Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
Last night was a real turning point in the campaign.
Most analysts were frankly shocked at how well Trump did. Some folks are in a state of denial that the Manhattan mogul will be the GOP nominee. But it's all but inevitable at this point.
Donald Trump stacked up five more wins Tuesday, sweeping the East Coast primaries in a decisive showing that moved him significantly closer to capturing the Republican presidential nomination and avoiding a bruising fight at the party's convention this summer.
Trump's victories — in Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island — were by commanding margins, giving him the overwhelming majority of 172 delegates at stake.
Speaking in New York City, at the gilded office and condominium tower that bears his name, Trump declared the fight for the GOP nomination ended — “I consider myself the presumptive nominee, absolutely” — and said his rivals, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, should immediately stand aside.
“As far as I'm concerned, it's over,” he said.
“We should heal the Republican Party,” continued Trump, who cited his business success as proof he is the only one qualified to do so. “I'm a unifier.”
The Manhattan real estate mogul, who won his home state of New York last week in a landslide, had been expected to do well Tuesday in the heavily urbanized Atlantic corridor.
Even so, and “even if you don't like Donald Trump, it's hard to deny the magnitude of his victories,” said Stuart Rothenberg, an independent campaign analyst.
Trump's dominating performance was important from both practical and psychological standpoints, pushing him closer to the 1,237 delegates needed for a first-ballot victory at the party's July convention and also shaping perceptions of the race to his great advantage.
In exit poll interviews, nearly 7 in 10 Republicans who cast ballots in Pennsylvania, Maryland and Connecticut suggested the candidate who gets the most votes — which has been Trump — deserves to win the nomination, even if he falls short in the delegate count.
“There's kind of a growing sense of inevitability,” said Rothenberg, publisher of the nonpartisan Rothenberg & Gonzales Political Report. “The trajectory now suggests he will be very close to 1,237 by the end of business on June 7, and probably close enough to sweep up the crumbs he needs to be the nominee.”
California, with 172 delegates — more than any state — will be important in determining whether Trump clinches the nomination or falls just short.
He began the day with 845 pledged delegates and was on track to win at least 105 more. Cruz had 559 and Kasich 148, and picked up only half a dozen more between them, according to nearly complete returns.
The most crucial fight may come in Indiana, which votes next Tuesday...
While 60 percent of Republican primary and caucus voters will support the eventual Republican nominee if their candidate is not chosen, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today national poll of likely election voters, a majority of Donald Trump supporters said they would vote for the businessman if he were to lose the nomination and run as a third-party candidate.
Forty percent of Republicans whose favored candidate is not nominated said they will vote for the Democratic nominee, seriously consider a third-party candidate, stay home on Election Day in November, or are undecided.
Democratic Party loyalty was higher among those polled, with 69 percent of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders voters saying that they will support the Democratic nominee regardless of whether their preferred candidate is chosen.
“As the Republican leadership scrambles to organize a unity effort at the July GOP National Convention in Cleveland and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich team up to stop front-runner Trump, we are seeing bipartisan dissatisfaction with convention rules and fairness,” said David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center in Boston. “Both the RNC and DNC chairs have their hands full this election season.”
I personally don't believe that Republican voters "whose favored candidate is not nominated" will vote for Hillary Clinton in the fall. I suspect this is pure bombast, spewed to pollsters at this stage in the primary campaigns in an effort to influence public opinion. Americans are extremely polarized, with hatred of the opposite party one of the defining features of the era (it's called negative partisanship).
That said, my hunch could be wrong if it's true that Donald Trump really is that caustic to those who've said they can't support him. But if that's the case, we should expect those voters to stay home on election day rather than cross party lines and vote for Hillary.
But it's all speculation at this point. We'll know more, and more precisely, after the party conventions wrap up in July and new polling comes out to show how well the party nominees are able to unify their disparate factions. It's going to be interesting.
(If Trump runs as a third-party candidate all bets are off. I suspect his backers would indeed bolt the GOP, throwing everything into utter uncertainty. I simply have no idea what will happen then, other than to think that the modern Republican Party's washed up as a viable presidential election vehicle.)
Palestinians have a new idol in their pantheon of heroes and heroines. Her name is Dima al-Wawi and she is 12 years old. But unlike the paths to distinction in other societies for children, al-Wawi isn’t a math or science whiz or a great athlete. Instead, she’s guilty of attempted murder.
The girl was released on Sunday after serving 4 and-a-half months in jail where she was housed with other youngsters. Upon returning to her home village of Halhoul near the city of Hebron, she was greeted as a conquering heroine as both the Fatah Party that runs the Palestinian Authority and Hamas competed to shower her with praise. But rather than contemplate the depravity of a society that indoctrinates a little girl to think of murder and the very real possibility that she might be killed in the attempt as a praiseworthy activity, the coverage of al-Wawi’s release centers mostly on outrage that she was imprisoned and the notion that her crime somehow symbolizes the “frustration” of Palestinians about Israeli policies or the existence of settlements. And that, in a nutshell, is not only everything that is wrong with the culture of Palestinian politics but also what’s wrong with much of what passes for coverage of the Middle East in the international press.
The facts of the case are fairly straightforward...
The temporary alliance between Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, formed to deny Donald J. Trump the Republican presidential nomination, was already fraying almost to the point of irrelevance on Monday, only hours after it was announced to great fanfare.
With the pact, the two candidates agreed to cede forthcoming primary contests to each other. Mr. Kasich would, most crucially, stand down in Indiana’s primary on May 3 to give Mr. Cruz a better chance to defeat Mr. Trump there, while Mr. Cruz would leave Oregon and New Mexico to Mr. Kasich. It appeared to be a measure of last resort, but initially it seemed like a breakthrough.
Mr. Cruz trumpeted what he called the “big news” in Indiana, a state that appears pivotal to stopping Mr. Trump from winning a majority of delegates. “John Kasich has decided to pull out of Indiana to give us a head-to-head contest with Donald Trump,” the Texas senator said.
But at his own campaign stop in Philadelphia on Monday, Mr. Kasich tamped down Mr. Cruz’s triumphalism. Voters in Indiana, Mr. Kasich said, “ought to vote for me,” even if he would not be campaigning publicly there. He added, “I don’t see this as any big deal.”
Under the best of circumstances, the arrangement between Mr. Cruz and Mr. Kasich would seem to be a long shot — more of an expedient to stop Mr. Trump from taking a big step toward winning the nomination next week in Indiana than a permanent joining of forces...
As Tuesday's quintuple primaries near, the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns appear to be moving in tandem for the first time.
Front-runners Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are targeting each other with an eye to November's general election and are mostly ignoring their party challengers. Behind them, their rivals are still aiming at the front-runners in a desperate effort to gain ground before the primary season spirals further out of their control.
Polls suggest that voters in Pennsylvania, the biggest of the Tuesday primaries, are lining up behind Clinton and Trump much as voters in New York did last week — in big numbers.
Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republicans Ted Cruz and John Kasich have given no sign they intend to leave the race before the final primaries in June. But losses in Pennsylvania and the four other Tuesday primaries would be another major blow to the underdog candidates, both in momentum lost and in the delegates each needs to rebound.
"They are struggling to get a narrative that trumps the notion that the other two are inevitable," said longtime Pennsylvania pollster G. Terry Madonna, whose surveys for Franklin and Marshall College have Clinton and Trump holding double-digit leads in Pennsylvania.
The contest here has been an echo of the national race. Clinton, who has ties to the state dating to childhood, has campaigned as if she was running for mayor with an excruciatingly local pitch. Sanders, with his more nationalized message, has reveled in the giant, college-area rallies that have dominated his campaign everywhere...
The 173rd Airborne Brigade is investigating what went wrong during an airborne drop that resulted in three Humvees free-falling to their destruction, as depicted in a widely-shared online video.
On April 11, the Army conducted a heavy drop and personnel airborne operation as part of exercise Saber Junction 16 at Hohenfels training area in Germany. About 150 supply bundles, vehicles, communications equipment and indirect weapons systems were dropped, according to Army spokesman Maj. Juan Martinez. But three Humvees slipped from their rigging as their parachutes deployed, plummeting hundreds of feet to the earth. Martinez said no one was hurt.
"The specific malfunctions that occurred on this day are under investigation," Martinez said in an email to Army Times. "There were multiple rehearsals and inspections of the equipment prior to mission execution. We cannot speculate on what went wrong until the investigation is complete."
Martinez also hinted at the severity of the issue, writing in a subsequent email that "this investigation will receive the highest priority."
The video, viewed more than 1 million times since U.S. Army W.T.F! moments posted it to Facebook, shows a couple of planes pass and drop their cargo without incident. The third plane's first item, one of the ill-fated vehicles, has its parachute deploy initially. But a few seconds after it leaves the aircraft, it slips free and falls off its platform.
Someone standing near the camera seems to instantly recognize what is happening, yelling "Ooo, Yeah! Yes!" as it slips. The person in the video laughs as the free-falling Humvee crashes into the ground and kicks up a cloud of smoke...
It's a phenomenal work using methods of the new social history, and applied to the Nazi regime it produces some pretty astounding revelations. Folks might read the review from MacGregor Knox, at WSJ, "The Reich Mind."
Yes, the country's common sense Freedom Party is going to be smeared as "far-right" all the way up to the second round of voting, and don't be surprised to see leftist parties form alliances with so-called centrist "Christian Democrats" to block the election of Norbert Hofer. That's basically what happened in the recent French regional elections, with leftist and so-called center-right parties working together to stop Marine Le Pen's National Front.
Austria's anti-immigration far-right triumphed on Sunday in the first round of a presidential election, with candidates from the two governing parties failing to even make it into a May 22 runoff.
Norbert Hofer of the Freedom Party (FPÖ) won 36.7 of the vote, followed by Alexander van der Bellen backed by the Greens on 19.7 percent and independent candidate Irmgard Griss on 18.8 percent, projections showed.
From the governing coalition, Rudolf Hundstorfer from the Social Democrats (SPÖ) came joint fourth with just 11.2 percent, level with Andreas Khol from the People's Party (ÖVP).
The only candidate who fared worse than the main parties' candidates was Richard Lugner, an 83-year-old construction magnate and socialite married to a former Playboy model 57 years his junior, who won 2.3 percent.
The result, if confirmed, means that for the first time since 1945, Austria will not have a president backed by either the SPÖ or ÖVP.
Support for the two parties has been sliding for years and in the last general election in 2013 they only just garnered enough support to re-form Chancellor Werner Faymann's "grand coalition".
Austria also no longer has the lowest unemployment rate in the European Union and Faymann's coalition, in power since 2008, has bickered over structural reforms.
The next general election is due in 2018. The FPÖ is currently leading national opinion polls with more than 30 percent of voter intentions, boosted by Europe's migrant crisis.
"This is the beginning of a new political era," FPÖ leader Heinz-Christian Strache said after what constitutes the best-ever result at federal level for the former party of the late, SS-admiring Joerg Haider...
At the video above, notice how the screen-grab has Hofer raising his hand as in a Nazi salute - "Heil Hitler!"
You know, leftist fearmongering will only work so long. Across Europe you're seeing the nationalist backlash against the invasion of refu-jihadists and rape-fugees. Any time now a nationalist party is going to come to power in one of the leading European democracies, and there's going to be reckoning. Shoot, this could happen in Germany itself, the way Angela Merkel keeps doubling down on national surrender and suicide.
