Trump Stumps the Establishment

Seen on Twitter:

Establishment Trumps People every time; Trump Stumps Establishment, everytime. #DEMSINPHILLY RETWEET #RETWEET pic.twitter.com/iIve2QbBBT

— ⚓ I'm With You ™ (@ImWithYou010) July 25, 2016

Bernie Sanders' Supporters Bawling at #DemConvention #DemsInPhilly #CrookedHillary (VIDEO)

At Heat Street, "Bernie Babies: Sanders Supporters Weep Openly at DNC as Their Candidate Gives His Final Speech."

And watch, at Ruptly, "USA: Cheers and tears as Sanders endorses Clinton at the DNC."

Still more, from Michelle Malkin:

Crying Peter Pan Guy is about to become an Internet Thing.#feelthebern#DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/kLxSIHaZuY

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 26, 2016

How Democrat Party Staffers Used Anti-Gay Slurs, Mocked the Name of a Black Assistant, and Created Sexist Craigslist Job Post to Shame Donald Trump

Nasty stuff.

At London's Daily Mail, "Revealed: How DNC staffers under Wasserman Schultz used anti-gay slurs, mocked the name of an African-American assistant and created a sexist Craigslist job post to humiliate Donald Trump."

Democrats are terrible people Horrible.

Protesters Chanting 'Off With Her Head' at #DemConvention #DemsInPhilly #CrookedHillary

Hey, it was a pretty rowdy first night, and lord knows you've got some Jacobins out in the streets.

At Vice News:

Outside the convention, protestors are flying a Bernie Sanders flag and chanting "Off with her head"https://t.co/au9SdOWveR

— VICE News (@vicenews) July 26, 2016

Democrat Chaos in Philadelphia!

At the New York Post:

DNC disarray is the foreshadowing of a Clinton administration https://t.co/Lrrd2XX5VH pic.twitter.com/U3Q8VxYQV2

— New York Post (@nypost) July 26, 2016

Jessica Alba Flaunts Toned Bikini Body During Hawaii Vacation

At London's Daily Mail:

Jessica Alba shows off her perfect figure in a pineapple bikini on her family vacation https://t.co/QvdE8W6ReE pic.twitter.com/n3GCSVJjLE

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) July 21, 2016

Democrats Divided as Convention Starts (VIDEO)

The Wall Street Journal's got an excellent live blog, "After email hack, Sanders supporters reluctant to unite."

The Bernie Bros are not pleased their man urged backing for Clinton:

Is Donald Trump a Vladimir Putin Plant?

Heh.

It's Julia Ioffe, at Foreign Policy, "Is Trump a Russian Stooge?":

Is Trump a Putin plant? In short, no.

My latest: https://t.co/0cBeDB7Kjz

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) July 25, 2016

That blinding flash of light you saw this weekend? That was the byproduct of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the American media’s two greatest obsessions, fusing into a single intoxicating storyline after the Democratic National Committee’s internal emails were hacked and made public with the apparent assistance of Russian hackers, and to the apparent glee of the Republican nominee. The conventional wisdom, after sifting through all the evidence, has reached a verdict, and it’s that Trump is Putin’s stooge, a veritable plant through which Putin plans to take over the United States.

Okay, I exaggerate. But not by much...

RTWT.

Deal of the Day: Hoover WindTunnel 3 Pro Pet Bagless Upright Vacuum

At Amazon, Hoover WindTunnel 3 Pro Pet Bagless Upright Vacuum, UH70931PC - Corded.

Also, KIND Bars, Dark Chocolate Nuts & Sea Salt, Gluten Free, 1.4 Ounce Bars, 12 Count.

And, AmazonBasics Apple Certified Lightning to USB Cable - 6 Feet (1.8 Meters) - White.

Today only, FitDesk Under Desk Elliptical $99.99.

More, from Isabel Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany.

Also, Tim Snyder, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning.

Logan Beirne, Blood of Tyrants: George Washington & the Forging of the Presidency.

And, Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom.

BONUS: Fergus Bordewich, Killing the White Man's Indian: Reinventing Native Americans at the End of the Twentieth Century.

Surge of Terror in Germany

From Noah Rothman, at Commentary, "Germany’s Terror Wave":

Germany’s Terror Wave - by @noahcrothman https://t.co/3AVz0BmqGN pic.twitter.com/0xghjwl7k6

— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) July 25, 2016

All young men; all of Middle Eastern or South Central Asian descent, with varying but generally modest levels of assimilation into Western society. Each was attracted to death cultism—be it of an Islamist or secular variety. Three of these four attackers were known to members of the psychological community and had at one point sought or received help for mental imbalances. None of it was apparently sufficient to prevent the worst.

What the effects of this new wave of terror will be on German and European political culture are not yet clear, but it is a safe bet that the kind of nationalist political backlash gathering support in France will soon materialize in Germany. And without a will to defeat the forces of radicalization abroad, Europeans will have little recourse but to bar the door and keep a watchful eye on their neighbors through lace curtains. Ultimately, that will only intensify the sense of paranoia that Europeans are already justifiably feeling today. The continent is under attack, and it’s only a matter of time before passivity is no longer an option.

Hillary Clinton Inherits a Far-Left Democrat Party in Philadelphia

Well, the Democrat National Convention is finally underway.

Things didn't start out as smoothly as folks would like, I'm sure. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has been banished from the proceedings and a major anti-Hillary protest was raging earlier today outside the Wells Fargo Center in Philly.

Only the most dishonest partisan hacks would deny that the Democrats today are in fact a far left-wing party pushing an openly socialist, identity-based agenda. I think the only ones now just noting it are the establishment journalists in the mainstream press. And even then, reporters still insist on calling radical leftist ideologues "liberals." It's pretty maddening.

In any case, the Wall Street Journal provides a pretty decent overview on the front page of the paper today.

See, "Hillary Clinton to Take Command of a Changed Democratic Party":

When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday, she will take command of a party that has little in common with the one she and her husband rode to the White House a quarter-century ago.

The party she will inherit is less white and more liberal. It is better educated and not as willing to compromise with Republicans. Many Democrats today aren’t convinced capitalism is the best economic model or that socialism is taboo.

Nor is the party entirely sold on its new leader. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this month showed 45% of registered Democrats and those who lean in that direction would have preferred a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.

“I’m in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton camp,” said Jason Frerichs, a Democratic Party county chairman in southwestern Iowa.

Behind the party’s evolution are seismic shifts that have threatened to sweep aside the pro-business, centrist brand of politics the Clintons long embodied. Those same forces could make it tougher for Mrs. Clinton to govern from the center should she win in November.

Working-class white voters once loyal to the Democratic Party have gravitated to the Republicans over the past two decades, drawn by the GOP’s stance on guns, immigration and other social issues.

Amid the exodus, Democrats have moved left.

Only 30% of Democrats considered themselves liberal in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That figure had nearly doubled by 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

With minorities, 20-somethings and college-educated voters making up a bigger chunk of the party, some Democrats are questioning tenets that once seemed inviolate. Take capitalism. An Iowa poll early this year showed more than four-in-10 likely Democratic caucus-goers in a state with an outsize influence on the nomination battle described themselves as socialist.

Watching these trends, some Democrats are uneasy. They fear the party will continue to lose state and local contests unless it makes an ideological course correction. For all of President Barack Obama’s electoral success, the party lost more than 80 House and Senate seats under his watch.

“The party has moved steadily left because of the surge of liberal populism, and that has caused the party to be in complete free fall at the subpresidential level,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank, Third Way.

“The party is going to have to realize that to get and hold a sustained majority and enact solutions that are even remotely politically feasible, it’s going to have to move toward the center,” he said.

The draft party platform that Democrats approved at a two-day meeting in Orlando, Fla., highlights the sharp left turn the party has taken since Mr. Clinton held the White House 20 years ago.

The 1996 Democratic platform celebrated free-trade deals; the proposed new platform says they don’t “live up to the hype.” Bill Clinton’s platform embraced the death penalty; the new one would do away with it. The old platform boasted of building new prison cells; the 2016 version calls for “ending the era of mass incarceration.”

Eyeing the changes over the last generation, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said: “These are two radically different parties.”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

She has signaled she isn’t about to govern in accordance with her party’s liberal faction. In naming a running mate, she passed over both Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the more moderate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Speaking to Charlie Rose of CBS News recently, she said: “We are the center-left party.”

Yet, pressed by Mr. Sanders during the presidential primaries, Mrs. Clinton reversed course and came out against a 12-nation Pacific trade deal she promoted back when she was secretary of state. Hoping to win over his young supporters, she recently rolled out new plans to wipe out public-college tuition for millions of families.

When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday, she will take command of a party that has little in common with the one she and her husband rode to the White House a quarter-century ago.

The party she will inherit is less white and more liberal. It is better educated and not as willing to compromise with Republicans. Many Democrats today aren’t convinced capitalism is the best economic model or that socialism is taboo.

Nor is the party entirely sold on its new leader. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this month showed 45% of registered Democrats and those who lean in that direction would have preferred a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.

“I’m in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton camp,” said Jason Frerichs, a Democratic Party county chairman in southwestern Iowa.

Behind the party’s evolution are seismic shifts that have threatened to sweep aside the pro-business, centrist brand of politics the Clintons long embodied. Those same forces could make it tougher for Mrs. Clinton to govern from the center should she win in November.

Working-class white voters once loyal to the Democratic Party have gravitated to the Republicans over the past two decades, drawn by the GOP’s stance on guns, immigration and other social issues.

Amid the exodus, Democrats have moved left.

Only 30% of Democrats considered themselves liberal in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That figure had nearly doubled by 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

With minorities, 20-somethings and college-educated voters making up a bigger chunk of the party, some Democrats are questioning tenets that once seemed inviolate. Take capitalism. An Iowa poll early this year showed more than four-in-10 likely Democratic caucus-goers in a state with an outsize influence on the nomination battle described themselves as socialist.

Watching these trends, some Democrats are uneasy. They fear the party will continue to lose state and local contests unless it makes an ideological course correction. For all of President Barack Obama’s electoral success, the party lost more than 80 House and Senate seats under his watch.

“The party has moved steadily left because of the surge of liberal populism, and that has caused the party to be in complete free fall at the subpresidential level,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank, Third Way.

“The party is going to have to realize that to get and hold a sustained majority and enact solutions that are even remotely politically feasible, it’s going to have to move toward the center,” he said.

The draft party platform that Democrats approved at a two-day meeting in Orlando, Fla., highlights the sharp left turn the party has taken since Mr. Clinton held the White House 20 years ago.

The 1996 Democratic platform celebrated free-trade deals; the proposed new platform says they don’t “live up to the hype.” Bill Clinton’s platform embraced the death penalty; the new one would do away with it. The old platform boasted of building new prison cells; the 2016 version calls for “ending the era of mass incarceration.”

Eyeing the changes over the last generation, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said: “These are two radically different parties.”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.

She has signaled she isn’t about to govern in accordance with her party’s liberal faction. In naming a running mate, she passed over both Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the more moderate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.

Speaking to Charlie Rose of CBS News recently, she said: “We are the center-left party.”

Yet, pressed by Mr. Sanders during the presidential primaries, Mrs. Clinton reversed course and came out against a 12-nation Pacific trade deal she promoted back when she was secretary of state. Hoping to win over his young supporters, she recently rolled out new plans to wipe out public-college tuition for millions of families...

Still more.

Blake Lively's an Astonishing Babe

I saw this L’Oreal advertisement this morning and it reminded me what a lovely woman she is.

And below is the bonus coverage from London's Daily Mail on Ms. Blake's Elle cover shoot.

Blake Lively wears plunging leather wrap dress in stunning shoot for Elle magazine https://t.co/6thnZsWuK0 pic.twitter.com/DuevNBQXrQ

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) July 25, 2016

Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists

This is a top work of political science by two major scholars of American politics, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.

I just finished Chapter 1. The authors take on what they call the "folk theory" of democratic governance, which is the ideal conception of democracy and electoral politics envisioning majority rule and an informed electorate. They're especially critical of the "retrospective theory of elections," which has been one of the more popular explanations of voting behavior in recent years. The approach, however, doesn't tell us much about electoral outcomes, other than a fickleness surrounding current political and economic issues that tend to make the elections akin to a coin flip.

Achen and Bartels argue that rather than government effectiveness and policy preferences, partisanship and social identity more powerfully determine voter choice and democratic outcomes. The book's amazingly jargon-free so far, and is hence well-suited to the general reader while still deeply embedded within the longstanding debates on democratic theory in American political science.

I'm enjoying it.

In any case, check out more at Amazon, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government.

I'll have more on the book later. I'm gearing up for my fall semester preparations (syllabus writing, class digital supplements, and so forth), so I thought it'd be good to read some real "science-y" type literature before school starts.

Donald Trump Gets Polling Bounce After Republican National Convention (VIDEO)

Actually, it's a pretty solid bounce.

A number of organizations are reporting a Trump bounce after Cleveland.

This is ephemeral, of course, because the Democrats are likely to get a bounce as well following Philadelphia, but it shows that voters are responding to the GOP ticket, despite what the MSM hacks would have you believe.

Here's the Los Angeles Times, for one, "Trump takes lead over Clinton as GOP convention generates a bounce for its nominee."

And at CNN, "Trump bounces into the lead." He's got a six-point lead in the CNN poll.

Also at Morning Consult, "Trump Surges Past Clinton With Post-Convention Bump."

The one possibility here is that the DNC hacking scandal ends up being more damaging than many would believe, and the Democrats fail to get a significant bounce coming out of their convention.

I doubt that though. Frankly, I expect Hillary Clinton to give a rousing speech on Thursday night, and Bernie's speech tonight will make the case for Democrat unity despite being slammed in the horrible DNC emails. He'll argue that Hillary's better than Trump.

So, we'll see. We'll see.

And watch, at Morning Joe:

Ansbach, Germany: Syrian 'Refugee' Suicide Bomber Pledged Allegiance to Islamic State (VIDEO)

Well, this comes as a surprise (eye roll).

At NYT and France 24:

Suicide Bomber in Ansbach, Germany, Pledged Loyalty to ISIS, Officials Say https://t.co/wYNY82WuuD #news pic.twitter.com/EfDpyqUExp

— Santanu Kandar (@santanukandar) July 25, 2016

Previously, "Syrian 'Refugee' Suicide Bomber Blows Himself Up in Jihad Attack in Ansbach, Germany."

How Political Correctness Leads to Indifference About Child Abuse on the Reservations

It's Naomi Schaefer Riley, at Heat Street, "NEW BOOK: How Political Correctness is Leading Us to Ignore Abuse on American Indian Reservations."

I'm a couple of chapters into Schaefer Riley's new book, The New Trail of Tears: How Washington Is Destroying American Indians.

It's excellent and highly recommended.

Jan Crawford at the National Constitution Center (VIDEO)

Watch, an interesting segment, at CBS This Morning, "National Constitution Center tells the story of America":

The National Constitution Center in Philadelphia tells the story of how our founders created a government by the people with an elected president -- and a Constitution that endures and protects us all. Jan Crawford reports.

I don't think the question is whether we can "keep" the Constitution so much as we can preserve the liberty that it was originally designed to protect. The Constitution will be with us for a long time. It's how much the interpretation and practice of our constitutional norms have changed that's troubling.

Glorious: Debbie Wasserman Schultz Booed at Florida Democrat Delegation Breakfast (VIDEO)

Absolutely glorious.

Sally Kohn has the sads, lol, "Heckling of @DWStweets right now during her delegation speech makes me sad. I support protest, but also civility. This just feels mean."

Watch. They booed her right off the stage:



More at Instapundit, "HERE’S VIDEO OF DWS GETTING BOOED OUT OF HER OWN DNC BREAKFAST..."

And at Politico, via Memeorandum, "Bedlam erupts as Wasserman Schultz speaks to Florida delegates."

Previously, "Debbie Wasserman Schultz to Resign Following Explosive Email Leaks."

Cybersecurity Subplot Implicates Russia in Democrat Party Email Hacking Scandal

More on the DNC leaks, a surprisingly tantalizing story of intrigue, at the New York Times.

I'm skeptical, of course. It seems pretty opportunistic for the media to pin this all on Russia, when the world is full of hackers, and frankly China's now considered our biggest cybersecurity enemy.

But what can you do? This fits the meme that Donald Trump is the Putinian candidate.

Democratic leaders and cyberspecialists in the U.S. wonder if Vladimir Putin is meddling in the election https://t.co/tJhvWIMqSF

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 25, 2016

Researchers conclude two Russian intelligence agencies hacked the DNC/s emails and passed them to @wikileaks. https://t.co/mwo3ZtBPBv

— Steven Lee Myers (@stevenleemyers) July 25, 2016

So, Maybe It's Not the Best Idea to Get Out of Your Car While Touring a Wildlife Park (VIDEO)

Heh.

Not too smart, to put it mildly.

Actually, the woman who was killed tried to save the first woman snatched by the tiger.

And as you can see at the video, that animal wasn't messing around.

At the Telegraph UK, "Family argument in wildlife park leaves woman dead after she leaves car and gets eaten by tiger."

And additional video, via CBS News, "Caught on camera: Woman mauled by tiger after stepping out of car."