#351151
"He's certainly a smart guy, but there's also a temperament issue."
#351152
Ted Cruz is out with another TV ad today, explaining how Donald Trump is lying about him with regard to TPA and TPP. It goes on to point out how Trump funded the Gang of 8 and had a judgment agains…
#351153
Trump’s favorite shoe-shine boy Bill O’Reilly had a melt down today when he was challenged to explain why he was giving so much coverage to Trump. He actually starts screaming and yelli…
#351154
Ted Cruz is out with a new TV ad over the weekend showing how Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are really just two sides to the same coin: This is a good ad. It’s simple to understand and exp…
#351155
Mack's mission is to “find true constitutional sheriffs who will tell the federal government, ‘You’re not going to abuse citizens anymore.'”
#351156
Share on Facebook 1 1 SHARES Lately I’ve been leaning hard on the 538 projections to see where we’re at with the Republican nomination. After a good stretch he’s close enough that uncommitted delegates could get him over the top. But he’s projected to take a near sweep in Indiana. Will he perform? 30 of Indiana’s delegates are bound statewide, a relatively large portion. 27 | Read More »
#351157
Claim to be a victim of a hate crime and today's uber-progressive, touchy-feely society will run to your doorstep to offer its support.
#351158
This is why Donald Trump is happening to America.
#351159
High prices and chronic food shortages have left many Venezuelans struggling to put food on their tables. Some families are skipping meals and relying more on starch foods to survive.
Yunni Perez (R) poses for a picture next to her relatives and the food they have at their home in Caracas, Venezuela, April 22, 2016.
Yunni Perez (R) poses for a picture next to her relatives and the food they have at their home in Caracas, Venezuela, April 22, 2016.
#351160
HIGH ENERGY Channel - https://goo.gl/lVZX74 Back-Up Channel - https://goo.gl/dyt6yZ 2nd Back-Up Channel - https://goo.gl/ANIA7b Become A Patron - https://goo...
#351161
#351162
Trump won New Hampshire big, but his delegates may be denied any of the coveted convention committee slots.
#351163
HOUSTON, Texas – Today, Ted Cruz announced a strong team of Pro-Lifers for Cruz leaders in the state of Indiana who are actively recruiting people who support life across the Hoosier state. These leadership team members join the more than 23,000 Pro-Lifers for Cruz nationwide who have joined the coalition and stood up for life in support of Ted Cruz. “I …
#351164
The hard reality of Republican chances this fall.
#351165
The Twitter account from the cheeto-faced casino charlatan continues to bring us blessings, and today’s edition has to do with Newtown, and how much the Donald loved Obama’s speech abou…
#351166
There is something a bit unsettling about watching violent, foul-mouthed protesters waving the Mexican flag on American soil.
#351167
With Donald Trump heading toward what more and more Republicans believe will be victory in the GOP primaries, an increasing number of party figures — none fans of Trump originally — are making their peace with the idea of Trump as their nominee. Some are even working out an argument, at least in their own minds, that Trump has a plausible chance to defeat Hillary Clinton in a general election.
There have been brief establishment flirtations with Trump in the past. But those flirtations ended when Trump said something outrageous or the campaign took some (brief) anti-Trump turn, most recently when Ted Cruz won the Wisconsin primary on April 5. Now, with Trump's five-for-five victories in the Northeast last Tuesday, some establishment members are doing more than flirting with the idea of Trump. They're accepting it.
What follows won't include names, but is based on private conversations with several stalwart Republicans, including a former top party official, former members of Congress who have been active in the campaign, a member of the party's foreign-policy establishment, two former managers of GOP presidential campaigns, and more. In addition, several other influential Republicans, like Sens. Bob Corker and John Cornyn, along with former House Speaker John Boehner, have spoken out publicly in a somewhat Trump-friendly way recently.
#351168
For more memes and videos, visit God Emperor Trump on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/GodEmperorTrump
#351169
Americans don't agree on much in politics these days, but a new poll finds broad majorities in agreement that the front-runners for the Republican and Democratic nominations for president will wind up the winners in the end.
#351171
ESPN Erases Sports History: Network Edits Schilling’s ‘Bloody Sock’ Game Out of Red Sox Versus Yankees Documentary
#351172
Democrat Hillary Clinton's campaign and allied groups encourage and often pay for these kinds of so-called "protests." Note they are holding signs that say, ...
#351173
Well, I read Donald Trump’s foreign-policy speech from last Wednesday.
I tried to be impartial in reading it; I’m a Cruz supporter, but I’m also a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and reading and responding to speeches like this is my job.
Mr. Trump sounded a lot of the same themes as Barack Obama. Overall, it was thin gruel. Certainly there was nothing close to the kind of global strategy which, at the beginning of the speech, Mr. Trump rightly said was necessary.
Mr. Trump opposes the defense cuts of the last few years. That is a good thing, but he didn’t say he would reverse the cuts. If he’s just arguing for more defense spending, but not for restoring the entire trillion dollars that was removed from the budget in 2011, he is doing no more than Barack Obama has done.
Mr. Trump also came out in favor of modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal, which was another plus. On the other hand, he also said at the end of the speech that there was “too much destruction out there, too many destructive weapons. The power of weaponry is the single biggest problem that we have in the world today.” I’m not sure how those two things fit together, and I doubt Mr. Trump is either; the last line seemed like a throwaway, and again was reminiscent of President Obama. The truth is that the “biggest single problem we have in the world today” is that the United States doesn’t have enough destructive weapons, or enough men to use the ones it has.
The only other defense programs Mr. Trump specifically mentioned were “3-D printing, artificial intelligence, and cyberwarfare.” That sounds like he has been deceived into believing that there is some technological miracle which can make up for the fact that, for example, the Navy is smaller than it has been in a hundred years and the Army is shrinking to pre-World War II levels.
The Army Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, recently testified that the United States is “outgunned, outmanned, and outranged” by the Russians in Eastern Europe. He’s right. Russian ready forces outnumber NATO forces, on average, 5–1 in men, armor, attack helicopters, and other important capabilities. If the Russians marched on the Baltic countries, they could be in Riga or Talinn within a few days. We’re not going to stop them, and therefore can’t deter them, with 3-D printing.
Speaking of the Russians, Mr. Trump said that he would “find out” whether the Russians would be “reasonable.” I can put Mr. Trump’s doubts to rest right now: Vladimir Putin will quite rationally and relentlessly continue to use Russian power to advance Russian interests to the detriment of the United States. Mr. Trump promised to have a summit with Putin, just as President Obama did, but that won’t change anything. Putin is not suddenly going to believe that a strong NATO is a good thing, that the rights of our Baltic allies should be respected, that the Assad regime in Syria should be removed just because it has committed genocide, that Russia’s partnership with Iran is mistake, or that the fall of the Soviet Union was actually not, in Putin’s own words, the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Mr. Trump promised to defeat ISIS and said that “their days were numbered” but declined to say how he would to it, on the grounds that it was important to be “unpredictable.” That was an obvious evasion of his responsibilities both to plan and communicate his plans to the American people. Of course the United States should not tip its hands as to particular operations, but Mr. Trump’s failure to lay out the basics of a successful strategy suggests that he either does not know what to do or is not prepared to do it. What we should do to defeat ISIS is, in its basic outlines, rather simple.
Again, the similarity to President Obama’s lack of leadership is striking.
Mr. Trump again insisted that he was “totally against the war in Iraq, very proudly.” That is not true. In September of 2002, Howard Stern asked him if he supported the war, which was then in progress; Mr. Trump replied, “I guess so.” Earlier, in his 2000 book “The America We Deserve”, he wrote more fully about Iraq:
Consider Iraq. After each pounding from U.S. warplanes, Iraq has dusted itself off and gone right back to work developing a nuclear arsenal. Six years of tough talk and U.S. fireworks in Baghdad have done little to slow Iraq’s crash program to become a nuclear power. They’ve got missiles capable of flying nine hundred kilometers—more than enough to reach Tel Aviv. They’ve got enriched uranium. All they need is the material for nuclear fission to complete the job, and, according to the Rumsfeld report, we don’t even know for sure if they’ve laid their hands on that yet. That’s what our last aerial assault on Iraq in 1999 was about…We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons. I’m no warmonger. But the fact is, if we decide a strike against Iraq is necessary, it is madness not to carry the mission to its conclusion. When we don’t, we have the worst of all worlds: Iraq remains a threat, and now has more incentive than ever to attack us.
If Mr. Trump was “totally” and “proudly” against the invasion of Iraq, he had a strange way of saying so.
Mr. Trump continued his attack on America’s allies, saying that they have not contributed enough to their own defense, that America has spent “trillions building up our military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia,” and that if the allies don’t do more, he “would be prepared to let these countries defend themselves.”
First, the United States has most definitely not been “building up its military to provide a strong defense for Europe and Asia.” As Mr. Trump said earlier in the same speech, America has in fact been cutting its defense budget, and the collective defense for Europe and Asia is weak, which is why the Russians and Chinese have been so provocative.
Second, Mr. Trump again showed that he does not understand the purpose of the European and Asian alliances. They are not just about defending the democracies in those regions; their object is collective defense of common interests: stability, freedom of trade and travel, and defense of democratic homelands, including America’s homeland. The alliances were negotiated 60 years ago precisely because they are the easiest, cheapest, and most certain way of achieving these common goals with the lowest risk of escalating aggression and armed conflict.
Mr. Trump thinks he can play chicken with the allies, and that they will have no choice but to continue the alliances on our terms. That is not true; the allies, and particularly the more powerful ones like Germany and Japan, have the alternative of cutting their own deals with the aggressors and leaving the United States, and the smaller countries we are pledged to defend, on their own. Lest that seem too farfetched, it is precisely what Mr. Trump himself hinted at when he proposed a summit with the Russians to determine whether they would be “reasonable”. Mr. Trump’s approach is music to the Kremlin’s ears; there is a reason why the Kremlin is all but openly supporting Mr. Trump’s nomination.
It is beyond me how men like Mr. Trump and President Obama can believe it is courageous, beneficial, or a sign of their unique genius, to play up to aggressive authoritarians, whose primary target is the United States, while showing continued disrespect for those countries that have, however imperfectly, joined their fortunes to ours.
Here is what, in the main, Mr. Trump had to say about China’s aggression in its near seas:
Fixing our relations with China is another important step — and really toward creating an even more prosperous period of time. China respects strength and by letting them take advantage of us economically, which they are doing like never before, we have lost all of their respect.
We have a massive trade deficit with China, a deficit that we have to find a way quickly, and I mean quickly, to balance. A strong and smart America is an America that will find a better friend in China, better than we have right now. Look at what China is doing in the South China Sea. They’re not supposed to be doing it.
China is not a friend now, and will not be a “better friend” in the future as long as it is run by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Chinese under the CCP are at best a competitor and prospective adversary, and there is a significant possibility they will become an enemy unless they are deterred from their ambitions to regional hegemony. While economic power is one tool that can be used to deter them, it will take hard power and effective diplomacy over time to preserve the peace while protecting America’s interests in the Western Pacific.
The fact that Mr. Trump views America’s relationship with China almost exclusively through an economic lens, while understandable for a businessman, is discouragingly naïve. Balancing the trade deficit with China, even if it were achievable, will not change the CCP’s calculus regarding the South China Sea, where they are systematically building a military infrastructure to support their claims of absolute sovereignty and inhibit the rights of other countries, including the United States, to operate freely.
It is encouraging, however, that Mr. Trump realizes “they’re not supposed to be doing” that.
***
In one of the better parts of his speech, Mr. Trump spoke about the need to update America’s Cold War global strategy to the needs of modern times. The lack of strategic purpose is indeed at the heart of the foreign policy failures in the last twenty years.
But Mr. Trump’s speech contained no strategy. He spoke about “putting America first” and the need for “stability”, in much the same way that President Obama has talked about “international cooperation” and President Bush stressed the value of freedom. All of that is fine, but bromides do not constitute a strategy.
Since the end of World War II, the United States has defended its interests by moving proactively to deter conflict at an early stage; to that end, America has assumed and exercised world leadership, built and nurtured alliances, and maintained robust tools of power. That was the strategy which won the Cold War during the Reagan years. At the beginning of Mr. Trump’s speech, he celebrated that victory; but nothing in the remarks that followed – in fact, nothing in Mr. Trump’s campaign so far — shows that he appreciates how the victory was achieved or what it will take to keep America safe in the perilous years ahead.
#351174
There is much talk about the chaos of this political season. Regardless of who you support and why, this season is definitely "off-script." Many people a
#351175
George Will went nuclear last Friday. Paul Mirengoff pointed out on Sunday that such may be a bit overwrought. This morning Jim Geraghty declared the cur