‘The woman is a disaster!’: Camille Paglia on Hillary Clinton

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America Is at Its Most Perilous Crossroads Since World War II

ROGER L SIMON 

https://pjmedia.com/

October 28, 2016

Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks with senior aide Huma Abedin aboard her campaign plane at Westchester County Airport in White Plains, N.Y., Friday, Oct. 28, 2016, before traveling to Iowa for rallies. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

To say that the USA is at its most dangerous crossroads since World War II might sound overheated, if it were not so obviously true.

Our country is about to (or was about to—we'll see) elect a woman president who, to a great many of us, possibly a majority, is indisputably a criminal and about to draw our federal government into nonstop litigation, more than likely leading to an impeachment trial at the least, weakening our already weakened state, blotting almost everything out and dominating all our attention and the airwaves for the next several years.

We didn't really need this latest round of email allegations emerging from the disgusting marriage and lifestyles of  Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner, what theNY Post calls a "Stroking Gun," to tell us that, but they have added a fillip, a certainje ne sais quoi to the political party formally known as "Democratic."

All this is happening with the Middle East falling apart, radical Islam spreading across all the continents save Antarctica (maybe even there), Russia and China expanding their influence, North Korea and Iran building their militaries and weaponry with impunity and the global economy in tatters (and that's not counting relatively local issues like the disintegration of Obamacare and the execrable condition of our inner cities).

And we have to listen to that appalling witch Hillary Clinton complaining that the FBI isn't being "transparent" enough.  This is the same woman who took her entire business as secretary of State offline and lied about it so many times it would take all the abacuses in China to count it up.

As Joseph Welch famously said to Joseph McCarthy, "Have you no sense of decency, sir?"  Only this time it's worse, because Hillary Clinton makes Joseph McCarthy seem like Mother Teresa.

Get ready, Mr. and Mrs. America, because we are headed for a "winter of our discontent" unlike any we have ever seen.  And there won't be a son of York or Lancaster to save us.  With a president already known to have lied through his teeth about the email server, we don't know where this is all going but we can be sure it's nowhere good.

At this moment the so-called "liberals" (how does that misnomer seem now?) are in a frenzy, lashing out because they are afraid her gangster-ladyship might actually lose.  They yowl on Twitter that Donald Trump or Kellyanne Conway were too gleeful about the sudden emergence of the new emails (who knew that even Julian Assange could be upstaged?), but, as her ladyship herself opined, "What difference at this point could it make?"

None, really.

The situation is clear—and should be even to the #NeverTrump crowd now, if they are honest with themselves (hard to do for all of us, I know, but try). Yes, we are at the crossroads. Whatever you think of Donald Trump is pretty much irrelevant.  Sometimes things get remarkably simple ... you know, those so-called moments of clarity, and we have one now:

If you consider yourself an American citizen who supports this country even a little bit—you don't have to be a flag-waving patriot for this—how do you feel about a criminal sitting in the oval office of the White House as president of the United States?

If that disturbs you,  you know what to do.  If that doesn't disturb you, well, anything goes or as some German once said, "The ends justify the means." Or was that really a German? Maybe it was John Podesta. Or Cheryl Mills. Or Huma Abedin. Or Hillary Clinton.  I'm getting confused here.

No, I guess it was Karl Marx, after all.  They just updated him—in ways that could make them millions of dollars, hundreds of millions.  I mean, who wants to spend the rest of your life scratching lice out of your beard in the British Museum?  Who wants to be a sucker when you can make the rest of us into suckers?

Had enough?  I have.

Let's save ourselves and put an end to it November 8.

Lessons from the Highway of Death

Elites’ impossible dreams often become dangerous realities for more vulnerable and distant ‘others.’

By Victor Davis Hanson — October 27, 2016

http://www.nationalreview.com/

Firefighters and paramedics tend to people who suffered minor injuries in a 20-car crash on Highway 99 near Bakersfield on Monday, Nov. 2, 2015. (Photo courtesy Kern County Fire Department)

California State Route 99 is the north-south highway that cuts through the great Central Valley. And it has changed little since the mid-1960s.

A half-century ago, when the state population was about 18 million — not nearly 40 million as it is today — the 99 used to be a high-speed, four-lane marvel. It was a crown jewel in California’s cutting-edge freeway system.

Not now.

The 99 was recently ranked by ValuePenguin (a private consumer research organization) as the deadliest major highway in the nation. Locals who live along its 400-plus miles often go to bed after seeing lurid TV news reports of nocturnal multi-car accidents. Then they wake up to Central Valley radio accounts of morning carnage on the 99.

The 99 is undergoing a $1 billion, multi-decade upgrade to increase its four lanes to six. Promises have been made to build off- and on-ramps in place of haphazard exits and entries from the old days of cross traffic.

In many of the most dangerous southern portions of the 99, huge semi trucks hog two lanes. Speeders weave in and out of traffic. They still try to drive 70 mph in the manner you could 50 years ago when traffic was less clogged. Text-messaging drivers are now even more dangerous than the intoxicated.

The 99 is emblematic of a state in psychological and material decline.

Running parallel to the southern portion of the 99 is an underused, subsidized Amtrak passenger rail line. Not far away is yet another rail corridor, where the state is plowing up some of its best farmland to build the first link of high-speed rail. That boondoggle’s projected price tag has soared from the original $33 billion to somewhere between $60 and $100 billion — without a single foot of track yet laid.

Californians are apparently too sophisticated to allot $10 billion or so to first ensure that the state has adequate north-south freeways. In addition to the 99, state residents must also contend with the equally primitive coastal Highway 101 and the now-overcrowded Interstate 5.

All societies in decline fixate on impossible postmodern dreams as a way of disguising their inability to address premodern problems.

Ensuring that California’s freeways were all six lanes, well-lit and safe would have been a gargantuan but practical task that could have been completed long ago and would have saved thousands of lives (though it would have required the admission that the mundane modern automobile was here to stay). Instead, cool bureaucrats and hip politicians preferred to blow money on visions of grandiose space-age rail.

The 99 also reminds the nation of California’s unique lessons about how to ruin a paradise: The more taxes are raised, the worse public service often becomes.

Currently, Californians pay among the highest sales, income, and gasoline taxes in the nation. Yet in return, the state’s decrepit transportation system in many national surveys rates nearly last. California public school test scores are likewise near the bottom of national rankings.

The state has become a pharaonic society of two classes. The coastal rich are exempt from financial worries over their high-tax dreams. And the subsidized poor in the state’s interior live out the real-life consequences. Meanwhile, the disrespected middle class, without either high incomes or state entitlements, is leaving the state in droves.

The 99 has become a neglected, poor person’s highway. California has far more residents receiving welfare than any other state, and it has among the highest poverty rates in the nation. Most of the state’s poorest counties are bisected by the 99. About a quarter of California’s inhabitants were not born in the United States. Many are still not U.S. citizens.

The result is a perfect storm that blows in daily over the 99.

The hazardous conditions of stretches of the highway and the 99’s enormous traffic volume are compounded by old and unsafe automobiles and trucks — and by California’s many inexperienced drivers, unfamiliar with U.S. driving etiquette and laws. The drivers of flatbed and pickup trucks on the 99 often do not tie down their loads.

The highway can often resemble a two-lane obstacle course. It takes only a single lost mattress, a bin of overturned peaches, or a motorcyclist failing to navigate between stalled cars to shut down the 99 — and with it the state’s north-south commerce.

The 99 offers a number of banal (and oft-forgotten) lessons handed down from our grandparents, who mapped out what once was the nation’s premier transportation system. 

Highways, along with dams, canals, and bridges, are the lifeblood of a state, a far more important priority than investing in transgendered restrooms or efforts to save the Delhi Sands flower-loving fly. 

Only measured, diverse and legal immigration, coupled with rapid assimilation and integration, can ensure that diversity is a strength.

The rich who can easily pay high taxes should not impose them on those who cannot.

Finally, the dreams of elites become quite dangerous realities when first tried out on more vulnerable and distant “others.”

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailingauthor@victorhanson.com. © 2016 Tribune Media Services, Inc.​​

Remembering Jack Chick: the Christian cartoonist who tried to save us from hell

Sam Thielman 

https://www.theguardian.com/

25 October 2016

Jack T. Chick, the cartoonist and evangelist, died on Sunday at the age of 92. It is probably safe to say that there was no one else like him in the world.

Karen Rockney, Chick’s secretary and friend of 45 years, confirmed his death by phone on Monday, saying she had last seen him the previous day. Chick, for weeks in poor health, had known he was close to the end, Rockney said.

“The last time I actually spoke to him was last Thursday,” she said. “We were there in his home. He didn’t have a lot to say; he knew he was going. There were several of us from Chick Publications who were there to share with him. He let us know he loved us all and would see us soon.”

Chick rarely gave interviews; Rockney declined to provide contact information for his widow, Susie Chick, or Fred Carter, Jack’s co-artist since 1972. Carter’s work graced the pages of Chick-written comics during the mid-1970s boom in Christian comics publishing, alongside titles from the former Archie Comics artist Al Hartley’s religious comics company, Spire. Carter also illustrated a line of comics featuring black characters – some of them his own stories, some reworked from previous Chick tracts in order to broaden the comics’ audience and better serve Chick’s all-important mission of evangelism.

To Americans who grew up in or adjacent to evangelical Christian communities in the 1970s and 80s, Chick’s harsh stories about the wages of sin were both inescapable and oddly inviting in the way of very few other methods of proselytizing. Often left in places known to attract sinners – on video games, public transportation or stacks of glossier comics – the little black-and-white books are instantly recognizable: about the size of a dollar bill, each cover with stark white title text over one half, a two-color illustration on the other half.

Jack Chick, controversial evangelical cartoonist, dies aged 92

 

Read more

This format, incidentally, is also the right size for a Tijuana bible, the slang name for the cheaply-produced depression-era pornographic comics starring cartoon characters such as Blondie and Popeye, which would have been in circulation when Chick was a boy. His innovation on the format outlasted the porn version by several decades, which surely pleased him.

Chick was married to his first wife, Lola Lynn, for 50 years; when she died, he married again, to Susie Chick. His only child, a daughter named Carol, died in 1998 after complications from surgery, Rockney said. Chick was not a Christian when he first met Lynn, Rockney told the Guardian, but his future in-laws insisted they listen to Charles E Fuller’s Old Fashioned Revival Hour together, and Chick adopted a charismatic form of Christianity that recast life’s difficulties in terms of a titanic struggle between ultimate good and absolute evil. That perspective would inform his work for the rest of his life.

A lot of people hated Jack Chick. He wrote furious screeds against Dungeons & Dragons, against Catholicism and against rock music; he waged a long and ultimately unsuccessful war on Halloween. If you were Jewish or Muslim or gay, Chick wanted you to be saved from the fires of hell and wrote a comic to tell you so.

At one time or another, Chick’s work was repudiated by his co-religionists, bookseller trade associations, and at least once by the government of Canada, which outlawed the distribution of a few of his comics as hate speech, according to an issue of the critic and New Yorker writer Daniel Raeburn’s magazine the Imp, devoted to Chick.

If Chick was troubled, it wasn’t by insincerity. Asked about Chick’s personal life, Rockney suggested a recent excerpt from the organization’s newsletter, Battle Cry: “He wrote about the witches that were sent to take his family out and how the Lord protected him,” Rockney recalled. “That’s recent. He just wrote that.” Chick befriended at least one of the witches, Rockney said.

The organization would throw parties – “banquets”, in her words – to celebrate milestones. In his last days, as he sat quietly surrounded by friends, Rockney said, they tried to ease his pain by reminding him of his hope of heaven. “I told him the next Chick Publications banquet is going to be with the Lord, and he got a big smile on his face,” she said.

Many underground and alternative comic artists admired him. In an interview last year, the cartoonist Daniel Clowes said that, as far as he was concerned, Chick deserved a place in the comics pantheon. “As a comics aficionado you don’t really think of those as being part of the official canon of effective comics,” he said. “And one day I sort of changed my mind on that. I thought, ‘These are really compelling and interesting and I’d rather read these than pretty much anything else published in 1985.’”

The prints of darkness

 

Read more

The revelation came after a Chick tracts bender, Clowes said: “[O]ne day I made a long trek out to a Christian bookstore in Queens where they had a rack where they sold them, and I bought every single one, which totaled I think $3. I think they were each 10 cents. And I went home and read them all in one sitting, and it was maybe the most devastating comics-reading experience I’ve ever had. I really felt like he’d almost won me over by the end. There’s really something to be said for that.”

Clowes drew his own parody of a Chick Tract, called Devil Doll, for the first issue of his own indie comics series, Eightball; other cartoonists including Jim Woodring and the celebrated underground cartoonist Robert Crumb mimicked Chick’s blunt storytelling style. At one point, a rumor circulated that Chick was in fact a pseudonym for Robert Crumb. (He wasn’t.)

By financial standards, the Chick Publications enterprise is successful – it has employed its small staff for nearly five decades – but in terms of pure saturation, it is a phenomenon. Raeburn called Chick “the most widely read theologian in human history”; if that is an exaggeration, it is a slight one. Four hundred million Chick tracts, sold in packets of 25 at just above cost, had been distributed in 1998 when Raeburn wrote that.

Rockney put the number closer to 1bn. “He was that very special, special person,” she said. “He sacrificed a lot to give what he gave to the world, and he’s one of the greatest reformers in the world.”

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/25/jack-chick-christian-comic-cartoonist-death

HILLARY VS. THE EDUCATION OF AMERICAN CHILDREN

What Clinton's proposed amnesty for illegal aliens would really do.

Michael Cutler

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

October 24, 2016

(Getty Images)

Two recurrent claims made by Hillary Clinton are that she will stand with Americans families against powerful interests and corporations and that she will increase spending on educating children to help them succeed.

These populist promises may resonate with many Americans.  However, as my mom used to say, “Actions speak louder than words.

Hillary Clinton's grandiose plans to provide unknown numbers of illegal aliens with lawful status would make her other promises impossible to keep.

During the last debate she stated that she would do whatever she needs to do so that workers will have good jobs with rising incomes.

However, for Hillary and the administration, American workers literally don't count.

Today tens of millions of working-age Americans have left the labor force and are not counted by the Labor Department when it  provides unemployment statistics.  In point of fact each month the United States admits more foreign workers than the number of new jobs that are created.

Legalizing millions of new foreign workers would serve to flood the labor pool with many more authorized workers providing unfair competition for beleaguered American workers, especially within the low income sector.  Under the principle of “Supply & Demand” flooding a market with a commodity drives down the value of that commodity.  Labor is not unlike any other commodity such as petroleum, steel or aluminum.

It is a bit ironic that during the third and final debate Hillary Clinton attacked Trump, alleging that he had used steel and aluminum that had been “dumped” in the United States by China.  Dumping is an economic crime when it involves dumping a large quantity of a commodity into the marketplace in order to artificially reduce the value of that commodity.  This is precisely what the open-border policies of the administration that Clinton promises to not only continue but expand, where the commodity of foreign labor is concerned.

I have written numerous articles about how Clinton's proposed massive amnesty program would undermine national security and the U.S. economy.

Two such articles were, “Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Would Irrevocably Undermine National Security” and “Hillary Clinton’s Immigration Goals Make Her Economic Promises Impossible to Achieve.”

What has not been considered or discussed by the media or politicians is the impact that Clinton's immigration policies would have on the ability of schools to teach children in America- the same children Hillary Clinton claims to be so concerned about.

If millions or, more likely, tens of millions of illegal aliens were suddenly granted lawful status, they would immediately have the absolute and unequivocal right to apply to have all of their minor children be lawfully admitted into the United States.  They would then be enrolled in school districts in virtually every state.

Under the hobbled U.S. economy, many cities and states are currently suffering from severe short-falls of revenue and struggling to provide education for the children who within those cities and states.

Families in Third World countries often have many children.  Although a significant number of illegal aliens who would benefit from Clinton's legalization program might not have minor children, it is likely that the number of kids who would ultimately be admitted into the United States because of her legalization program would exceed the number of heretofore aliens who would be placed on the pathway to United States citizenship. 

Additionally, these legalized aliens would likely go on to have more children in the United States, further increasing the school population and burdens placed on struggling schools around the United States.

This would be extremely costly and would result in over-crowded classrooms with many children, who are not fluent in the English language, requiring additional costly educational services.

In December 2007 the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published an important paper, “The Impact of Unauthorized Immigrants on the Budgets of State and Local Governments.”

The paper, that was published nearly ten years ago, estimated that there were 12 million illegal aliens present in the United States.

Today the news media and various government agencies claim that there are 11 million illegal aliens present in the United States even though, under the Obama administration, we have witnessed a succession of surges of illegal aliens flooding across the U.S./Mexican border and various government reports note that it is believed that each year approximately 500,000 nonimmigrant aliens who are admitted into the United States through ports of entry ultimately overstay their authorized period of admission or otherwise violate their terms of admission.

Prior to the enactment of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (IRCA) which, for the first time established a law that penalized employers who could be shown to have knowingly hired illegal aliens, also provided a “one time” amnesty program for the officially estimated population of roughly one million illegal aliens who were present in the United States.

Ultimately that amnesty program provided more than 3.5 million illegal aliens with lawful status.

Although the reason behind the extreme disparity between the originally estimated number of aliens who would “emerge from the shadows” was never determined, it is likely the consequence of a combination of two factors, underestimating the actual number of illegal aliens who were present in the United States and many aliens entering the United States long after the cutoff date and successfully defrauding the program by falsely claiming to have entered the United States prior to the established cutoff date.

A succession of GAO reports have found that immigration fraud is rampant within the immigration benefits program.  What is particularly disturbing about this fact is the finding of the 9/11 Commission that visa fraud and immigration benefit fraud were key to the ability of terrorists to enter the United States and embed themselves in the United States as they went about their preparation to launch deadly attacks.

While the report noted that it was difficult to quantify all of the costs attributable to the illegal alien population it did note that, “The tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to those immigrants.”

The CBO paper addressed the issue of the cost of education to cities and states.  Consider this excerpt that began on page 7:

Education

Education is the largest single expenditure in state and local budgets. Because state and local governments bear the primary fiscal and administrative responsibility of providing schooling from kindergarten through grade 12, they incur substantial costs to educate children who are unauthorized immigrants.  In 1982, the Supreme Court ruled that states may not exclude children from public education because of their immigration status.  Current estimates indicate that about 2 million school-age children (5 to 17 years old) in the United States are unauthorized immigrants; an additional 3 million children are U.S. citizens born to unauthorized immigrants.

According to the most recent population data released by the Census Bureau, as of July 2006, there were 53.3 million school-age children in the United States. Thus, children who are unauthorized immigrants represent almost 4 percent of the overall school-age population. Their numbers are growing quickly in some states, adding additional budgetary pressures.

The paper went on to report:

In terms of public education, unauthorized immigrants who are minors increase the overall number of students attending public schools, and they may also require more educational services than do native-born children because of a lack of proficiency in English. Analyses from several states indicate that the costs of educating students who did not speak English fluently were 20 percent to 40 percent higher than the costs incurred for native-born students.

Finally, school districts across the United States have found that the flood of unaccompanied minors from Central America has included within their ranks members of violent gangs such as MS-13.

My article, “President Obama: Accessory to the Crimes Committed By Illegal Aliens? The grim findings unveiled by a House congressional hearing” was predicated on a hearing conducted by the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security on April 19, 2016 on the topic, “The Real Victims of a Reckless and Lawless Immigration Policy: Families and Survivors Speak Out on the Real Cost of This Administration’s Policies.”

The prepared testimony of Sheriff Charles A. Jenkins of Frederick County, Maryland included this excerpt:

The criminal alien gang numbers are growing, and the serious crimes being committed are increasing. There is also a nexus between the deferred action on unaccompanied minors and the increases we are seeing in gang crimes. Statistics (2014-2015 stats were provided) and hard facts demonstrate the impact on public safety and the seriousness of the crimes committed by criminal alien gang members:

* There are over 75 active known validated transnational criminal gang members in Frederick County, many more suspected of gang affiliation. We also believe that MS-13 and 18th Street alien gangs are recruiting, locally, in our schools, in the region, and out of country.

The Sheriff went on to detail murders, rapes and assaults committed by these students who should not be present in the United States.  It must be noted that often the victims of the violence are members of the ethnic immigrant communities.

Our immigration laws were enacted to save American lives and American jobs.  Clinton's promise to make a mockery of those laws are anti-American.

 Tags: Education, Hillary, Left

Michael Cutler is a retired Senior Special Agent of the former INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) whose career spanned some 30 years. He served as an Immigration Inspector, Immigration Adjudications Officer and spent 26 years as an agent who rotated through all of the squads within the Investigations Branch. For half of his career he was assigned to the Drug Task Force. He has testified before well over a dozen congressional hearings, provided testimony to the 9/11 Commission as well as state legislative hearings around the United States and at trials where immigration is at issue. He hosts his radio show, “The Michael Cutler Hour,” on Friday evenings on BlogTalk Radio. His personal website is http://michaelcutler.net/.

NeverTrump Agonistes: Trump is the Only Pro-Life Choice

Supporting the GOP nominee is the only hope of saving innocent life

Laura Ingraham

October 20, 2016

http://www.lifezette.com/

Now that we are done with the presidential debates, with just a few weeks until Election Day, the choice for the country could not be more stark. Hillary Clinton promises to continue the economic and foreign policy path of Barack Obama, which has weakened our country and emboldened our enemies. By expanding government spending, forgiving student loan debt, granting amnesty to millions of illegals, raising taxes, continuing with Obamacare, Madam President would massively pile on debt to a nation already leveraged to the hilt.

As for Donald Trump, he will streamline government, cut taxes, incentivize businesses to bring assets back to the U.S., retire Obamacare, renegotiate bad trade deals, shut off illegal immigration, and begin a new, more pragmatic approach to foreign affairs. On those factors alone, he should be the obvious choice for anyone who thinks America is heading in the wrong direction.

Yet there are still some Republicans — including prominent figures such as Jeb Bush and John Kasich — who can still not bring themselves to live up to their pledge to support their party’s nominee. They cite not only his temperament but his “failure to show any capacity to learn about conservatism.”

They should have taken notice, however, that Trump, on stage in Las Vegas Wednesday, clearly demonstrated that he has really learned something significant about the issue of abortion. Killing babies, especially those in the latter stages of pregnancy — no matter how Mrs. Clinton tried to justify it — is evil.

For any Republican or independent who believes late-term abortion is a moral evil, these are the facts:

1.) Either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States

2.) If Hillary Clinton wins, she will support policies and judges that are absolutely horrific from a pro-life perspective

3.) The vast majority of Republicans — including pro-life Republicans — believe that Hillary Clinton must be kept out of office, and therefore they are working together as a coalition to block her and elect Donald Trump instead.

4.) A tiny minority of pundits claim to oppose Mrs. Clinton, but devote almost all their time and energy to attacking Donald Trump and his supporters

5.) By attacking Trump and his supporters, they make it more likely that Mrs. Clinton will win the White House

6.) By making it more likely that Mrs. Clinton will win the White House, they are making it more likely that Mrs. Clinton’s abortion regime will become U.S. law

Based on these facts, it seems logical to conclude that by constantly attacking Trump and his supporters, the NeverTrumpers are effectively advancing Mrs. Clinton’s abortion regime.

http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/nevertrump-agonistes-trump-pro-life-choice/

HILLARY'S ADVANTAGE: THE MEDIA; TRUMP'S ADVANTAGE: THE ISSUES

By Ann Coulter

http://www.anncoulter.com/

October 19, 2016

Say, does anyone remember when Trump was the lightweight with no "policy specifics"? I have an entire chapter in my book, In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome!, quoting media savants complaining about Trump's lack of "policy specifics," interspersed, by date, with his major policy speeches and papers.

At this point, the only "policy specific" Trump hasn't given us is which company will supply rebar for the wall.

But now, the media's entire campaign against Trump is to prevent him from talking about policy. They would rather talk about fat-shaming than trade, immigration and jobs.

Sometimes, it seems like Trump is cheating by taking the vastly more popular side of every issue.

The official GOP used to send its candidates out with ankle weights, a 75-pound backpack and blinders. But Trump didn't agree to take any staggeringly unpopular positions, however much the Business Roundtable loved them.

He's against amnesty, for building a wall, against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, for Social Security, against the Iraq War and for extreme vetting of Muslim immigrants.

That's why the media have to change the subject to something flashy that will capture the attention of the most down-market, easily fooled voters. Trump is a groper!

The media's interest in sex scandals goes back and forth, depending on their needs at the moment. When the last name of the perp is "Kennedy" or "Clinton," they're not interested. When it's "the Duke lacrosse team": Guilty.

The fact that a lacrosse team at an elite college had hired a couple of strippers, who -- THANK GOD ALMIGHTY -- turned out to be black, was all the evidence our media needed to conclude that the athletes had committed a gang-rape, based on centuries of entitlement.

By contrast, when former U.S. senator John Edwards was cheating on his dying wife -- while he was running for president, paying his mistress with campaign funds and lying to the American people about it, between lecturing us about morality with the unctuous sanctimony that passes for policy in the Democratic Party -- the media primly refused to cover it.

That is, until Edwards was out of the race, at which point the media refused to cover it because he wasn't a candidate. (You guys are the best! I love the media.)

For more than a year, the National Enquirer had the entire Edwards story to itself. Finally, its reporters chased Edwards into a hotel bathroom at 2:40 in the morning, after having caught him spending the evening with his mistress and their love-child at the Beverly Hilton.

At that moment, when the affair was plastered in photos all over the Enquirer, Los Angeles Times editor Tony Pierce emailed his bloggers, instructing them not to mention the "alleged affair," explaining, "We have decided not to cover the rumors or salacious speculations," since "the only source has been the National Enquirer" -- he might have added, "a vastly more interesting and accurate publication than the L.A. Times.”

A few years passed, and suddenly we were back to Duke lacrosse standards of proof. As a rule of thumb, the only sex stories our media believe are the false ones.

Emma Sulkowicz, or "Mattress Girl," claimed she had been raped by a fellow student at Columbia University and that college administrators refused to take action against her rapist.

Columbia, to refresh your memory, is the institution that invited Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak. University administrators are constantly changing mascot names and canceling traditional celebrations because some feminist yelps.

But, somehow, Mattress Girl's claim that administrators at Columbia turned a deaf ear to her brutal rape was completely believable to our media and political class. You could see the corporate recruiters lining up!

Among the many, many articles in The New York Times about brave Mattress Girl, art and culture writer Roberta Smith said her art project -- carrying a mattress around campus to symbolize the weight carried by rape victims -- raised "analogies" to Christ's Stations of the Cross (especially to writers at the Times, where not a minute goes by without their thinking about the Passion).

Mattress Girl made the Times' "Quotation of the Day" for this humdinger: "I've never felt more shoved under the rug in my life.”

Even as the charges were unraveling, easily fooled U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand brought Mattress Girl as her special guest to President Obama's State of the Union address. (If only Clinton had known it was possible to invite girls with mattresses to the State of the Union!)

After Mattress Girl had spent a couple of years accepting awards, her alleged rapist finally released her texts to him, both before and after the alleged rape.

Here are a few from before the alleged rape:

"f**k me in the butt”

"I love youuuu”

And here are a few after:

"I wanna see yoyououoyou”

"I love you Paul. Where are you?!?!?!?!”

Unlike Trump's secretly recorded hot-mic conversation 11 years ago, the Times never thought it worthwhile to quote any of Sulkowicz's messages to Paul -- much less on its front page, sans asterisks. The closest the Times came to acknowledging these texts was to delicately note that the two had "traded mutually affectionate messages.”

Continuing the media's winning streak, about the same time as Mattress Girl was sitting for her Smithsonian portrait, Rolling Stone's Sabrina Rubin Erdely was all over the news, reaping accolades for a story about a gang-rape at the University of Virginia even more preposterous than the Duke lacrosse case.

Sadly for the media, the victim wasn't black. But, on the other hand, the alleged perps were "frat boys." (As far as our media are concerned, the lowest circle of hell is reserved for "frat boys.”)

Erdely was the toast of the town ... until a few weeks later, when her story completely fell apart. Rolling Stone retracted the article, the Columbia Journalism Review investigated, and there are currently three defamation lawsuits proceeding against the magazine.

Now, the same people who brought us the Duke lacrosse case, Mattress Girl and the Rolling Stone abomination -- but who discreetly left John Edwards' sex scandal to the National Enquirer; Bill Clinton's serial sexual assaults to private litigant Paula Jones; and the Kennedy family's whoring to investigative journalists Seymour Hersh (30 years later) and Leo Damore (20 years later) -- these are the people who tell us they're pretty sure Donald Trump is a groper.

Three weeks before a major presidential election.

Trump has been a rich celebrity for 40 years, employing thousands of women, but this is the first time he has been seriously accused of any sexual impropriety. You will recall that, just this May, The New York Times conducted a major investigation into Trump's treatment of women -- and came up empty-handed.

Trump denies the allegations, but don't expect a "Correction" like this one from the Chicago Tribune, dated Sept. 5, 1996: "In her Wednesday Commentary page column, Linda Bowles stated that President Clinton and the former campaign adviser Dick Morris both were 'guilty of callous unfaithfulness to their wives and children.' Neither man has admitted to being or been proven to have been unfaithful. The Tribune regrets the error.”

Strangely, the allegations against Trump don't even tell a larger story about the (apocryphal) "campus rape culture." Trump's not a member of the Duke lacrosse team. He isn't a "frat boy.”

The only reason for these 11th-hour claims is that the ruling class doesn't want voters thinking about the immigration policies, trade deals and wars that are destroying their way of life. Ever since Trump started raising the issues that no one else would, the media and the political class have done everything in their power to try to stop our movement.

They're so close! Just four more years of importing the Third World at breakneck speed, and America will be O-ver

Maybe it will work. And then six months after the election, Americans will realize they've been scammed by the media into giving away their country. 

N. T. Wright: The Church Continues the Revolution Jesus Started

By Mike Bird

http://www.christianitytoday.com/

October 13, 2016

A foundational Christian belief is that Jesus Christ died on the Cross for our sins. For many, the most important result of this is that believers go to heaven when they die. Bestselling author, scholar and bishop, N. T. Wright, thinks we’re missing a critical aspect of what Jesus accomplished on the Cross if we limit our understanding just to this explanation. His latest book, The Day the Revolution Began, explores the Crucifixion and argues that the Protestant Reformation did not go far enough in tranforming our understanding of this event. Mike Bird, author of What Christians Ought To Believe, interviewed Wright about how Christians should view the Crucifixion.

Tom, you describe Jesus' death as the beginning of a "revolution." What was that revolution and why does it still matter today?

Most Western Christians have been taught that Jesus died so that they could escape the results of sin and go to heaven after they die. The New Testament, however, regularly speaks of Jesus’ death as the defeat of the powers of evil that have kept the world in captivity, with the implication that the world is actually going to change as a result—through the life and work and witness of those who believe this good news. Think of Revelation 5:9–10. Humans are rescued from their sin so that they can be “a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth.” That began at Easter and, in the power of the Spirit, has continued ever since. Of course, the “reign” of Jesus’ people, like that of Jesus himself, is the reign of suffering love . . . but that’s a whole other story. Suffice it to say that the vocation of God’s people today is to continue to implement that revolution.

Even as Western cultures grow more secular, we still find the Crucifixion presented in art and echoed in music. Plus the notion of sacrifice for others is still very much a Christian theme that novels like Harry Potter seem to borrow from. Why do you think the cross, its image and message, is so captivating?

It seems as though the world knows in its bones that the cross of Jesus was the ultimate revelation of true power and true love. Most people for some of their lives, and some people for most of their lives, nurse sorrows and wounds whether secret or open; and the thought or sight of Jesus on the cross, perhaps particularly when it’s painted beautifully or set to wonderful and appropriate music, speaks of the true God not as a distant, faceless bureaucrat, nor as a bullying boss, but as the one who has strangely come into the middle of the pains and sorrows of the world and taken their full force on himself. In a sense, all of Christian theology, certainly theology of the cross, is the attempt to explain, to give a wise and scriptural account of, that very immediate, personal, visceral impact.

We tend to think of the cross as a very churchy or religious symbol, like the Apple logo or the McDonald’s sign, but what did the Crucifixion mean for people in the first century?

Crucifixions were common in the first century. It was a fairly standard punishment for slaves or for rebel subjects. It was a way for the Roman Empire to say “We are in power, and this is what we do to people who get in our way.” Crucifixion was unspeakably horrible, with victims often left on crosses for several days, pecked at by birds and gnawed at by vermin. It was deliberately a very public execution, to warn others: When the Spartacus rebellion was put down, roughly 100 years before Jesus’ day, 6,000 of his followers were crucified all along the Appian Way between Rome and Capua, making it more or less one cross every 40 yards for 130 miles. Anybody, and especially any slave, walking anywhere on that road would get the point. But it wasn’t just (what we would call) a “political” point. In Jesus’ day Rome was “deifying” its emperors, at least after their deaths, making the present emperor “son of god.” Rebelling against Caesar’s empire was therefore a kind of blasphemy, and crucifixion a restatement of the theological “fact” that Caesar was “Lord.” That is the context for Mark’s statement that the centurion (a Roman army commander) at the foot of the cross looked at Jesus and said, “Truly, this man was the Son of God.’”

Click on the link below to read the full article:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2016/october-web-only/n-t-wright-jesus-death-does-more-than-just-get-us-into-heav.html