The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars

The new volume's out from David Horowitz, The Black Book of the American Left — Volume 5: Culture Wars.

Turkey’s Warning Shot

At the Wall Street Journal, "Putin may be testing NATO’s resolve, and the Turks need U.S. support":

A pair of Turkish F-16s shot down a Russian Su-24 over Turkish airspace on Tuesday, and Russian President Vladimir Putin called it a “stab in the back” that would have “serious consequences for Russian-Turkish relations.” This is what we mean when we say the last months of the Obama Administration will be the most dangerous since the end of the Cold War.

Turkish military officials said the Russian pilots ignored 10 warnings over five minutes to return to Syrian airspace before their plane was shot down. That rings true given Ankara’s warnings against previous intrusions. Russian planes twice violated Turkish airspace in early October, incidents NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said did “not look like an accident.” Around the same time a Russian MiG-29 locked its radar on a pair of Turkish jets patrolling the Syrian border for more than four minutes. Next a Russian-made drone entered Turkish airspace and was shot down. Moscow denies it was one of theirs.

More recently, the Turks summoned Russia’s ambassador to Ankara after an attack on ethnic Turkmen in Syria. “It was stressed that the Russian side’s actions were not a fight against terror, but they bombed civilian Turkmen villages and this could lead to serious consequences,” according to Turkey’s foreign ministry. This fits the Russian pattern of bombing enemies of the Assad regime except Islamic State—a useful reminder that Mr. Putin is not a fit partner in the coalition to fight ISIS.

The larger question is why Mr. Putin would risk provoking Turkey, with its powerful military and NATO ties. Part of the answer may lie with Moscow’s alliance with Iran and its Shiite Muslim proxies in Damascus and Beirut, who see themselves as competing with the Sunni Turks for regional dominance.

Mr. Putin may also be testing NATO cohesion. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is an impulsive leader who has alienated his allies with his autocratic instincts and Islamist sympathies. If Russia continues to prick Turkey and NATO fails to support Ankara, it will expose the hollowness of NATO’s Article 5 collective-defense obligations.

The Obama Administration failed to invoke Article 5 on France’s behalf after the Paris massacre. And on Tuesday President Obama said that while Turkey had the right to defend its airspace, his priority is to “discourage any escalation.” But what if Mr. Putin retaliates against Turkey? Mr. Obama should have said that the U.S. will stand with its NATO partner...

Good luck with that.

More at that top link.

Radical Parents, Despotic Children

From Bret Stephens, at WSJ, "Sooner or later, Orwellian methods on campus will lead to Orwellian outcomes":

“Liberal Parents, Radical Children,” was the title of a 1975 book by Midge Decter, which tried to make sense of how a generation of munificent parents raised that self-obsessed, politically spastic generation known as the Baby Boomers. The book was a case study in the tragedy of good intentions.

“We proclaimed you sound when you were foolish in order to avoid taking part in the long, slow, slogging effort that is the only route to genuine maturity of mind and feeling,” Miss Decter told the Boomers. “While you were the most indulged generation, you were also in many ways the most abandoned to your own meager devices.”

Meager devices came to mind last week while reading the “Statement of Solidarity” from Nancy Cantor, chancellor of the Newark, N.J., campus of Rutgers University. Solidarity with whom, or what? Well, Paris, but that was just for starters. Ms. Cantor also made a point of mentioning lives lost to terrorist attacks this year in Beirut and Kenya, and children “lost at sea seeking freedom,” and “lives lost that so mattered in Ferguson and Baltimore and on,” and “students facing racial harassment on campuses from Missouri to Ithaca and on.”

And this: “We see also around us the scarring consequences of decade after decade, group after group, strangers to each other, enemies even within the same land, separated by an architecture of segregation, an economy of inequality, a politics of polarization, a dogma of intolerance.”

It is an astonishing statement. Ms. Cantor, 63, is a well-known figure in academia, a former president of Syracuse University who won liberal acclaim by easing admissions standards in the name of diversity and inclusiveness. At publicly funded Rutgers she earns a base salary of $385,000, a point worth mentioning given her stated concern for inequality. The Newark Star-Ledger praised her as a “perfect fit” for the school on account of her “exceptional involvement in minority recruitment and town-gown relations.”

Yet this Stanford Ph.D. (in psychology) appears to be incapable of constructing a grammatical sentence or writing intelligible prose. All the rhetorical goo about the “architecture of segregation” and “dogma of intolerance” rests on deep layers of mental flab. She is a perfect representative of American academia. And American academia is, by and large, idiotic.

That’s why I’m not altogether sorry to see the wave of protests, demands, sit-ins and cave-ins sweeping university campuses from Dartmouth to Princeton to Brandeis to Yale. What destroys also exposes; what they are trashing was already trashy. It’s time for the rest of the country sit up and take notice...

Well, the rest of the country that includes grownups might sit up and take notice. Remember, there aren't too many grownups on college campuses these days. Indeed, the conservative students at Claremont McKenna showed a lot more maturity than the school's administration.

But keep reading, in any case.

Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points Memo: Is World War Getting Closer? (VIDEO)

Last week a student asked me, in my American government class, whether the Paris attacks would bring on World War III. I gave the suggestion kind of a chuckle, and told her no, we'd be seeing a major escalation in the terror war, but we weren't yet quite near a world war.

Then yesterday morning as I was getting ready for classes, around 7:00am, I saw the news of the Russian fighter jet shot down by Turkey, and I thought, "Man, shit just got real over there." In class I spoke again to the student and suggested that if there was going to be World War III, it's crises like this, seemingly small at first, that have the potential to escalate into major conflict.

In any case, imagine my chagrin last night when Bill O'Reilly led off with the possibility of a world war. What a trip:

Turkey Shoots Down Russian Fighter Jet (VIDEO)

There's a huge live blog at the Telegraph UK, "Putin's fury after Turkey shoots down Russian jet, killing at least one pilot before rebels destroy rescue helicopter • President warns of 'serious consequences' but Obama says Turks have right to defend airspace":

There are dark corners of the Internet where Russian nationalists will argue the toss with Americans about whether the Su-24 is better than an F-16. I guess that argument was resolved today.

Also at WSJ, "Skies Darken for Accord on Syria With Turkish Downing of Russian Fighter":

Fallout of fatal incident threatens to destroy chances for grand coalition of international powers to change course of chaos in war-torn country.

When Turkey destroyed a Russian warplane it had warned away from its airspace, the fallout threatened to destroy chances for any grand coalition of international powers to change the course of chaos in Syria, at least for now.

The fatal incident in the skies Tuesday immediately escalated, and complicated, what had already been an intensely difficult enterprise—trying to bridge divides and corral longtime adversaries into a pact to combat their one shared enemy, Islamic State.

The Turkish-Russian aerial altercation quickly hardened the positions held by all sides. While the U.S. and its ally France dug in on their demands on resolving the Syrian conflict, Russia and its ally Iran adhered to theirs.

Aggravating the conflict was a war of words, with Mr. Putin leveling charges that Turkey, an ally of the U.S. and France, finances terrorism—accusations widely aired on Russian television in a daylong propaganda blitz.

Amid the strife, President Barack Obama and French President François Hollande presented a united front, speaking at the White House Tuesday after their first meeting since the Paris attacks. They outlined changes they said Russia must make to its military strategy in Syria and to its position on a political resolution to the conflict before the U.S.-led coalition, which includes Turkey, would cooperate with Moscow in the fight against Islamic State.

The demands made by the U.S. and French leaders—including the key issue of the future of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whom Russia supports—now have set the stage for a tense meeting between Mr. Hollande and Russian President Vladimir Putin scheduled for Thursday.

The downing of the Russian jet is likely to redraw the lines of engagement in Syria and affect Russians’ perceptions of their country’s intervention, analysts say.

“Hollande’s mission was to reach some kind of coordination with Russia,” said Alexei Makarkin, deputy director at Center for Political Technologies. “Now it is very, very doubtful that it is even possible to coordinate actions. The maximum that we can talk about now is avoiding shooting each other.”

Mr. Hollande’s visit to Moscow this week was supposed to be a crowning moment for Mr. Putin’s plan to bring more countries into his antiterrorism tent, as well as any potential rapprochement with the West after isolation over his intervention in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.

But Mr. Obama, after expressing a new openness to coordinating with Russia since he met with Mr. Putin in Turkey last week, on Tuesday sought instead to isolate him.

“Russia right now is a coalition of two—Iran and Russia, supporting Assad,” he said. “We’ve got a global coalition organized. Russia is the outlier.”

At the same time, the U.S. and French leaders sought to demonstrate enhanced cooperation in their coalition.

Mr. Hollande said the immediate priority in the military campaign in Syria is to take back territory currently controlled by Islamic State and secure the border with Turkey.

Mr. Obama called on the European Union to implement an agreement that would require airlines to share passenger information.

“By targeting France, terrorists were targeting the world,” said Mr. Hollande.

Mr. Hollande’s stop in Washington was part of a whirlwind international tour to build a “single, grand coalition” of nations to take on Islamic State, which he called for last week.

French diplomats, however, have in recent days inched away from Mr. Hollande’s call for such a sweeping coalition. Instead officials in Paris have spoken of “coordination” in the strikes against Islamic State and have ruled out any shared command center for bombing targets in Syria...

And see, "Turkey Shoots Down Russian Military Jet Near Syrian Border."

New Books on the Salem Witch Trials

At Amazon.

See Benjamin C. Ray, Satan and Salem: The Witch-Hunt Crisis of 1692.

And Stacy Schiff, The Witches: Salem, 1692.

More, Books in Colonial History.

Ellie Goulding for Rollacoaster Magazine

At Studio Invisible UK, "ROLLACOASTER MAGAZINE: ELLIE GOULDING."

The photos are posted at Imgur, "Ellie Goulding Rollacoaster Magazine.

Shot cover for @rollacoaster with lovely @elliegoulding out now :) #EllieGoulding #photography #fashion #music pic.twitter.com/MHcOhr8aKA

— Alexandra Leese (@aleckyleese) September 19, 2015

GRAPHIC: Police Release Video of Officer Shooting Laquan McDonald

At the Chicago Tribune, "Chicago releases dash-cam video of fatal shooting after cop charged with murder," and "A moment by moment account of what the Laquan McDonald video shows."

Also, at WSJ, "Chicago Officials Urge Calm as Police-Shooting Video Is Released":

CHICAGO—A city police officer was charged with murder Tuesday in the fatal shooting in 2014 of a black teenager, and hours later officials released a graphic video showing the white officer repeatedly firing at the 17-year-old.

The video of the shooting death of Laquan McDonald was released after a news conference held by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy.

City leaders said they understood the footage, taken from a camera on a police car dashboard, would be disturbing, but they urged the public not to resort to violence.

“I understand that people will be upset and will want to protest when they see this video,” Mr. Emanuel said, but added that the family of Mr. McDonald had urged people to conduct any protest peacefully.

Mr. McDonald died on Oct. 20, 2014, after officers responded to reports of a man breaking into vehicles.

The video shows Mr. McDonald jogging down the middle of a street. He slows to a walk as he approaches two police cruisers that have pulled in ahead of him. He is holding a small knife at his side.

Two officers hop out of one of the vehicles and point their guns at Mr. McDonald as the teen veers away from them.

Mr. McDonald is a car-lane’s-width away when Officer Jason Van Dyke opens fire, the bullets twisting the teen’s body and sending him to the ground. Puffs of smoke can be seen rising from his body, which prosecutors say is from the officer’s continued gunfire.

None of the other officers on the scene opened fire on Mr. McDonald. Police later recovered a knife with a three-inch blade, prosecutors said.

The video doesn’t show Mr. McDonald advancing on Mr. Van Dyke. An initial police version of the shooting, contained in the medical examiner’s report, said the teenager had lunged at the officers with a knife, leading an officer to open fire. A Chicago police spokesman didn’t respond to questions about that initial account.

The video’s release came after Mr. Van Dyke turned himself in to authorities Tuesday. The first-degree murder charge carries a potential penalty of life in prison.

Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez said the decision to prosecute was made because Mr. Van Dyke hadn’t faced an immediate threat from Mr. McDonald and because he continued to fire at the teen as he lay on the ground after being shot. The youth was hit by 16 shots.

“Clearly this officer went overboard, and he abused his authority, and I don’t believe the force was necessary,” she said at a separate Tuesday news conference.

Mr. Van Dyke’s lawyer, Daniel Herbert, said he expects to prevail at trial. He has said the officer was protecting himself and others.

“This is a case that needs to be tried in a courtroom,” said Mr. Herbert. “This is a case that can’t be tried on the streets. It can’t be tried in the media. It can’t be tried on Facebook.”

Ms. Alvarez said that while she had made the decision to charge the officer internally in recent weeks, the announcement was moved up because of the imminent release of the video.

Mr. Van Dyke, who is 37-years-old, appeared in court Tuesday wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. A judge denied him bail, saying he wanted to view the video before setting bond.

Jeffrey Neslund, an attorney for Mr. McDonald’s family, said they were thankful that the officer had been charged and urged a peaceful response to the video’s release.

“We hope that Laquan will finally get justice,” Mr. Neslund said. “We hope that the city of Chicago will remain peaceful and any demonstrations will be nonviolent.”

The video was ordered released Wednesday by a circuit court judge who ruled last week the footage is subject to public-disclosure laws.

Mayor Emanuel, pastors and community activists have been meeting in recent days in the face of concerns the video could touch off violence in the nation’s third-largest city.

Cities such as Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore have experienced rioting, looting and vandalism in response to police shootings. But there also have been peaceful protests in many U.S. cities amid a growing call for changes in the use of police force, particularly against black men...

More.

Randall Munroe, Thing Explainer

At Amazon, Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words.

Teenage Girl from Vienna Who Ran Away to Join Islamic State Reportedly Beaten to Death After Trying to Flee

Bad things happen when you join up with bad people.

She made a big mistake.

At the Telegraph UK, "Teenage Austrian 'poster girl for the Islamic State' killed by group for trying to escape":

Sabra Kesinovic, 17, was reportedly murdered after she was caught attempting to escape from Raqqa, Syria.

An Austrian teenager who became a poster girl for the Islamic State has reportedly been beaten to death by the group after she was caught trying to leave Syria.

Sabra Kesinovic, 17, was murdered after she was caught attempting to escape from Raqqa, Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant's (Isil) de facto capital in Syria, according to reports in two Austrian newspapers.

She appeared extensively in Isil propaganda material after leaving her native Vienna to join the group together with Sabina Selimovic, a 16-year-old friend.

The two teenagers were shown wearing Islamic headbands and brandishing Kalashnikov rifles, surrounded by masked male jihadists.
They were also shown wearing full Islamic veils and pointing towards heaven.

The Austrian government refused to comment on reports in Österreich and Kronen Zeitung newspapers that Kesinovic had been beaten to death.

“We cannot comment on individual cases,” Thomas Schnöll, a spokesman for the foreign ministry said.

Both Austrian women are now believed to be dead, after reports Selimovic was killed in fighting in Syria last year.

Krone Zeitung newspaper quoted an unnamed Tunisian woman who lived with the two Austrians in Raqqa as saying Kesinovic was murdered.

The Tunisian, who was also an Isil volunteer for a woman, later escaped.

Kesinovic and Selimovic were both children of Bosnian refugees who fled to Austria from the war in their country during the nineties.

Their families reported them missing after they disappeared from their homes in Vienna last year.

They reportedly left a note for their families which read: “Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah and we will die for him.”
They were traced as taking a flight to the Turkish capital of Ankara, and travelling on to the region of Adana, close to the border with Syria.

It emerged they had joined Isil after Kesinovic telephoned her sister from Syria to let her know she was alright.

She reportedly wrote home late last year telling family she wanted to return and that she has had enough of the extreme violence she witnessed every day.

It is believed they both married Isil jihadists in Syria. Selimovic later denied reports she was pregnant in an exchange of SMSes to the magazine Paris Match, and claimed she was happy in Syria.

“Here I can really be free. I can practise my religion. I couldn’t do that in Vienna,” she told the magazine.

Reports of her death first emerged last year from David Scharia, an expert at the UN security council’s counter-terrorism committee...

More.

Syrians are a Nation of Terrorist Supporters

From Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine, "10,000 Syrian refugees mean 1,300 ISIS supporters":

Syria is a terror state. It didn’t become that way overnight because of the Arab Spring or the Iraq War.

Its people are not the victims of American foreign policy, Islamic militancy or any of the other fashionable excuses. They supported Islamic terrorism. Millions of them still do.

They are not the Jews fleeing a Nazi Holocaust. They are the Nazis trying to relocate from a bombed out Berlin.

These are the cold hard facts.

ISIS took over parts of Syria because its government willingly allied with it to help its terrorists kill Americans in Iraq. That support for Al Qaeda helped lead to the civil war tearing the country apart.

The Syrians were not helpless, apathetic pawns in this fight. They supported Islamic terrorism.

A 2007 poll showed that 77% of Syrians supported financing Islamic terrorists including Hamas and the Iraqi fighters who evolved into ISIS. Less than 10% of Syrians opposed their terrorism.

Why did Syrians support Islamic terrorism? Because they hated America.

Sixty-three percent wanted to refuse medical and humanitarian assistance from the United States. An equal number didn’t want any American help caring for Iraqi refugees in Syria.

The vast majority of Syrians turned down any form of assistance from the United States because they hated us. They still do. Just because they’re willing to accept it now, doesn’t mean they like us.

If we bring Syrian Muslims to America, we will be importing a population that hates us.

The terrorism poll numbers are still ugly. A poll this summer found that 1 in 5 Syrians supports ISIS.  A third of Syrians support the Al Nusra Front, which is affiliated with Al Qaeda. Since Sunnis are 3/4rs of the population and Shiites and Christians aren’t likely to support either group, this really means that Sunni Muslim support for both terror groups is even higher than these numbers make it seem.

And even though Christians and Yazidis are the ones who actually face ISIS genocide, Obama has chosen to take in few Christians and Yazidis. Instead 98.6% of Obama’s Syrian refugees are Sunni Muslims.

This is also the population most likely to support ISIS and Al Qaeda.

But these numbers are even worse than they look. Syrian men are more likely to view ISIS positively than women. This isn’t surprising as the Islamic State not only practices sex slavery, but has some ruthless restrictions for women that exceed even those of Saudi Arabia.  (Al Qaeda’s Al Nusra Front, however, mostly closes the gender gap getting equal support from Syrian men and women.)

ISIS, however, gets its highest level of support from young men. This is the Syrian refugee demographic.

In the places where the Syrian refugees come from, support for Al Qaeda groups climbs as high as 70% in Idlib, 66% in Quneitra, 66% in Raqqa, 47% in Derzor, 47% in Hasakeh, 41% in Daraa and 41% in Aleppo.

Seventy percent support for ISIS in Raqqa has been dismissed as the result of fear. But if Syrians in the ISIS capital were just afraid of the Islamic State, why would the Al Nusra Front, which ISIS is fighting, get nearly as high a score from the people in Raqqa? The answer is that their support for Al Qaeda is real.

Apologists will claim that these numbers don’t apply to the Syrian refugees. It’s hard to say how true that is. Only 13% of Syrian refugees will admit to supporting ISIS, though that number still means that of Obama’s first 10,000 refugees, 1,300 will support ISIS. But the poll doesn’t delve into their views of other Al Qaeda groups, such as the Al Nusra Front, which usually gets more Sunni Muslim support.

And there’s no sign that they have learned to reject Islamic terrorism and their hatred for America...

Still more.

Obama's New Terror Plan: 'Travel at your own risk...'

Ed Driscoll has the New York Daily News cover story, at Instapundit, "NEW YORK DAILY NEWS HEADLINE: “BAM’S NEW TERROR PLAN: BE AFRAID:”

Today's NY Daily News front page... not the best news for people traveling for the holiday pic.twitter.com/3WWhUcw6Z7

— New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) November 24, 2015

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On sale, 40% Off - Brother SE400 Combination Computerized Sewing and 4x4 Embroidery Machine With 67 Built-in Stitches, 70 Built-in Designs, 5 Lettering Fonts.

And for under the tree, from Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South.

College 'Crybullies'

From the letters, at the Los Angeles Times, "Readers React: Telling college 'crybullies' to grow thicker skin":

Protesting students are exercising their rights of free speech. However, these same students do not recognize the rights of those who disagree with them. Polls have suggested that roughly half of students in many universities favor speech codes and “trigger warnings” alerting them to issues that might offend their sensibilities.

Increasingly there is a totalitarian bent on university campuses, which have become a breeding ground for victimhood. Administrators lack the will to stand up to these tactics.

The real world is not so sanitized and safe. We are doing these young people no service to coddle them. They need to learn to stand up for themselves in debate, not shut down the opposition with demonization.

Lisa Niedenthal
Los Angeles

RELATED: From Roger Kimball, at WSJ, "The Rise of the College Crybullies."

The Rape of Sweden

Condell seems to produce one vlog per per month, so it's probably still a week or two until he comes out with his next one, no doubt on the Paris attacks.

But we'll see. We'll see.

This one's perhaps hard-hitting enough, man.

ICYMI, The German War

From Nicholas Stargardt, The German War: A Nation Under Arms, 1939–1945.

What the 'Hunger Games' Movies Say About Feminism — and War

At the Los Angeles Times, "The Katniss Factor":

Throughout the new "Hunger Games" movie, the fourth and final in the dystopian series, heroine Katniss Everdeen's name is intoned with grave sincerity. The manipulative President Snow whispers it, as one does of a worthy rival; her battle partner and occasional romantic interest Gale Hawthorne utters it to suggest a noble comrade.

But the most telling invocation comes early in the film. "It's Katniss," belts out Peeta Mellark, her other battle partner and romantic interest, compromised and angry as he lies in a hospital bed. "It's [all] because of Katniss."

Much has indeed happened thanks to Katniss, a name you couldn't dream up if you tried and now can't imagine not existing. The character has become a kind of cultural shorthand — an archetype, someone who has deepened our understanding of armed conflicts and paved the way for a political movement. And that's just off the screen.

As the Lionsgate franchise winds down with this week's release of "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2," the film and its lead character reside in a far different world than the one in which they began. And many of those differences came because of "The Hunger Games" films.

There is, of course, the money. The franchise that started with novelist Suzanne Collins and was largely directed by Francis Lawrence has taken in $2.3 billion globally, with more on the way. Every year since 2012, at least 35 million tickets have been bought in the United States to a new "Hunger Games" movie. More Americans on average have come out to see Katniss in a given film than they have Harry Potter.

But the effects go beyond sheer popularity. As played by Jennifer Lawrence, Katniss, with her bow and arrow, has inspired a generation to lift up their weapons, both literally (the surge in archery lessons) and otherwise. She is often unsmiling, efficient and "male-like," by the chestnutty Hollywood definition, in which female characters are rarely foremost and even less frequently autonomous.

Before "Hunger Games," Hollywood somehow couldn't conceive of a fully formed, villain-thwacking heroine in a top-tier franchise. Sure, some swings had been taken. But they were exceptions — pre-made stars in one-offs (Angelina Jolie in "Salt" or "Wanted") or one-dimensional types in B-movie serials (Milla Jovovich's "Resident Evil" or Kate Beckinsale's "Underworld").

Katniss, on the other hand, was, almost from the start, confident but complicated, bold but human. "She's just so relatable and she's not a superhero — she feels real, she feels lost, she feels reluctant," said director Francis Lawrence. "She doesn't want to be a leader, she doesn't want to be part of a rebellion."

If the character was sometimes caught in a love triangle, a Bridget Jones touch that doesn't exactly scream postfeminist consciousness, she spent much of the rest of the time knocking away at glass ceilings, the Hollywood lady hero whose power comes from thoughts and actions more than sexuality...

Still more.

CNN, Fox, and Other TV Networks Met to Discuss How to Respond to Donald Trump's Attempts to Restrict Press at Events, Including Blacklisting Reporters

They're not used to this kind of treatment. They've been feted as royalty for so long under the Democrats.

At Politico, "TV networks hold conference call to discuss Trump treatment":

Representatives from ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox and CNN discussed how embeds and reporters from outlets are being treated, including being pushed into media "pens." The Washington Post was first to report on the conference call.

It's unlikely a formal unified message will be sent to the Trump campaign unless all the networks agree on a response.
The plan, according to one network news executive familiar with the discussions, is to have a call with Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski and work through their issues.

The issues being discussed, the executive said, involve access to attendees at Trump events. Often reporters are able to speak with attendees before an event is set to begin, but lately reporters have found themselves confined to media-only areas by Trump staffers.

"The effort in the Trump campaign is to limit any kind of interaction between our reporters and the people attending the Trump events. So we'd like to have some access to folks," the executive said.

But the executive cautioned that the talks were being handled by the networks' political units and were not rising to high executive levels. Though media has complained about access with other campaigns, the executive said this was the first coordinated effort of its kind thus far this cycle...

Just think: a candidate who doesn't need these flacks.

Can the Democrats Keep Us Safe?

At Instapundit, "NO. NEXT QUESTION? New RNC ad: Can these Democratic weaklings be trusted to keep America safe?"

Click through for the new RNC ad.

France Can't Keep Tabs on 10,000 Radicalized Young Muslims (VIDEO)

From last night's CBS Evening News: