Open-Borders Money Backs Marco Rubio

Following-up from yesterday, "A National Security History Lesson for Marco Rubio."

From Michelle Malkin:

Political analysis of the Las Vegas debate immigration dust-up between Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio is missing a key ingredient: the money factor.

You can read the lips of the candidates till the cows come home. But you’ll get to the truth much faster when you learn where pro-amnesty power brokers have placed their bets and hitched their wagons.

Rubio’s brazenly fraudulent campaign to paint Cruz as soft on illegal immigration is a flabbergasting attempt to distract from the Florida junior senator’s faithful allegiance to the open-borders donor class.

Here’s what you need to know:

Facebook, Microsoft and Silicon Valley back Marco Rubio. Mark Zuckerberg is a social justice CEO who panders to Hispanics with his pro-amnesty, anti-deportation advocacy; Facebook is an H-1B visa dependent company working hard to obliterate hurdles to hiring an unlimited stream of cheap foreign tech workers. It’s no coincidence that Facebook’s lobbying outfit, FWD.us, was waging war on Sen. Cruz online this week in parallel with Sen. Rubio’s disingenuous onstage attack.

The D.C. front group, which Zuckerberg seeded in 2013 with nearly $40 million during the Gang of Eight fight, has consistently provided political protection for Rubio as he carried their legislative water.

FWD.us’s GOP subsidiary, “Americans for a Conservative Direction,” showered Rubio and pro-illegal alien amnesty Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., with millions of dollars in media ad buys. The group also funded a deceptive, $150,000 ad campaign for immigration sellout Rep. Renee Ellmers, R-N.C., which falsely claimed she opposed amnesty to help her fend off a primary challenge. In all, FWD.us spent an estimated $5 million on TV and radio spots in more than 100 GOP districts before the Senate passed the Gang of Eight bill in June 2013.

Zuckerberg personally donated to Rubio, as have pro-H-1B expansionist Silicon Valley CEOs from Oracle, Cisco and Seagate. Microsoft, founded by leading H-1B/amnesty cheerleader Bill Gates, has been Rubio’s No. 2 corporate donor the past five years.

Paul Singer backs Marco Rubio. The hedge fund billionaire announced his support for Rubio in October. Amnesty is and always has been a top agenda item for Singer, who helped fund the National Immigration Forum along with fellow hedge fund billionaire George Soros. NIF propped up a faux “grass-roots” initiative of religious conservatives, dubbed the Evangelical Immigration Table, to lobby for the Gang of Eight.

NIF was founded by far-left attorney Rick Swartz, who opposes tracking/deporting visa overstayers and opposes employer sanctions against companies that violated immigration laws. Swartz also served as an advisor to Microsoft.

The Singer/Soros-funded NIF helped sabotage the Immigration Act of 1990, which was intended to impose modest restrictions on immigration, and turned it into “one of the most expansionist immigration bills ever passed,” as one expert put it. On Capitol Hill, Swartz worked closely with immigration expansionist Sen. Spencer Abraham’s legislative director Cesar Conda and Sen. Sam Brownback’s legislative director (now GOP House speaker) Paul Ryan—-who is busy this holiday season fronting an omnibus bill that will open the floodgates to 250,000 unskilled foreign guest workers.

Side note: Beltway establishment fixture Conda previously worked for the pro-amnesty U.S. Chamber of Commerce and mentored Ryan from the age of 19. Conda guided newbie Rubio as his Senate chief of staff from 2011-2014 and remains his powerful immigration Svengali behind closed doors.

Rove/Bush-tied front groups back Marco Rubio. The American Action Network is a Big Business GOP lobbying organization led by former Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., and co-founded with John McCain adviser/fundraiser Fred Malek. AAN shares [clarification: shared] its offices with amnesty peddler Karl Rove’s American Crossroads in D.C. AAN’s “action arm,” the American Action Forum, was founded in February 2010 and proceeded to spend a whopping $25 million to attack conservatives who opposed amnesty. [Correction: AAN embarked on the anti-conservative spending campaign.] Jeb Bush sat on the AAF board.

In 2013, the group dumped more than $750,000 into primetime, Fox News Channel ad buys pushing the Gang of Eight immigration bill, including $100,000 in ads to support leading GOP voices for amnesty, including, you guessed it, Sen. Marco Rubio.

Open-borders Democrats love Marco Rubio. As Sen. Schumer brayed last month: Rubio “was not only totally committed, he was in that room with us. His fingerprints are all over” the Gang of Eight monstrosity. Indeed, Sens. Durbin and Rubio plotted strategy during early morning workout sessions at the Senate gym.

Rubio hired Enrique Gonzalez, a Democratic donor and partner with the global immigration law firm, Fragomen Del Rey, to be his chief adviser on the bill. Gonzalez specializes in obtaining H-1B guest worker visas (tripled in the Gang of Eight bill) and EB-5 visas for wealthy foreign investors. After the bill passed, Gonzalez returned to his law firm as managing partner of the Florida office, where he brags about his role as Rubio’s “special counsel” and “principal advisor/negotiator”—read: bill writer.
Bottom line?

Cruz kept his promise to voters. He voted against the Gang of Eight giveaway. Period.

Rubio broke his promise: He paid lip service to border security and the American Dream, while scheming with Sens. Schumer and Durbin on the 180,000-word, 1,200-page Christmas tree for Big Biz, Big Tech and ethnic lobbyists.

Rubio didn’t just vote for the bill. He and his staff were integral to crafting it, shilling for it, and cashing in on the legislative boondoggle dubbed a “permanent pension plan for immigration lawyers.”

When you need the truth about which Beltway crapweasels are selling out America, always follow the money.

Kate Hudson for Harper's Bazaar December 2015

Absolutely stunning.

See, "YES, IT'S FUN TO BE KATE HUDSON."

Enrique Marquez Accused of Plotting Terrorist Attacks Against Riverside City College and 91 Freeway

At the Riverside Press-Enterprise, "SAN BERNARDINO SHOOTING: Marquez charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism":

Enrique Marquez, the former neighbor and close friend of San Bernardino shooter Syed Rizwan Farook, has been charged with conspiring with Farook in 2011 and 2012 to commit crimes of terrorism, including attacks on Riverside City College and the 91 freeway.

The U.S Attorney's Office filed the conspiracy charge against Marquez, 24, of Riverside, on Thursday, Dec. 17. His arrest Thursday morning was the first stemming from the investigation into Dec. 2 attack at the Inland Regional Center that left 14 people dead and 22 injured.

Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, who had both become radicalized several years ago before their marriage, were killed in a shootout with police.

Federal prosecutors said there was no evidence that Marquez participated in the Dec. 2 attack or had advance knowledge of it.
The charges against Marquez include conspiring with Farook to provide material support – including himself, a firearm and explosives – for crimes of terrorism.

"Marquez was also charged today with the unlawful purchase of two assault rifles used in the deadly shooting two weeks ago," the U.S Attorney's Office said in a statement.

"A three-count criminal complaint filed this afternoon additionally charges Marquez with defrauding immigration authorities by entering into a sham marriage with a member of Farook’s family."

Marquez, who was raised Catholic, was married to a Russian woman whose sister was married to Farook's brother, Syed Raheel Farook.

An affidavit by FBI Special Agent Joel T. Anderson filed with the criminal complaint said Marquez moved to Riverside in 2004 and met Farook, his neighbor on Tomlinson Avenue. "In late 2005, Farook introduced Marquez to Islam and began educating Marquez about religion."

Marquez converted to Islam in 2007, the affidavit says...

More.

The L.A. Schools' 'Not Credible' Threat

From Robert Spencer, at FrontPage Magazine, "“I’m kinda tired of hearing all this ISIS,” but they’re still coming":

When the Los Angeles Board of Education closed all its schools Tuesday because of a terror threat, officials in New York City, which had received a similar threat, were contemptuous. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio characterized the threat as “so generic, so outlandish” that it was beneath serious notice. “It would be a huge disservice to our nation,” he declared, “to close down our school system.” New York Police Department Commissioner Bill Bratton said “we cannot allow ourselves to raise levels of fear. Certainly raise levels of awareness. But this is not a credible threat.”

Fair enough. But there is enough of a credible threat in general to warrant taking every precaution. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-California), said that the threat (which was initially reported, of course, as a generic “terrorist threat,” with no indication that it was Islamic,” lacked “the feel of the way the jihadists usually write.” He pointed out, according to the Los Angeles Times, that “the roughly 350-word message did not capitalize Allah in one instance, nor did it cite a Koranic verse. He said the elements of the threatened attack also seemed unlikely, such as the claim that it would involve 32 people with nerve gas.”

Sherman claimed that “there isn’t a person on the street who couldn’t have written this.” Smearing the flyover states with Hollywood insouciance, he added: “Everybody in Nebraska could have written this.” He even suggested that an “Islamophobe” wrote the threat: “I don’t know whether this was sent by a radical Islamic jihadist or somebody who had an anti-Islamic agenda or just a prankster.”

Maybe the threats did come from someone with “an anti-Islamic agenda or just a prankster.” But those with an “anti-Islamic agenda” don’t really need to work that hard. Islamic jihadis are doing a fine job of issuing threats all by themselves. In September 2014, the Islamic State issued a lengthy communiqué calling upon Muslims in the West to murder non-Muslims. It included the exhortation to “strive to your best and kill any disbeliever, whether he be French, American, or from any of their allies.” It followed this up with a quotation from the Qur’an: “O you who have believed, take your precaution and [either] go forth in companies or go forth all together” (4:71).

The Islamic State exhortation continued...

More.

And previously, "Don't Let Fear Undermine Freedom?"

Holiday Savings in Fashion

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BONUS: See Oleg Khlevniuk, Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator.

Highland Park Church Gets City Funding to Shelter Homeless During Cold Stretch (VIDEO)

Jeez, you'd have to be heartless to abandon the church just as it's getting the homeless out from the cold.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Homeless shelter in Highland Park gets city funding to stay open during El Niño."

City regulators said that church pews weren't up to code for sleeping accommodations. Can you believe that? Official reversed course, knowing that they'd be getting hammered by public outrage.

Watch, at CBS News Los Angeles:

The Mystery of Missing Inflation

Following-up, "Federal Reserve Raises Short-Term Interest Rates."

At the Wall Street Journal, "The Mystery of Missing Inflation Weighs on Fed Rate Move":

Federal Reserve officials this week are expected to raise interest rates for the first time in nine years on the expectation that employment and inflation will hit targets reflecting a healthy U.S. economy.

But Fed officials face a troubling question: Jobs are on track, but inflation isn’t behaving as predicted and they don’t know why. Unemployment has fallen to 5%, a figure close to estimates of full employment, while inflation remains stuck at less than 1%, well below the Fed’s 2% target.

Central bank officials predict inflation will approach their target in 2016. The trouble is they have made the same prediction for the past four years. If the Fed is again fooled, it may find it raised rates too soon, risking recession.

Low inflation—and low prices—sound beneficial but can stall growth in wages and profits. Debts are harder to pay off without inflation shrinking their burden. For central banks, when inflation is very low, so are interest rates, leaving little room to cut rates to spur the economy during downturns.

The Fed’s poor record of predicting inflation has set off debate within the central bank over the economic models used by central bank officials. Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen, in a 31-page September speech on the subject, acknowledged “significant uncertainty” about her prediction that inflation would rise. Conventional models, she said, have become “a subject of controversy.”

Ms. Yellen faces dissent from Fed officials who want to keep interest rates near zero until there is concrete evidence of inflation rising, voices likely to try to put a drag on future rate increases.

While the job market is near normal, “I am far less confident about reaching our inflation goal within a reasonable time frame,” Charles Evans, president of the Chicago Fed, said in a speech this month. “Inflation has been too low for too long.”

For a generation, economists believed central banks had control over the rate of inflation and could use it as a policy guide: If inflation was too low, then lower interest rates could boost the economy; high inflation could be checked by raising rates.

Inflation’s about-face

Today’s conundrum over low inflation marks a turnabout. Former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker tamed persistently high double-digit inflation in the 1980s, after a decade of stagflation—a period of rising prices, slow growth and high unemployment that confounded economists. For years afterward, central banks adopted slow and steady inflation growth targets of 2%.

The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation rose an average of 2.038% a year between 1992 and 2007, bolstering confidence that economists understood how inflation worked. The price of a Fourth of July barbecue, for example, closely tracked the 2% annual target over that period: Average prices for a pound of ground beef went to $2.70 from $1.91; American cheese climbed to $3.91 a pound from $3.01; a 16-oz bag of potato chips rose to $3.65 from $2.84. Wages also rose modestly so workers kept pace.

Central bankers “thought that it must be their own doing,” said Jon Faust, the director of the Center for Financial Economics at Johns Hopkins University, who served two stints at the Fed during that period. “We thought we figured out macro policy, and we could deliver low, stable inflation and stable output and low unemployment and all things good.”

The financial crisis deflated that confidence. Confronted by low inflation and sluggish economic growth, the U.S. and U.K. nearly seven years ago—and the eurozone three years later—slashed interest rates to near zero...

Raising rates might restore a little stability to the economy, especially on housing. It's not a bad thing. And for goodness' sake, a 1/4 point increase is virtually unnoticeable.

More.

Long Beach Unified Schools to Stay Open After 'Non-Credible' Threat

Well, I hope they have real experts evaluating those threats.

See the Los Angeles Times, "Long Beach schools remain open after emailed threat called 'non-credible'."

And previously, "Don't Let Fear Undermine Freedom?"

Kohl's to Stay Open 24-Hours-a-Day for Christmas Shopping (VIDEO)

This is so wild.

At the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, "Kohl's stores will stay open 24 hours in week before Christmas."

And at CBS This Morning:



ADDED: More at KCRA News 3 Sacramento, "Kohl's to stay open for more than 170 hours before Christmas."

Shkreli, CEO Reviled for Drug Price Gouging, Arrested on Securities Fraud Charges

Heh.

I just love that headline, at Bloomberg, via Memeorandum.

Martin Shkreli's a real asshole.

Don't Let Fear Undermine Freedom?

I don't know. I'd support my kid's school if they received a threat. I'd want my kid home.

In any case, here's the libertarian O.C. Register, "L.A. schools closure: Don't let fear undermine freedom":

Regardless of whether the threats were sent by a wannabe terrorist or a prankster, we can acknowledge and reaffirm that this is the new age of terrorism. But while we understand that the LAUSD did not want to take any chances with student safety, we must balance our fear with a resolute stand to maintain our way of life and the freedoms that make it possible. Once we surrender to fear the ideals that made this nation great, we will have ceded a victory to the terrorists.

RTWT.

Word is the L.A. Unified threat was a shoddy hoax, easily decipherable as fake. But then, an "abundance of caution" isn't a bad thing. Americans expect more attacks.

More here, "After San Bernardino shootings, no one is taking chances with safety":

FULLERTON – The note found taped on a door Wednesday at Sunny Hills High School included no bomb threat, no link to terrorism.

But two weeks after a radicalized couple killed 14 people in San Bernardino, and one day after a threatening email closed Los Angeles public schools, the note was deemed worrisome enough. Principal Allen Whitten, along with a team of teachers, soon began ushering students off campus, and the school was shut for the day.

Fullerton police would not elaborate later on the details of the note, and Sunny Hills was expected to reopen Thursday. But the swift and decisive reaction to what once might have been dismissed as a prank highlighted a hyper-vigilance about public safety that has become routine in Southern California in the wake of the Dec. 2 terrorist attacks and other recent mass shootings.

“This is my children’s lives. What if it wasn’t a hoax?” said Brenda Matto, the mother of two Sunny Hills students. “Am I willing to take that chance?”

In Orange County this week, it has been clear that no one charged with protecting the public’s safety is taking any such chances...

More.

'Teflon Trump' Popularity Climbing After Republican Debate (VIDEO)

Watch, at ABC News "The Republican front-runner mocked Jeb Bush's decline in the polls yet played nice with perceived rival Ted Cruz."

Worker Saves Kitten from Trash Compactor at NorCal Recycling Center (VIDEO)

Wow, what a story.

Who would put a kitten in the garbage?

At LAT, "Worker at recycling center saves kitten on conveyor belt."

And watch, at KCRA News 3 Sacramento, "Kitten saved from trash compactor."

Donald Trump Rally in Mesa, Arizona (VIDEO)

Here's the full clip, "FULL Donald Trump Rally in Mesa, AZ."

And at ABC News 15 Phoenix:

Public's View of Race Relations at Lowest Point in Two Decades

And Obama was supposed to be the great uniter, a post-partisan leader for the ages. Boy, was that a load of crap.

At WSJ, "Americans’ View of Race Relations at Two-Decade Low — WSJ/NBC News Poll":

Americans’ view of race relations is as grim as it has been in 20 years, in the wake of a series of deaths of unarmed black men in confrontations with police officers, the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows.

This month, only 34% of Americans believe race relations in the U.S. are fairly good or very good, down from a high of 77% in January 2009, after the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president.

The figure is the lowest since 34% in October 1995, after the acquittal on murder charges of African-American former football star O.J. Simpson, a traumatic and racially polarizing event.

“This is a very sad chart,” Bill McInturff of Public Opinion Strategies, a Republican polling firm that conducted the poll for The Wall Street Journal and NBC News, said of the figures. “It’s a reminder… what a continued rupture point in our country race is.”

Just Wednesday afternoon, a judge declared a mistrial in the criminal trial of a Baltimore police officer charged in connection with the death of an African American man last April

Over the past two decades, blacks and Hispanics have always had slightly more negative views on race relations in the U.S. than whites. But for about four years following the election of Mr. Obama in November 2008, majorities of the three demographic groups viewed race relations in the U.S. as very or fairly good.

In February 2012, a white volunteer neighborhood watchman named George Zimmerman shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was black and unarmed, at an apartment complex in Florida, after reporting to police he had seen a “suspicious person” and was stepping from his vehicle to investigate. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted of murder in July 2013.

Since then, a series of police killings of unarmed black teenagers or men – in Missouri, New York City, South Carolina, Chicago, Cincinnati and beyond, have sparked outraged protests and have significantly diminished views of race relations among all racial groups, the polls show.

“We know the march is not yet over.  We know the race is not yet won,” Mr. Obama said in March at the 50th anniversary of the marches from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., a seminal moment in the history of the civil rights movement. “We know that reaching that blessed destination where we are judged, all of us, by the content of our character requires admitting as much, facing up to the truth… There’s nothing America can’t handle if we actually look squarely at the problem.”

Jeff Horwitt of Hart Research Associates, which also conducts the WSJ/NBC poll, said Americans’ views on race relations began to decline in polls in 2013, after the Zimmerman/Martin episode and continuing with high profile police shootings of African Americans.

In an unhappy irony, the gloomy view on race relations is a rare point of agreement among blacks, whites and Hispanics who are divided on so many other issues.

In the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 26% of African Americans, 33% of whites and 38% of Hispanics view race relations as very or fairly good.

The issue is not free from partisan divide, however...

Baltimore Protests After Mistrial Declared in Trial of Officer in Death of Freddie Gray (VIDEO)

Totally predictable.

The story's at the Baltimore Sun, via Memeorandum, "Mistrial declared in trial of Officer William Porter in death of Freddie Gray."

Federal Reserve Raises Short-Term Interest Rates

It's not that big of a deal. And it wasn't unexpected. The Fed's been telegraphing this move for some time.

At WSJ, "Quarter-Point Increase Marks First Rise in Almost a Decade."

And, "Fed Raises Rates After Seven Years at Zero, Expects ‘Gradual’ Tightening Path":

The Federal Reserve said it would raise its benchmark interest rate from near zero for the first time since December 2008, and emphasized it will likely lift it gradually thereafter in a test of the economy’s capacity to stand on its own with less support from super-easy monetary policy.

Fed officials said they would move up the federal funds rate by a quarter percentage point on Thursday, to between 0.25% and 0.5%, and would adjust their strategy as they see how the economy performs. At these low rates, they added, policy remains accommodative.

“The [Fed] expects economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant only gradual increases in the fed funds rate,” the Fed said in a statement following its two-day meeting. To hammer home this point, officials added in a second place in their statement that they anticipated “gradual adjustments” in rates.

Fed Chairwoman Janet Yellen won a unanimous vote.

New projections show officials expect their benchmark rate to creep up to 1.375% by the end of 2016, according to the median projection of 17 officials, to 2.375% by the end of 2017 and 3.25% in three years. That implies four quarter-percentage-point interest rate increases next year, four the next and three or four the following.

That is a slower pace than projected by officials in September and much slower compared to earlier series of Fed rate increases. In the 2004-06 period, for example, the Fed raised rates 17 times in succession, an approach Fed officials don’t intend to repeat. In September seven Fed officials believed the fed funds rate could rise to 3% or higher by 2017; now just four do.

When the Fed moves next will depend importantly on how inflation evolves. The Fed’s preferred measure of inflation has run below its 2% objective for more than three years. The central bank focused extra attention on the inflation outlook in its statement, saying it would “carefully monitor” actual and expected progress toward the goal. This point implied the Fed will be reluctant to raise rates again unless it sees inflation actually moving up. For now, officials said they were “reasonably confident” inflation would rise.

Ms. Yellen, in a speech and in testimony earlier this month, said a rate increase represented a vote of confidence in the U.S. economy after the deep 2007-09 recession and a long, often-disappointing recovery. Still, uncertainties abound about how markets and the economy will respond in the months ahead.

Any number of factors might throw the central bank off its plans...

Keep reading.

Republican Elites Don't Want Donald Trump Elected. But Millions of Voters Do

This is what I love about Donald Trump.

From Thomas Edsall, at the New York Times, "Can This Really Be Donald Trump’s Republican Party?":

John Feehery, a prominent Republican lobbyist with roots on the South Side of Chicago, understands that he embodies the Republican predicament.

He warns that while the party’s establishment used to be able to call the shots when it came to the selection of presidential nominees,

We are now living in a post-recession world where fundamental assumptions have changed. In this new reality, Republicans can’t just do the bidding of big donors. Our guys are too in tune with donors and not with the concerns of regular voters. Donald Trump has tapped into a new reality.

Raised in a middle-class Irish-Catholic family, Feehery graduated from Marquette in 1986 and rose quickly in the ranks of the party. His most prominent jobs were as communications director for the former House majority leader Tom DeLay and later for House Speaker Dennis Hastert.

Since giving up work as a staffer in 2005, Feehery, 52, has done well. He is president of the public relations arm of QGA Public Affairs, a major Washington lobbying firm. QGA’s clients include AT&T, United States Steel, State Farm and Zurich Financial Services.

Feehery believes that as Democrats have made gains among well-educated and relatively affluent whites, Republicans “have to rely much more on the white working class than on white upper middle-class voters.”

When I asked Feehery what the party needed to do to get back on track, he paused and said, “I’m not sure it’s fixable.”

Despite what liberals might think, Trump’s success in capitalizing on voter animosity to immigration and to political correctness has shocked many conservative Republicans.

Matthew Continetti, the editor in chief of the Washington Free Beacon, warned in a column on Dec. 11, “The Party Divides: A Trump nomination would be the end of the GOP”: Homegrown terrorism, demographic panic, racial tension, income stagnation, and Trump’s persona may catalyze a political realignment along the lines we have seen before in our politics and see currently in Europe’s. Continetti goes on to ask:

Have conservatives and Republicans thought through what would happen next? What choices we might have to make? Or are we too afraid to acknowledge the possibility that the movement and party to which we belong is no longer our own?

Reihan Salam, executive editor of National Review, told The New Yorker:

Trump is not someone I consider an ideal candidate — he does not represent my line of thinking. But he is proving that certain beliefs the professional political class had about who Republican primary voters are — what they respond to, what they care about — were just incorrect.

For those on the traditional right, one of the most infuriating aspects of Trump’s ascendance is the sense that a man described by Jeb Bush, according to Politico, as “a buffoon” and a “clown,” has wrested control of their party, an institution they have spent five decades turning into the home of principled ideologues.

Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, looks at Donald Trump and does not see a conservative. Together with Ramesh Ponnuru, a senior editor, Lowry wrote in the October 19 essay “Trump Wrongs the Right” that Trump:

basically never says “freedom” or “liberty.” He gives no indication of caring about the Constitution. He talks only sparingly about the federal debt. He has, in short, ignored central and longstanding conservative tenets that seemed to have become only more important in the tea-party era — and he has not only gotten away with it, but thrived.

Although “Trump is not a conservative and does not deserve conservatives’ support, Republicans can nonetheless learn from him,” Lowry and Ponnuru write. He

has exposed and widened the fissures on the American right. If conservatives are to thrive, they must figure out how to respond creatively, sensibly, and honorably to the public impulses he has so carelessly exploited.

Lowry and Ponnuru make a point similar to Feehery’s:

The fact that Trump’s polling did not suffer even a modest drop after his soak-the-rich comments should tell other Republicans that the priorities of the donors they meet at fundraisers are not the same as those of the voters whose support they need.

Trump, the survivor of many financial ups and downs — including four Chapter 11 corporate bankruptcies – has emerged as uniquely positioned to capitalize on the thwarted aspirations and economic vulnerability of much of the electorate...

Keep reading.

And flashback to September, "The Political Establishment's Terrified by Donald Trump's 'Tangible American Nationalism'."

A National Security History Lesson for Marco Rubio

Flashback to April 2013, from Michelle Malkin (a needed reminder to enthusiasm for Marco Rubio, even mine):

Florida GOP Sen. Marco Rubio seems well meaning enough. As second-generation conservative Americans, I know we both share a common passion for this great land of opportunity. But when it comes to comprehending the real agenda of the open-borders zealots he’s allied himself with, Rubio doesn’t have a clue.

And his abject ignorance threatens all of us who cherish American sovereignty and exceptionalism.

On Fox News’ “The Sean Hannity Show” Tuesday night, Rubio defended his Gang of Eight “immigration reform” bill and insisted that we could and should have a system in place that vets foreign tourists and short-term visa holders based on their “national security” profiles.

“In essence, we should be able to analyze (whether) these are individuals coming from a part of the world that keeps feeding into the terrorist network,” Rubio earnestly explained. “(W)e should be very careful about who we allow in and take into account every single measure or every single factor that we think could lead to somebody being more likely possibly a member of a terrorist organization or involved in terror.”

Great idea, Rubio! Newsflash: The concept of a national security entry-exit screening database is at least 10 years old. It’s an idea that was sabotaged by the progressive soft-on-security ideologues with whom Rubio has recklessly partnered.

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration created NSEERS, the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System. Administered and championed by Justice Department constitutional lawyer, immigration enforcement expert and now-Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, NSEERS stopped at least 330 known foreign criminals and three known terrorists who had attempted to come into the country at certain official ports of entry.

NSEERS required higher scrutiny and common-sense registration requirements for individuals from jihad-friendly countries including Afghanistan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria and Yemen, as well as other at-risk countries. The basic components included a more rigorous application process in light of the shoddy visa questionnaires and undetected overstays of the 9/11 hijackers; 30 extra minutes of interviewing at ports of entry; a digital fingerprint check and in-person registration after they arrived in the interior of the country; and verification of departure once they exited.

The targeted registration of certain foreign nationals already in the country (temporary visa holders including students, tourists and businesspeople) resulted in the apprehension of dozens of illegal alien felons. As I reported at the time, these scumbags included:

- a Tunisian convicted of multiple drug-trafficking offenses, in addition to previous violations of immigration law.

- an Iranian who had been convicted three times of assault with a deadly weapon and had been convicted twice of grand theft in addition to immigration violations.

- an Iranian twice convicted of child molestation.

- two suspected al-Qaida operatives who were caught trying to enter the U.S. after their fingerprints matched ones lifted by our military officials from papers found in Afghanistan caves.

But grievance-mongering identity groups and the American Civil Liberties Union could not stand the idea of an effective national security profiling database. For one thing, a successful program would have laid the groundwork for a broader nationwide entry-exit system affecting all foreign visitors. Congress mandated that system six times over the past 17 years. It has yet to be built.

Let me repeat that: We still have no way of tracking who has actually met their visa requirements, who has overstayed their visa, and who has left the country when their visa requires them to do so. Earth to Rubio: This malignant failure is by special-interest design, not by accident or lack of imagination.

Here`s a test: Why doesn`t Rubio form a Gang of One and dare Washington to pass the entry-exit system his new pals all say they support as a stand-alone first. Let`s see them prove they can keep even a single one of their national security/immigration enforcement promises before entertaining 900 more pages of them. Prove it.

I`ve read the bill — and I can see right through it. The Democrats` history speaks for itself. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy, whose illegal alien amnesty spirit infuses the Gang of Eight`s bill, spearheaded legislative attempts to de-fund and destroy NSEERS. His left-wing pals (and a few open-borders Republicans such as heavyweight operative Grover Norquist, who stood literally and figuratively behind Rubio at the amnesty bill unveiling) decried NSEERS and its supporters for fostering “discrimination” and “profiling.”

Never mind that the pilot program was in line with alien registration systems around the world. And never mind that indiscriminate entry and immigration policies are what enabled so many jihadi plots in the first place.

When the Obama administration took over, as Kentucky GOP Sen. Rand Paul pointed out this week, it indefinitely suspended the NSEERS pilot program and has no plans to revive it in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings.

Now the Gang of Eight Republicans want conservatives to jump in bed with these security saboteurs for another Amnesty Now, Enforcement Never plan? Who`s Rubio kidding? Only himself...

Still more.

Ted Cruz Has a Problem

From Leon Wolf, at Red State:

Up until last night, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 100%‘s refusal to attack Donald Trump was defensible. Without question, it was smart politics, as his rise in the polls would attest. But it was also defensible on the merits as a guy who is a solid conservative in good standing, who was just refusing to criticize any of the other Republicans in the race, preferring rather to point out, like a good white knight should, how much better all the Republicans were than Hillary Clinton.

Last night, though, what the country watched was a Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) 100% who called Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) 94% a liar several times to his face, and also on more than one occasion treated him like someone who was ignorant of the issues. After the way Cruz has treated Trump throughout this contest, that’s a major prolbem.

Prior to last night, Cruz had engaged in substantive disagreements with some of the other candidates (including Rubio), but he had always kept it on an above the fray level. Even when Trump came after him personally, he responded with a tweet that was positively fawning towards the Donald in response.

Listen, this is all fine and good, and as I acknowledged, it’s smart politics. It earned Donald Trump a rebuke from Limbaugh and Levin, which probably contributed to the fact that last night, Trump was back praising how great Cruz was on stage. For people who are sympathetic to Trump, they no doubt like to see the way that Cruz refuses to tangle with Trump no matter what.

For the rest of us – including the ones who grudgingly accepted that it was necessary for Cruz to do this for political reasons – last night’s sparring with Rubio was borderline infuriating.

It’s not just that Cruz disagreed with Rubio. It’s that his disagreement was laced with biting sarcasm and personal attacks. For many (if not most) of us who are not already in Camp Trump, Rubio is considered to be an acceptable choice for the nomination (if not our first), and only a fool would not concede that he presents the best chance in the general to defeat Hillary. Watching a guy who’s turned turtle repeatedly to a fake conservative insult comic, only to turn around and show some fighting spirit against a guy who is actually conservative was a little hard to stomach.

I know that many of Cruz’s own supporters consider him to be a slightly better choice between the two good choices of Cruz and Rubio. I think that’s probably where a good portion of the editorial staff here at RedState stands. Watching the two in nuclear war last night was more than a little vaguely unsettling.

It would be different if Cruz had been been in attack mode against all the other candidates equally. Cruz has a legitimate claim to the mantle that all the other candidates – especially Trump –  have been trying to wear since day one and he would have been forgiven (if not expected) to vigorously defend his claim to being the guy who has actually fought against the “establishment,” as opposed to Trump, who has given some speeches in which he insulted people.

But instead, people who realize that Trump represents an existential threat to the credibility and future existence of the conservative movement as a political force have been forced to grind our teeth as Cruz – who really has been a champion for our causes – held fire on this charlatan for months. Now we are treated to the spectacle of Cruz treating Rubio in the same way many of us wish he had treated Trump from day one? It’s frankly galling...

Well, I like Trump, but he's too crazy sometimes. I don't count him out at all for the nomination, but deep inside I really like Marco Rubio, despite his shady record on illegal immigration. So, I agree Ted Cruz is pretty craven in his selective attacks, and I say that notwithstanding my considerable respect for Cruz. I'd be happy to support him in the general as well. Frankly, all of this reminds me how much I hate the GOP primary season. It's the time when lots of folks on the right make a lot of enemies.

In any case, from last night, "Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz Battle Takes Center Stage at #GOP Debate (VIDEO)."

Save $50 on Select Nikon Golf Laser Rangefinders

At Amazon, Shop - Nikon Golf Laser Rangefinders Sale.

Here's Adele's new CD, 25.

And ICYMI, from Michelle Malkin, Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.

Ted Cruz Iowa Backer Steve Deace Apologizes for Tweet Saying Carly Fiorina Went 'Full Vagina' in #GOPDebate

Heh, now that's a pretty wild story.

From Jennifer Jacobs, at the Des Moines Register, "Iowa Cruz backer Steve Deace apologizes for 'full vagina' tweet."

Dana Loesch Unloads on the 'Godless Left'

Not watching her language.

The Bleak Reality Driving Trump's Rise

Well, it's particularly bleak if you're a leftist. Democrats are going to get hammered.

From William Galston, at WSJ, "Workers with low or middle incomes sense a deep and alarming economic shift":

Elections are about more than counting votes. They reveal peoples to themselves. They are democracy’s mirror. And what we see is often disconcerting.

In 2015, for the first time in decades, an angry, disaffected U.S. white working class has found its voice. Xenophobia, nationalism and bigotry are the dominant tones, so it is tempting for the rest of us to turn away in dismay. We should resist that temptation, because underlying the harsh words are real problems that extend well beyond our shores.

Throughout the West, democratic governments are struggling to maintain a postwar order premised on prosperity and economic security. Since the onset of the Great Recession, established center-right and center-left parties have failed to meet that test, opening the door to the far left and the populist right. From Hungary to France to Poland (long regarded as the poster-child for postcommunist democratization), illiberal populism is on the rise.

Western democracies may be on different decks, but we are all in the same boat. In a world of mobile capital and global labor markets, we have not figured out how to maintain jobs and incomes for workers with modest education and skills. In Europe the result has been sustained double-digit unemployment and a generation of young adults on the economic margins. The U.S. has made a different choice: large numbers of low-wage jobs that don’t offer the promise of upward mobility.

Beneath the dry statistics of the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we can see that future emerging. Over the next decade, the service sector will provide 95% of all the new jobs. Manufacturing, which shed more than two million jobs between 2004 and 2014, will shrink by an additional 800,000, to only 7% of the workforce. Of the 15 occupations with the most projected job growth, only four ask for a bachelor’s degree; eight require no formal education credentials; nine offer median annual wages under $30,000.

Few Americans know these statistics, but most of them are living the reality they represent. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the economy has ceased to work for households at and below the middle. A recent report from the Pew Research Center finds that the median income for middle-income households is about where it was in 1997. For lower-income households, median income stands where it did in 1996...

Galston's a Democrat analyst, so naturally he's going to dismiss rising populism as "illiberal." It's not. That's the big lie the media's foisting on the American people, designed to help the Democrat Party. The truth is regular folks have had it with political correctness and politics-as-usual, and the first casualties are those responsible for the mess we're in --- establishment politicians from both parties. Next year's election promises a realignment in American politics, particularly if an outsider wins the White House.

More at the link.

And ICYMI, "Donald Trump's Rise Coincides with Decline of the Middle Class."

Jackie Johnson's Got Your Cold Wednesday Forecast

It's been nippy in the mornings, man!

Teenager Killed Crossing Street After L.A. Unified Closed All Campuses Because of Terror Threat

Now this is just sad.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Teen killed crossing street after L.A. schools closed over threat was 'awesome student'":

A 17-year-old student was struck and killed by a city service truck Tuesday morning as he was crossing a Highland Park street not far from his charter high school.

The crash occurred after the Los Angeles Unified School District closed all campuses because of a threat sent to several school board members.

The county coroner identified the student as Andres Perez of Montebello.

The teen, who an administrator said was en route to Los Angeles International Charter High School on Coleman Avenue, was crossing the street at Avenue 60 and Figueroa Street at about 7:30 a.m. when the L.A. city street services truck struck him, according to Officer Jane Kim of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Tony Torres, the school's director of recruitment, said that "the decision to close the school came very late. So people were still heading to school."...

Muath Qagi, 28, of Fontana was driving in the area Tuesday morning when he saw something in the road -- a black shoe. And a cellphone. The AAA employee said he saw the fire trucks and ambulances. Someone was in the street.

Police had covered the body by the time he parked and stopped to watch.

He said Perez's mother was near the intersection, screaming: "My son! My son!" and laying on the ground, distraught. She tried to get closer to the body but wasn't allowed any closer, Qagi said.

"She was on the ground, just crying, screaming," he said.

A little ways away, sitting on the curb by the front of the parked truck was the driver, holding his face in his hands and crying hysterically.

The truck driver told authorities he did not see the teen, police said, but immediately stopped after the incident and helped Perez, who was pronounced dead by Los Angeles Fire Department officers.

Clifford Moseley, the charter school's executive director, rushed to the scene along with other administrators just after 8 a.m. Moseley said police were just starting to tape off the street when he got there.

The administrator said he knew the identity of the student but did not want to release his name before the coroner confirmed his identity.

According to Moseley, the teen and his mom had taken the Gold Line train and he had just exited while she continued on to work.

Perez had just been accepted to film school at Cal State L.A., Moseley said.

The charter school is not part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said Joseph Riser, the school's director of development, but decided to close Tuesday morning because it was near other L.A. Unified schools...

And to think: the bomb threat ended up being a hoax.

You just never know when you're going to go.

More at the link.

Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz Battle Takes Center Stage at #GOP Debate (VIDEO)

I like Marco Rubio. I think he won the debate, but Ted Cruz came in looking very sharp.

See the Wall Street Journal, "Terror Takes Center Stage at Republican Presidential Debate."

Praise for San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan After #SanBernardino Attack

Amazingly professional. The kudos are quite justified.

At the Los Angeles Times, "San Bernardino police chief kept his cool after the massacre":

As police officers kicked open doors in the Inland Regional Center in the search for the armed assailants who had just massacred 14 county employees, San Bernardino Police Chief Jarrod Burguan was outside scanning the terrain for a safe place to coordinate the sweeping emergency response.

He found it a block away — an abandoned house with a dirt yard and boarded-up windows, one of many pocking the streets of this hollowed-out city. Within minutes, police, fire and other emergency agency commanders huddled inside, out of gunshot range.

It was a no-nonsense move by a city police chief who has been praised for his cool-headed response in the chaotic aftermath of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11.

When standing before television news cameras, Burguan's cleanly shaven crown and thick, linebacker frame punctuated his blunt, straightforward accounts of the manhunt and the rapidly developing investigation.

"He was quite effective in giving out whatever information he could, calming the public and discouraging any other lunatics from committing acts of backlash," said Brian Levin, a former New York City police officer and terrorism expert teaching at Cal State San Bernardino. "The response, of all the agencies, was a national model for first responder actions regarding terrorist attacks."

Burguan knew that the nation was watching, and that San Bernardino was on edge. He held three news conferences on the day of the attack. He didn't dodge questions but also knew some leads could not be made public.

"I believe in transparency," Burguan, 45, said. "My philosophy has always been that if I can tell you, I'm going to tell you. And if I can't tell you, I'm going to say I can't tell you."

Burguan also took to Twitter to provide instant updates and knock down rumors: "Suspects are down, one officer wounded. Details still unfolding," he tweeted shortly after the assailants were killed in a gun battle with police.

On Friday, he was at home and sending out a series of tweets explaining why a UPS station was evacuated after a delivery driver spotted a package addressed to one of the killers. "Item was safe, posed no threat." Moments later, he watched, amazed, as his tweet popped up on a television news broadcast.

"The power of social media," Burguan said.

Burguan, named chief two years ago after two decades as a San Bernardino officer, is uneasy with the attention, sensitive to the lives lost and victims maimed in the terrorist attack and the long list of agencies, including the FBI and San Bernardino Sheriff's Department, involved in the case.

His pride, however, is difficult to hide.

"We knew the response was good, we knew people were very, very happy that we hunted down these guys and caught them very quickly," he said. "There's no doubt that these guys were going to do something else. They had an arsenal on them. They were going to continue fighting."

Burguan, a former football star at Bloomington Christian High School, just outside of Rialto, was 21 when he joined the San Bernardino Police Department in 1992. It was near the height of the crack epidemic, when gunfire echoed around the city almost every night and the homicide rate was double what it is today. He worked the night shift and went to night school, eventually earning undergraduate and master's degrees at the University of Redlands.

San Bernardino was a different city then. Lumbering C-141 Starlifters still flew out of Norton Air Force Base. There were two malls in town and a hopping restaurant row. Burguan, living on a traffic officer's salary, failed to qualify for a loan when he tried to buy a home up near Cal State San Bernardino.

"I watched the decline. I've watched businesses leave, and I saw Norton close," he said.

This once-proud blue-collar city has been hamstrung by years of bankruptcy, poverty and noxious politics. Since 2009, the police force has been cut by 100 officers. The anti-gang and other crime prevention programs "are a shell" of what they used to be, he said. There is a proposal to beef up the agency over the next five years, but it is before a federal bankruptcy judge awaiting approval.

"We're largely a reactive agency. I hate to say it, but that's the truth of the matter," Burguan said. "Our response times are not good. And the irony is, people are praising us for our response to this incident."

More.

I watched the press conferences. He's totally no nonsense.

Also, at the letters to the editor, "Readers React San Bernardino shooting: In praise of the police response."

Paris Climate of Conformity

From the editors, at the Wall Street Journal:

The moment to be wariest of political enthusiasms is precisely when elite opinion is all lined up on one side. So it is with the weekend agreement out of Paris on climate policy, which President Obama declared with his familiar modesty “can be a turning point for the world” and is “the best chance we have to save the one planet that we’ve got.”

Forgive us for looking through the legacy smoke, but if climate change really does imperil the Earth, and we doubt it does, nothing coming out of a gaggle of governments and the United Nations will save it. What will help is human invention and the entrepreneurial spirit. To the extent the Paris accord increases political control over human and natural resources, it will make the world poorer and technological progress less likely.

***
The climate confab’s self-described political success is rooted in a conceit and a bribe. The conceit is that the terms of the agreement will have some tangible impact on global temperatures. The big breakthrough is supposed to be that for the first time developing and developed countries have committed to reducing carbon emissions. But the commitments by these nations are voluntary with no enforcement mechanism.

China (the No. 1 CO2 emitter) and India (No. 3 after the U.S.) have made commitments that they may or may not honor, depending on whether they can meet them without interfering with economic growth. If the choice is lifting millions out of poverty or reducing CO2, poverty reduction will prevail—as it should.

No less than the supposedly true global-warming believers of Europe are also happy about voluntary commitments because Paris liberates them from the binding targets of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. Germany’s high energy costs in particular have been driving companies offshore thanks to its renewable energy costs and mandates.

But no one is happier than President Obama, who would have to submit a binding treaty to the Senate for ratification. As we have learned from the Iran nuclear deal and so much else, Mr. Obama is not into winning democratic consent for his policy dreams. Mr. Obama plans to use Paris as a stick to beat Republicans even as he ducks a vote in Congress. We doubt the Paris climate deal would get 40 Senate votes once Democrats in Ohio, Colorado or North Dakota were forced to debate the costs.

Mr. Obama’s U.S. CO2-reduction targets are fanciful in any case, short of a major technological breakthrough. The President promises that the U.S. will reduce carbon emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025, but the specific means he has proposed to get there would only yield about half that. And that’s assuming none of Mr. Obama’s unilateral regulatory policies are declared illegal by U.S. courts.

As for the bribe, rich countries in Paris bought the cooperation of the developing world by promising to send $100 billion a year in climate aid. So the governments of the West are now going to dun their taxpayers to transfer money to the clean and green governments run by the likes of Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. We can’t wait to see New York’s Chuck Schumer make the case on the Senate floor for American aid to China so it can become more energy efficient and economically competitive...

Lol.

The editors better not talk too much sense. They might get attacked as racist, heh.

Still more.

Left and Right Differences: How Do You Judge America?

An awesome clip, from Dennis Prager:

Poll: Heightened Fear of Terrorism is Rippling Through the Electorate

Yes, and the Democrats want to mock people for it.

At the Wall Street Journal, "Poll Finds National Security Now a Top Concern":

WSJ/NBC poll finds that after terror attacks, national security is now a top concern. https://t.co/f1uyRwCFEl

— Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) December 15, 2015

Fear of terrorism surges after attacks in Paris and California, WSJ/NBC poll finds, and likely will impact 2016 election.

Heightened fear of terrorism is rippling through the electorate, thrusting national-security issues to the center of the 2016 presidential campaign, according to a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on the eve of Republicans’ latest presidential debate.

Some 40% of those polled say national security and terrorism should be the government’s top priority, and more than 60% put it in the top two, up from just 39% eight months ago.

More than one quarter worry they or their family will be a victim of a terror attack. The most prominent news event of 2015, in the public’s mind, was the terrorist attack in Paris.

“For most of 2015, our country’s mood and thus the presidential election was defined by anger and the unevenness of the economic recovery, and now that has abruptly changed to fear,” said Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster who conducted the survey with Republican Bill McInturff.

That undercurrent of anxiety, if it lasts, has the potential to reshape the 2016 policy landscape, shifting attention to national-security issues that traditionally are Republicans’ strong suit and away from the economic issues that Democrats prefer to spotlight.

But for now, the increased concern hasn’t seemed to change the election’s fundamentals: The new poll, as ones before the recent spate of attacks, found voters evenly split on which party they want to control the White House. Still, Mr. McInturff said, candidates are now facing “a very different campaign than the one we thought we were going to be running.”

Republican presidential candidates will be trying to adapt to this environment when they meet on the debate stage Tuesday night in Las Vegas. In the run-up to the debate, candidates have increasingly focused on foreign policy as they try to promote their own leadership skills and discredit their rivals.

Businessman Donald Trump has been betting that his trademark swagger will be a selling point at a time when voters are looking for someone to stand up to terrorists. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is talking tough about defeating Islamic State, but he has stopped short of calling for U.S. ground troops in Iraq and Syria. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida has argued that Mr. Cruz has taken votes in the Senate that weakened U.S. intelligence gathering.

Overall, the mood of the electorate has turned bleaker in the weeks since the latest Journal/NBC News survey in late October—a period that included the terrorist attacks in Paris, the shootings by a lone gunman at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, and the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., by a pair of Islamic militants...

Still more.

Democrats Mock Americans' Terror Fears

It's come to this, despite overwhelming --- and bipartisan --- polling data that show a genuine anxiety about U.S. national security.

From Noah Rothman, at Commentary, "Dems Turn to Mocking Terror Fears":

In just over a year, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has graduated from taking and holding territory inside its nascent “caliphate” to exporting terrorism around the globe. From Sydney to Ottawa, from Copenhagen to San Bernardino, this terrorist organization is directing or inspiring jihadists to conduct heinous acts of mass-casualty terrorism. Since October of last year, three such attacks have taken place in the United States; one of those being the worst act of radical Islamic terror in America since September 11, 2001. Subsequently, Americans now rate terrorism as their number one concern. They feel unsafe and insecure. They are justifiably afraid of the threat that might be just around the next corner. Americans are lunging for the shotgun and barricading the door. And what do they get from their leaders? Reassurance? Understanding? Resolve to defeat terrorism abroad before it comes home? No, they get a lecture on their latent hostility toward the Islamic faith and practicing Muslims. Stranger still, now that it has become inescapably clear that the fear of terrorism is broad-based, the left’s mission to convince itself that these concerns are isolated to the fever swamps has become even more urgent.

For Democrats, particularly those who must defend President Barack Obama’s record on foreign affairs and terrorism, there is no good news. According to the latest New York Times/CBS News survey, seven in 10 Americans now describe ISIS as a major threat to national security. Another 44 percent of respondents believe another attack inside the United States at some point in the next few months is “very” likely, greater than at any point since October 2001. 57 percent of those polled disapprove of Obama’s handling of the issue of terrorism. According to Gallup, 67 percent believe future “acts of terrorism” inside the United States are either somewhat or very likely. Gallup further revealed that confidence in the government’s ability to keep its citizens safe is lower than it has ever been since the 9/11 attacks.

Simultaneously, a majority of Americans fear they will be the next victims of that forthcoming attack for the first time since 2001. Perhaps most ominously from a Democratic perspective, satisfaction in the direction the country is headed has not been this depressed since November of 2014 when Republicans rode a wave of voter dissatisfaction to pick up control of the U.S. Senate.

Regarding the potential political ramifications of this negative development for the president, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest was asked today about Gallup’s numbers. Earnest’s tart reply: “Gallup predicted Mitt Romney would be president.”

There is no worthy response to this non sequitur; it was not designed to elicit one. The strategy here is clear, and it is one that this president has used to great effect in the past: Project to like minds in media that concerns over terrorism are a preoccupation of the intellectually sequestered right. To lend any credence to that notion would be to align yourself with that brutish, unthinking element in flyover country, and you wouldn’t want to be thought of by your peers in that way, would you?

Even Democrats are finding themselves the target of this rather elementary form of manipulation...

More.

U.S. Counterterrorism Officials Plan to Beef Up Social-Media Scrutiny

Folks were really fired up about this on Twitter this afternoon.

At ABC News, via Memeorandum, "Secret Policy Kept Social Media Out of Visa Vetting."

And here's WSJ, "The Department of Homeland Security is working on a plan to scrutinize social-media posts as part of its visa application process":

WASHINGTON—The Department of Homeland Security is working on a plan to expand scrutiny of social-media posts as part of its visa application process before certain people are allowed to enter the country, a person familiar with the matter said.

The move is part of a new focus on the use of social-networking sites following the shooting rampage in San Bernardino, Calif.

Currently, DHS looks at postings only intermittently, as part of three pilot programs that began in earnest earlier this year. It is unclear how quickly a new process could be implemented, and other details couldn’t be learned.

Investigators are looking for clues in Facebook posts, computer records and elsewhere that may have hinted at the intentions of the Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the married couple suspected of killing 14 people at a holiday gathering Dec. 2 before dying in a shootout with police.

Ms. Malik lived most of her life in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia but moved to the U.S. in 2014 on a K-1 visa given to those engaged to Americans. The day of the shooting, she pledged allegiance to the leader of Islamic State, law-enforcement officials have said, on a Facebook account registered to a pseudonym. Counterterror officials are looking to see if she made similar postings in the past.

Islamic State and other terror groups have used social media to communicate with one another and seek converts. Intelligence, law-enforcement and counterterrorism officials have spent years trying to unearth clues about attacks in such postings.

The House of Representatives on Tuesday will vote on a bill to require the Obama administration to come up with a comprehensive strategy to combat terrorists’ use of social media. Under the measure, the White House would have to inform Congress about the social-media training it provides law-enforcement officials.

That bill is the latest to respond to public anxiety following the San Bernardino killings, which investigators believe could have been inspired by Islamic State propaganda fueled by social media. House Republicans have worked to advance several bills since the rampage that aim to show they are taking concrete steps to address Americans’ security concerns.

Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said the DHS move is overdue. “It is time this administration stopped worrying about the privacy of foreigners more than the security of Americans,” he said.

Separately, congressional negotiators were looking at including in a fiscal 2016 spending bill a measure to impose new curbs on travel by citizens who live in one of the 38 countries that enjoy expedited travel clearance to the U.S...

More.

Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo: 'The Age of Anger' (VIDEO)

Watch, from earlier this evening, at Fox News, "The Age of Anger."

Graffiti at California Mosques Investigated as Hate Crimes (VIDEO)

This is wrong.

But if leftists got as outraged by Islamic jihad as they do by so called "hate crimes" against Muslims, we'd probably have defeated ISIS by now.

At the New York Times, "California Police and F.B.I. Open Hate Crimes Inquiry Into Vandalism of Mosques."

Tarek and Christina El Moussa, Stars of HGTV's 'Flip or Flop', Cancel Events in Portland After Protests by Far-Left Rent Control Alliance

Big mistake.

If there was ever a cool inspiration for entrepreneur ship and business hustle, it's Tarek and Christina. They're really cool.

At Instapundit, "BLUE STATE IDIOCY: Stars of HGTV house-flipping series cancel events in Portland after angry residents claim seminars will only worsen the city’s ‘rental crisis’."

Kelly Brook Leaves Little to the Imagination in Very Sexy 2016 Calendar

She's still got it.

At London's Daily Mail, "Kelly Brook shows off her ample cleavage and pert posterior as she strips naked for very sexy calendar shoot."

From Decadence to Destruction in California

Check out Victor Davis Hanson's new collection of essays, The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction.

Plus, Hanson's classic on illegal immigration, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.

Lily Aldridge, Candice Swanepoel Show Off Bikini Bodies at St. Bart's

At London's Daily Mail, "Lily Aldridge shows off her beautifully bronzed body in a little pink bikini for Victoria's Secret photo shoot in St. Bart's," and "All things bright AND beautiful! Bikini-clad Lily Aldridge leads the hard-to-miss Victoria's Secret Angels in neon as they show off their cheekier sides in St Barths."

Plus, "Looking heavenly! Candice Swanepoel shows off her bikini body as she poses in St Bart's for Victoria's Secret."

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More, Shop Amazon Fashion - 12 Days of Timex.

BONUS: Michelle Malkin's new book, Sold Out: How High-Tech Billionaires & Bipartisan Beltway Crapweasels Are Screwing America's Best & Brightest Workers.

'Home Grown Terror' is America's New Nightmare

A great piece, from John Schindler, at the Observer, "The Intelligence Lessons of San Bernardino":

Americans were shocked by the San Bernardino crime, and no wonder: Farook, a native-born citizen, coldly gunned down co-workers who were assembled at an office party, with help from his immigrant wife, both of whom had left their six month-old baby at home when they left for their suicide mission. While female participation in jihadist terrorism is nothing new, this was an unusually brazen and horrifying attack, particularly since given the size of their arsenal – with thousands of rounds of ammunition and multiple homemade bombs – Farook and Malik intended to kill many more people than they did.

Making matters worse, most Americans felt reasonably safe from the threat of domestic jihadism in recent years, despite repeated warnings about the rise of the Islamic State and terrible attacks like the recent mass-casualty atrocity in Paris. Although the November 2009 Fort Hood massacre, perpetrated by Army Major Nidal Hasan, killed thirteen, it happened within the confines of a military base and did not involve the general public.

Two months before that, authorities rolled up a major jihadist cell in the New York City area that was plotting complex attacks that would have rivalled the 2005 London 7/7 atrocity in scope and lethality. That plot was backed by Al-Qa’ida Central in Pakistan and might have changed the debate on terrorism in the United States, but it was happily halted before execution – “left of boom” as counterterrorism professionals put it.

In general, American domestic counterterrorism since 9/11 has been astonishingly effective. The combination of National Security Agency signals intelligence (SIGINT) providing lead information for Federal Bureau Investigation operations has disrupted dozens of terror plots over the last fourteen years. Something like eighty percent of disrupted terrorism cases in the United States begin with a SIGINT “hit” by NSA. Before San Bernardino, the NSA-FBI combination had a near-perfect track record of cutting short major jihadist attacks on Americans at home since late 2001.

Indeed, the marriage of NSA SIGINT with old-fashioned FBI gumshoe work has been so effective that civil libertarians and anti-intelligence activists have complained that it has worked too well, with the FBI using agents provocateurs to egg homegrown radicals onto the path violence – and then rapid arrest. While the issue of the limits of provocation in counterterrorism is a legitimate one that needs discussion, it’s evident that many of those castigating the FBI and NSA for being too effective are also the first to criticize them when those agencies miss a terrorist.

However, the effectiveness of the NSA-FBI counterterrorism team has begun to erode in the last couple years, thanks in no small part to the work of such journalists-cum-activists. Since June 2013, when the former NSA IT contactor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow, leaking the biggest trove of classified material in all intelligence history, American SIGINT has been subjected to unprecedented criticism and scrutiny.

The uproar that followed the Snowden leak and defection has put NSA in an unflatteringly light, which has taken a serious toll on Agency morale. The recent Congressionally-mandated halt on NSA holding phone call information, so-called metadata, has harmed counterterrorism, though to what extent remains unclear. FBI Director James Comey has stated, “We don’t know yet” whether the curtailing of NSA’s metadata program, which went into effect just days before the San Bernardino attack, would have made a difference. Anti-intelligence activists have predictably said it’s irrelevant, while some on the Right have made opposite claims. The latter have overstated their case but are closer to the truth.

While the importance of metadata to American counterterrorism will continue to be a hot-button topic, the disastrous effect of the Snowden affair and its political aftershocks on our intelligence agencies is not up for debate. Neither is the fact, as attested to by several Western intelligence chiefs, that Snowden’s leaks have made terrorists more careful in their communications, and therefore more difficult to intercept. Just as bad, several top secret NSA programs, beyond metadata, that assisted counterterrorism have been downscaled since 2013 out of fears they may “look bad” if leaked.

“Before Snowden we had a definite bias for action,” explained a senior NSA official with extensive experience in counterterrorism. “But now we all wonder how the White House will react if this winds up in the newspapers.” “It’s all legal,” the official added, “the lawyers have approved, and boy do we have lots of lawyers – but will Obama throw us under the bus again?”

That concern is widespread in American counterterrorism circles, where the Obama administration’s worries about appearing “Islamophobic” are well known. This White House early on warned intelligence personnel about using the term “Islamic terrorism” even in classified reports that would never be released to the public. “Since 2009 we’ve opened investigations of groups we knew to be harmless,” explained a Pentagon counterterrorism official, “they weren’t Muslims, and we needed some ‘balance’ in case the White House asked if we were ‘profiling’ potential terrorists.” One of the worst side-effects of the Snowden affair is the entirely false image it created of NSA as an all-listening and all-seeing agency that spies on everyone, everywhere without respite. The truth is more mundane – or worrisome, depending on your viewpoint. While 21st century SIGINT, thanks to advanced filtering technologies, can collect and process unprecedented amounts of information for analysis – phone calls, text messages, emails, online chats, and whatnot – that has in no way kept up with the global IT revolution. There is much more information out there that might be of interest to counterterrorism officials but which will never be examined closely by any NSA analyst, much less passed to the FBI for action

Investigation has revealed that Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik were radicalized long before they embarked on their mass murder spree. Both had engaged in online radicalism for years and it’s evident that a devotion to violent hatred brought the couple together; speculation in counterintelligence circles that Malik was actually the prime mover of the couple’s jihadism – and may even have been a provocateur – are plausible but not yet substantiated.

What is known, however, is that Malik, a Pakistani national who had lived for years in Saudi Arabia, had written extensively on her public social media accounts about her ardent desire to wage jihad and seek martyrdom in the name of radical Islam. Americans who are accustomed to having their social media accounts examined whenever they apply for a job have questions here, and rightly so...

Still more.

Wow! Donald Trump Surges to 41 Percent in New Monmouth University Poll

Ah, I guess those Muslim comments didn't hurt trump too much at all.

Here's the the latest Monmouth University poll:

LATEST - National poll: Trump at 41% Cruz 14%, Rubio 10%, Carson 9% https://t.co/hwCSwPBy1I

— MonmouthPoll (@MonmouthPoll) December 14, 2015

And at Politico, "Trump hits a new high in national poll: The billionaire businessman surges to 41 percent after releasing proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the U.S.":

Donald Trump just got a little more vault in his ceiling. Nationwide, the polling-obsessed Manhattan multi-billionaire and leading Republican presidential candidate broke into the 40s on Monday.

According to the results of the latest Monmouth University poll surveying voters identifying as Republican or independents leaning toward the GOP, Trump earned 41 percent, nearly tripling the support of his closest rival, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who took 14 percent.

The poll underscores Trump's success at keeping voters fixated on his unprecedented presidential campaign. The latest national survey was taken after Trump landed another whopper, proposing in an emailed statement last Monday to temporarily ban all Muslims from entering the U.S. The statement gave Trump another boost of media attention, and some speculated it was designed to shift the conversation away from a Monmouth poll from Iowa released earlier that day that showed Cruz with a 5-point edge in the state.

Trump was still smarting from that poll last Friday, trashing it during a campaign rally in Des Moines, Iowa, though he may change his tune after this latest result.

“What the hell is Monmouth?” Trump asked at the rally, adding, “I only like polls that treat me well.”

Monmouth's survey also held good news for Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who moved up to 10 percent support and third place, and bad news for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who plummeted from 18 percent in October to 9 percent in this latest survey. Other candidates, including former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, polled within the margin of error, with 6 percent remaining undecided.

Among various demographic groups, Trump picked up 13 points among those with a high-school education, earning 54 percent support with that group, and 11 points with those identifying with the tea party, earning 52 percent with that group. Cruz, however, picked up 15 points among tea party supporters, receiving 29 percent with that group. Trump's standing among women has fallen slightly, down four points since October (41 percent to 37 percent this time), though he has gained three points with men (41 percent to 44 percent). Among those with a college degree, support for Trump fell by 10 points, from 41 percent to 31 percent.

In terms of favorability, Cruz led the way with a net positive 40 points (58 percent favorable to 18 percent unfavorable), followed by Rubio at +37 points (55 percent to 18 percent) and Trump at +32 points (61 percent to 29 percent). For Trump, the latest results mark an improvement over the last two months in the Monmouth poll. In October, his favorability sat at 52 percent to 33 percent.

Regardless of whether they supported Trump, 30 percent said they would be enthusiastic if he were the nominee, compared to 37 percent who said they would be satisfied. Just 12 percent said they would be dissatisfied, while 16 percent said they would be upset...

More.

WATCH: Video Shows Suspect in Lynwood Shooting Brandishing Gun

ABC News reports, "Deadly LA Shooting Raises Questions: Was Suspect Unarmed?"

And at the Los Angeles Times, "Fuller narrative emerges after officials release new video of fatal Lynwood shooting."

Plus, watch at CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Donald Trump Surges to New High in Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll

At WSJ, "Trump, Cruz Lead GOP Field; Support for Carson Plummets, Poll Finds":

Donald Trump has risen to a new high and Ben Carson’s support has plummeted among Republican primary voters after a tumultuous month of international and domestic terrorism, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds.

Mr. Trump leads the Republican field with 27% support, taking over the top position from Mr. Carson, who led in a late October Journal/NBC News survey.

Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas has vaulted into second place, amid signs that he has picked up former Carson supporters. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida placed third in the survey, but the poll also carried evidence that he stands to benefit most when the big field of GOP candidates is winnowed.

Mr. Carson, the retired neurosurgeon, dropped to fourth place, with 11% support, down from 29% in late October. As terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., heightened attention to national security in the past month, Mr. Carson has stumbled on foreign policy questions, and critics have raised doubts about his mastery of international affairs.

The shifts are a reminder that the large GOP presidential candidate field is still sorting itself out, less than two months before the nominating process begins with the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses.

Mr. Trump’s 27% support was his highest showing in Journal/NBC News polling this year and compares to 23% support in the prior survey, in late October. The results continue to defy the expectations of many political analysts and Trump rivals that the celebrity businessman’s candidacy would fade, or at least hit a ceiling, when its novelty wore off.

The poll suggests a new dynamic has arisen in the race, with Mr. Cruz becoming a formidable force. His spike in support—to 22% of GOP primary voters, up from 10% in late October—catapulted him to the poll’s No. 2 spot for the first time since the 2016 campaign began.

Mr. Cruz has been assiduously courting evangelical voters who had also been drawn to Mr. Carson, and the poll suggests his efforts are reaping benefits. Support for Mr. Cruz among “values voters”—those who most strongly support traditional marriage and oppose abortion rights—increased to 27%, from 14% in October. Meanwhile for Mr. Carson, support among those voters dropped to 14%, from 34% in October.

Similarly, Mr. Cruz’s support among voters who call themselves “very conservative’’ rose by 23 percentage points, while Mr. Carson’s support among that group dropped by 23 points.

“This is a good poll for Ted Cruz,’’ said Fred Yang, a Democratic pollster who helped conduct the survey with GOP pollster Bill McInturff. “He’s been doing things for the last 3-4-5 months that are now paying” off.

The poll offered little ground for cheer for former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, long ago considered the party’s front-runner, who like the rest of the field remained stuck with single-digit support.

Mr. Bush was the first choice of 7% of GOP primary voters; former Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina was first choice of 5%; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie drew 3% each; and Ohio Gov. John Kasich and Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky each drew 2%.

The poll also tested what would happen if the field narrowed to only five candidates: Messrs. Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Carson and Bush...

More.

Attendance Skyrockets at Del Mar Gun Show (VIDEO)

At ABC News 10 San Diego:



Reminds me of a couple of years ago at the O.C. Fairgrounds, "Long Lines, Ammunition Shortages at Orange County Gun Show."

Smokin' Instagram Star Steph Claire Smith Wins Contract for Australian Lingerie Brand Intimo

She's really hot.

At London's Daily Mail, "An Insta-star on the rise! Social media darling Steph Claire Smith, 21, lands new modelling gig with lingerie brand Intimo."