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On the question of entitlement reform, the good news is that you can’t believe a word that comes out of Trump’s mouth.

Donald Trump said Thursday that he meant exactly what he said when he called President Barack Obama the "founder of ISIS" and objected when a conservative radio show host tried to clarify the GOP nominee's position.

Americans are paying more attention to the debate over the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership as the general-election season kicks off, but are split on whether they support the trade deal, according to a new Morning Consult poll.

According to a statement at the city's web site, Fairfax, Virginia Mayor Mayor Richard "Scott" Silverthorne's resignation took effect at noon on Thursday. The resignation occurs a week after Silverthorne was arrested "for allegedly trying to exchange methamphetamine to undercover detectives in exchange for sex, city officials said Monday." The press, as has so often been the case in situations involving Democrats, has been very reluctant to report Silverthorne's party affiliation, either avoiding the tag entirely or delaying it until their stories' very late paragraphs.

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The desperate Trump shill has resorted to mafia-style threats.

Donald Trump is not going to quit the race. The Republican party is not going to push him off the ballot. He may have a brief surge in the polls at some point, because the first rule of politics is that all races tighten. Then again, maybe not. It could be that Trump's surge came and went during the final week of July and that the tightening period has already passed. But while we're talking about things that are not going to happen, understand this: Donald Trump is not going to win. Trump isn't just behind in the big battleground states. No, what should scare sense into any sophisticated Republicans is that Trump is clinging to bare leads in Utah, Kansas, and South Carolina. He's behind in Georgia. This is not a presidential race. It's The Poseidon Adventure. If Trump were any other figure, Republican party elites would be making cold-blooded calculations about pulling the plug. //

Three people with tangential connections to Bill and Hillary Clinton have died in unusual circumstances over the last few weeks, sparking a renewed interested in the so-called “body count” of people who allegedly got in the way of the “Clinton machine.” And even WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange appeared to suggest Tuesday that recently murdered DNC […]

Donald Trump's sinking polls, unending attacks and public blunders have the GOP reconsidering its strategy for November

Donald Trump's infrastructure plan seems to be the same as Paul Krugman's

I was once called a “cracker” by a member of the Nation of Islam. It was in the mid-1980s and I was driving through Washington, D.C., in the kind of neighborhood that conservatives call dangerous and liberals call “transitioning.” I saw a member of the Nation of Islam, bow tie and all, on the corner hawking copies of The Final Call, the NOI’s newspaper. I rolled down the window and asked for a copy. That’s when he hit me with it: “F*ck off, cracker.” I thought of this gentleman fondly when I was reading the new book, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies by Polish scholar Ryszard Legutko. The book is an intense read that argues that liberal democracies are succumbing to a utopian ideal where individuality and eccentricity might eventually be banned. As liberals push us towards a monoculture where there is no dissent, no gender, and no conflict, the unique and the great will eventually cease to exist. No more offbeat weirdoes, eccentric crazies, or cults. No more Nation of Islam there to call me a cracker. No more of the self-made and inspired figures of the past: Duke Ellington, Hunter Thompson, Annie Leibowitz. Legutko’s thesis is that liberal democracies have something in common with communism: the sense that time is inexorably moving towards a kind of human utopia, and that progressive bureaucrats must make sure it succeeds. Legutko first observed this after the fall of communism. Thinking that communist bureaucrats would have difficulty adjusting to Western democracy, he was surprised when the former Marxists smoothly adapted — indeed, thrived — in a system of liberal democracy. It was the hard-core anti-communists who couldn’t quite fit into the new system. They were unable to untether themselves from their faith, culture, and traditions. Both communism and liberal democracy call for people to become New Men by jettisoning their old faith, customs, arts, literature, and traditions. Thus a Polish anti-communist goes from being told by communists that he has to abandon his old concepts of faith and family to become a member of the larger State, only to come to America after the fall of the Berlin Wall and be told he has to forego those same beliefs for the sake of the sexual revolution and the bureaucratic welfare state. Both systems believe that societies are moving towards a certain ideal state, and to stand against that is to violate not just the law but human happiness itself. Legutko compares the two: “Societies — as the supporters of the two regimes are never tired of repeating — are not only changing and developing according to a linear pattern but also improving, and the most convincing evidence of the improvement, they add, is the rise of communism and liberal democracy. And even if a society does not become better at each stage and in each place, it should continue improving given the inherent human desire to which both regimes claim those found the most satisfactory response.” Legutko argues that, of course, there are huge differences between communism and liberal democracy — liberal democracy is obviously a system that allows for greater freedom. He appreciates that in a free society people are able to enjoy the arts, books, and pop culture that they want. Our medical system is superior. We don’t suffer from famines. Yet Legutko argues that with so much freedom has come a kind of flattening of taste and the hard work of creating original art. We’ve witnessed the a slow and steady debasement of our politics and popular culture — see, for example, those “man on the street” interviews where Americans can’t name who won the Revolutionary War. Enter the unelected bureaucrats who appoint themselves to steer the ship; in other words, we’re liberals and we’re here to help. Inspired by the idea that to be against them is to be “on the wrong side of history,” both communism and contemporary liberalism demand absolute submission to the progressive plan. All resistance, no matter how grounded in genuine belief or natural law, must be quashed. Thus in America came the monochromatic washing of a country that once could boast not only crazies like Scientologists and Louis Farrakhan, but creative and unusual icons like Norman Mailer, Georgia O’Keefe, Baptists, Hindus, dry counties, John Courtney Murray, Christian bakers, orthodox Jews, accents, and punk rockers. The eccentric and the oddball, as well as the truly great, are increasingly less able to thrive. As Legutko observes, we have a monoculture filled with people whose “loutish manners and coarse language did not have their origin in communism, but, as many found astonishing, in the patterns, or rather anti-patterns that developed in Western liberal democracies.” The revolution didn’t devour its children; progressive-minded bureaucrats did. — Mark Judge writes for Acculturated, where this piece originally appeared. It is reprinted with permission.

Coughing fits. Strange reactions to surprises. No press conferences for almost a year. And some of the strangest facial expressions ever made. Is Hillary Cli...

On Wednesday night, Fox News' Sean Hannity, apparently desperate to begin casting blame for Donald Trump’s November election loss in August, called out conservatives unwilling to vote for Donald Trump. “Get my point, all you stubborn Republicans?” Hannity ranted.

It's no secret that the mainstream media is a giant liberal cesspool willing to do and say anything to make sure their Democrat candidate gets elected. In this case it's Hillary Clinton.

Election 2016: Judicial Watch, which has been doing all the heavy lifting to expose the extent of Hillary Clinton's scandalous use of a private email account while secretary of state, released dozens of emails on Tuesday that shouldn't exist. For more than a year, Clinton insisted that

The great American humorists have something in common: hatred. H. L. Mencken and Mark Twain both could be uproariously funny and charming — and Twain could be tender from time to time, though Mencken could not or would not — but at the bottom of each man’s deep well of humor was a brackish and sour reserve of hatred, for this country, for its institutions, and for its people. Neither man could forgive Americans for being provincial, backward, bigoted, anti-intellectual, floridly religious, or for any of the other real or imagined defects located in the American character. Historical context matters, of course. As Edmund Burke said, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” Twain was born in 1835, and there was much that was detestable in the America of Tom Sawyer. Mencken, at the age of nine, read Huckleberry Finn and experienced a literary and intellectual awakening — “the most stupendous event in my life,” he called it — and followed a similar path. Both men were cranks: Twain with his premonitions and parapsychology, Mencken with his “Prejudices” and his evangelical atheism. He might have been referring to himself when he wrote: “There are men so philosophical that they can see humor in their own toothaches. But there has never lived a man so philosophical that he could see the toothache in his own humor.” The debunking mentality is prevalent in both men’s writing, a genuine fervor to knock the United States and its people down a peg or two. For Twain, America was slavery and the oppression of African Americans. For Mencken, the representative American experience was the Scopes trial, with its greasy Christian fundamentalists and arguments designed to appeal to the “prehensile moron,” his description of the typical American farmer. The debunking mind is typical of the American Left, which feels itself compelled to rewrite every episode in history in such a way as to put black hats on the heads of any and all American heroes: Jefferson? Slave-owning rapist. Lincoln? Not really all that enlightened on race. Saving the world from the Nazis? Sure, but what about the internment of the Japanese? Etc. “It was wonderful to find America,” Twain wrote. “But it would have been more wonderful to miss it.” In high school, I had a very left-wing American history teacher who was a teachers’-union activist (a very lonely position in Lubbock, Texas, where the existence of such unions was hardly acknowledged) for whom the entirety of the great American story was slavery, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, the Great Depression, and the momentary heroism of the New Deal (we were not far from New Deal, Texas), with the great arc of American history concluding on the steps of Central High School in Little Rock on September 23, 1957. It was, for reasons that remain mysterious to me, very important to her — plainly urgent to her — that the American story be one of disappointment, betrayal, and falling short of our founding ideals. Much of this phenomenon isn’t about how one sees society but how one sees one’s self. Literary men invent literary characters, and very often the first and most important literary character a writer invents is himself. Samuel Clemens cared a great deal more about money and the friendship of titled nobility than Mark Twain ever would, and Mencken was in real life subject to the sort of crude superstitions and pseudoscience that Mencken the public figure would have mocked. The great modern example of this was Molly Ivins, a California native raised in a mansion in the tony Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, who liked to take her private-school friends sailing on her oil-executive father’s yacht, who somehow managed to acquire a ridiculous “Texas” accent found nowhere in Texas and reinvent herself as a backporch-sittin’ champion of the common man, a redneck liberal. The chief interest of Molly Ivins’s writing about Texas is that it demonstrates how little she actually understood the state, or the Union to which it belongs. As with Twain and Mencken, Ivins’s America would always be backward and corrupt, with Washington run by bribe-paying lobbyists (a lazy writer, she inevitably referred to them as “lobsters” — having thought that funny once, she made a habit of it) and a motley collection of fools and miscreants either too feeble or too greedy to do the right thing, defined as whatever was moving Molly Ivins at any particular moment. Each candidate’s partisans make the argument that while their own candidate might be awful, the other candidate is literally akin to Adolf Hitler. Mencken lived in horror of the American people, “who put the Hon. Warren Gamaliel Harding beside Friedrich Barbarossa and Charlemagne, and hold the Supreme Court to be directly inspired by the Holy Spirit, and belong ardently to every Rotary Club, Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Saloon League, and choke with emotion when the band plays ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’” Much of that horror was imaginary, and still is. But we must have horror, especially in politics. How else to justify present and familiar horror except but by reference to a greater horror? In this year’s election, each candidate’s partisans already have been reduced to making the argument that while their own candidate might be awful, the other candidate is literally akin to Adolf Hitler. Yesterday, I heard both from Clinton supporters and Trump supporters that the other one would usher in Third Reich U.S.A. “Don’t tell yourself that it can’t happen here,” one wrote. A nation needs its Twains and Menckens. (We could have got by without Molly Ivins.) The excrement and sentimentality piles up high and thick in a democratic society, and it’s sometimes easier to burn it away rather than try to shovel it. But they are only counterpoints: They cannot be the leading voice, or the dominant spirit of the age. That is because this is a republic, and in a republic, a politics based on one half of the population hating the other half is a politics that loses even if it wins. The same holds true for one that relies on half of us seeing the other half as useless, wicked, moronic, deluded, or “prehensile morons.” (I know, I know, and you can save your keystrokes: I myself am not running for office.) If you happen to be Mark Twain, that sort of thing is good for a laugh, and maybe for more than a laugh. But it isn’t enough. “We must not be enemies,” President Lincoln declared, and he saw the republic through a good deal worse than weak GDP growth and the sack of a Libyan consulate. The better angels of our nature have not deserted us. It is closer to the truth that we have failed them, and the impossible situation of 2016 — a choice between two kinds of corrupt, self-serving megalomaniacs — is only the lesion that denotes a deeper infection. There is no national vice-principal’s office or confessional into which we can drag ourselves and shame-facedly admit that we messed up, say that we’re very sorry, and promise to do better next time. But we must nonetheless admit that we messed up, say that we’re very sorry, and promise to do better next time. And there will be a next time, irrespective of the hysterical ninnies who insist that if this election does not go their way, then this is the end of the nation. There’s work in that. Hating the Other One and all affiliated partisans will not do. Between the caustic skepticism of H. L. Mencken and the mass-produced, sentimental, plastic-wrapped patriotism of the American civil religion in its foursquare expression there exists space for serious, reflective, clear-eyed citizenship that accounts for both the lovely and the unlovely, for both Bull Connor and the patriots at Valley Forge. Election Day is November 8. There are 364 other days in the year, and we owe them a civic duty, too, a larger and more significant one. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent.

Pastor Mahin Mousapour and Bundestag member Erika Steinbach called for much stronger sanctions for Muslims who abuse Christians in Germany.

As you may have heard, in the week leading up to the FBI's decision to let Hillary Clinton off the hook, Bill Clinton had a secret meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch. Lynch later claimed they discussed golf and their grandchildren but people with brains know better. Even FBI insiders...

A U.S. appeals court on Wednesday issued a stay of a recent ruling that struck down parts of Wisconsin's voter ID law, the Justice Department announced. The law had required all voters to show photo IDs at polls. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit issued the stay of a recent ruling by Judge Lynn Adelman in Frank v. Walker after the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Law Center for Homelessness and Poverty asked for the injunction in June. The court concluded both that the district court's decision is likely to be reversed on appeal and that disruption of the state's electoral system in the interim will cause irreparable injury, the DOJ said in a statement. We are pleased with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit's decision to grant our motion for stay in Wisconsin's voter ID case, Attorney General Brad Schimel said. I will continue to represent the State of Wisconsin and defend the rule of law until the case is resolved.

Will Smith Hopes America Can 'Cleanse' Itself of Trump Supporters

A millennial member of a focus group has angrily objected to the contents of a television programme because it portrayed millennials as coddled, easily offended and thin-skinned. The feedback for CBS’ new comedy series The Great Indoors was recounted by its executive producer Mike Gibbons at a Television Critics Association panel this week and, in further vindication, outraged a millennial member of the press.

Elizabeth Warren recently tried to defend Hillary and attack Trump on Twitter but he plan backfired. Warren angered feminists and other social justice warriors by calling Hillary a girl. Twitchy reported: Feminists! Are you going to let Elizabeth Warren get away with this blatant sexism?...

Hillary Clinton has rolled out a long list of Republicans supporting her candidacy for president, but the names are not likely to impress the mass of rank-and-rile GOP voters and independents attracted to Donald Trump’s populist message or traditional conservatism. Most are hardly household names, and many have backgrounds supporting progressive policies vigorously enough that they may be fairly labeled as RINOs — Republicans in Name Only. Perhaps the most prominent name on the list was such a RINO that he is not even, technically, a Republican anymore — former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire news executive never was much of a Republican. He assumed the party label when he saw it as his best path to succeed Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and then ditched it when was no longer necessary. As an independent, Bloomberg formed a group committed to strict gun control. He has donated tens of billions to putting coal workers out of business alongside radical environmentalists.

On Thursday, US President Barack Obama proclaimed that Israel was now a supporter of his nuclear deal with Iran, but on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu corrected him, saying that Israel is more worried about the deal than ever.

While the liberal “Big Three” networks were up in arms Wednesday evening over the a comment Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump made about “second amendment people” in reference to stopping Hillary Clinton, they were strangely silent then when a Democratic Senate candidate from Ohio was caught celebrated the death of Justice Antonin Scalia. “And my friends, a lot of average citizens out there don’t understand the importance of that court,” Ted Strickland declared during an AFL-CIO event, “I mean, the death of Scalia saved labor from a terrible decision.”