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“Why would an American President embrace the Muslim Brotherhood?” 20 minutes of easy listening from a wise and knowledgeable man

As Donald Trump emerged victorious in the race for the Republican presidential nomination this week, the loudest cries of anguish heard in Washington may well have come from one section of his own party—from those in its conservative movement. “Conservatives had their party hijacked from them in the 2016 primaries,” wrote Jonathan S. Tobin in Commentary, a leading platform for conservatives. He added: “The consequences for individual liberty and restraint of government power, not to mention America’s foreign-policy interests, will be incalculable.” Meanwhile, Leon H. Wolf, writing on the conservative site Redstate.com, proposed what many conservatives would consider a radical...

We have a very serious political problem in this country. Our system of government works best when it is balanced between roughly equal political parties, one on the center-right and the other on the center-left. Unfortunately, what we have is a centrist Democratic Party and a far-right Republican Party. Therefore, the system is out of balance, creating gridlock even as the public cries out for action on serious problems such as our deteriorating public infrastructure, epitomized by that in Flint, Michigan. I believe that Republicans made a deal with the devil in 2009 when they embraced the Tea Party, a...

The supporters of Donald Trump believe he might awaken a sleeping giant -- a cohort of white working-class voters that will propel him to the presidency. His more politically-minded opponents insist he will summon a colossal electoral disaster on Republicans that will not only secure the presidency for the Democrats but lose the GOP the House and Senate. I'll let the Trumpkins make the case for their man. I want to look at the potential for Republican disaster here. John McCain got roughly 60 million votes in 2008. Mitt Romney got roughly 61 million in 2012. Barack Obama secured 70...

It's 2019 and the fact that you and Vice President Cruz have decided to run for a second term deeply disturbs those of us who still care about this country. Like many true patriots, my wife and I voted for Sanders in 2016 and considered moving to France when you and that creepy Canadian won. We stayed and we regret it. http://takimag.com/article/future_letter_from_a_socialist_to_president_trump_gavin_mcinnes/

A Bad Day for Preferred Narratives Noah Rothman Everything was going as planned at President Barack Obama's Thursday evening town hall on gun control when the unexpected occurred. A woman, a mother, a victim of sexual assault in college, someone who according to the overly simplistic center-left perspective should be sympathetic both to Democrats and stricter gun laws, stood up and defended firearm ownership. It was a moment that demonstrated the fragility of narratives and stereotyping. It exposed just how rapidly worldviews predicated on a naïve and one-dimensional typecasting - a trap into which political demographers easily fall - can...

Senator Marco Rubio's recent support for an Article V Convention of the States is causing some folks heartburn. Noah Rothman at Commentary calls Rubio's support for a Convention of the States a Pander for the Ages. Rather than taking Rubio at his word and assuming this is a principled stand, Rothman argues that Rubio's support for the Convention of the States is a politically strategic rouse. As a political maneuver, Rubio’s latest is a deft one. Hardened by influential talk show hosts who have spent months inveighing against his support of a 2013 immigration reform bill, Rubio will need to...

We just wanted to do something fun that everyone could enjoy. My friend C4 has a beautiful voice so we made use of her God given talent:)

Lisa's offhand comment about the size of a plane takes on a whole new meaning, leading to a lot of laughter, and stirring from Karl.

You don’t have to agree with all or even most of Senator Rand Paul’s brand of libertarianism to concede that his candidacy once held so much promise. Paul entered the race buoyed by what seemed like a burgeoning libertarian moment. From the conduct of the global war on terrorism to massive comprehensive reform packages, American political culture had grown suspicious of the federal government’s ability to avert the unforeseen negative consequences of its good intentions. For several weeks in the summer of 2014, Rand Paul led a field of nine prospective Republican presidential candidates in the polls. It was a...

Don't know if this has been seen before. These Egyrtian commentators don't think to highly of Obama. They laugh at him, his body, his wife and how no one can trust him.

28 Shares A Every day seems to bring an escalation of the Russian military involvement in Syria. First it was airstrikes from more than 30 warplanes that Russia has positioned in Syria. Now it’s cruise missile strikes from warships in the Caspian Sea. Soon, if hints from Moscow are to be believed, Russian “volunteers” — a.k.a. “Little Green Men” — will be showing up in Syria to engage in ground combat alongside Iranian and Assad forces. President Obama can pretend that this is no big deal and that Russia is getting sucked into a quagmire, but this is a serious...

In one short sentence, [Amira Hass] neatly encapsulates the moral rot at the heart of the modern multicultural left: “We don’t rate suffering.” .... No one has the right to compare in any way the suffering of peoples and human beings, or to quantify it, rank it, calculate it … We don’t quantify. We don’t rate suffering. This, in a nutshell, is the moral abdication at the heart of today’s multicultural left: In its ostensibly noble desire to ensure that no suffering goes unnoticed or unattended, it has abandoned the very essence of morality – the ability to draw distinctions,...

It was particularly revealing when David Axelrod explained that, of all his accomplishments in Barack Obama’s White House, he was proudest of the fact that “there hasn’t been a major scandal.” The qualifier “major” lays the burden on shoulders of the press to define what constitutes a serious scandal, and political media had thus far reliably covered the administration’s ethical lapses as merely the peculiar obsessions of addlebrained conservatives. Surely, much of the political establishment in Washington nodded along with Axelrod as he patted himself on the back. A mere seven months later, though, and it is clear now that...

A well-intentioned article by Noah Rothman in Commentary Magazine offers that Donald Trump’s supporters are the right wing’s version of Obama’s vacuous “Hope and Change” acolytes. Says Rothman: “Trump is the right’s Obama, insofar as his policy preferences are ill-defined, pliable, and reflective of whatever the audience immediately before him wants them to be.” Such comparisons short-change Trump’s supporters.

In a compelling column, George Will – who knows a thing or two about conservatism – makes the conservative case against Donald Trump. Mr. Will refers to Trump as an “unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate” who is coarsening our civic life. He labels Trump “a counterfeit Republican and no conservative.” And he argues that Trump is an affront to anyone devoted to the legacy of William F. Buckley, Jr., the founder of National Review and a giant in American conservatism. Just as Buckley excommunicated the John Birch Society from the conservative movement in the 1960s, so should conservatives today...

Earlier this week I referred to Hillary Clinton’s “tangle of corruption.” It turns out I was being generous. As the politically explosive story in the New York Times demonstrates, the depths of the Clintons’ corruption and avarice is stunning. The facts in the Times story are utterly damning and prima facie evidence of a conflict of interest. If foreign governments, including adversarial ones like Russia, paid the Clinton Foundation and/or Bill Clinton huge sums of money, they assured themselves favorable treatment. (Mr. Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that...

[snip]I understand what you are saying, but fortunately the corruption of leadership does not go as deep as you fear. It remains something to worry about, but it is not the immediate problem. The immediate objective is not to establish a democratic republic in Iraq, or even to rule Iraq; it is to eradicate the Caliphate. ISIS is a self-proclaimed mortal enemy of the West in general and the United States in particular. If they survive we will have to fight them. They will not choose to fight until they believe they are strong enough to work the Will...

Sympathy for the Devil in all its variations represents the Boomers acme and epitaph. [Embedded Video: The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil (Live) - OFFICIAL ] I last saw the Stones perform this at Altamont, where it was accompanied by pool cue bludgeoning and a lethal stabbing. I sort of last my taste for it after that concert, but I check in on variations from the Stones' endless tours from time to time. More and more the penultimate line, "Just as every cop is a criminal / And all the sinners saints" seems to be prophetic of this...

YouTube Video The Oberlin College choir responds to the Christina Sommers controversy.