California Matters Tuesday

My district's in play, the 45th congressional, where two-term incumbent Mimi Walters has a good chance at being shown the door. Their campaign has not done door to door canvassing and outreach, while the Democrat Katie Porter's campaign has come to our house thrice in the last week, one time leaving voter information materials at our door when no one was home.

At LAT, "California hasn't mattered in national politics for a long time. Here's why this Nov. 6 is different":

Successive congressional wave elections have come and passed, cresting without ever breaching the Sierra Nevada.This year is different.
https://t.co/XjO3jkwkbg

— Jim Puzzanghera (@JimPuzzanghera) October 30, 2018

California — big, bounteous, beautiful — is pretty much used to irrelevancy come election day.

Sure, the state has produced many leaders of national import and helped countless more finance their political pursuits. But it’s been two decades since California was a presidential battleground, and longer still since the state played a meaningful role choosing a major party presidential nominee.

Successive congressional wave elections have come and passed, cresting without ever breaching the Sierra Nevada.

This year is different.

Unaccustomed as it may be, California stands at the center of the fight for control of the House, with at least half a dozen seats up for grabs, or more than a quarter of the 23 that Democrats need to seize the majority. A handful more could tip the party’s way if Nov. 6 produces a blue tsunami.

History favors the Democrats. With rare exception, the party holding the presidency loses House seats at the midpoint of a president’s first term. The current occupant could, of course, defy expectations; Donald Trump wouldn’t be in the Oval Office if he hadn’t managed to upend a number of political verities.

Trump won the White House while buried in a California landslide — no surprise there — and six of the seven congressional districts he lost to Hillary Clinton are key to Democrats’ hopes of taking over the House, which they last controlled in 2010. (The seventh, the mostly rural Central Valley district represented by three-term GOP incumbent and perennial target David Valadao, seems like a considerably further reach.)

Midterm elections are typically a referendum on the nation’s chief executive, and that dynamic has not helped Republicans in California, where the president remains deeply unpopular. Call it the Trump undertow.

Embattled GOP Reps. Mimi Walters in Orange County and Jeff Denham in the San Joaquin Valley would probably be headed to relatively easy reelection if the president hadn’t stirred such an outpouring of Democratic antipathy. Republicans would also be much better positioned to hang on to the northern Orange County seat of Rep. Ed Royce, who is retiring after more than 20 years in office.

Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, who hasn’t faced much of a threat since his first election during the Reagan era, might not have his back to the wall in coastal Orange County but for his cozy relationship with Russia, which interfered in the 2016 election to benefit Trump.

Setting the president aside, the competition also reflects political and demographic changes that have transformed California.

The state’s burgeoning Latino population has grown more politically active and pro-Democratic in response to the belligerent tone sounded by many Republicans. The GOP’s embrace of religious conservatism also pushed many live-and-let-live Californians away from the party.

That helped turn Orange County, a onetime Republican bastion, into a congressional battleground, along with the high desert outside Los Angeles, where two-term GOP incumbent Steve Knight is fighting for reelection, and northern San Diego County, where Republicans are struggling to hold the seat being vacated by Rep. Darrell Issa after nine terms...

More.

Partisan Realignment After the 2016 Election

This is the best piece I've read on our current crisis of political polarization.

It's not a crisis of governmental institutions. It's a crisis of the party system. What a great read.

From Stanford political scientists David Brady and Bruce Cain, at National Affairs, "Are Our Parties Realigning?":

THE STRUGGLE FOR THE GOP

The election of Donald Trump was even more of a blow to any expectations of a new equilibrium than the back-and-forth elections of the prior decades. Not only was he not a standard Republican on free trade, taxes, entitlements, and so on, but the Republicans in Congress did not expect him to win. Their reaction to his victory was to try to pull together and pass the legislation they thought mandated by their 2010 wins six years earlier: end Obamacare, reform taxes, cut regulation, and increase energy production, among other longstanding Republican agenda items.

But the narrow Senate margin and Trump's lack of policy knowledge and legislative skill left Republicans with only a tax-bill victory. Obamacare is still the law of the land; immigration reform and budget policy remain problematic; and Trump is a more divisive president than either Bush or Obama. Thus our system — already burdened by partisan divisiveness, close elections, and few incentives for parties to cooperate on public policy — is saddled with an inexperienced, chaotic president and a governing party with no clear sense of what it wants or what voters want.

One result has been a struggle to define the GOP, which has sometimes seemed like a fight between the party's longstanding priorities and some of President Trump's particular emphases. But the battle lines have not been very clear — especially since neither the practical and contemporary meaning of the party's longstanding priorities nor Trump's beliefs are actually all that clear at this point, and since disputes about the president's character often overshadow internal policy debates.

If Republicans lose one or both houses of Congress in 2018, then the battle lines could be drawn more clearly, because those congressional Republicans who have held back criticism of Trump in order to pass legislation will no longer need to restrain themselves in the battle for the party. The 2018 and 2020 election cycles will, by and large, shape what Republicans become post-Trump. Republican incumbents might buy into Trump's views on immigration, deficits, trade, and so on to appease the Trump base, and thus change the party. Or the battle between Trump-like candidates and traditional Republicans could yield a new set of internal divisions and patterns. Or traditional Republican views might come to be reaffirmed.

The dimensions of the battle are revealed in survey data that YouGov has collected over the past few years. Starting in May 2015, they interviewed a panel of 5,000 Americans 17 times, with more interviews scheduled prior to the 2018 elections. The results have shown that Trump voters, compared to those Republicans who voted in the primaries for other candidates, are older, whiter, less well-educated, have lower incomes, and are disproportionately from the Southern, border, and Midwestern states. They are also, on average, angrier about politics, more likely to believe that many in the government are crooks, and  more dissatisfied with government. They are very anti-trade and anti-immigration and favor taxing the rich (those making over $250,000).

When asked about illegal immigrants living in the U.S. now, 70% of Trump supporters said they should be required to leave, while less than 35% of other Republicans agreed. In fact, a slight majority of other Republicans thought that they should be allowed to stay and acquire citizenship. On social issues such as gay marriage and the death penalty, Trump supporters were much more conservative than their fellow Republicans; in fact, a majority of other Republicans opposed the death penalty. In the post-election surveys, by a two-to-one margin, Trump Republicans favored a Muslim ban, while other Republicans opposed the ban. The battle for the heart and soul of the party is underway.

While these issues will be important, perhaps even more important is the extent to which Trump Republicans and other Republicans differ regarding the president. The August 2017 YouGov re-contact survey showed that 92% of early Trump supporters liked him, with 72% liking him a lot; Republicans who weren't early supporters, however, liked him less, with only 29% liking him a lot. The president's ability to retain the support of his base means those Republicans running for Congress must face the delicate task of appealing to that base in both the primary and general elections. Ed Gillespie's run for governor of Virginia in 2017 was an excellent example of such balancing. As one Washington Post article put it a few days before the election, "Gillespie is at the center of a civil war that is dividing his party, one pitting the Republican establishment he personifies with his four-star credentials against the anti-Washington forces that propelled President Trump's rise."

The battle between the Trump wing and other Republicans will play out numerous times over the next two election cycles, and the future of the party hangs on who wins. Crucial to Republican success will be suburban independents and Republican women who chose Trump over Hillary but today do not like the president. Off-year election turnout numbers in Virginia and Alabama confirm the importance of these voters.

THE RACE TO REALIGNMENT

In American political science, the standard party-change model has focused on "realigning elections," wherein one party achieves dominance that lasts long enough to resolve the key issues generated by the instability of the era. Those issues, in our time, appear to be challenges like immigration, inequality, family and social breakdown, worker insecurity, automation, trade, America's role in the world, and environmental challenges, among others.

Some observers suggest that Democrats have the best chance to arrive at a formula that captures a durable majority on most of these issues. As of this writing, the 2018 generic congressional poll favors Democrats by seven points (according to the RealClearPolitics average), and Trump's popularity is low. Historically, presidents in their first term often lose seats at the midterm election. And winning the House, the Senate, or both in 2018 would be seen as a harbinger of winning control of the government in 2020.

Control of all the elected branches would give Democrats a base of support from which to reduce inequality, reform the immigration system, and restore American leadership in the economic realm, on the environment, and in other respects. Nice scenario, if you ask any progressive. But there are many reasons why the Democrats are likely to fail in their efforts to create a new stable majority. The first and most obvious is that Democrats, like Republicans, are badly split on how the party should respond to both the Trump presidency and the dominant issues of our time. The result is that the number of Democrats running for president in 2020 may well be in the double digits, creating divisions that resemble those the Republicans faced in 2016.

Second, potential candidates are already favoring policies, like Medicare for all and free tuition, that even Californians know are not affordable. These views don't actually represent today's Democratic coalition all that well. In YouGov surveys, Democrats, by over two-to-one, favor cutting spending over raising taxes to balance the budget, and by almost two-to-one, they believe that quite a few in government do not know what they are doing. In regard to free tuition, 40% of Democratic voters are either against it or are not sure that it would work. Thus, the Democrats have not achieved agreement within their party regarding policies that deal with today's core challenges, and a multi-candidate presidential primary is not likely to resolve the issues and create a stable majority. That leaves the Democrats, like the Republicans, divided and not unified, and, just as with the GOP, the necessary changes seem more likely to occur in primary and general-election contests over the next few electoral cycles. The Democratic Party does not look ready to step up; the Republicans don't either.

Here again, a student of history would be reminded of the closing decades of the 19th century, when there were pro-silver Republicans and pro-gold Democrats (like President Cleveland) and the same intra-party mix on tariffs and immigration and many other prominent issues. Control of the government shifted back and forth between these unsteady parties over and over again. But by 1896, the sorting of the parties had occurred, and Republicans were pro-gold, pro-tariffs, and so on, while the Democrats under William Jennings Bryan were the opposite. The electorate, in that case, chose Republicans, and the ensuing stability gave rise to economic growth and a period of prosperity.

A broadly similar transformation is very likely in our future. The sorting process in the Republican Party has begun, with the Democrats to follow in 2020. This time the sorting will not be conservatives to the GOP and liberals to the Democrats, since that has already occurred and has defined the very order that is growing exhausted. Rather, the coming era will be defined by questions like what do conservatism and liberalism mean to Republicans and Democrats, and which vision will the American people support? Whichever way it turns out, the parties have finally begun the process of adjusting to the realities of the new global economy.

The shapes our parties are likely to take might be easier to see if we consider their most extreme possible forms — which aren't where we will end up but can show us the contours of possibility. For Republicans, these are the possible alternatives on either pole: a Trump-like Republican Party that is anti-immigrant, protectionist, anti-gay marriage, dependent on entitlements, white, old, not well-educated, and concentrated in the southern and central United States; or a party that favors markets and smaller government, and is not anti-immigration per se but is, rather, more libertarian and diverse in membership.

The Democrats, likewise, face a similar polar choice: a Bernie Sanders/Elizabeth Warren Party that pushes socialist-leaning policies (Medicare for all, free tuition, a smaller military, higher taxes, and more regulation) joined to an identity politics that excludes moderates from swing states; or a Democratic Party more like that envisioned by the Clinton-era Democratic Leadership Council, which is center-left on economic policy, inclusive on social issues, relatively moderate on defense and immigration, and somewhat resistant to identity politics.

The battles between these alternatives have already begun in some primaries. And the likely outcome is not any of the polar opposites, but a shuffling of the issues that gives shape to complex coalitions...

RTWT, at the link.

Beth Jacob Synagogue Vandalized (VIDEO)

The synagogue's in Irvine, on Michaelson on the south side of the 405. I was meaning to drive by there and pay my respects and make a donation for repairs, but didn't make it today. Will try to swing by tomorrow.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

'Dreams'

From yesterday's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM, the Cranberries:

Dreams
The Cranberries
8:53am

Rock You Like A Hurricane
Scorpions
8:49am

Demons
Imagine Dragons
8:46am

Hold The Line
Toto
8:43am

Sheena Is A Punk Rocker
Ramones
8:40am

Little Red Corvette
Prince
8:35am

Come As You Are
Nirvana
8:32am

Dirty Deeds
AC/DC
8:16am

Something Just Like This
The Chainsmokers & Coldplay
8:12am

Another Brick In The Wall
Pink Floyd
8:09am

Ghostbusters
Ray Parker Jr.
8:04am

You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred

From Ruth Wisse, at WSJ:

The Many Faces of Jew-Hatred by my former professor at McGill University Ruth Wisse https://t.co/Ud7ogCfXfz

— Mark Dubowitz (@mdubowitz) November 1, 2018

The most discouraging feature of the anti-Israel brand of anti-Semitism is its penetration of Western societies, including the U.S. That a single shooter wants to kill the Jews is less dangerous to this country than Louis Farrakhan’s smiling designation of Jews as “termites,” broadcast to a vast audience, or the vicious movement to boycott Israel—an extension of the Arab boycott launched in 1945. The incursion of fanatical anti-Israel politics into the American campus and the Democratic Party is a threat not to the Jews alone but to what they represent in liberal democracy.

Even as we try to comfort the mourners and suggest better security measures, we must stop the scourge before a full-fledged anti-Semitic politics emerges in America under the unifying banner of “intersectionality.” Anti-Semitism is the only ideology that can unite the far left and far right. Its success would signify America’s failure....

RTWT.

The 'Radicalization' of Cesar Sayoc

First off, it should be said that I'm glad no one was killed. I don't know what went wrong with Cesar Sayoc's improvised explosive devices (the mail bombs), or whether the bombs were meant to detonate at all, but it's blessing that no one was harmed.

That said, I can't but help thinking that if the targets had been Republicans and Fox News there'd be no outrage or media investigations. When Bernie-supporting leftist James Hodgkinson opened fire at Republicans, almost killing Rep. Steve Scalise, there was very little leftist introspection regarding a Democrat Party "climate of hate" that contributed to the attack. I remember maybe two days of coverage on CNN, a few stories in the newspapers, and that's about it. There was no long national dialog on a so-called toxic environment. Here's the Google search results for "James Hodgkinson shooting suspect." There's one result for June 21st, but besides that the latest date for search findings are June 14th, the day of the shooting. I see a couple more results for the search "Republican congressional shooting." In October 2017, Alexandria (Virginia) Commonwealth Attorney Bryan Porter released a investigative report on the shooting, covered at the Chicago Tribune, "Gunman who shot Steve Scalise cased baseball field for weeks before rampage."

With the mail bombing attempts, along with the horrific mass murder at the Pittsburgh Tree of Life synagogue, the leftist media is exploiting the events to blame President Trump, Republicans, and their supporters for the violence. Some media leftists have been over the top with their accusations, especially Julia Ioffe, who yesterday claimed the President Trump had radicalized more people than Islamic State.

In any case, it's an awful moment on American politics. I've been teaching my classes this semester, and I've been focusing a lot on partisan polarization and the sources of current political divisions and dysfunctions. I've mentioned, for example, that we had frequent violence during the 1960s, especially the assassinations of President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King. I've said I hope things don't get as bad as they were then, but now I'm thinking they're just as bad. The murder of the 11 elderly Jews in Pittsburgh breaks my heart.

More later.

Meanwhile, here's leftist "investigative journalist" Andrew Kaczynski at CNN, for what it's worth:

The radicalization of an alleged domestic terrorist https://t.co/R5pSbDGyLk pic.twitter.com/n1XRCWbPl6

— CNN (@CNN) October 30, 2018

Carla Howe in Leather Costume

At Taxi Driver, "Playboy Model Carla Howe in Leather Costume."

Plus, "Carla Howe Playboy Photos."

'You Really Got Me'

It's Van Halen, from 93.1 Jack FM, for yesterday's drive-time.

Somebody That I Used To Know
Gotye Feat. Kimbra
8:37am

You Really Got Me
Van Halen
8:34am

Rio
Duran Duran
8:22am

California Love
2Pac
8:18am

Miss You
The Rolling Stones
8:14am

Rebel Yell
Billy Idol
8:09am

Down Under
Men At Work
8:05am

Pardon Me
Incubus
8:02am

Super Freak
Rick James
7:51am

London Calling
The Clash
7:47am

Song 2
Blur
7:45am

The Joker
The Steve Miller Band
7:42am

Blind Woman Sues Walmart After Employee Steals Her Money, Taking Advantage of Disability

I can't believe how awful this is.

The blind are vulnerable. You're supposed to help people with disabilities, not steal from them.

This is terrible.

At ABC News 15 Phoenix:

Blind woman sues @Walmart after employee steals money from her and blind boyfriend: https://t.co/jU9z5OhQWQ #abc15 pic.twitter.com/dzxVaHskBI

— ABC15 Arizona (@abc15) October 29, 2018

Georgia Gibbs in Aruba (VIDEO)

She's so sweet:

Allie Beth Stuckey: Vote for Democrats in November (VIDEO)

She's very effective. You can see why radical leftists hate her.

Jennifer Delacruz's Windy Monday Forecast

Here she is, the lovely Ms. Jennifer, at ABC 10 News San Diego:

Blaming Normal Americans for Nuts Will Backfire on Dems

From Kurt Schlichter, at Town Hall, "Democrats Blaming Normal Americans for Nuts Will Blow Up In Their Faces at the Ballot Box":

They don't realize their lies will motivate their opponents. My new @townhallcom column does.🛳🤷🏼‍♂️🐿🇺🇸

Democrats Blaming Normal Americans for Nuts Will Blow Up In Their Faces at the Ballot Box https://t.co/2OnPQSKTfO

— Kurt Schlichter (@KurtSchlichter) October 29, 2018

You know, there's nothing that Normal Americans can identify with more than a guy living in a Ford panel van covered with Trump memes and soccer manifestoes who sends bombs that don't work to Democrats who support policies that don't work. Likewise, Normal people totally identify with – let me get the liberal narrative du jour right here – a Trump-hating freak who shoots up a synagogue. And I think it’s a terrific midterm strategy for our Democrat friends is to keep making that idiotic case. (extreme sarcasm for the benefit of the willfully obtuse)

The Official Media is in a frenzy explaining how Donald Trump personally instructed Kooky Weirdo de Florida to mail pipe bombs to washed up Dem hacks and that nameless garbage being in Pittsburgh via a series of cunningly encrypted dog whistles. “Make America Great Again” is apparently code for “Mail bombs!” Nothing says “Murder Jews” like moving the embassy to Jerusalem and ending the Iran deal.

Oddly, of 63 million Trump voters, only one jerk managed to decode this cipher. The other hated Trump for liking Jews too much. But, as CNNMSNBC’s brain trust and such thinkers as rock legend Joe Scarborough teach us, their crimes are on all of us anyway for some reason.

We’re all to blame for one kook’s real terrorism because…well, he thought Trump was part of the giant Zionist conspiracy to make him a friendless loser, so it’s not clear why. Maybe it being a useful lie is reason enough.

We’re also to blame for the other idiot’s pantomime terrorism pursuant to the dippy moral calculus proposed by the same peeps who spent eight years slobbering over the protege of Bill Freaking Ayers. Ayers, as you would never know from watching our media, was a leader in an actual campaign of political bombings that actually maimed and killed actual people. So, when libs feigned shock at those raising the possibility that leftists might be responsible for doing something leftists had a history of doing (as well as a history of faking hate crimes where they were the victims) at a politically convenient time, the faux outrage rang hollow.

And how faux the outrage was - and so very selective too. Leftists demand you ignore the near-miss massacres at the Family Research Council and the baseball field by committed leftists who were not any crazier than their political allies, only more proactive. The message is that you Normal Americans are complicit for voting for a guy who doesn’t hate your guts.

I think that on November 6th, the Democrats are going to get a message back from the people they are shamelessly lying about.

Normal voters are not going to look at this blood libel and say, “Yeah, I feel personally responsible for the actions of that Elizabeth Warren-channeling fake Indian stripper guy with a kilometer-long rap sheet who totally would not have done anything nutty if it weren't for Trump. And also for the crimes of a scuzzy coward who hates Trump. I guess I have a moral obligation vote for people who will ruin this surging economy, restore America to its rightful place as a laughingstock on the world stage, and attack my rights of free speech, free exercise of religion, and to keep and bear arms to protect myself from exactly these kind of aspiring Stalins. Because that idea makes sense. I'm convinced.”

I think Normal people are going to be furious at these lies...

More.

Julia Ioffe Doubles Down on Attacks and Demonization of President Trump

Following-up from yesterday, "Julia Ioffe Blames President Trump for Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre."

See the ghoul Ioffe's lenghty op-ed at today's Washington Post, and some clips of her appearance on Jake Tapper's show, where she claims President Trump's radicalized more people than Islamic State. Just wow:

Perspective: How much responsibility does Trump bear for the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh? https://t.co/na05EDgw6b

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 29, 2018

This might be one of the most ridiculous things ever said on @CNN.@GQMagazine's @juliaioffe just claimed @realDonaldTrump has "radicalized so more people than ISIS ever did."

Sheer lunacy.

And oh by the way, no push-back from @jaketapper. pic.twitter.com/suFC2WKHya

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 29, 2018

.@jaketapper gives @juliaioffe time to clean up her comments near the end of the #TheLead. Ioffe says her rhetoric "was not factual." pic.twitter.com/X9Gwqx4ysQ

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) October 29, 2018

What I Learned as a U.S. Jew After the Pittsburgh Attack

It's John Podhoretz, at the New York Post:

Me on America, Jews, and anti-Semitism: https://t.co/ZAmYuHu7v4

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) October 29, 2018

Today's cover: Victims of deadly Pittsburgh synagogue shooting identified https://t.co/EZlQoiKN0p pic.twitter.com/QK18Ivp8A5

— New York Post (@nypost) October 29, 2018

On this day of all days it needs to be said: America has been a blessing for the Jewish people unlike any other blessing given any other people in the history of the world.

One crime — or 29 separate crimes, committed at the same time by a monster in human form — cannot be allowed to overshadow this extraordinary fact.

My own gratitude to America is actually greater today than it was yesterday because of the outpouring of grief and rage and common humanity we have witnessed in the response to the horror in Pittsburgh.

The philo-Semitic response to this unspeakable act of anti-Semitism reveals how American Jews are anchored in America in a way that Jews who live anywhere else outside of Israel are not anchored to the lands in which they reside or have ever resided.

We are Americans. And we are Jews. And there is no contradiction between the two. When people talk freely and foolishly and noxiously about America as having been built on racism, there is one simple answer to their libel: George Washington’s letter to a synagogue in Newport, written in August 1790.

“The citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy — a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” Washington wrote. “May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

That final phrase, taken from the prophet Micah, was violated in the most obscene way on Saturday. But the story of America is a story of a country that has indeed served as vine and fig tree for the world’s most beleaguered peoples.

America has allowed us to sit in safety. America has allowed us to flourish due to its “enlarged and liberal policy” that assumes all human beings have inalienable rights.

From the time of the Jewish expulsion from the Holy Land in the first century after the death of Christ, Jews lived all over the world, but none of those places constituted a home. Even when we were treated relatively well, we were other. We were apart.

Because nothing is unmixed, because good can come out of bad, it has to be said that this forced separation is one of the reasons the Jewish people survived when thousands of ancient Middle Eastern tribes died out.

We believed what the Bible told us — that we had a special role, a special mission, a special place in the destiny of humankind. And that kept us alive.

America took us in, by the many millions, and the founding doctrine to which George Washington alluded in his letter made this country something vastly greater than just another dot on the millennia-old map of the diaspora.

The only true threat to the Jewish people from the American experiment comes not from hate but from love. The problem for American Jews, the late Irving Kristol used to say, isn’t that they want to kill us, but that they want to marry us. Our difficulty is maintaining the separateness necessary to the continuation of the Jews as a people — because America has so taken us to its bosom.

This is a tragically low moment, a day when the words we speak on Passover really came home: “In every generation they rise up against us to destroy us.” But this time it was not “they” who “rose up against us to destroy us.” And that makes all the difference.

It was not the Nazi regime. It was not the Spanish Inquisition. It was not Crusaders. It was not Russian or Polish soldiers. It was not an organized effort to extirpate.

It was the work of a lone villain poisoned by the ancient temptation that has guided the hands of Jew-haters from the days of Amalek — the temptation to believe that whatever ails you can be cured by the extirpation of Jews. Any Jews. All Jews...

RTWT.

Kelly Brook Official Calendar 2019

At the Sun U.K., "Kelly Brook wows in black lingerie for her 2019 calendar shoot as she gets set for Celebrity Antiques Road Trip."

Kelly Brook poses for her 2019 calendar shoot as she gets set for Celebrity Antiques Road Trip https://t.co/PEbzp5dkhE

— The Sun (@TheSun) October 29, 2018

Charlotte McKinney Upskirt

When folks are usually checking out Ms. Charlotte, they're checking out the upstairs material. But here's a shot of her bottom parts.

At Taxi Driver, "Charlotte McKinney Tiny Panty Upskirt."

Julia Ioffe Blames President Trump for Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

Following-up, "The Hateful Left's Response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre."

At Twitchy, "GQ correspondent Julia Ioffe tells ‘fellow American Jews’ who ‘makes this possible’ after synagogue shooting (just guess).

Also, AWKWARD: After shaming ‘fellow American Jews’ for supporting Trump an INCONVENIENT pic of Julia Ioffe pops up.

Social Collapse Caused All the Bad Things Last Week.

At Victory Girls:

President Trump didn’t cause the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue. Nor did conspiracy theories or MAGA rallies cause a madman to mail bombs to congressmen. No, the root of these things is social collapse, and yet folks still want to blame everyone else rather than looking within.

Oh, there’s plenty of finger-pointing to go around. Take, for example, what happened when Rep. Steve Scalise, a shooting survivor himself, expressed his sadness at the carnage in Pittsburgh...

Click through and read the whole thing. (There was an awful lot of leftist nastiness yesterday, and of course on Friday, but even by our regular standards things this week have been especially bad.).

The Hateful Left's Response to the Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

From David Harsanyi, at the Federalist, "The Left’s Response to the Mass Shooting of Jews is an Act of Bad Faith":

How are Americans ever going to 'come together' if the first thing a political party sees when it sees dead Americans is a partisan cudgel? https://t.co/tOIWmv2Boe

— David Harsanyi (@davidharsanyi) October 28, 2018

It was ironic to see many of the same liberals, who recently fought to prop up the world’s most powerful Jew-hating terror state, lecturing us on the importance of combating anti-Semitism. But there they were yesterday.

The same Voxers who had long rationalized, romanticized, and excused the Jew-killing terror organization of the Middle East were now blaming the existence of the evil, anti-Semitic Pittsburgh shooter on Republicans. The same Pod bros whose echo chamber deployed anti-Semitic dual-loyalty tropes to smear critics of the Iran deal were now incredibly concerned about the Jewish community.

There were many others, and that was bad enough. But others decided to dip into a little victim blaming, as well. Hadn’t American Jews been little too Jew-centric and pro-Israel for their own good?

Franklin Foer of The Atlantic demanded that Jews finally dispense with their faith, adopt his, and start expelling co-religionists for their political opinions. (If you want to read about the left’s co-opting of American Judaism, I recommend Jonathan Neumann’s excellent book, “To Heal The World?”) Wire creator David Simon went bold, embracing a transparent anti-Jewish conspiracy theory, accusing the Israeli government of intervening in the American democracy.

For those who confuse progressivism with Judaism — which is to say many — it might be difficult to understand that undermining the Democratic Party isn’t an act of anti-Semitism. The Trump administration, in fact, has been the most pro-Jewish in memory.

Every Jew who’s ever prayed understands the importance of Jerusalem in our faith, culture, and history. It was President Trump, not any of the other presidents who promised the same, who recognized Jerusalem as the undisputed Jewish capital, putting an end to the fiction that it’s a shared city.

It was Trump who withdrew from the Iran deal and once again isolated the single most dangerous threat to Jewish lives in the world, the Holocaust-denying theocrats of the Islamic Republic.

It was Trump who cut more than $200 million in aid to a Palestinian government that was not only inciting terrorists (including the murder of a Jewish-American citizen named Ari Fuld; but since he never wrote for The Washington Post, you might not have heard of him) but also rewarded the killers’ families.

It was his administration that kicked the Palestine Liberation Organization, the most successful Jewish-civilian murdering organization of the past 60 years, out of DC. It was the Trump administration that cut funding to the anti-Semitic U.N. Relief and Works Agency. It was also the Trump administration that turned around the unique Obama-era legacy of standing against Israel at the United Nations. And it is his administration that cracked down on anti-Semitism on college campuses and that deported one of the last real-life Nazis.

At the same time, the liberal activist resistance wing is being led by a couple of Louis Farrakhan fangirls, and most Jewish Democrats are scared to death to say a single word in protest. But that’s another story...

Keep reading.