How Ben Rhodes helped the president betray the trust of the American people

Among the most serious charges that President Obama and his supporters have leveled against President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney: They “cherry-picked intelligence.” The phrase suggests that, while in office, they sorted through the information provided by America’s spy agencies, selecting the tidbits that supported their policies while discarding anything that might cast doubts on their conclusions.

So what has been Mr. Obama’s record in this area? Thanks to an incisive essay by David Samuels in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, we now know.

To sell the Iran deal — which Mr. Obama considers his signature foreign policy achievement — the public was told there was “a new political reality in Iran, which came about because of elections that brought moderates to power in that country.”

Mr. Samuels asks Leon Panetta, who served as CIA director in the Obama administration, “whether it was ever a salient feature of the CIA’s analysis when he ran the agency that the Iranian regime was meaningfully divided between ‘hard-line’ and ‘moderate’ camps.” Mr. Panetta answers without equivocation: “No.”

The intelligence community clearly understood that Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps “ran that country with a strong arm.” They faced no challenge from a rising moderate faction.
In other words: Mr. Obama did not cherry-pick intelligence — he disregarded it entirely...

Quebec teen discovers ancient Mayan ruins by studying the stars

A teenager from Quebec has discovered an ancient Mayan city without leaving his province’s borders.

William Gadoury is a 15-year-old student from Saint-Jean-de-Matha in Lanaudière, Quebec. The precocious teen has been fascinated by all things Mayan for several years, devouring any information he could find on the topic.

During his research, Gadoury examined 22 Mayan constellations and discovered that if he projected those constellations onto a map, the shapes corresponded perfectly with the locations of 117 Mayan cities. Incredibly, the 15-year-old was the first person to establish this important correlation, reported the Journal de Montreal over the weekend.

Then Gadoury took it one step further. He examined a twenty-third constellation which contained three stars, yet only two corresponded to known cities.

Gadoury’s hypothesis? There had to be a city in the place where that third star fell on the map.

Satellite images later confirmed that, indeed, geometric shapes visible from above imply that an ancient city with a large pyramid and thirty buildings stands exactly where Gadoury said they would be. If the find is confirmed, it would be the fourth largest Mayan city in existence...

‘Get a damn job’: Chief offers blunt remedy for what ails First Nations

Clarence Louie says things anyone other than a respected indigenous leader couldn’t get away with. 

His advice to young men on his home reserve? “Get a damn job, be a man. It should be embarrassing for you to raise your kids on welfare.”

Looking to succeed in the workplace? “Be punctual. Be on time. Indian time doesn’t cut it.”

Deciding what to read? “Too many times I go into Indian people’s houses, even on my own rez, I see tabloids. Tabloids? That’s what you read? You’re never going to be a leader reading tabloids.”

Louie’s straight talk captivated a Flin Flon audience Wednesday afternoon as some 340 people, including many aboriginal youth, crammed the RH Channing Auditorium to hear him speak.

A gentle-looking man with greying bangs and an animal-skin vest, he deluged the crowd with morsels of advice that have transformed Osoyoos Indian Band, where he is chief, into a beacon of hope for economically ravaged First Nations.

While many other chiefs are preoccupied with old treaty claims and calls for additional government support, Louie’s prime focus is clear-cut: put people to work.

“I firmly believe every person needs to be in a good-paying job,” he told the auditorium audience. “I don’t like seeing native people unemployed. I don’t like seeing my people on welfare. I don’t agree with welfare. Our people never had welfare before, on the reserves. One old chief once told me, ‘The worst thing Indian Affairs ever brought to our communities was welfare.’ Our oldtimers never survived on welfare before. Every First Nation society that I’ve studied, we all come from a working culture. Our people worked for a living. They got up early and went to work, whether it was on traplines or whether it was in the fur trade.

“I’m not looking for handouts. I’m looking for self-sufficiency for my people.”...

Corbyn is savaged in face-to-face clash with Labour MPs over poll failure

Jeremy Corbyn was last night savaged by his own MPs, furious at Labour’s failure to make progress in last week’s local elections.

There were angry recriminations at a meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party, despite Labour sources promising earlier that he would reprimand rebels.

He was due to criticise them for ‘parading on the media to give a running commentary on our party’, but appeared to lose his nerve.

But last night, Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham Yardley, said: ‘I thought socialism was about “we”, but it’s all been about you – and that’s not a good thing.’

Sadiq Khan, who was elected Mayor of London in one of the few Labour successes of the elections, told Mr Corbyn he must stop missing ‘open goals’.

The meeting was described by one anonymous shadow cabinet member as ‘the worst one yet’.

Mr Corbyn was expected to warn MPs to stop attacking him in public. Labour sources claimed he would say: ‘We need, if not across-the-board unity, then at least respect for each other.’

But he appeared to lose his nerve. MPs at the meeting said he toned down the warning dramatically when faced by his critics. ‘He didn’t say any of it,’ one said. ‘It was just the usual waffle.’...

Hard Truths About Race on Campus

...A basic principle of psychology is that people pay more attention to information that predicts important outcomes in their lives. A key social factor that we human beings track is who is “us” and who is “them.” In classic studies, researchers divided people into groups based on arbitrary factors such as a coin toss. They found that, even with such trivial distinctions, people discriminated in favor of their in-group members.

None of this means that we are doomed to discriminate by race. A 2001 study by Robert Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that race was much less prominent in how people categorized each other when individuals also shared some other prominent social characteristic, like membership on a team. If you set things up so that race conveys less important information than some other salient factor, then people pay less attention to race.

A second principle of psychology is the power of cooperation. When groups face a common threat or challenge, it tends to dissolve enmity and create a mind-set of “one for all, all for one.” Conversely, when groups are put into competition with each other, people readily shift into zero-sum thinking and hostility.

With these principles in mind, it is hard to see how the programs now being adopted by many universities will serve to create campuses where students of color feel more welcome and less marginalized...

Jason Kenney lists Conservative Party of Canada Firsts

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation...

Kristof’s ‘Confession of Liberal Intolerance’

New York Times columnist Nichols Kristof writes on liberal intolerance in his latest column. Here’s a taste:

We progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.

Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us. . . .

I’ve been thinking about this because on Facebook recently I wondered aloud whether universities stigmatize conservatives and undermine intellectual diversity. The scornful reaction from my fellow liberals proved the point.

Kristof summarizes empirical work highlighting the stark ideological imbalance in many disciplines. As he notes, in the social sciences, “it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.” (And this was pre-Trump.)

Kristof understands that the issue is far broader than whether universities and other institutions are “fair” to those with politically incorrect perspectives.

The stakes involve not just fairness to conservatives or evangelical Christians, not just whether progressives will be true to their own values, not just the benefits that come from diversity (and diversity of thought is arguably among the most important kinds), but also the quality of education itself. When perspectives are unrepresented in discussions, when some kinds of thinkers aren’t at the table, classrooms become echo chambers rather than sounding boards — and we all lose...

The mind behind ‘Dilbert’ explains why Donald Trump will win in a landslide

 ...“The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”

Writes Adams: “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.

“If this were poker, which hand looks stronger to you for a national election?”

Labour MPs turn on Jeremy Corbyn after elections

Labour MPs  Jo Cox and Neil Coyle: " We nominated Jeremy Corbyn for the leadership. Now we regret it "

...The Tories deserved a kicking last night. With chaos and discord in our hospitals and schools, an unprecedented housing crisis and fatcats lining their pockets while life gets tougher for everybody else, it’s an outrage for David Cameron to appear on TV looking like the cat who got the cream, knowing his party is on track to win again in 2020.

The hard truth is that Labour was humiliated in Scotland and slipped back in England and Wales. No party has ever lost ground at a time like this and gone on to win a general election. Labour is in the doldrums and we have to ask ourselves why. Why, day after day during the campaign, we failed to get a hearing. Why the voters aren’t getting the alternative vision of a fairer, stronger, more just Britain that we should be offering.

Of course it would be wrong to view these results simply through the prism of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. But nor can we pretend that the leadership isn’t an issue.

When the voters tell us on the doorsteps that they can’t picture our leader in No 10 we have to listen. When our candidates in London and Wales ask the leader to stay away, we have a problem. When the revival we were promised in Scotland with Corbyn’s “new” politics proves to be a mirage, we have to ask what it has actually achieved...

The afternoon I spent with Jane Jacobs

On May 4th, rather than recognizing Star Wars Day, Google posted a "doodle" to celebrate the 100th Birthday of the famed urban theorist Jane Jacobs, who died in 2006.

So it seems an appropriate time to discuss the occasion when I was a teenager that I spent about four hours in conversation with her.

It was during the 1981 by-election in Spadina riding. I was a "Liberal Youth" working on the campaign for Jim Coutts, who was Pierre Trudeau's Principal Secretary and had been parachuted into the riding when the sitting MP, Peter Stollery, was bumped up to the Senate to give Coutts a 'safe' riding in which to run. 

I'd joined the Liberals because I was about to start taking Political Science as one of my majors at U of Toronto, and I figured that having some practical experience in the workings of an election and watching politics up close from the inside would be educationally advantageous and interesting. The Liberals, back in '81, lined up most closely with my political outlook, and the fact that Coutts was so highly placed as an insider with Trudeau made them the clear choice for me.

It was an interesting by-election. Coutts, who died at the beginning of 2014, was a thoughtful, soft-spoken, decent man. As such, he wasn't entirely suited to "in front of the camera" politics. It was a high-profile election,with Coutts' main opponent being a local city councilor and Anglican priest named Dan Heap, who ran for the NDP.  Heap was also a decent man who, though mired in outdated socialist doctrines, was honest, compassionate, and straightforward.

The Jane Jacobs Google doodle

However despite the reasonableness of the two leading candidates, both had campaigns filled with hot-headed political zealots. On one occasion, when Pierre Trudeau made an unannounced visit to a quickly organized street rally for Coutts, a protester from the Progressive Conservatives who got wind of the event was physically attacked by a member of the Liberal riding's executive committee when the Tory heckled Trudeau from the back of the crowd. While that sort of thing now may be common at a Trump rally in 2016, it was virtually unheard of in Canada in 1981.  

When it came to election day, the Liberals, as did the other two main parties, had volunteers as scrutineers at the polling stations.  I was assigned to one in a church in the Annex, a couple of blocks from where I lived, for the afternoon shift until the polls closed.

Election day was the middle of August. It was a typically muggy, Toronto August afternoon. I rode up in to the church on my bicycle wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Inside in the church basement, where the poll was set up, were a pair of people from Elections Canada and I informed them I was there for the Liberals. Nearby, there was a guy wearing a loud tie and a dumpy, powder blue polyester suit who was the scrutineer for the Progressive Conservatives. The NDP scrutineer was a little old lady, slight, wrinkled, very grey, very typical Annex-y, with a loose, earth-toned, woolly, crocheted light sweater. They were sitting far apart from each other at the long scrutineers' table, so I sat between them. I said 'hi' to my table-mates. The PC fellow ignored me and the little old lady introduced herself as Jane Jacobs.  Of course, to me as a teenager, this Jane Jacobs was nothing other than a nice old lady I recognized from her walks through my neighborhood, not having any idea she was a world-renowned urban theorist.

Jane and I exchanged pleasantries about the weather and little anecdotes about the election campaign. The PC fellow refused to be engaged in conversation. When Jane asked him what he thought, he said, "I don't want to talk to you."  Jane and I exchanged a rather surprised but knowing "what an ass" look, joked in sotto that all Progressive Conservatives were like that, and continued our discussion without him. By-elections traditionally draw very low turnouts and this one was no exception. Therefore, there was lots of time where nothing else was going on other than the conversation between me and Jane. She was curious about what someone my age thought about politics and society, and I was happy to pass the time discussing those things with her.

The Annex, back at that time, was, and to a good extent still is, a quiet, green enclave in the north west part of  downtown Toronto. It's filled with large Victorian and Edwardian homes, parkettes, and a few apartment buildings, all within close walking-distance to the main thoroughfares and shops of Bloor and Dupont Streets and the Bloor-Danforth and University-Spadina subway lines. Its proximity to the downtown core, character, ease of shopping, and access to rapid transportation makes it the most convenient neighborhood to live in the city.

That area became central to Jacobs' concept of what an urban environment should be like. Realistically, the economic, geographical, and social dynamics that define the Annex make it extremely difficult to replicate elsewhere. The Annex itself was in danger of having its character overhauled in the late 1960's and early 70's when there was the threat of a proposed expressway that would have torn up the neighborhood. But a movement to stop the Spadina Expressway, of which Ms Jacobs and my parents were a part, successfully persuaded then-Premier Bill Davis to cancel it.

However, despite nods to her from Toronto's municipal politicians, the rest of the city has turned into something much uglier and unfriendly than the place that was Jane Jacobs' home. The extreme-densification by condominium towers, Mayor Art Eggleton and his successors' essential dispensing with height restrictions that were brought about 10 years earlier in Toronto's Golden Age under mayor David Crombie, and the domination of the Ontario Municipal Board by a development industry which owns politicians at the provincial and municipal level, has created a congested, uptight, impersonal Toronto. And it looks to only get worse.

Jacobs seemed very pleased that someone my age was interested in politics, and was conscious of the importance of the balance required to make up a neighborhood. In my childhood, that included skating on a makeshift ice rink in Jean Sibelius Park or walking two blocks alone as a seven-year old to see movies and puppet shows at The Poor Alex Theatre on Brunswick Avenue. The latter was not at all unusual then; now something like that would get parents arrested for child neglect. It was like walks along Bloor Street to the Royal Ontario Museum and sitting on ancient Chinese stone camels in the courtyard there while eating a hamburger bought at the museum's basement cafeteria. Then you could do things like that, now the public isn't allowed to go within 4 feet of those camel statues.

That civility and easy-going aspect of Toronto is now long gone, though there were signs of its waning on that day. The gruff Progressive Conservative scrutineer wasn't the only bit of unpleasantness that election day. While I was sitting in conversation with Jane, Jack Layton came into the church to inquire about the voter turnout.  Layton was my city councilor. I'd never met him or seen him in person before, but I recognized him from the news, cheerfully said hello, and asked how he was.

Layton said, "I'm not here to talk to you," startling me with his unprovoked rudeness to a constituent, and he started querying Jane about the polls. Jane gave me an embarrassed glance as she answered Layton's questions, and when he left she apologized for him. His behavior was particularly sad for her in light of our interaction with our Progressive Conservative colleague. "Not your fault,"  I replied and didn't attribute it as an NDP characteristic at the time, especially in the context of my many enjoyable, debate-like discussions with their federal candidate, Dan Heap.

Jane left the poll before it closed and we fondly said goodbye to each other. I never ran into her in person again, and it was only years later that I even realized who she was beyond being that nice little old lady from the neighborhood. 

University of Toronto "pro-Palestine" lecture featured Holocaust denial, claims of Jewish conspiracies, and praise for Hitler

Out of respect for the right to free speech, this sort of thing shouldn't be banned by law. But you'd imagine out of a sense of a commitment to truth, if not of decency, the University of Toronto would know better than to host an event featuring the demented antisemite, Ken O'Keefe.

On April 28, O'Keefe was featured at a grubby little bunker called "Beit Zatoun,"  a hub of anti-Israel activism in Toronto.

The following day, he delivered a speech at The University of Toronto. Watch the video below and you'll see a man whose head is clearly filled with paranoid delusions and frizzled mental wiring claiming the Holocaust was a "myth," part of a Jewish conspiracy to oppress the Palestinians. He essentially says that Jews have conspired to control and oppress everyone. His unbalanced ravings are more hateful and idiotic than anything Mel Gibson ever said when plastered on tequila. But O'Keefe was dead sober when he spewed them out, as these are claims he frequently makes when speaking in public. His warped interpretation of history is that Hitler wasn't responsible for exterminating six million Jews, but instead was punished for bypassing "Jewish banking debt." O'Keefe's insanity extends to conspiracy theories about childhood vaccines, 'chemtrails,' and the CIA creating ISIS.

This happened with the acquiescence and, by allowing it to take place unchallenged at one of its lecture facilities, the imprimatur of The University of Toronto. It's worth noting that this Holocaust-denier has incurred the praise of the NDP-affiliated, neo-Marxist website rabble.ca. O'Keefe's Toronto events were promoted by the so-called "progressive" magazine, NOW. Interestingly, a NOW editor notoriously has said that she is in favor of censorship, which one might presume is a counter-intuitive stance for a real journalist. NOW editor Susan Cole said universities are not the place for "provocateurs" who "target minorities." More interestingly, Holocaust denial and overt antisemitism evidently don't qualify as an example of hate speech for them. In fact, NOW referred to the Holocaust-denier O'Keefe as a "human rights activist."

When people talk about the Regressive Left, O'Keefe and his leftist Toronto supporters are what it looks like in action.

This is what things have come to for them.

Trump says he's open to Cruz or Kasich as VP

More...

Kathleen Wynne trails Patrick Brown in approval ratings

Patrick Brown is something different than the last few Ontario PC leaders... 

Progressive Conservative Leader Patrick Brown’s lead in Ontario’s political horse race continues to firm up amid stagnant approval ratings for Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne, a new Forum Research poll shows.

The province-wide survey by Forum Research Inc. continues to paint a troubling picture for Wynne with the latest results indicating she maintains the confidence of just one fifth of voters in the province.

The survey, conducted on April 25, reveals that 39 per cent of Ontarians would vote for the Progressive Conservatives if an election were held today, while 34 per cent would vote Liberal.

The polling agency further found that of respondents who voted Liberal in 2014, 13 per would vote either PC or NDP this time around.

Forum president Lorne Bozinoff said this suggests the Liberals, as a centre party, “are bleeding at both ends” as left- and right-wing supporters “melt away equally” to endorse other parties at opposite ends of the political spectrum.

The results also suggest the PCs would take 53 seats out of 107 in the legislature — one short of a majority government. The Liberals would win 33 seats while the NDP would take 21...

Linda Frum and Tony Clement: Keep the pressure on Tehran

As the Conservative caucus hosts Iran Accountability Week on Parliament Hill, we are concerned that the Liberal government will pursue policies with Iran that jettison Canada’s values and interests. In recent days alone, there have been worrisome signs that any rush to embrace Iran remains ill-advised and dangerous.

This month, Iranian officials have expressed outrage at the U.S. Supreme Court ruling freeing up billions in frozen Iranian assets to compensate victims of terror. Tehran has also made clear its displeasure with the U.S. increasing its military presence in Syria to combat the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. At the same time, the U.S. has openly expressed its irritation at Russia’s early delivery of the sophisticated S-300 air defence system to Iran, an alarming development for our ally Israel.

These are only some of the indicators that dealing with Iran comes with no certainties. The regime is mounting little more than a marketing facade to attract foreign investment to its weakened economy. In truth, the regime has done little, if anything, to warrant a thaw in relations...

See also:  Irwin Cotler: Naming Tehran’s victims

Terry Glavin: The left confronts its antisemitism

"Queers for Palestine are probably the stupidest people on the planet" - Milo Yiannopoulos

...The Haavara agreement allowed the escape of well-to-do German Jews in exchange for the liquidation of their property and the purchase and export of German goods to break the boycott of Germany’s Nazi-controlled economy. The deal deeply divided Europe’s Jews, but in any case, according to research published by Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, at least a third of the 60,000 Jews who fled to Palestine from Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1939 managed to do so by resorting to the Haavara contract’s extortionate arrangements.

The point of rubbing everyone’s noses in the Haavara agreement, whether it’s some neo-Nazi Stormfront yob doing it or Ken Livingstone doing it, is to traffic with impunity in the anti-Israel slander that Adolph Hitler (who made his own belligerent antipathy to Zionism quite clear in his 1925 memoir and manifesto, Mein Kampf) “was supporting Zionism,” as Livingstone explicitly put it. This is a direct equation of Zionism with Nazism, which the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia defines as a clear manifestation of antisemitism disguised as criticism of Israel.

Predictably, unreconstructed Jew-haters joined “anti-Zionists” in the rush to Livingstone’s defence, led by Livingstone’s long-time political ally, the long-disgraced celebrity “anti-war” demagogue George Galloway. Now polling close to zero in his own bid for election as mayor of London, Galloway leaped straight into the muck last Friday on Sky News: “Ken Livingstone said absolutely nothing wrong … Nazism and Zionism were two sides of the same coin.”

The good news is that dozens of Labour MPs have expressed disgust with Livingstone, not least MP John Mann, a founder of an inter-parliamentary committee on antisemitism, who was seen on live television confronting Livingstone on the street and calling him a “Nazi apologist,” a “lying racist” and a “fucking disgrace.” The bad news: by the weekend, several thousand Labour Party members had signed a petition calling for Mann to be disciplined by the party brass.

Only by the skin of its teeth has Canada’s NDP avoided this kind of nauseating spectacle. Anti-Israel histrionics reached a crescendo during Jack Layton’s term as NDP leader, and Layton’s policy was to pretend it wasn’t happening except when it became too obvious to ignore — like when NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis was booed and hissed at an NDP national convention for proposing that an anti-Israel resolution before delegates should at least mention in passing that Hezbollah was a terrorist organization.

By the time Tom Mulcair took the party helm, it had become necessary to quarantine a noisy faction of the NDP nomenklatura that resembles nothing so much as an evangelical cult devoted to the notorious Galloway...

Trigglypuff's snowflake friend has epic meltdown after being mocked for disrupting "The Triggering" at U Mass

A friend of Trigglypuff's is furious because she was made fun of after she was one of a group heckling and creating disturbances at Milo Yiannopoulos, Christina Hoff Summers and Steven Crowder's appropriately-named, "The Triggering" at U Mass.

This particular idiot came to disrupt an event, and is now is having an epic meltdown for being publicly mocked for her public behavior.  The real world will come as a terrible shock to "Social Justice" wankers who demand that you must admire them when they act like spoiled, mentally-unbalanced infants:

My name is Jennie Chenkin. I am a Hampshire College junior on a pre-law track with a concentration in political theory, carceral studies, and conflict resolution. I am writing this email because I have been harassed mercilessly online following “The Triggering” event and I have reason to believe that UMass Republicans have endorsed this harassment and libel against me.

On Monday night, I attended the event “The Triggering” hosted by UMass Republicans in protest of the panelists they had chosen to bring in to speak on “social justice, feminism, trigger warnings, microaggressions, and more.” My friends and I held up a banner outside the venue that said “content warning: bigotry inside” and we passed out fliers which explained what we believe political correctness stands for. When the panelists came on stage, we booed and heckled and disrupted, because that was what we were there to do...

...On Monday night, UMass Republicans asked their audience to be open to different opinions in the name of free speech. They then allowed their panelists to call Muslims rapists and dissenters in the audience, such as myself, pussies. They allowed their panelists to harass students on stage. The panelists got applauded and paid to do so. This makes me seriously wonder what kind of ship UMass Republicans run and why UMass has allowed them to get away with this atrocious behavior. I wonder why UMass Republicans care so much about protecting free speech, but only when it aligns with their views — and when it doesn’t, I wonder why they think it’s okay to publicly harass and bully and humiliate dissenters such as myself...

The darling of Canada's "pro-Palestine" activists, Hitler fan-boy Ken O'Keefe's visit to Toronto

Blogwrath covered the event.



Extra background HERE

‘Climate Hustle’ storm brews as Weather Channel founder calls Bill Nye ‘pretend scientist’

The skeptical documentary “Climate Hustle” doesn’t hit U.S. theaters until Monday, but it’s already unsettling the climate-change debate. 

Weather Channel founder John Coleman rushed to the defense of the film, which challenges the catastrophic climate-change narrative, after “science guy” Bill Nye slammed it in a clip released over the weekend as “not in our national interest and the world’s interest.”

“I have always been amazed that anyone would pay attention to Bill Nye, a pretend scientist in a bow tie,” Mr. Coleman said Saturday on the website Climate Depot.

“As a man who has studied the science of meteorology for over 60 years and received the AMS [American Meteorological Society] ‘Meteorologist of the Year’ award, I am totally offended that Nye gets the press and media attention he does,” Mr. Coleman said. “And I am rooting for the ‘Climate Hustle’ film to become a huge hit — bigger than ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ by Al Gore.”

Indeed, the documentary by Climate Depot’s Marc Morano bills itself as a response to former Vice President Gore’s Academy Award-winning 2006 documentary, which sparked international alarm with its warnings of imminent environmental disaster fueled by rising greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere.

“Climate Hustle,” which has a one-day screening at theaters nationwide Monday, argues that the climate-change catastrophe scenarios are part of an “overheated environmental con job” aimed at creating hysteria in order to drive public support for bigger government and ever-increasing regulation...

Bloomberg View: Kasich Is Still Trump's Best Weapon

It is simply astonishing how destructive John Kasich’s campaign has been to the Republican Party.

Right now, the evidence is on full view in Indiana. As part of a deal with the Ted Cruz campaign, Kasich isn't campaigning in the Hoosier State, which votes on Tuesday. But he and his supporters are still telling people to vote for him -- even though a vote for the Ohio governor is basically a vote for Donald Trump. If Kasich's supporters in Indiana want him to have any chance at the nomination, they will vote for Cruz.

Here's why.

Trump has a slim lead in current polling averages in Indiana. He’s at 37 percent, with Cruz close behind at 35 percent. Kasich is far behind with 16 percent. If Kasich’s voters switch to Cruz (and all else remains equal), then Cruz will win big. If they stay put, Trump might narrowly prevail. Indiana has 57 delegates: 30 will go to the statewide winner; of the remaining 27, 3 each will go to whomever wins in the state's nine congressional districts...