GOP Leaders Fear Party's on Cusp of Epochal Split Between Traditional Conservatism and Atavistic Nationalism (VIDEO)

That's because it is on the cusp of an epochal split. Frankly, the Republican Party's on the verge of a permanent collapse.

From Jonathan Martin, at the New York Times, "Republican Party Unravels Over Donald Trump’s Takeover":

By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.

Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them. The party’s two living former presidents spurned Mr. Trump, a number of sitting governors and senators expressed opposition or ambivalence toward him, and he drew a forceful rebuke from the single most powerful and popular rival left on the Republican landscape: the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan.

Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.

Many Americans still cannot believe that the bombastic Mr. Trump, best known as a reality television star, will be on the ballot in November. Plenty are also anxious about what he would do in office.

But for leading Republicans, the dismay is deeper and darker. They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism, with roots as old as the republic, that has not flared up so intensely since the original America First movement before Pearl Harbor.

Some even point to France and other European countries, where far-right parties like the National Front have gained power because of the sort of resentments that are frequently given voice at rallies for Mr. Trump.

Mr. Trump, with his steadfast promises to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally and to build a wall with Mexico, may have done irreversible damage to his general election prospects. But he quickly earned the trust that so many of those voters had lost in other fixtures of America — not just in its leaders, but in institutions like Congress, the Federal Reserve and the big-money campaign finance system that Mr. Trump has repudiated, as well as in corporations, the Roman Catholic Church and the news media.

And he has amplified his independent, outsider message in real time, using social media and cable news interviews — and his own celebrity and highly attuned ear for what resonates — to rally voters to his side, using communication strategies similar to those deployed in the Arab Spring uprising or in the attempts by liberals and students to foment a similar revolution in Iran.

“Trump leveraged a perfect storm,” said Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in an email message. “A combo of social media (big following), brand (celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness (dominating news cycles).”

Mr. Trump is an unlikely spokesman for the grievances of financially struggling, alienated Americans: a high-living Manhattan billionaire who erects skyscrapers for the wealthy and can easily get politicians on the phone. But as a shrewd business tactician, he understood the Republican Party’s customers better than its leaders did and sensed that his brand of populist, pugilistic, anti-establishment politics would meet their needs.

After seething at Washington for so long, hundreds or thousands of miles from the capital, many of these voters now see Mr. Trump as a kind of savior...

That's a surprisingly good analysis, especially for the far-left New York Times, heh.

More:

Mr. Trump now feels so empowered that he does not think he needs the political support of the party establishment to defeat the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. He is confident that his appeal will be broad and deep enough among voters of all stripes that he could win battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania without the support of leaders like Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump said in an interview on Saturday.

That's going to be quite a test, the defining test of this campaign. Can he really win these states without establishment backing, or even some of the establishment? It's going to be an epic campaign! I love this.

Keep reading.

Hatred of Israel and Jews Can't Be Separated

From Melanie Phillips, at the Times of London (via Mick Hartley):

Corbyn blamed for backing Jew-haters, but most lefties support Palestinians who teach their kids to murder Jews. https://t.co/I020DtbDgw

— Melanie Phillips (@MelanieLatest) May 3, 2016

The current uproar over antisemitism is truly a wonder to behold. For the past three decades and more, antisemitism was the prejudice that dared not speak its name. It was deemed to have been stamped out, other than among cranks on the far right.

Anyone rash enough to protest that the anti-Israel animus in progressive circles was a mutation of ancient Jew-hatred was told they were “waving the shroud of the Holocaust” to sanitise the crimes of Israel. There could be no connection. The left was institutionally anti-racist, wasn’t it?

On the contrary, the left is institutionally anti-Israel and the connection is irrefutable. For sure, many who loathe Israel may not be hostile to Jews as people. Nevertheless the narrative of Israel to which they subscribe is inescapably anti-Jew....

Among the educated classes, Israel, the target of decades of Arab exterminatory aggression, is almost universally presented as the villain and the Palestinians as its victims. Israel is held to be responsible for the absence of a Palestine state and thus the obstacle to solving the Middle East conflict.

The fact that the Arabs turned down proposals or offers of a Palestine state alongside Israel in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, responding instead with terrorism or war, is ignored. The repeated statements of the Palestinian leadership that its real aim is to capture all of Israel are also ignored. It is never reported how the Palestinian Authority-controlled media and educational materials routinely incite Palestinian children to hate Jews, murder Israelis and capture every Israeli city.

Instead, Britain is told that the Israelis are child-killers. During the 2014 war in Gaza, when Israel finally responded to years of rocket attacks by launching airstrikes against Hamas, broadcast and print media claimed Israel was recklessly or deliberately killing hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians.

In fact, as the High Level Military Group of western top brass told the UN last year, the lengths to which Israel went to try to protect Gaza’s civilians far exceeded the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, even at the cost of its own soldiers’ and civilians’ lives, and going further than any other nation’s army would ever do.

Yet the British public had been told, virtually without contradiction, that Israel had wantonly killed hundreds of children. Among those on the left now vowing to root out antisemitism, I didn’t notice any of them rushing to condemn that particular blood libel.

Last year, the Islamic adviser to Mahmoud Abbas taught on Palestinian Authority TV that Jews throughout history have represented “falsehood . . . evil . . . the devils and their supporters . . . the satans and their supporters”. The Palestinian Authority daily published an opinion article claiming that Jews “are thirsty for blood to please their god (against the gentiles), and crave pockets full of money”. Children were shown on TV reciting poems portraying Jews as “most evil among creations”, “barbaric monkeys” and “Satan with a tail”.

Progressive Britain never reports any of this. Instead, it amplifies the hate in its own intellectual, cultural and media echo-chamber.

Denying the legal and historical rights of the Israeli “settlers” to the land, it demonises and dehumanises them. When they are murdered by Palestinians, this is rarely reported on the grounds that they had it coming to them. Dehumanisation of the “settlers” leads inexorably to the dehumanisation of all Jews...

Hat Tip: EOZ.

Bill O'Reilly's Talking Points: Handicapping the Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump Presidential Race (VIDEO)

This is interesting, especially the snippet of Glenn Beck going off on Donald Trump included there. He argues that if Hillary Clinton wins in November, Republicans will be shut out of the White House forevermore, since the Democrats will legalize everybody and that'll be the end of the ballgame, heh.

Watch, via Fox News, "Bill O'Reilly Handicapping the Clinton, Trump Race."

Sara Sampaio is Maxim's May 2016 Cover Girl (VIDEO)

She's nice!

Here, "Watch: Sara Sampaio Sizzles Behind the Scenes of Her Maxim Cover Shoot!"

Environmental Wackos Cheer Canada's Fort McMurray Fires (VIDEO)

Following-up from the other day, "Canada's Fort McMurray Engulfed in Flames (VIDEO)."

Here's Ezra Levant:

Fear and Loathing on the 2016 Campaign Trail

Heh.

You gotta love this piece from Professor Larry Sabato, at Sabato's Crystal Ball, "The Fall Outlook: Fear and Loathing on the 2016 Campaign Trail":

Our views on the Electoral College outcome of a Clinton-Trump match-up haven’t changed since we published our “Trumpmare” map a month ago. If anything, we wonder whether our total of 347 EVs for Clinton to 191 EVs for Trump is too generous to the GOP.

Still, party polarization will probably help Trump. In the end, millions of Republicans will hold their nose and vote against Hillary and for Trump, just as millions of Democrats will put aside their hesitations about Clinton to stop Trump. Negative partisanship — casting a ballot mainly against the other party’s nominee rather than for your party’s candidate — will be all the rage in November. This will be especially likely after the vicious scorched-earth campaign on both sides that is coming. Someone could make a fortune at polling places selling clothespins for the nostrils.

However, we do recognize at least some upset potential in Trump. Third terms for the White House party are difficult to secure. President Obama is, more or less, at 50% job approval — pretty good, in fact, for this president. But an unexpected economic plunge, major terrorist success, international crisis, or serious scandal could subtract critical percentage points from Clinton. Voters are not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, so intertwined is her fate with Obama’s, and so fixed is her scarred image after decades in the hothouse of politics.

Just as important, Clinton can lose if she and her team smugly take victory for granted. You are halfway to losing when you think you can’t lose. Students of President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against the doomed Barry Goldwater recognize that LBJ wouldn’t let his lieutenants rest on favorable polls; he ran a superb if brutal effort against Goldwater, and never let up. Much the same was true for President Richard Nixon in 1972. While he and his team schemed to insure George McGovern became his opponent, using dirty tricks against some of McGovern’s Democratic foes, Nixon had tasted defeat and near-defeat too often in his career to rest easy for even a day. Will overconfidence generated by favorable surveys cripple the Clinton campaign?

Trump has forced the political world to ingest a sizable dose of humility. Even many of political science’s much-vaunted statistical models that attempt to predict election results cannot account for a candidate like Trump — either because he overrides or suspends some of the normal “rules” of politics, or because he proves that parties do not always nominate electable candidates...

Interesting.

RTWT.

I think it's advantage Democrats, but I wouldn't count out Donald Trump for a second. It's going to be the most interesting presidential campaign in my lifetime.

Donald Trump Needs Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to Win the Electoral College Vote (VOTE)

The New York Times had this piece the other day, "Electoral Map Looks Challenging for Trump."

We're going to see lots of different "hot" takes on how the Electoral College will shape up for November, but for now just remember, it's a long way off until the general election. A lot can happen before then.

In any case, here's John King's argument, at CNN:

'When traditional religion is rejected, the odds are pretty good that something cultish will be chosen to replace it...'

Heh. So true.

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "CALIFORNIA VEGANS ASSEMBLE THE CIRCULAR FIRING SQUAD: Top L.A. Vegan Restaurant Owners Receiving Death Threats for Slaughtering Animals."

Anne De Paula Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Casting Call 2017 (VIDEO)

More, early prep for next year!

Deal of the Day: Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny Desktop Computer

This is pretty cool.

At Amazon, Lenovo ThinkCentre M93p Desktop Computer - Intel Core i5 i5-4570T 2.90 GHz - Tiny - Business Black 10AA002CUS.

Also, Intex Pillow Rest Raised Airbed with Built-in Pillow and Electric Pump, Queen, Bed Height 16 1/2".

More, Yamaha NS-AW570BL Speaker (Black).

Plus, from Yuval Levin, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left, and The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism.

Daron Acemoglu, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty.

Still more, from Don Watkins and Yaron Brook, Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality.

BONUS: John Micklethwait ane Adrian Wooldridge, The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State.

Mother's Day in Home, Garden, and Kitchen

At Amazon, Mother's Day Gift Guide.

Make Mother's Day Great Again https://t.co/d1cW1v9K8Y

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) May 6, 2016

Republican Field Began with 17 Candidates, and Trump's Branding of His Opponents Helped Knock Them Out of the Race (VIDEO)

Heh.

This is killer, lol.

 Is the American Party System About to Crack Up?

Here's Danielle Allen, at the Nation, "Communications Breakdown":

In 1999, the libertarian party helped transform American politics by launching a campaign that ultimately sent hundreds of thousands of e-mails to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protest its proposed “know your customer” banking regulations. The FDIC withdrew the rules, and the era of digital politics was born. Roughly a decade later, social media propelled “birtherism” to the forefront of the national conversation, reinstating nativism as an active ideology in the United States. In 2009 came the Tea Party movement, followed by Occupy Wall Street in 2011, both of which drew on new online organizing mechanisms to build solidarity networks around a particular analysis of social reality. The question for students of American politics now is whether these changes can drive a fundamental realignment of our political parties.

Transformations in communications technology have made it more possible than ever before for dissenters from the Democratic and Republican parties to find one another and to form sizable communities of interest. The result is lowered barriers to entry for the work of political organization, with consequences announced daily in headlines about the 2016 presidential campaign. Insurgent candidates in both parties have drawn on the organizational power that has developed over the past decade within ideologically defined communities: Donald Trump has summoned the anger and xenophobia of the birthers, Bernie Sanders has channeled Occupy’s critique of rampant inequality, and Ted Cruz has marshaled the forces of the Tea Party universe. By attaching other groups of voters to their original, more ideologically concentrated constituencies, these candidates have achieved greater success in their respective primary campaigns than anyone thought possible just one year ago.

Regardless of whether they succeed in taking over their parties, these new coalitions have the potential to remake American politics if either the insurgents or the party faithful are driven to seek refuge in existing third parties or to create entirely new ones. For the 2016 campaign at least, that latter possibility is already foreclosed, so a takeover (hostile or otherwise) of a third party seems more likely—both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party can place candidates on the ballot in a significant number of states. Even so, our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it very hard for third parties to challenge the top two. Barring the emergence of new habits of collaboration and alliance formation among small parties, only a fundamental change to our system of voting—the introduction of proportional representation, for example—would allow for a more fluid political system to develop.

 Speculating on what the future holds for America’s political alignment requires thinking through a complex array of factors: voting rules, political egos, the time horizons of charismatic leaders, questions of succession, the intensity of various ideological commitments, and a famously mutable public opinion. What we are most likely to see is more of the new normal: incredibly bitter fights among plurality-sized groups for total—if temporary—control of one of the major parties. Will this also worsen gridlock at the national level, thereby exacerbating the intensity of those intraparty battles and further destabilizing our political system overall? If these dynamics play out simultaneously in both parties, the most unified side will triumph.

There's more, FWIW, from Rick Perlstein and Daniel Schlozman at the link.

Jackie Johnson Forecasts Possible Showers and Thunderstorms

Well, it was pretty lovely weather today, mostly overcast but cool and pleasant.

Here's the forecast though, via CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime

This looks interesting -- especially as how I really need to get up on the academic debates on mass incarceration. It's all the rage on the left, and the idiot progs are obviously having a significant policy impact (considering how the Obama White House is releasing hardened criminals onto the streets, to say the least).

Out Tuesday, and available at Amazon, Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America.

Happy #CincoDeMayo!

From The Donald, on Twitter:

Happy #CincoDeMayo! The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! https://t.co/ufoTeQd8yA pic.twitter.com/k01Mc6CuDI

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2016

I'm not sure how well that Latino outreach is going, lol. But check Memeorandum, heh.

In the Mail: Matthew Desmond, Evicted

Crown Publishers sent me a copy of Matthew Desmond's fantastic new book, Evicted.

I've read the first couple of chapters and it's amazing. I'm going back to it as soon as I finish The Closing of the Liberal Mind.

Check it out, at Amazon, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City.

In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind.

The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, “Love don’t pay the bills.” She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas.

Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America’s vast inequality—and to people’s determination and intelligence in the face of hardship.

Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.

Rush Limbaugh: Donald Trump Will Crush Hillary Clinton in Landslide (AUDIO)

At Memeorandum, "Rush Limbaugh: My Gut: Trump Beats Hillary in Landslide."

How Donald Trump Staged a GOP Takeover

At WSJ, "How Trump Won — and How the GOP Let Him":

With his victory in Indiana, Donald Trump has seized a controlling stake in the Republican Party.

Back when few people took Donald Trump seriously as a potential presidential candidate, the New York businessman asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, to meet in Iowa. Over breakfast at the Des Moines Marriott Hotel in January 2015, Mr. Trump spent 45 minutes grilling Mr. Gingrich on his experience running for president.

“It was clear to me at the end of the talk that he was seriously considering it,” Mr. Gingrich said.

Yet two months later, in March 2015, three-quarters of Republican primary voters in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said they couldn’t imagine supporting Mr. Trump for president. He was so marginal that during a candidate cattle call by the National Rifle Association the following month more people stayed to listen to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal than to Mr. Trump.

Most Republican leaders remained oblivious while Mr. Trump plotted the political equivalent of a corporate takeover. With his resounding victory Tuesday in Indiana, he has seized a controlling stake in the Republican Party with the backing of shareholders unhappy with previous management.

Mr. Trump, having driven out the last of his rivals, is now the party’s presumptive nominee—a jaw-dropping outcome that says as much about the GOP, caught in turmoil and transition, as it does about Mr. Trump.

Ever since their bitter 2012 presidential loss, Republican leaders and the party’s grass roots have been at odds, with rank-and-file voters angry at the failure of elites to deliver, and at odds over the issue of immigration. Mr. Trump found opportunity in the rupture.

Party leaders and the other GOP candidates almost unanimously underestimated Mr. Trump’s staying power. His rivals believed his provocative campaign would fail, a presumption that allowed him to run for months in a splintered field of competitors. Most were reluctant to attack, convinced they would scoop up his supporters when Mr. Trump’s campaign finally imploded.

Republicans proved vulnerable to his unconventional campaign style. As a skilled entertainment professional, he made himself ubiquitous. His audience seemed ready to forgive any outrageous comment or slip-up.

Mr. Trump dominated the campaign conversation with a communications-heavy strategy that relied on mass rallies, TV interviews and debates. That meant no polling, no analytics, little paid media, no consultants.

“This election isn’t about the Republican Party, it’s about me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview this week. “I’m very proud I proved an outsider can win by massive victories from the people, not from party elites or state delegates.”

Having dealt the GOP establishment its biggest defeat in decades, Mr. Trump said his mission wasn’t to change the party. He also doesn’t appear interested in whether the GOP can muster the kind of institutional support its presidential nominee normally receives...

Keep reading.

Deal of the Day: Singer 4423 Heavy Duty Sewing Machine

At Amazon, SINGER 4423 Heavy Duty Extra-High Sewing Speed Sewing Machine with Metal Frame and Stainless Steel Bedplate.

More, Up to 70% Off Easy Spirit Women's Shoes.

And for Mother's Day, IGI-Certified 18k White Gold Diamond Studs (1 cttw, H-I Color, SI1-SI2 Clarity).

Also, by Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity.

Still more, from Pat Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Plus, from Ann Coulter, ¡Adios, America! The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole. (And, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.)

From Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming, and The Decline and Fall of California: From Decadence to Destruction (Kindle Edition).

BONUS: Mark Krikorian, The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal.