing him closer to the 1,237 delegates needed for a first-ballot victory at the party's July convention and also shaping perceptions of the race to his great advantage.
In exit poll interviews, nearly 7 in 10 Republicans who cast ballots in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut suggested the candidate who gets the most votes — which has been Trump — deserves to win the nomination, even if he falls short in the delegate count.
“There's kind of a growing sense of inevitability,” said Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. “The trajectory now suggests he will be very close to 1,237 by the end of business on June 7, and probably close enough to sweep up the crumbs he needs to be the nominee.”
California, with 172 delegates — more than any state — will be important in determining whether Trump clinches the nomination or falls just short.
He began the day with 845 pledged delegates and was on track to win at least 105 more. Cruz had 559 and Kasich 148, and picked up only half a dozen more between them, according to nearly complete returns.
The most crucial fight may come in Indiana, which votes next Tuesday...
Well, I'm all broken up about this: Far-Left San Francisco Torn as Some See ‘Street Behavior’ Worsen https://t.co/Hgma4T5I8y #Progs #Dems
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) April 25, 2016
New poll: Majority of Trump supporters would vote for him if he were to lose the nom & run as a 3rd-party candidate https://t.co/3ZzTuNzUNU— Suffolk University (@Suffolk_U) April 25, 2016
.@davidpaleologos on the new @USATODAY/@Suffolk_U poll: Major challenges ahead for GOP https://t.co/PMLYHFmF4E— USA TODAY 2016 (@usatoday2016) April 25, 2016
While 60 percent of Republican primary and caucus voters will support the eventual Republican nominee if their candidate is not chosen, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today national poll of likely election voters, a majority of Donald Trump supporters said they would vote for the businessman if he were to lose the nomination and run as a third-party candidate.More.
Forty percent of Republicans whose favored candidate is not nominated said they will vote for the Democratic nominee, seriously consider a third-party candidate, stay home on Election Day in November, or are undecided.
Democratic Party loyalty was higher among those polled, with 69 percent of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voters saying that they will support the Democratic nominee regardless of whether their preferred candidate is chosen.
“As the Republican leadership scrambles to organize a unity effort at the July GOP National Convention in Cleveland and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich team up to stop front-runner Trump, we are seeing bipartisan dissatisfaction with convention rules and fairness,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “Both the RNC and DNC chairs have their hands full this election season.”
What Hate Education Breeds - by @tobincommentary - https://t.co/GT35IbEJjl pic.twitter.com/zGwf05yibG
— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) April 26, 2016
Palestinians have a new idol in their pantheon of heroes and heroines. Her name is Dima al-Wawi and she is 12 years old. But unlike the paths to distinction in other societies for children, al-Wawi isn’t a math or science whiz or a great athlete. Instead, she’s guilty of attempted murder.Keep reading.
The girl was released on Sunday after serving 4 and-a-half months in jail where she was housed with other youngsters. Upon returning to her home village of Halhoul near the city of Hebron, she was greeted as a conquering heroine as both the Fatah Party that runs the Palestinian Authority and Hamas competed to shower her with praise. But rather than contemplate the depravity of a society that indoctrinates a little girl to think of murder and the very real possibility that she might be killed in the attempt as a praiseworthy activity, the coverage of al-Wawi’s release centers mostly on outrage that she was imprisoned and the notion that her crime somehow symbolizes the “frustration” of Palestinians about Israeli policies or the existence of settlements. And that, in a nutshell, is not only everything that is wrong with the culture of Palestinian politics but also what’s wrong with much of what passes for coverage of the Middle East in the international press.
The facts of the case are fairly straightforward...
#CruzCrew pic.twitter.com/B6kUWhXUGL
— AdolfJoeBiden™ (@Bidenshairplugs) April 25, 2016
The temporary alliance between Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, formed to deny Donald J. Trump the Republican presidential nomination, was already fraying almost to the point of irrelevance on Monday, only hours after it was announced to great fanfare.More.
With the pact, the two candidates agreed to cede forthcoming primary contests to each other. Mr. Kasich would, most crucially, stand down in Indiana’s primary on May 3 to give Mr. Cruz a better chance to defeat Mr. Trump there, while Mr. Cruz would leave Oregon and New Mexico to Mr. Kasich. It appeared to be a measure of last resort, but initially it seemed like a breakthrough.
Mr. Cruz trumpeted what he called the “big news” in Indiana, a state that appears pivotal to stopping Mr. Trump from winning a majority of delegates. “John Kasich has decided to pull out of Indiana to give us a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump,” the Texas senator said.
But at his own campaign stop in Philadelphia on Monday, Mr. Kasich tamped down Mr. Cruz’s triumphalism. Voters in Indiana, Mr. Kasich said, “ought to vote for me,” even if he would not be campaigning publicly there. He added, “I don’t see this as any big deal.”
Under the best of circumstances, the arrangement between Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich would seem to be a long shot — more of an expedient to stop Mr. Trump from taking a big step toward winning the nomination next week in Indiana than a permanent joining of forces...
Campaigns split: No more Dem and Rep; instead the division is frontrunners + underdogs https://t.co/9AwtpZGqSy
— Cathleen Decker (@cathleendecker) April 25, 2016
As Tuesday's quintuple primaries near, the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns appear to be moving in tandem for the first time.More.
Front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are targeting each other with an eye to November's general election and are mostly ignoring their party challengers. Behind them, their rivals are still aiming at the front-runners in a desperate effort to gain ground before the primary season spirals further out of their control.
Polls suggest that voters in Pennsylvania, the biggest of the Tuesday primaries, are lining up behind Clinton and Trump much as voters in New York did last week — in big numbers.
Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republicans Ted Cruz and John Kasich have given no sign they intend to leave the race before the final primaries in June. But losses in Pennsylvania and the four other Tuesday primaries would be another major blow to the underdog candidates, both in momentum lost and in the delegates each needs to rebound.
"They are struggling to get a narrative that trumps the notion that the other two are inevitable," said longtime Pennsylvania pollster G. Terry Madonna, whose surveys for Franklin and Marshall College have Clinton and Trump holding double-digit leads in Pennsylvania.
The contest here has been an echo of the national race. Clinton, who has ties to the state dating to childhood, has campaigned as if she was running for mayor with an excruciatingly local pitch. Sanders, with his more nationalized message, has reveled in the giant, college-area rallies that have dominated his campaign everywhere...
The 173rd Airborne Brigade is investigating what went wrong during an airborne drop that resulted in three Humvees free-falling to their destruction, as depicted in a widely-shared online video.
On April 11, the Army conducted a heavy drop and personnel airborne operation as part of exercise Saber Junction 16 at Hohenfels training area in Germany. About 150 supply bundles, vehicles, communications equipment and indirect weapons systems were dropped, according to Army spokesman Maj. Juan Martinez. But three Humvees slipped from their rigging as their parachutes deployed, plummeting hundreds of feet to the earth. Martinez said no one was hurt.
"The specific malfunctions that occurred on this day are under investigation," Martinez said in an email to Army Times. "There were multiple rehearsals and inspections of the equipment prior to mission execution. We cannot speculate on what went wrong until the investigation is complete."
Martinez also hinted at the severity of the issue, writing in a subsequent email that "this investigation will receive the highest priority."
The video, viewed more than 1 million times since U.S. Army W.T.F! moments posted it to Facebook, shows a couple of planes pass and drop their cargo without incident. The third plane's first item, one of the ill-fated vehicles, has its parachute deploy initially. But a few seconds after it leaves the aircraft, it slips free and falls off its platform.
Someone standing near the camera seems to instantly recognize what is happening, yelling "Ooo, Yeah! Yes!" as it slips. The person in the video laughs as the free-falling Humvee crashes into the ground and kicks up a cloud of smoke...
Austria's anti-immigration far-right triumphed on Sunday in the first round of a presidential election, with candidates from the two governing parties failing to even make it into a May 22 runoff.More.
Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) won 36.7 of the vote, followed by Alexander van der Bellen backed by the Greens on 19.7 percent and independent candidate Irmgard Griss on 18.8 percent, projections showed.
From the governing coalition, Rudolf Hundstorfer from the Social Democrats (SPÖ) came joint fourth with just 11.2 percent, level with Andreas Khol from the People's Party (ÖVP).
The only candidate who fared worse than the main parties' candidates was Richard Lugner, an 83-year-old construction magnate and socialite married to a former Playboy model 57 years his junior, who won 2.3 percent.
The result, if confirmed, means that for the first time since 1945, Austria will not have a president backed by either the SPÖ or ÖVP.
Support for the two parties has been sliding for years and in the last general election in 2013 they only just garnered enough support to re-form Chancellor Werner Faymann's "grand coalition".
Austria also no longer has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union and Faymann's coalition, in power since 2008, has bickered over structural reforms.
The next general election is due in 2018. The FPÖ is currently leading national opinion polls with more than 30 percent of voter intentions, boosted by Europe's migrant crisis.
"This is the beginning of a new political era," FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache said after what constitutes the best-ever result at federal level for the former party of the late, SS-admiring Joerg Haider...
So here we have Rosie, telling the world that she lives in North East Bedfordshire, where she is suffering from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and — oh, by the way — she has vaginismus and was (allegedly) raped by Jason Lee Weight in June 2014.Keep reading.
Yeah, let’s just put that on the Internet, and also publish photos of yourself topless, Rosie. Because what could possibly go wrong?
Here’s a word parents need to teach their kids: “Crazy.”
What part of “crazy” do I need to explain here? The Internet is forever, boys and girls. Go ask former Rep. Anthony Weiner what he was thinking before he started sending photos of his penis to women. My old buddy Andrew Breitbart turned that into the biggest political story of 2011, and you might have thought former Rep. Anthony Weiner would have learned his lesson, but no, he got caught again in 2013 having some kind of perverted Internet fling with a sleazy admirer named Sydney Leathers.
My teenage sons got an earful of warnings after that. While I was reporting the breaking developments in the second WeinerGate scandal, it dawned on me that kids (and obviously, too many adults who should know better) are simply not thinking before they hit the “send” button on their text messages and emails. They are not thinking about the possible consequences of clicking the “publish” button on their social media accounts. Nor are people thinking about what they are doing in the real world in an age where everybody’s cellphone has a video camera, where anything a guy does in his dating relationships may become the subject of an online rant by an angry ex-girlfriend, where a guy meets a girl at a party and has what seems to him a consensual hookup only to discover, nearly two years later, that she’s telling the world that he’s a rapist.
Rosie’s account of that night is a classic “he-said/she-said” situation. Her story of that (allegedly) “horrific” June 2014 encounter seems entirely plausible, and Jason Lee Weight’s (alleged) behavior is indefensible. Rosie says she filed a report with police “a long time after” this encounter, but a lack of evidence made prosecution impossible. Because I am not a prosecutor or a detective or any sort of “activist,” however, the question of Jason Lee Weight’s guilt or innocence is not actually relevant to my point. Discussing this allegation in terms of “rape culture” is above my pay grade. What I am trying to do here, as a professional journalist, is to convey the reality of what sex means in the social media age. And what I am also trying to do, as a father of six, the youngest three of whom are teenagers, is to explain to parents, teachers and other responsible adults why young people must be warned very strongly about these dangers.
This is not 1977, the year I graduated high school. This is not 1983, the year I graduated college. It’s not 1989, the year I got married. Heck, it’s not even 2008, the year I left The Washington Times and embarked on a career as a freelance correspondent and blogger. Social media has exploded during the past decade, technology has advanced to the point where rapists are livestreaming their rapes on the Internet, where mass murderers publish their “manifestos” online before they commit their deadly rampages. What does this mean for “casual sex”? To quote the recently departed Prince: “Party over. Oops! Out of time.”
Welcome to 2016, boys and girls. There is no such thing as “privacy.”
As machine guns rattled Thursday from a nearby firing range, Iraqi recruits at this dusty base outside Baghdad trained on tactics, radios, firing mortars and tanks before a bevy of visiting Pentagon brass.Actually, no.
But off to the side, their trainers, mostly from Spain and Portugal, said the soldiers often show up late for training courses or don't show up at all.
"The last group we had here was a complete disaster," said Spanish army Maj. Ignacio "Nacho" Arias. "They would come and go without permission."
The troubles at this training base reflect broader difficulties in building an Iraqi ground force capable of pushing entrenched Islamic State fighters out of Mosul, the militants' self-declared capital in Iraq, a priority for the White House and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Abadi's government.
The Pentagon announced in March 2015 that an Iraqi offensive on the strategic city was all but imminent. But those ambitious plans were repeatedly shelved as Iraqi troops struggled to push the militants out of smaller cities and towns.
Iraqi forces finally launched their long-delayed assault toward Mosul last month. It quickly stalled.
The sluggish pace has frustrated U.S. commanders and White House officials, who had hoped to recapture the heavily defended northern city and deal a decisive blow to the militants before President Obama leaves office in January.
Obama made it clear this week that he isn't very optimistic.
"My expectation is that by the end of the year, we will have created the conditions whereby Mosul will eventually fall," he said Monday in an interview with CBS News.
"We're not doing the fighting ourselves, but when we provide training, when we provide special forces who are backing them up, when we are gaining intelligence … what we've seen is we can continually tighten the noose," he added...
On Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama authorized the deployment of 217 more troops to Iraq, as part of the fight against the Islamic State. As Secretary of Defense Ash Carter explained: “This will put Americans closer to the action.” Washington will also send Apache helicopters to Iraqi forces and pay $415 million in salaries for Kurdish troops and other “military needs” in the runup to retaking Mosul.A great piece.
If you think this counts as getting tough in the fight against radical jihadis who have unsettled the Middle East and brought violence to the heart of Europe, you’re deluding yourself. Obama’s strategy for fighting the Islamic State is half-measures, at best: contributing U.S. military force at the margins of efforts by those most directly affected with loss of territory. The president prides himself on a minimalist approach, doing just about as much for Iraqi forces or the Syrian rebels as they could do for themselves. It amounts to an argument that he is preventing the moral hazard of other countries relying on the United States for their security. But that approach treats as costless two very important elements in fighting the Islamic State: confidence and time.
One of the emptiest canards in warfare is “there is no military solution.” Unless you fight to complete extermination, war always involves convincing your adversary to stop fighting. That is, to cede their political goals rather than continue using military force to attain them. Usually, that requires doing some fighting. Of course, adversaries tend not to give up if they think they’re winning or could win — which is why soldiers like the Powell Doctrine of committing large forces in order to demonstrate your political will to win.
It’s also why Obama’s incremental commitment of small numbers of troops — 300 advisors here, a specialized targeting team there — is so ineffective. It conveys the limits of Washington’s willingness to fight. The Islamic State, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei all understand those limits and are acting accordingly. America’s allies get the message now, too, especially after the president wrote off Iraq and fought the war in Afghanistan halfheartedly. They will not step forward and commit the ground troops necessitated by Obama’s approach because they lack the confidence that Washington will see this difficult fight through...
It's nice to take a day from politics & news, in general, to see the world isn't as bad as it sometimes seems.
— Mister H (@ATHudd) April 23, 2016
In forecasts of China’s future power position, much has been made of the country’s pressing domestic challenges: its slowing economy, polluted environment, widespread corruption, perilous financial markets, nonexistent social safety net, rapidly aging population, and restive middle class. But as harmful as these problems are, China’s true Achilles’ heel on the world stage is something else: its low level of technological expertise compared with the United States’. Relative to past rising powers, China has a much wider technological gap to close with the leading power. China may export container after container of high-tech goods, but in a world of globalized production, that doesn’t reveal much. Half of all Chinese exports consist of what economists call “processing trade,” meaning that parts are imported into China for assembly and then exported afterward. And the vast majority of these Chinese exports are directed not by Chinese firms but by corporations from more developed countries.More.
When looking at measures of technological prowess that better reflect the national origin of the expertise, China’s true position becomes clear. World Bank data on payments for the use of intellectual property, for example, indicate that the United States is far and away the leading source of innovative technologies, boasting $128 billion in receipts in 2013—more than four times as much as the country in second place, Japan. China, by contrast, imports technologies on a massive scale yet received less than $1 billion in receipts in 2013 for the use of its intellectual property. Another good indicator of the technological gap is the number of so-called triadic patents, those registered in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, nearly 14,000 such patents originated in the United States, compared with just under 2,000 in China. The distribution of highly influential articles in science and engineering—those in the top one percent of citations, as measured by the National Science Foundation—tells the same story, with the United States accounting for almost half of these articles, more than eight times China’s share. So does the breakdown of Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, and Physiology or Medicine. Since 1990, 114 have gone to U.S.-based researchers. China-based researchers have received two.
Precisely because the Chinese economy is so unlike the U.S. economy, the measure fueling expectations of a power shift, GDP, greatly underestimates the true economic gap between the two countries. For one thing, the immense destruction that China is now wreaking on its environment counts favorably toward its GDP, even though it will reduce economic capacity over time by shortening life spans and raising cleanup and health-care costs. For another thing, GDP was originally designed to measure mid-twentieth-century manufacturing economies, and so the more knowledge-based and globalized a country’s production is, the more its GDP underestimates its economy’s true size.
A new statistic developed by the UN suggests the degree to which GDP inflates China’s relative power. Called “inclusive wealth,” this measure represents economists’ most systematic effort to date to calculate a state’s wealth. As a UN report explained, it counts a country’s stock of assets in three areas: “(i) manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines, and equipment), (ii) human capital (skills, education, health), and (iii) natural capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” Added up, the United States’ inclusive wealth comes to almost $144 trillion—4.5 times China’s $32 trillion.
The true size of China’s economy relative to the United States’ may lie somewhere in between the numbers provided by GDP and inclusive wealth, and admittedly, the latter measure has yet to receive the same level of scrutiny as GDP. The problem with GDP, however, is that it measures a flow (typically, the value of goods and services produced in a year), whereas inclusive wealth measures a stock. As The Economist put it, “Gauging an economy by its GDP is like judging a company by its quarterly profits, without ever peeking at its balance-sheet.” Because inclusive wealth measures the pool of resources a government can conceivably draw on to achieve its strategic objectives, it is the more useful metric when thinking about geopolitical competition.
But no matter how one compares the size of the U.S. and Chinese economies, it is clear that the United States is far more capable of converting its resources into military might. In the past, rising states had levels of technological prowess similar to those of leading ones. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, the United States didn’t lag far behind the United Kingdom in terms of technology, nor did Germany lag far behind the erstwhile Allies during the interwar years, nor was the Soviet Union backward technologically compared with the United States during the early Cold War. This meant that when these challengers rose economically, they could soon mount a serious military challenge to the dominant power. China’s relative technological backwardness today, however, means that even if its economy continues to gain ground, it will not be easy for it to catch up militarily and become a true global strategic peer, as opposed to a merely a major player in its own neighborhood...
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. — The head of the Republican National Committee implored leaders of his sharply divided party on Friday to rally behind their eventual presidential nominee, suggesting that they ignore Donald J. Trump’s assault on the nominating process.Keep reading.
Reince Priebus, the committee’s chairman, did not mention Mr. Trump by name when addressing the group’s members at the party’s spring meeting here, but he devoted much of his speech to the tensions created by the Republican front-runner.
“Now I know our candidates are going to say some things to attract attention,” Mr. Priebus said, in a barely veiled reference to Mr. Trump’s attacks on what he has called “a rigged” and “corrupt” nominating process.
“That’s part of politics,” Mr. Priebus said. “But we all need to get behind the nominee.”
Mr. Trump is not the nominee yet, but his considerable advantage in delegates and lead in overall votes has prompted some mainstream Republicans to come to terms with the likelihood that he is the favorite, however unthinkable it may once have been, to become their standard-bearer this fall.
Yet the lingering split between those Republicans willing to accept Mr. Trump, however reluctantly, and those ferociously opposed to his nomination was on vivid display at the beachside resort where the party gathered.
While Mr. Priebus was speaking to state chairmen and chairwomen and committee members in a second-floor ballroom, officials from the best-funded anti-Trump group were briefing reporters a floor below about its efforts to deny Mr. Trump delegates in the remaining contests and keep him from clinching a majority before the party’s convention in Cleveland in July.
More to the point, Katie Packer, the chairwoman of the group, Our Principles PAC, rejected Mr. Priebus’s implicit suggestion that Mr. Trump was worthy of carrying the party’s banner...
HOLLYWOOD, Fla. (AP) — Donald Trump's chief lieutenants told skeptical Republican leaders Thursday that the GOP front-runner has been "projecting an image" so far in the 2016 primary season and "the part that he's been playing is now evolving" in a way that will improve his standing among general election voters.More.
The message, delivered behind closed doors in a private briefing, is part of the campaign's intensifying effort to convince party leaders Trump will moderate his tone in the coming months to help deliver big electoral gains this fall, despite his contentious ways.
Even as his team pressed Trump's case, he raised fresh concern among some conservatives by speaking against North Carolina's "bathroom law," which directs transgender people to use the bathroom that matches the sex on their birth certificates. Trump also came out against the federal government's plan to replace President Andrew Jackson with the civil-rights figure Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill.
The developments came as the GOP's messy fight for the White House spilled into a seaside resort in south Florida. While candidates in both parties fanned out across the country before important primary contests in the Northeast, Hollywood's Diplomat Resort & Spa was transformed into a palm-treed political battleground.
Trump's newly hired senior aide, Paul Manafort, made the case to Republican National Committee members that Trump has two personalities: one in private and one onstage.
"When he's out on the stage, when he's talking about the kinds of things he's talking about on the stump, he's projecting an image that's for that purpose," Manafort said in a private briefing.
"You'll start to see more depth of the person, the real person. You'll see a real different guy," he said.
The Associated Press obtained a recording of the closed-door exchange...
Donald Trump says Caitlyn Jenner can use whatever bathroom she prefers in Trump Tower https://t.co/fGk0712mzz pic.twitter.com/XA8CdoPfOK
— CNN (@CNN) April 21, 2016
GOP culture war breaks out over transgender bathrooms https://t.co/6OiShWhsZ2 | Getty pic.twitter.com/NT9u1rVosW
— POLITICO (@politico) April 21, 2016
Donald Trump on Thursday freshly exposed the fissures dividing the Republican Party by responding to the transgender bathroom wars with a shrug — setting off a fierce response from Ted Cruz who accused the Republican front-runner of being no better than the “politically correct leftist elites.”More.
The latest front in the culture wars is now a bathroom stall. The raging debate over whether transgender people should be forced to use bathrooms of their gender at birth is acutely playing out within the GOP, and it’s now become a central topic on the presidential campaign trail.
Social conservatives see Big Business — once a close ally — becoming a pawn of the left, joining forces to convince Republican governors that anti-LGBT bills will kill their economy. Some more moderate Republicans, on the other hand, once again see the party picking divisive fights that will hurt them at the ballot box.
For Trump, the consummate businessman, it’s the chance to highlight the identity crisis of his adopted party.
“I will tell you. North Carolina did something that was very strong. And they’re paying a big price. There’s a lot of problems,” Trump observed on NBC’s “Today” show on Thursday, saying that he agreed with remarks from a commentator he did not name who said North Carolina should leave its laws as they are.
Alluding to businesses that have left the state or canceled plans to expand after North Carolina passed a law in March banning transgender people from using the facilities of their choice, Trump called it reason enough to “leave it the way it is.”
“There have been very few complaints the way it is. People go. They use the bathroom that they feel is appropriate,” Trump said. “There has been so little trouble. And the problem with what happened in North Carolina is the strife and the economic — I mean, the economic punishment that they’re taking.”
Sensing a chance to expose Trump as a phony Republican, Cruz pounced. He talked about Trump’s comment on Glenn Beck’s radio show. He talked about it at his morning rally. And then, for good measure, he issued a statement...
Won't Get Fooled Again
The Who
5:10 PM
Young Americans
David Bowie
5:05 PM
I Want You to Want Me (Live)
Cheap Trick
4:53 PM
Separate Ways (Worlds Apart)
Journey
4:48 PM
Miss You
The Rolling Stones
4:43 PM
The Boys of Summer
Don Henley
Take The Long Way Home
Supertramp
4:24 PM
American Girl
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
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Black Magic Woman / Gypsy Queen
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Black Water
The Doobie Brothers
Fifteen minutes into a heated session on whether bullfighting should be banned in Baja California, legislator David Ruvalcaba proposed that the fate of the controversial but financially attractive sport needed further study.More.
Immediately the boos rang out, and half the crowded walked out.
For the third time this year, the Congress of the Mexican state of Baja California blinked in the face of banning a sport that has deep cultural roots in Mexico but is increasingly viewed as animal cruelty.
On Thursday, 12 legislators voted for the delay, eight opposed it and two abstained. And like that, bullfighting season will indeed begin Sunday in Tijuana.
Though they have repeatedly chosen not to vote on the issue, legislators here bristled at the notion, put forward by the bullfighting lobby, that the state does not have the power to regulate the sport.
“Of course we have the power to regulate the sport,” said legislator Juan Manuel Molina, though he allowed that that power carried the responsibility of exploring the ban further.
“It's a matter of culture and a matter of belief, but it's also a matter of humanity,” Molina said. “The spectacle is cruel.”
But Molina questioned how it was possibly fair to ban bullfighting while allowing other sports that claim Mexican heritage, such as cockfighting and the rodeo.
Animal rights groups have presented signature campaigns, celebrity endorsements and polls that purport to indicate overwhelming opposition to bullfighting as part of a public campaign against the sport, which has its roots in Spain and has been banned in some Latin American countries.
Bullfighting is increasingly unpopular in Mexico, according to the polling firm Parametria. In a 2015 poll, 73% of Mexican citizens supported a nationwide ban.
The Mexican states of Sonora and Coahuila, which border the U.S., have banned bullfighting, as has the southern state of Guerrero. But the sport remains popular in the capital, Mexico City, where the Plaza de Toros Mexico seats 48,000 spectators, the largest bull ring in the world.
On Sunday in Tijuana, the largest city in Baja California, the event will feature a rejoneador, a bullfighter on horseback, for the first bullfight of the season.
Built next to the sea and nearly adjacent to the border wall that separates it from California, the Tijuana bullfight ring is designed to appeal to Americans, even extending special offers to San Diego tourists: For a minimum of $200, guests will be whisked to the grounds of a winery on Saturday for a “Toros and Vino Event” that will feature two hours of private bullfights and a return trip across the border before the main event on Sunday.
If the ban is successful, the nearest bull ring near the Southwest border would be Chihuahua's La Esperanza...
During protests, #Mizzou staffer feared walking on campus. @heatstreet has the exclusive: https://t.co/2oFStT2LBU pic.twitter.com/j57nvZYqWV
— Jillian Melchior (@JillianKayM) April 20, 2016
Being defamed by a UCLA Vice Chancellor for defending the Jews.More.
Today a letter attacking me was sent to all members of the UCLA community – that would be nearly 50,000 people I think – by Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Jerry Kang. The Vice Chancellor’s letter attacked me as a “provocateur” who last year “put up hostile posters accusing two student organizations — the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — of being murderers and terrorists.” This is a lie.
Actually it is two lies. First, the posters posted last year targeted only Students for Justice in Palestine – not the Muslim Students Association. Kang obviously included MSA so that he could condemn me for employing what he called a “tactic of guilt by association, of using blacklists, of ethnic slander, and sensationalized images engineered to trigger racially-tinged fear.” (Calling people you don’t agree with racist seems to be a favored gutter tactic of activists on campuses like UCLA these days.)
Second the posters did not accuse SJP of being an organization of murderers and terrorists, as the Vice Chancellor claims. They accused SJP of being “Jew-haters” because they support the murderers and terrorists of Hamas, which they do. That is why the only words on the posters were “Students for Justice in Palestine” and “#Jew Haters.” In a public statement I also called on UCLA to remove the campus privileges and university funding of SJP because they are a hate group and their activities routinely violate UCLA’s “Statement of Principles Against Intolerance,” which Vice Chancellor Kang professes to champion.
Kang then accused me of compounding these sins by conducting a new poster campaign – launched yesterday - called “Stop the Jew Hatred on Campus.” The new posters listed the names of UCLA student and faculty activists who support SJP and BDS – the Hamas-inspired boycott movement, designed to strangle the Jewish state. Kang’s letter calls the posters “a focused, personalized intimidation that threatens specific members of our Bruin community.” There is no intimidation on the posters, just a list of names of activists who support SJP and BDS. Nonetheless, Kang went on to elaborate “if your name is plastered around campus, casting you as a murderer or terrorist, how could you stay focused on anything like learning, teaching, or research?” But the posters don’t cast those listed on them as murderers and terrorists, just activists from Students for Justice in Palestine who supported the BDS boycott campaign. BDS has been denounced by figures as liberal as Alan Dershowitz and Larry Summers as anti-Semitic. Kang sent a personal letter of support to all those named as activists in behalf of these anti-Semitic campaigns. He then went on to lecture everybody about diversity, tolerance and inclusion.
This disgraceful performance by a top university official demands a retraction and apology from the University of California and some serious reflection by Vice Chancellor Kang about the hateful content of his letter and the focused, personalized intimidation directed at myself and all those involved in putting up posters he happens to disagree with.
Black is white; up is down; and ….
“You are a slow learner, Winston,” said O’Brien gently.
“How can I help it?” he blubbered. “How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.” (“1984” Orwell)
Donald Trump roared to a huge victory Tuesday in New York's Republican primary, delivering a much-needed chance to reset his presidential campaign and retake the upper hand in the fight for the GOP nomination.More.
There had been little doubt Trump would carry his home state, where the real estate mogul is literally a household name: In giant letters and various forms, “Trump” adorns some of Manhattan's most exclusive properties.
The outcome was clear the instant that polls closed, with the front-runner leaping to an enormous lead that never wavered. With nearly all of the votes counted, Trump had 60% support, followed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich with 25% and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz with 15.
The key question was the size of Trump's victory and whether he would capture all of the delegates by winning 50% of the statewide vote and a majority in each of New York's 27 congressional districts. It appeared he would claim at least the overwhelmingly majority of the state's 95 delegates, with Kasich taking a handful.
The allocation was more than a matter of vanity or political perceptions. The GOP contest has become a hand-to-hand battle for delegates to the party's July convention in Cleveland, where they alone will choose the nominee to carry the party standard into the fall campaign against Democrat Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.
It takes a majority, 1,237 delegates, to be assured of the nomination before the GOP gathering, which appears to be Trump's best hope as opponents work to stop him short and throw the convention open to one or another of his rivals.
Trump entered the day with 756 delegates, followed by Cruz with 559 and Kasich with 144. Trump's substantial gain eases his quest for the nomination but still leaves the outcome far from certain.
“The path forward is a high wire,” said Bill Whalen, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and speechwriter for former Republican Gov. Pete Wilson of California. “It is manageable, but there is no room for error on either side.”
Trump was blown out by Cruz in the last GOP contest, the April 5 primary in Wisconsin, and has been steadily losing ground to the senator's better-organized campaign ever since, as Republicans seat their national delegates at state- and district-level conventions across the country.
Still, of the three candidates remaining, Trump is the only one with a realistic chance of winning the nomination on the first ballot in Cleveland.
In an effort to steady his campaign, Trump recently shook up its staff, bringing in some of the very Washington establishment figures he once criticized. Amid the upheaval, his campaign field director, a political neophyte, resigned as Trump sought to professionalize his delegate wrangling under Paul J. Manafort, a former lobbyist and longtime Beltway insider, who quickly moved to consolidate and extend his power.
In one sign of Manafort's apparent influence, Trump has grown uncharacteristically restrained in his public comments, in a seeming effort to project a more presidential image. His victory speech Tuesday night was notably brief and absent the insults and braggadocio that characterized previous celebrations...
The government and media alliance advancing the transgender cause has gone into overdrive in recent weeks. On May 30, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services review board ruled that Medicare can pay for the "reassignment" surgery sought by the transgendered—those who say that they don't identify with their biological sex. Earlier last month Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he was "open" to lifting a ban on transgender individuals serving in the military. Time magazine, seeing the trend, ran a cover story for its June 9 issue called "The Transgender Tipping Point: America's next civil rights frontier."Keep reading.
Yet policy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.
The transgendered suffer a disorder of "assumption" like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one's maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight.
With body dysmorphic disorder, an often socially crippling condition, the individual is consumed by the assumption "I'm ugly." These disorders occur in subjects who have come to believe that some of their psycho-social conflicts or problems will be resolved if they can change the way that they appear to others. Such ideas work like ruling passions in their subjects' minds and tend to be accompanied by a solipsistic argument.
For the transgendered, this argument holds that one's feeling of "gender" is a conscious, subjective sense that, being in one's mind, cannot be questioned by others. The individual often seeks not just society's tolerance of this "personal truth" but affirmation of it. Here rests the support for "transgender equality," the demands for government payment for medical and surgical treatments, and for access to all sex-based public roles and privileges.
With this argument, advocates for the transgendered have persuaded several states—including California, New Jersey and Massachusetts—to pass laws barring psychiatrists, even with parental permission, from striving to restore natural gender feelings to a transgender minor. That government can intrude into parents' rights to seek help in guiding their children indicates how powerful these advocates have become.
How to respond? Psychiatrists obviously must challenge the solipsistic concept that what is in the mind cannot be questioned. Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry's domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field. Many will recall how, in the 1990s, an accusation of parental sex abuse of children was deemed unquestionable by the solipsists of the "recovered memory" craze.
You won't hear it from those championing transgender equality, but controlled and follow-up studies reveal fundamental problems with this movement. When children who reported transgender feelings were tracked without medical or surgical treatment at both Vanderbilt University and London's Portman Clinic, 70%-80% of them spontaneously lost those feelings. Some 25% did have persisting feelings; what differentiates those individuals remains to be discerned...
