This summer I had an epiphany as I watched packs of racists riot in Ferguson, Missouri, in support of a gigantic thug who was higher than a kite when he attacked Ferguson Police Department Officer Darren Wilson, who unfortunately had to put this animal down.Keep reading, if putting down big black gigantic animals is your thing.
Why do liberals go to such lengths to revise the motives of terrorists, who are quite clear about their goals? Why do liberals even obscure the names of terrorist groups, replacing the crystal clear “Islamic State” with the alphabet soup of “ISIS” or “ISIL”? Why do liberals replace the terrorists’ own, express rationale with made-up excuses, such as Justin Trudeau’s famous suggestion that terrorists are driven to violence because we “exclude” them?Terrible people, these so-called "liberals" (who are really America-hating, and Canada-hating, radical leftists).
Why do liberals try to revise history, and whitewash the war against us? How is it any more justifiable to minimize the atrocities against us committed by Islamic fascists than it would have been to minimize the atrocities committed by Nazi fascists?
Downplaying the crimes of the terrorists, and even suggesting we are somehow to blame – isn’t that like saying “Hitler wasn’t as bad as people say, and besides, the Jews provoked him”?
We didn’t think that was in the 1940s. We do now, because liberals have abolished the ideas of good and evil as too judgmental. Terrorists? No, our enemies are actually victims themselves, you see. We are privileged. Society is to blame.
When we see the beheading of innocent children and the rape slavery of the Islamic state, it is too horrible to process for the modern, liberal mind.
We cannot accept the terrorists’ reasons, that they mean to kill us and our freedom. So we offer up our own reasons – they’re not that bad, we deserve it, it’s not black and white.
Liberals cannot understand so much hate against us. So liberals sympathize. Liberals help find the answer. They join in. To justify the hate.
By hating ourselves.
.@SarahPalinUSA: President @BarackObama needs to PUT AMERICA FIRST - this is a crisis #Ebola @FoxNews #Greta
— Greta Van Susteren (@gretawire) October 27, 2014WHO IS IN CHARGE? @WhiteHouse pushes back on State #Ebola quarantines @SarahPalinUSA says we need LEADERSHIP @FoxNews #Greta
— Greta Van Susteren (@gretawire) October 27, 2014.@SarahPalinUSA: State & Federal level - we must make sure the solutions are SCIENCE based & not let politics creep in @FoxNews #Greta
— Greta Van Susteren (@gretawire) October 27, 2014Ebola may not be a widespread health crisis in the United States just yet, but it is creating a crisis of another kind — a crisis of confidence in the competence of the federal government.Keep reading.
Many Americans were shocked to learn that when Ebola-infected doctor Craig Spencer returned to New York City from Guinea, took a three-mile run, visited a coffee stand, ate at a meatball restaurant, traveled on three New York subway lines, met friends at a Brooklyn bowling alley and used an Uber sedan to return home, he was not violating the U.S. government’s Ebola protocols.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructs health workers returning from West Africa to monitor their health for 21 days and that “during the time that you are monitoring your health, you can continue your normal activities.” Only after a health worker’s temperature reaches 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit does the CDC advise that he or she go to a doctor, “limit your contact with other people” and “avoid public transportation.”
Continue your normal activities? It is simply unbelievable that this remains the official federal guidance for people who were exposed to the Ebola virus — especially after the CDC just came under fire for telling Dallas nurse Amber Vinson (who had been exposed to Ebola and had a 99.5-degree fever) that she was safe to fly on a plane with 134 passengers aboard because her temperature had not yet reached 100.4 degrees.
So bad has the CDC’s handling of Ebola been that the governors of New York and New Jersey had to step in and impose their own mandatory 21-day quarantine on health-care workers returning to their states from West Africa after treating Ebola patients...
Republicans are on the precipice of taking control of the Senate for the first time in eight years, new NBC News/Marist polls released Sunday show, but the GOP has yet to lock up many of the key battleground races.Keep reading.
The surveys show the Republican candidate with slight, inside-the-margin advantages in three of the hardest-fought contests for Democratic-held seats: Arkansas, Colorado and Iowa. North Carolina is a dead heat.
Republicans’ brief scare in South Dakota appears to be over, with Mike Rounds now leading by double digits. But the party still faces danger in Kansas, where an independent candidate is in a virtual tie with the GOP incumbent.
NBC/Marist didn’t poll all of this year’s competitive Senate races. But with Montana, West Virginia and South Dakota in the GOP column, Republicans need to pick up just three seats in the following states: Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana and North Carolina.
Republicans have a cushion. Five of those states currently lean toward the GOP, poll averages show, while North Carolina is still a toss-up. They also are closing the gap in New Hampshire. But the party may need to pick up additional seats if it loses Georgia, Kansas (if the independent conferences with Democrats) or Kentucky.
Here are the numbers from Sunday’s NBC/Marist polls...
She is a former Marxist guerrilla whose organisation once stole $2.5 million from the safe of the governor of São Paulo.And now she's reelected to another four-year term. At the New York Times, "Brazil Stays With Rousseff as President After Turbulent Campaign":
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian voters re-elected Dilma Rousseff as president on Sunday, endorsing a leftist leader who has achieved important gains in reducing poverty and keeping unemployment low over a centrist challenger who castigated her government for a simmering bribery scandal and a sluggish economy.PHOTO CREDIT: Brazil's Marxist president seen with America's Marxist president, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
Ms. Rousseff of the Workers Party took 51.4 percent of the vote in the second and final round of elections, against 48.5 percent for Aécio Neves, a senator from the Social Democracy party and scion of a political family from the state of Minas Gerais, electoral officials said Sunday night with 98 percent of votes in the country counted.
While Ms. Rousseff won by a thin margin, the tumultuous race was marked by accusations of corruption, personal insults and heated debates, revealing climbing polarization in Brazil. Mr. Neves surged into the lead this month in opinion surveys, only to be eclipsed by Ms. Rousseff as the vote on Sunday approached.
“People without much money have seen their lives improve during recent years,” said Liane Lima, 62, a secretary in São Paulo who voted for Ms. Rousseff. “I think we should let Dilma finish what she started.”
Indeed, Ms. Rousseff’s victory reflects broad changes in Brazilian society since the Workers Party rose to power 12 years ago with the election of her predecessor and mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who chose Ms. Rousseff as his successor to run in the 2010 election and campaigned for her again this year.
Building on an economic stabilization project put in place by the Social Democrats in the 1990s, Ms. Rousseff and Mr. da Silva aggressively expanded social welfare programs, lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty. Pointing to the popularity of the antipoverty spending, Mr. Neves, the challenger in the race, said he would not scale it back.
But while Ms. Rousseff campaigned largely on her government’s support for poor and working-class citizens, she faced fierce criticism over her economic policies, with Brazil struggling with slow growth throughout her first term and a recession this year. Brazil’s financial markets gyrated wildly throughout the race, reflecting skepticism over her management of the economy.
Ms. Rousseff, 66, a former Marxist guerrilla who was imprisoned and tortured by Brazil’s military dictatorship, rejected much of the criticism while emphasizing that she had no plans to shift away from policies involving greater state control over the economy. Still, she signaled openness to shaking up her cabinet, including replacing her unpopular finance minister, Guido Mantega.
In addition to facing turbulence in the markets, Ms. Rousseff will deal in her next four-year term with a sprawling scandal involving testimony of bribes and money laundering at Petrobras, the national oil company, which has eroded confidence in the Workers Party. A former high-ranking executive at Petrobras has testified that he channeled bribes to the party and its allies in Brasília.
“I always voted for the Workers Party, since I was a teenager, but this government hasn’t done anything different,” said José Abel, 48, who runs a tourist agency in Brasília and voted for Mr. Neves largely out of concern over corruption in Ms. Rousseff’s government. “They’re just the same as other parties now.”
Julia Roberts: I've risked my career by not having a facelift http://t.co/BzOBIqMA8O
— Telegraph Film (@TelegraphFilm) October 26, 2014Living with #Ebola in West Africa (in our redesigned blog) http://t.co/DC4SxLRp6r #photojournalism pic.twitter.com/wbZkGrfZqg
— The Big Picture (@big_picture) October 9, 2014Madison Bumgarner Complete Game Shutout #WorldSeries Game 5
We are all witnesses. pic.twitter.com/6gHrpb2rcy
— #OctoberTogether (@SFGiants) October 27, 2014#sfgiants a win away from championship after Bumgarner gem: http://t.co/SaOhro2zQZ
— Henry Schulman (@hankschulman) October 27, 2014The White House pushed back against the governors of New York, New Jersey, Illinois and other states that instituted procedures to forcibly quarantine medical workers returning from West Africa, deepening an emotional debate brought on by recent Ebola cases in the U.S.Whatever happened to federalism? You know, the laboratories of democracy? We might find out that New Jersey's doing the right thing, but then again, the Democrat-left isn't really about keeping people safe and healthy. They're all about creating more political conflicts and distractions.
A senior administration official said Sunday that new federal guidelines under development would protect Americans from imported cases of the disease but not interfere with the flow of U.S. health workers to and from West Africa to fight the epidemic there.
“We have let the governors of New York, New Jersey and other states know that we have concerns with the unintended consequences of [quarantine] policies not grounded in science may have on efforts to combat Ebola at its source,” the official said.
It wasn’t clear what action the Obama administration could take to end the quarantines.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie held firm on his decision to quarantine returning health-care workers. “I absolutely have no second thoughts about it,” he said on Fox News.
A nurse detained in New Jersey after treating Ebola patients in Sierra Leone retained lawyers to challenge her mandatory quarantine in a tent at a Newark hospital, where she said Sunday the conditions are “really inhumane.”
One of those lawyers, Norman Siegel, a prominent civil rights attorney, said the mandatory quarantine policy infringed on the constitutional rights of the worker, Kaci Hickox, a 33-year-old Doctors Without Borders nurse, raising “serious questions procedurally.”
New York Mayor Bill de Blasio also criticized how Ms. Hickox was treated.
WASHINGTON — Bracing for a difficult election in just over a week, when they could lose control of the Senate, Democrats exasperated with the White House are already moving to pin blame on President Obama, whom Republicans have made the centerpiece of the campaign.Continue reading.
Even optimistic Democrats say they have little more than a 50-50 chance to retain their Senate majority. Senior elected officials, strategists and donors have begun to openly criticize Mr. Obama, contending that his low popularity and some ill-advised remarks have proved toxic for candidates trying to distinguish themselves from the president to appeal to swing voters.
“It is all Republicans are running on,” Gov. Mike Beebe of Arkansas said. “It’s not necessarily the national environment as it is mismanagement by the White House, real and imagined.”
Republicans have expanded their advantage in the final days of the midterm campaign and now hold an 11-point lead among likely voters on the question of which party should control Congress, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News/Annenberg survey finds.Nearly 9-in-10 registered voters at the poll said they disapproved of President Obama's handling of the ISIS threat. Yep, the Democrats continue to appease our enemies, and it shows.
Some 52% of likely voters in the survey said they wanted the election to produce a Republican-led Congress, while 41% favored Democratic control.
A week earlier, Republicans had held a narrower, 5-point lead on the question in the Journal/NBC/Annenberg survey.
“The Democrats, who badly need some momentum, find little comfort in these results some ten days out from the election,” said pollster Peter D. Hart, who helped conduct the survey. “The thread holding things together for them is both more slender and now even frayed.”
By historical measures, an 11-point lead on the question of which party should control Congress is large. Republicans held a seven-point lead on the question at this point in the 2010 election in a Journal/NBC survey, which used a different method to determine which voters were most likely to cast ballots. Republicans went on that year to make big gains in the Senate and to retake the majority in the House.
In the new survey, Republicans also led on the “congressional control” question among registered voters, a broader group than likely voters, with 46% favoring GOP leadership and 42% favoring Democratic control. The GOP lead had been two percentage points a week earlier.
“The GOP appears to be solidifying its lead,” said Mr. Hart.
The midterm battle for control of the Senate will hinge on state-by-state dynamics in about a dozen closely contested races, where Democrats hope intensive campaigning has built a climate more favorable to their candidates than national polls suggest.
Still, the Journal/NBC/Annenberg survey points to a national political climate that continues to favor Republicans. Coming amid fears of Ebola, the U.S. war on Islamic State terrorists and intensified campaigning just ahead of the election, the survey found that recent events had taken a toll on both parties but had hurt Democrats more.
Asked whether the events of the past few weeks made them feel more or less favorably toward the parties, 53% said it made them less favorable toward Democrats; 40% said they were less favorable toward Republicans.
Everything in Amy Poehler's book makes me think we'd be friends, but this sex advice for men proves we're soulmates pic.twitter.com/zpBc9r00iI
— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) October 22, 2014Polls: Momentum swinging to Republicans http://t.co/6gLwiXYw6j
— The Hill (@thehill) October 26, 2014
I think it’s a respectable position to say we should not allow flights from West Africa. I don’t think it’s probably very effective, because don’t just fly here from direct to Africa. They fly around the world and then come here. So, I just don’t think it’s effective, but it’s a respectable position.OMG!! Brooks is just a Fox News fearmonger! Oh, well, not exactly, since he's on the far-left PBS network, but don't tell No More Mister! He might get his "we won't panic" panties in a bunch, lol!!
But I don’t think it’s below the belt to have a feeling that the establishment or the ruling class in this country is not particularly competent. And you wouldn’t look at the way Ebola has been handled, at least so far, and say it’s been a testimony to the competence of the establishment.
And there are a lot of people who are just — we have a great social segmentation going on. And so there are a lot of people just with no contact with the people like us they see on TV giving them expert opinion about Ebola or anything else, and they just want to wave it away and they just want to pull in and trust the people they trust and that’s local.
And when the national borders seem porous and uncontrolled, they are going to react. And I think that’s a completely legitimate reaction.
The liberal media and the Obama enablers will not tell you the truth, instead you have a New York Times editorial saying: "Starting Monday in six states, and rolled out in other states soon after, travelers who visited [the Ebola region] will be required to report their temperature and any other symptoms to state or local health officials daily for 21 days, the maximum incubation period for the disease to develop. The officials will be responsible for finding and detaining anyone violating these rules."
Are you kidding me? The officials will be responsible for finding these people if they don't call in?
They should be in isolation. If you have direct contact with anyone in the Ebola region, and you come back to the U.S.A., you should be in quarantine for 21 days. Period.
The Times continues: "The new measures surely make unnecessary a harmful ban on all travelers who have been in the three countries."
Sure. Just ask Dr. Spencer, he went through the screening, it did not work. That doesn't matter to the New York Times because the countries involved are poor and largely comprised of Black Africans. That's why the Obama administration and the liberal press do not want a travel ban.
Here's what should be happening: No American airlines go to the Ebola region. None. Charter flights are allowed, but folks on those flights should be isolated for 21 days. You simply can not have self-reporting, it does not work. So the people, military people, diplomats, whoever they might be, have to give up three weeks of their lives when they return from the Ebola region. Otherwise, we're going to have more Ebola cases.
As I discussed here yesterday, of all the unexpected twists and turns of this year's midterm election cycle, nothing has surprised and flummoxed me more as an analyst than the Senate race in Colorado between incumbent Democrat Mark Udall and Republican challenger Rep. Cory Gardner. Sen. Udall held a narrow but persistent lead in the polls all year until early September. Ever since, he has been trailing in virtually every poll, and the trend into October has been getting worse.Bwahahaha!! Boy, I'm sure old Booman's going to have a bang-up election forecast for the midterms!
This has confused me for a couple of reasons. I can't think of anything that Sen. Udall has done to arouse the anger of Coloradans. If he's outspoken about anything, it's government surveillance which I don't think is something that would galvanize any opposition outside of the Intelligence Community.
Senator Mark Uterus https://t.co/odi4dASTwm
— Rosie Gray (@RosieGray) October 8, 2014
People are irrational in their assessment of risks, blah, blah. Yes, we can find here and there examples of Americans overreacting to Ebola. But more in evidence has been media’s own anti-hysteria hysteria. This week a Bloomberg Radio host rudely and repeatedly (and uncharacteristically) hushed a Wall Street analyst for suggesting we still have things to learn about how the virus is transmitted. Guess what? This is true. What’s more the virus is subject to forces of natural selection, so even our broadly reliable generalizations about transmissibility are hardly written in stone.Oh, so it's not irrational to worry about the spread of Ebola? And that's coming from an infectious disease expert? Well, what do you know? I thought No More Mister had laid down the final word about the Ebola hysteria, which is of course that it's all a Republican plot to make President Obola look bad just before the midterms! See, "YOU'LL HAVE TO DO THE PANICKING FOR US, DOUG."
The media, as if citing an iron law, keep telling us that (to use the New York Times formulation) “people infected with Ebola cannot spread the disease until they begin to display symptoms, and it cannot be spread through the air.”
Sorry, each clause of that sentence is subject to caveat, and the whole thought needs to be preceded with the words “government scientists believe . . . .”
Acknowledging these realities is not tantamount to saying an uncontained breakout is likely or possible in the United States. A person deliberately infected and sent among us in an act of bioterrorism wouldn’t be able to infect any sizable number of people given what we know about Ebola. The average American is in far more danger from a ham sandwich or the neighborhood salad bar. Yet much sense was spoken on PBS on Wednesday night by Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease expert at Vanderbilt University, who said: “I would like not to call it irrational. When people are just learning about something, something that they regard as a threat, and they haven’t integrated all of this information still into their thought process, their sense of anxiety obviously increases.”
Final Score #SFGiants win 11-4, tie the #WorldSeries 2-2
Pence 3-for-5 3 RBI
Sandoval 2-for-5 2 RBI
Petit (W) pic.twitter.com/EL7azDfabA
— #OctoberTogether (@SFGiants) October 26, 2014#sfgiants come back with huge burst of runs, tie Series at 2-2: http://t.co/mb0tyRwwtf
— Henry Schulman (@hankschulman) October 26, 2014Vogelsong and the #SFGiants try to tie up the #WorldSeries in Game 4 at 5 PT. http://t.co/C2cW85bk3j #OctoberTogether pic.twitter.com/gwImxsJoMK
— #OctoberTogether (@SFGiants) October 25, 2014SAN FRANCISCO — Zack Greinke asked out of Kansas City four years ago. He was in the prime of his career. He would not sign a new contract with the Royals because he wanted to win and, as he told anyone who asked, he did not believe the Royals could win.More.
Greinke has taken his talents to the Milwaukee Brewers, to the Angels, and to the Dodgers. He has yet to pitch in the World Series.
And just look at the team he jilted now. The Royals are halfway to the World Series championship.
Alcides Escobar, one of the players the Royals acquired for Greinke, got two hits and scored two runs Friday. Lorenzo Cain, another of the players in the trade, drove in a run and made two splendid catches in right field. And Kansas City got four hitless innings out of its splendid bullpen to close out a 3-2 victory over the San Francisco Giants in Game 3 of the World Series.
The Royals lead the Series, two games to one. The record of the largely anonymous underdog Kansas City squad this postseason: 10-1.
"There's no intimidation on this team," Cain said. "No one's intimidated. It's just a baseball game."
The only pitcher to beat the Royals in the postseason: Giants ace Madison Bumgarner. Although another loss would put the Giants on the verge of elimination, Manager Bruce Bochy said he would stick with Ryan Vogelsong for Game 4 — even though Bumgarner said he would be willing to start on short rest.
"It's not like he pushed real hard," Bochy said.
The scarred, leather-faced tank commander, Don “Wardaddy” Collier (an aggressively deglamorized Brad Pitt), butchers a solitary German officer rather than take him prisoner [in the opening scene]. A short time later, he not only decides to shoot an SS man who surrenders to him, but he forces — in an excruciatingly prolonged scene — a jittery clerk-typist, Private Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), to pull the trigger. “Don’t make me do this!” weeps Ellison as Collier slaps him and wrestles him into position to fire a bullet into the head of a man who has pulled out photos of his wife and children and is begging for his life. And then — blam!"Weeps Ellison." OMG terrible. Just terrible!
Here’s the long and short of it: Fury is probably the best Hollywood WW2 movie since “Saving Private Ryan.” It has courage. It has heart. It is intentionally upsetting. It has unrelenting battle scenes that will have you on the edge of your seat and more than slightly repulsed at the carnage. It has an underlying message of resistance to evil, devotion to faith and ethics that viewers can accept or ignore. The film works as Grand Guignol just as well as it works as a religious statement.Word, brother. Mother f-king Word.
Fury left me deeply moved and more admiring than ever of the Greatest Generation. More than anything, it left me shaking my head about the nation we have become, and how we became such a pale imitation of what we once were.
The fact is, there are no “lone wolves” in the global jihad.
For months, the White House has insisted that President Obama would do all he could to help his party in the midterm election. Now that he’s started, some Democrats wonder whether he could help a little bit less.Ah, far-left Sturm und Drang --- you gotta love it!
In a rocky return to the campaign trail, Obama has served up campaign fodder for Republican opponents in a formal speech and in an off-the-cuff interview. He’s been heckled by immigration activists angry about his decision to delay executive action on deportation. On Sunday, he watched a chunk of his audience head for the exits — apparently to avoid traffic — before the end of his stump speech.
The slip-ups have even extended to the usually disciplined first lady, who campaigned in Iowa for Senate candidate Bruce Braley but repeatedly called the congressman by the wrong last name. After she went back Tuesday for a do-over, a White House news release got Braley’s name right but his title wrong.
Democrats have witnessed the performances, cringed and complained, offering a preview of the finger-pointing that might come if the party fares poorly in the Nov. 4 election.
“It doesn’t open up a new line of attack, but it freshens one right as voters are tuning in,” said a campaign advisor, one of several Democrats who would not be quoted by name while discussing the president’s effect on elections.
The focus of much of their frustration has been Obama’s off-message comments, which undermined a key strategy for many Democratic candidates — to distance themselves from the unpopular president.
Several Democratic strategists and campaign advisors noted Obama’s blunders were minor problems compared with the drag his sunken approval rating is putting on their candidates.
Still, they saw in the missteps a window into a president’s mind-set and his political operation. They blamed a White House political team disconnected from the tough realities of campaigning and a president better at selling himself than his party...
Retracing the steps of the New York Ebola patient http://t.co/rMlqr5PVtg pic.twitter.com/ga1JviBp9p
— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 25, 2014@ChrisCoon4 @AmPowerBlog David Perdue he is my vote. I ain't voting for no Fugly shemail Obama loving Democrat
— Thomas Kayler (@KCSI_RW) October 25, 2014Disenchantment among millennial voters is the latest worry for Democrats fighting to hold their Senate majority.Well, Republicans shouldn't get cocky. It's a pox on both houses, as far as I'm concerned. But the fault lies with young voters themselves.
Young voters rallied to President Obama’s side when he first ran for the White House in 2008, and then defied predictions that their enthusiasm would drop off in 2012.
But there is no guarantee they will turn out for Democrats at the polls next month.
Plagued by unemployment and economic anxiety, 18- to 34-year-olds feel a sense of disappointment in the party it helped boost in previous elections, political observers say.
Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said the promise of “hope and change millennials invested in has hit a brick wall.”
Manley said that this in turn has made young voters “very cynical about the political process and less likely to vote than they had in the past.”
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, agreed that winning over young voters is an issue for Democrats.
“Obama in 2008 had been successful at exciting millennials about political institutions they distrusted and giving them faith in an economy that really wasn’t delivering on the American dream,” Zelizer said.
Since then, Zelizer added, Obama “seems like politics as normal while the economy continues to crawl.”
“Democrats have failed to really lock in their support,” he said.
A poll released earlier this year showed a significant decline in the number of Democratic-leaning millennials who planned to vote in the midterm elections.
The survey, conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, found that young voters are increasingly turned off by the political environment.
It revealed that a mere 23 percent of Democratic-leaning millennials said they would vote in the midterm elections. That was down from the 31 percent who said they would vote in the 2010 midterm elections. (Only 24 percent actually showed up at the polls that year.)
At the same time, the poll indicated that 32 percent of conservative-leaning millennials said they would vote in the election.
“We’ve seen a growing disenchantment with Democrats generally,” John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics, said in an interview.
While millennials were an important part of the Democratic coalition in recent election cycles, that same coalition appeared to be “fractured” now — something that should concern Democrats, Della Volpe said.
Sensing a weakness, Republicans have pounced...
Alamosa, Colo.More.
The political class is so focused on what Democrats may lose Nov. 4 that it has largely missed what the party already has lost. So much for the much-vaunted “Colorado Model.”
Nothing has buoyed the progressive left more in recent years than a self-satisfied belief in that blueprint, Exhibit A in their promise of a new Democratic majority. The party poured money into the Centennial State, building an activist infrastructure honed to outspend and attack Republican candidates. These messages were aimed at what was described as an ascendant coalition of liberal whites moving to the state, and minorities—who would join to keep Colorado blue for decades.
It seemed to be working. Democrats, beginning in 2004, would ultimately take from Republicans the state legislature, the governorship, both U.S. Senate seats, key House districts and a variety of statewide offices. The media pronounced a new Democratic dominance of the Mountain West, and the left promised exportation of its model far and wide.
Or not. If Colorado is serving as a model for anything these days, it’s the risks of Democratic overreach. Sen. Mark Udall has trailed GOP Rep. Cory Gardner in every poll since September. Gov. John Hickenlooper is trailing Republican Bob Beauprez in poll averages. Republicans are poised to take back the state Senate. Democrats recently pulled funding from the only Colorado U.S. House seat they had targeted, that of GOP Rep. Mike Coffman.
The party’s biggest mistake was thinking its recent electoral victories—based largely on a superior campaign game—translated into a mandate for liberal governance. Colorado long has been, and remains, a pragmatic state. It’s a place that for decades gave Republicans the state legislature and Democrats the governor’s mansion. It loves its political independents, folks like former Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, who it elected in 1992 as a Democrat and re-elected in 1998 by an even bigger margin as a Republican.
No surprise, the state hasn’t appreciated Mr. Obama’s ideological agenda. Some 22,000 residents just found out they’re losing health insurance; some 200,000 more face cancellations next year. Residents are worried about Ebola and the terror threat, frustrated by falling incomes, disturbed by Washington scandals. The president’s approval rating—in supposedly liberal-ascendant Colorado—is 40%...
American Bridge 21st Century was started by former journalist and liberal activist David Brock, who staffed the super PAC with former Hill staffers and employees of his nonprofit, Media Matters for America.It's worth noting then how badly these losers screwed up today with their ill-considered attack on Georgia Senate candidate David Perdue.
Media Matters describes itself as a “progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media.” American Bridge’s mission is similar, with a strong focus on opposition research to help Democratic candidates and other allied super PACs.
Presented without comment. #gasen
http://t.co/DE1zZkRy7a
https://t.co/IoyNQNdnkr
— American Bridge (@American_Bridge) October 24, 2014
#GASen Watch A Republican Senate Candidate Sign A Young Woman’s Torso http://t.co/DQNzp8Piup
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
staff try to block camera as David Perdue signs a young woman’s torso and says “no pictures on this.” Video: http://t.co/DQNzp8Piup
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
if you think the tracker was excited to capture this David Perdue footage, you are right http://t.co/DQNzp8Piup
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
“No pictures on this.” #GASen http://t.co/DQNzp8Piup
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
no pictures brian RT @brianbeutler: Send the Pulitzer directly to @EvanMcSan c/o BuzzFeed's DC bureau http://t.co/DQNzp8Piup
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
.@American_Bridge Perdue tracker footage missed Perdue signing girl’s insulin pump, says GOP. Vid backs them up: http://t.co/jPqhAFDhWY
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
UPDATE: Perdue footage from @American_Bridge did not capture the whole story in that #GASen signing http://t.co/jPqhAFDhWY
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
Another angle on the Perdue signing, not captured by Republicans, backs up Perdue’s explanation for torso signing. http://t.co/jPqhAFDhWY
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
http://t.co/jPqhAFDhWY pic.twitter.com/qiz8GFOlZG
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
http://t.co/jPqhAFDhWY pic.twitter.com/9jOSgsmKb8
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
.@American_Bridge tells BuzzFeed News they will be pulling down the Perdue tracker video
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
#FF RT @morningmoneyben: "If they claim it's a torso, get more than one source-o." #unfollow
— E McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) October 24, 2014
American Bridge posted this video as it was recorded without commentary. We regret any confusion it caused.
— American Bridge (@American_Bridge) October 24, 2014
Boy, Evan McMorris-Santoro (@EvanMcSan) screwed the pooch on that Perdue hit piece. And @American_Bridge is total fail. #DavidPerdue #DEMS
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) October 24, 2014
RT @famblog: Buzzfeed hack falsely claims David Perdue signs woman’s torso http://t.co/5eSayYVXwR #tcot #tgdn pic.twitter.com/dwBjDk8g7i
— ┌П┐(•_•) (@exposeliberals) October 24, 2014
Dems accuse David Perdue of signing girl’s “torso.” Was signing insulin pump - Hot Air http://t.co/o9hZXKLAhD
— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) October 24, 2014
One Sunday morning last December, China’s defense ministry summoned military attachés from several embassies to its monolithic Beijing headquarters.Continue reading.
To the foreigners’ surprise, the Chinese said that one of their nuclear-powered submarines would soon pass through the Strait of Malacca, a passage between Malaysia and Indonesia that carries much of world trade, say people briefed on the meeting.
Two days later, a Chinese attack sub—a so-called hunter-killer, designed to seek out and destroy enemy vessels—slipped through the strait above water and disappeared. It resurfaced near Sri Lanka and then in the Persian Gulf, say people familiar with its movements, before returning through the strait in February—the first known voyage of a Chinese sub to the Indian Ocean.
The message was clear: China had fulfilled its four-decade quest to join the elite club of countries with nuclear subs that can ply the high seas. The defense ministry summoned attachés again to disclose another Chinese deployment to the Indian Ocean in September—this time a diesel-powered sub, which stopped off in Sri Lanka.
China’s increasingly potent and active sub force represents the rising power’s most significant military challenge yet for the region. Its expanding undersea fleet not only bolsters China’s nuclear arsenal but also enhances the country’s capacity to enforce its territorial claims and thwart U.S. intervention.
China is expected to pass another milestone this year when it sets a different type of sub to sea—a “boomer,” carrying fully armed nuclear missiles for the first time—says the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence, or ONI.
China is hardly hiding its new boomers. Tourists could clearly see three of them at a base opposite a resort recently in China’s Hainan province. On the beach, rented Jet Skis were accompanied by guides to make sure riders didn’t stray too close.
These boomers’ missiles have the range to hit Hawaii and Alaska from East Asia and the continental U.S. from the mid-Pacific, the ONI says.
“This is a trump card that makes our motherland proud and our adversaries terrified,” China’s navy chief, Adm. Wu Shengli, wrote of the country’s missile-sub fleet in a Communist Party magazine in December. “It is a strategic force symbolizing great-power status and supporting national security.”
Three weeks before Michael Zehaf-Bibeau killed a Canadian soldier and thrust the government into a terrified lockdown on Wednesday, he came to Ottawa to get a passport so he could travel to Syria, police said. On Tuesday, he prayed and slept in a downtown hostel for the homeless where he had been staying.More.
A number of details about Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau emerged Thursday that began to fill in a picture of a middle-class suburban youth who grew estranged from his family—last week he had lunch with his mother, Susan Bibeau, a federal civil servant he hadn’t seen in five years—and descended into a string of petty crimes. What authorities couldn’t yet answer was why that led to the attack.
“I think the passport figured prominently in his motives,” said Bob Paulson, the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Investigators learned of his plans to travel to Syria from his estranged mother on Wednesday, the RCMP said, after the shooting and his own death.
Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau was on the radar of Canadian intelligence and deemed a man “down on life,” according to one person familiar with the investigation. But he wasn’t on a list of 90 Canadians deemed “high-risk” travelers because of their potential for terror links abroad, according to the RCMP.
He may have had links, however, to one such person. Investigators said they are probing a possible connection to a Vancouver-area man who is believed to have traveled to Syria. That man is Hasibullah Yusufzai, according to a U.S. official.
In July, Mr. Yusufzai became the first person charged in Canada under a law passed last year making it illegal to travel to another country to try to commit an act of terrorism. Mr. Yusufzai had left Canada by the time the charges were laid, and his relatives have denied the accusation. Mr. Yusufzai, a 25-year-old Afghan immigrant, attended the same Vancouver-area mosque as Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau, according to Aasim Rashid, religious director for the B.C. Muslim Association.
In a statement sent to the Associated Press, Ms. Bibeau said of her son’s actions: “We have no explanation to offer.”
Ms. Bibeau’s statement was cosigned by Bulgasem Zehaf, whom she characterized as her husband although the two divorced in 1998, according to court documents.
Canadian intelligence briefings indicate that the couple’s son had some form of mental illness, according to another person familiar with the investigation.
A U.S. official said that Mr. Zehaf-Bibeau didn’t appear to have been active in any local terrorist cells or radical mosques. Investigators believe that he was probably inspired by Islamic State militants, rather than taking direction from them, this official said...
The president is upset. Very upset. Frustrated and angry. Seething about the government’s handling of Ebola, said the front-page headline in the New York Times last Saturday.More.
There’s only one problem with this pose, so obligingly transcribed for him by the Times. It’s his government. He’s president. Has been for six years. Yet Barack Obama reflexively insists on playing the shocked outsider when something goes wrong within his own administration...
While the race for control of the U.S. Senate is not over yet, and Democrats are aggressively defending embattled incumbents as well as supporting capable candidates in traditionally Republican states like Kentucky and Georgia, the situation is looking grim for the president’s party.More.
While the Senate is not yet in Republican hands, Democrats are engaging in the stages of grief right before our eyes as the last remaining bulwark propping up the nearly spent Obama presidency crumbles...
A President can use his veto pen, but he also has to pick his spots lest he become the main obstructionist. A shrewd GOP leadership would be able to make at least incremental progress toward the party’s goals of faster economic growth, rising incomes, and more health-care choice.Heh, I'm feeling the exquisite early pangs of schadenfreude.
The media know all of this, which may be the real reason so many are so eager to portray a GOP victory as defeat even before the votes are counted. Their real worry is that Republican gains in the House, and a sweep in the Senate, would represent a repudiation of six years of liberal governance. Their fear is that a GOP Congress might even succeed.
Gay rights advocates have won a sweeping and deserved victory in the court of public opinion – and done so at a breathtaking pace. They ought not to tarnish that triumph by employing a type of victor’s justice that calls into question how far their professed loyalty to tolerance really runs.Well, they're not really about tolerance at all, but RTWT.
As Hillary and Bill Clinton prepare for another White House ramble, the country is fated to endure more than a few 1990s flashbacks, often including attempts to whitewash the real history. The latest character to re-emerge is Monica Lewinsky, the former intern who is doffing her beret to reinvent herself as an anti-cyberbullying activist.Keep reading.
In a speech this week at a Forbes magazine conference that went viral on the Web, Ms. Lewinsky describes herself as a “survivor” of online abuse—she became “the creature from the media lagoon.” As the worst abusers, she cited Matt Drudge and the New York Post, which gave Ms. Lewinsky a term of tabloid endearment as “the portly pepperpot.” Another culprit was “a politically motivated independent prosecutor,” or Ken Starr.
The problem is that Ms. Lewinsky was actually the victim of the Clinton lagoon, as White House operatives tried to destroy her reputation when the scandal broke. The real bullies weren’t online but in the West Wing...
“You’re not going to see a tank film again,” Rae explained. “There’s not much shelf-life left on these machines.” Fury is these old war wagons’ last chance to show off. Rae was there to make sure they showed off right.
Republicans still have the edge for a Senate majority, but this fight has a lot more uncertainty than the computer models suggest.No matter the size of the GOP gains, the Democrats are going to get hammered. It's not going to be pretty.
