Explaining Donald Trump's Popularity To The Political Left

Something that people on the political left don't seem to understand about the nature of Donald Trump's support is that no amount of insults and name calling is going to dissuade his supporters. There's nothing anyone can say about Trump that's going to make him look any crazier than the things coming out of his own mouth, and clearly, his supporters don't care.

You can say or imply that his supporters are racists, fascists, homophobes, xenophobes, ignoramuses or whatever you like, but that's not going to work either. The ones who are don't care what you call them, and the majority who aren't are only persuaded further about how dishonest and sleazy the left has become, and that a tectonic shift in the system is needed.

Trump's unshakable support is in enormous measure a reaction to the vacuous identity politics that says that all white people and only white people are racist. It's a reaction to the type of ideology that espouses that feelings are more important than facts. It's a reaction to the campus 'safe space' idiots who think they have the right to shut down any discussion that offends them. It's a reaction to the cultural relativists who refuse to acknowledge that Islam is directly linked to Islamic terrorism and that there is no mainstream branch of that religion that doesn't advocate for the subjugation of Christians and Jews and the death of apostates and gays, and often mean it literally. It's a reaction to the dunderheads who refuse to recognize that people who violate immigration laws are flouting the law and instead insist on using the term "undocumented immigrant." It's a reaction to the eco-fascism that literally wants to imprison people for disputing their version of climate change theory.

That these things are problems is something that the political left and even the Republican establishment have consistently either failed to acknowledge are problems, or failed to deal with in any substantive way, other than to make them worse.

Hillary Clinton can promise change all she likes, but she's been firmly nestled in and benefitted from the system that caused all these problems for a quarter of a century, so it's hard to believe her.

Then along comes someone like Donald Trump, a political outsider, who promises to blow up the political correctness and the entrenched establishment. Despite all his many obvious flaws, just that is enough to make him bulletproof to many millions of Americans.

So if leftists really want to know why Donald Trump stands a very good chance of becoming the next President of the United States, they should take a look in the mirror. Because it's the political left who caused it.

Peter Cook & Dudley Moore in Superthunderstingcar

Michael Coren: When celebrity endorsements can backfire

Recently an old university friend, who is now a senior BBC producer, told me about when he helped assemble the acts for a major celebrity fundraising concert. The usual illustrious names were present but the fun was dealing with the fossils and the failures eager to resurrect their careers in the guise of charity. Apparently a once famous British rock star pleaded that he desperately wanted to sing in the climate change gig because, “the bloody climate is awful and we have to change it.” No joke.

Which brings us to the 100-plus celebrities who have just given their names to a campaign to stop Donald Trump becoming president. Bashing the famous and beautiful is too easy, largely pointless and, anyway, most of these actors, singers and writers probably have genuine concerns about the putrid Trump winning the election. He’s a lump on the body politic and for all our sakes needs to be defeated.

But if anything plays into his smooth, pink hands it is the glossy vision of front-cover millionaires telling people how to vote and what to believe. I’m not sure who planned the Democrat convention but the idea, for example, of giving self-consciously provocative Sarah Silverman such prominence was about as sensible as booking Don Cherry to host the Giller Prize. Just because the few find Silverman funny doesn’t mean the many find her funny. Just because the few think she has something to say doesn’t mean the many think she has something to say...

The Case for Free Trade Within Canada

...Perversely, we have more difficulty selling goods and services between and among our own provinces and territories than we do to and from the United States. More than twenty years ago, we established what is called the Agreement on Internal Trade (ait). Yet beer, wine, transportation, energy, labour, construction, government procurement—all are affected by barriers of one sort or another.

But just this July, the members of the Council of the Federation (Canada’s provincial and territorial premiers) emerged at the end of their gathering in Whitehorse and announce, with no small amount of fanfare, an “historic”, “ground-breaking” “agreement” on opening internal trade. They even gave it an ambitious name, the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (cfta).

All of which sounds positive, except for one problem: there is no agreement, there are no details—for all the noise, all we got was a short press-release-geared statement about an agreement-in-principle. And recalling that over the years, prior sets of premiers have made similar announcements but to no real effect, one is left with something of a boy-crying-wolf feeling about this announcement. The words “historic”, “ground-breaking” and even “agreement” sound very positive—certainly for the politicians—but they are entirely hypothetical without a strong enforcement mechanism to keep the parties in line...

Help out a good egg

A very nice, elderly Toronto woman, a fan of this blog, has run into some financial difficulties recently. She needs a bit of money to help her stay in her apartment.

Vardit has a Go Fund Me page where you can donate. If you can spare a little something, please do.

Claims that Jeremy Corbyn will fail have become a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’

Claims Jeremy Corbyn is an “unelectable leader” have become a self-fulfilling prophecy, one of his closest allies in the Parliamentary Labour Party has publicly said.

Clive Lewis, who is Mr Corbyn’s shadow defence secretary and was not one of the MPs to resign last month, also said the Labour leader and his team had made “mistakes”.

“It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy that Jeremy Corbyn is an unelectable leader,” he said in a video interview with The Guardian newspaper. 

“When elements of your own party are saying that and you’ve got pretty much the establishment media, including the so-called liberal wing of that media saying that, it does become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”...

The politics of disgust

The extent to which you may be politically conservative or liberal can be determined with reasonable accuracy by the extent to which you feel disgust.





Take the test HERE

Palestinian Tells Israeli Soldiers To Shoot His Child

Palestinians are filled with hate because their parents teach them nothing but hate.

...A Palestinian father uses his 3 year old child as bait, yelling in Arabic to the soldiers, “Shoot this child! Come on and shoot this child since you are so professional in killing children!” 

When the child receives a handshake from an IDF soldier instead, the boy is told by his father to throw rocks at the soldiers...

Why are the Democrats trying to make Hillary look like Chairman Mao in their new posters?

Are these Hillary posters a joke, a colossal screw-up, or are the Democrats trying to tell us something?

A photoshopped photo dated from a decade ago making her look like Communist Chinese depictions of Chairman Mao?!? ....Seriously!?!

  

They are actually selling these on Hillary Clinton's official website:

I can hardly wait until they unveil the poster for Hillary's running mate, Tim Kaine (who will have dropped the "I" in Kaine because there's no "I" in "Team Hillary"...um..ok, there's one "I," but it belongs to Hillary)...

Some takeaways from the Republican and Democratic conventions

Republicans and Democrats have wrapped up their national conventions and what happened at them told us a lot more about what to expect than any poll numbers we'll see over the next week or so.

Trump's bounce was significant, taking him into a slight overall lead, but Hillary's, in the aftermath of four days of news coverage and media like CNN reshaping itself into the Clinton News Network, should balance things out. But none of the polls this early in the game mean much. It's the debates that we'll see in fall and what the public thinks of them that will be the real indicators of which way the electorate is leaning. Don't forget that all those intelligent, experienced, skilled Republican Senators and Governors were supposed to make Trump look like a fool and collapse his support during the primary debates. It didn't work out that way. Whether Hillary fares better or worse remains to be seen.

However, for now, there are some very significant convention factors worth noting.

The dissent at the conventions was the highest I remember ever seeing in my lifetime. The closest ones I recall were the Reagan/Ford and Kennedy/Carter rivalries. But neither of those reflected the internal discord that Clinton faces from the Sanders camp and Trump from the old school Republicans. This degree of internecine dissatisfaction bodes ominously for both nominees. But particularly for the Democrats.

The dissent within the Republican Party came almost completely from The Establishment. That, in many ways, works to Trump's advantage, since after 8 years of a Democrat President and widespread dissatisfaction and insecurity in the nation as a whole and the GOP in particular, there's a big appetite for change. In such a climate, being seen as part of The Establishment can be a disadvantage. To that end, Trump's strategy was to paint himself as an outsider while tagging his Republican rivals during the primaries as embedded in the establishment and the Democrat's Presidential nominee as "Secretary of the Status Quo."

That charge stings. It's why during the convention, Hillary and her proxies, including her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and current President Obama went to such great lengths to portray her as an agent of change. But whether that's a convincing sales pitch when applied to someone who has been entrenched in the Washington political establishment for more than a quarter century is a dubious proposition. Especially when the people championing Hillary and telling you that she rejects the status quo are the very people who comprise the status quo.

While Trump's problems within his own party as serious, as Hillary endorsements from people like Republican Michael Bloomberg indicate, they're not as severe as Hillary's problems. Well before November, the bulk of Republican establishment will almost certainly fall into line to set up a line of defence for the party, and to save their own skins in the event Trump wins.

Hillary's dissent problem is much more threatening to her prospects for victory. Her party's establishment was completely behind her. So much so that, as the recent DNC leaks published by Wikileaks reveal, the Democrat establishment tipped the scales in her favor. But the establishment, for all its power and influence, is a relative handful of people. It's the grass roots where Hillary has a problem and that is going to be devastating to her unless she can win them over by election day. As it stands, Hillary  has to contend with legions of democrats who detest her, seemingly even more than they do Donald Trump. Having those problems with her voter base may mean she has an even bigger problem winning over the independents and centrist Republicans she hopes to attract.

There's also the authenticity factor.

Trump says wildly outrageous things as a matter of course. What he says often seems to reflect what he actually thinks at the moment, as if there's no filter between the frontal lobe of his brain and his mouth. Although there are obvious disadvantages that come with that trait, it has the single advantage of making him seem genuine. Trump also understands showmanship and charisma and he has plenty of both. Politics in the TV era is in no small measure entertainment, and Trump knows how to entertain. It can't be overstated how important a factor that is in a national campaign. Trump may have delivered the longest party nomination acceptance speech in living memory, but it wasn't boring. In entertainment, there's no greater sin than being boring.

Hillary's speech, insofar as content goes, was good. But just as timing is crucial to comedy, charisma and at least the appearance of authenticity are crucial to politics. In that, Hillary still has a serious problem. For all her policy expertise, Hillary's acceptance speech sounded as if it were something written by Bill Clinton and delivered by a Kurzweil voice synthesizer. Much of it was dull by virtue of the way it was delivered, and by being dull, went on too long. That dullness was exacerbated by being spoken by someone who conveys the feeling that everything she says is calculated for political advantage rather than coming from the heart.

Having been lauded at the convention in sermons by two of the greatest political orators of our generation, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, might have even been disadvantageous to Hillary, since it highlighted her comparative shortcomings to them. Retired General John Allen and Senator Cory Booker also delivered more stirring addresses than Hillary, predictably making hers anticlimactic and, even with a generous assessment, no better than the 5th best performance of the Democratic convention. Say what you will about Donald Trump, but there was no question about whether he was the star of the show at the Republicans' gathering.

As an aside, it's interesting to consider and compare the two "first daughters" who introduced the Democrat and Republican nominees before making their acceptance speeches. Chelsea Clinton is clearly a lovely, decent, intelligent woman. But she inherited her mother's dearth of charisma and seems to have lost something, even from that, in the transfer. By contrast, Ivanka Trump is beautiful, extremely articulate, warm, convincing and dynamic. Whether that makes much, if any difference to voters is doubtful, but elections are sometimes very close calls and if there is an advantage to be had in that regard, Trump has it.

In the end, the two conventions have given American voters something akin to two choices to pick from off a menu. Hillary is like a healthy, green salad, made up mostly of lettuce, with a light dressing. Trump is like that big, greasy chili burger with cheese dripping down the side. Even though it's bland, you know the salad is healthier. That chili and cheese burger isn't nearly as good for you. It might not even taste good and if you swallow it, there's the distinct possibility it could make you puke. But on the other hand, it might taste great, and it might give you energy and make you feel really satisfied.

You know you should probably choose the salad, but you know that the chili burger is going to be a lot more fun. The fact that America has one of the highest obesity rates in the world may give some indication of how its voters will choose come election day in November.

Which looks more appealing? The Hillary Salad or the Trump Burger?

Bernie Sanders' supporters sound exactly like Donald Trump's and hate Hillary even more

Sexy Justice Warriors and the Truck of Peace

Barbara Kay: In a case with no witnesses, how can any judge be so sure?

I'm very glad Barbara Kay wrote this. 

The judgement, and the whole while thought it very strange and was more reflective of the judge's biases than of any of the evidence cited in the decision. 

Rape is a terrible crime and I hope the defendant is guilty if he was convicted. But based on the evidence, as she wrote, there's no way of telling whether the accuser or the defendant is telling the truth (or at least being the more truthful of the two) without accepting the principle that the defendant in a sexual assault case is guilty until proved innocent. 

The judge also made repeated, contemptuous references to the defendant's having a string of relationships, of which the accuser was one, and how he was anxious to have a threesome. The judge's comments on them bordered on prurience and seemed both bizarre and inappropriate for a legal judgement. It made it seem he was biased against the defendant for his prior sexual history, none of which involved any sexual assault, and was being convicted on that basis. 

There are unfortunate similarities between this and the Ghomeshi case in that one wants to sympathize with the victim, but we also don't want a legal system in which a person can be found guilty and imprisoned simply on the basis of an accusation that has no supporting evidence. It seems in many ways, the judge was setting out to try to make a statement about the Ghomeshi case more than the one he was trying.

You can read the full decision HERE.

Last week York University PhD candidate Mustafa Ururyar was convicted of sexually assaulting grad student Mandi Gray. My curiosity piqued by reports of comments made during trial by Justice Marvin Zuker, I read the 179-page judgment.

The specifics of the incident — an evening of social drinking, a quarrel en route to Ururyar’s home, his break-up of their two-week casual “relationship,” followed by sex he says was consensual, she says wasn’t — can be found in the transcript. There were no witnesses and no injuries. This left us with a he-said, she-said story in a judge-alone trial.

In the end, Zuker found that Gray was “the credible witness” and there was “no uncertainty in this court. Ms Gray was raped by the accused.” In Zuker’s opinion, then, the defence failed to raise a “reasonable doubt,” which in criminal law, as he notes, “is not a far-fetched or frivolous doubt. It is not a doubt based on sympathy or prejudice. It is a doubt based on reason and common sense. It is a doubt that logically arises from the evidence, or the lack of evidence.”

Zuker’s absolute certainty puzzles me, for whatever the truth is, I – someone with “reason and common sense” — found Ururyar’s account no less (or more) credible than Gray’s. Now it is not unusual for two witnesses, one lying and one not, to produce credible stories. But to quell my own reasonable doubt as to an accused’s guilt, I would not only have to find the accuser’s story more credible, I’d have to find the defence implausible. Ururyar’s story may not be true, but it is indeed entirely plausible...

"Social Justice" fascists are enraged because the new Wonder Woman is a Jew who doesn't hate Israel

Don’t expect this to get one-tenth as much attention as the supposedly sexist pre-release attacks on the all-female Ghostbusters. But Wonder Woman is under attack from SJWs — for being Israeli.

While most of the tweets about the upcoming Wonder Woman movie’s new trailer have been positive, many are quite toxic because the lead, Gal Gadot, is an Israeli “Zionist.”...

 Follow

Kayleigh Lobdell @kayleaving

also im feeling more than slightly disillusioned abt wonder woman now that i realize what a vehement zionist gadot is...

1:47 PM - 25 Jul 2016 · Vestal, NY, United States

 
•  33 Retweets
 
•  33 likes

Complaints after CBBC shows ‘ISIS-style execution’… of a boiled egg

A sinister ‘toast jihadi’ stands behind an innocent egg – before decapitating his victim

Someone has reported Ooglies to offcom for the ISIS style execution. The country has gone insane pic.twitter.com/2qy17f3n1L

— Messy Galore (@unobtainabelle) December 9, 2015

Andrew Lawton: Trump support more diverse than media admits

...They are not united by a singular race, nor even by an ideology, but rather a belief that politicians have ignored them and Donald Trump won’t.

Though some white nationalists will cast ballots for Trump come November (as some undesirables invariably will for Hillary Clinton) it would be disingenuous to say that these represent the majority. 

I spoke with numerous black attendees who spoke highly of Trump and even endorsed him as the guy to bridge America’s racial divide.

A Hispanic Texas delegate told me he has reservations about Trump’s anti-Mexican rhetoric, but is supporting him overall based on his positions on other issues.

On the second night of the convention, a group called LGBTrump held an event featuring gay provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, during which a number of speakers—including Dutch MP Geert Wilders—charged that the left is focusing on “distraction” issues like wedding cakes and transgender washrooms while Trump is tackling the real threat to gays—radical Islam.

“Donald Trump is the most pro-gay Republican nominee we have ever had,” event organizer Chris Barron told me.

It would be easy to surmise that those at a Republican convention are hell-bent on supporting any Republican, but conversations outside the convention walls further revealed the breadth of Trump’s appeal.

During a cab ride from Cleveland to my hotel, the driver, a black man who hasn’t voted in 20 years, told me, unprompted, that he’ll be supporting Trump in November.

“He’s different than everyone else,” he said. “Everyone is scared of him getting in because they know he’s going to shake things up.”

Trump not only inspired this man to vote for him, but also to reverse two decades of rejecting the political process—all because Trump is not a part of the much-maligned “establishment,” a group whose definition becomes broader with each passing day...

Public Servants Selling Influence Reveals the Staggering Level of Corruption in Kathleen Wynne's Government

Political staff of many Ontario cabinet ministers double as fundraisers for the Liberal Party, encouraging companies that do business with government to buy tickets to private events hosted by the same ministers who make decisions on contracts and policy.

The Globe and Mail has obtained several invitations to Liberal fundraisers that list ministerial aides as contact people selling tickets.

And more than a half dozen sources in companies doing business with the province say it is commonplace for staffers to invite them to donate to the politicians they deal with...  

Bernie's rebellion is going rogue

PHILADELPHIA — Chants of "Bernie!", and boos whenever Hillary Clinton’s name was mentioned, filled the opening hours of the Democratic National Convention, with delegates supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) of Vermont repeatedly drowning out other speakers with their vocal dissent.

Never mind that after the weekend’s Wikileaks scandal revealed bias against Senator Sanders, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) issued a formal apology, forced the resignation of DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and moved Senator Sanders’ speech to the final keynote spot. His supporters were largely unappeased.

Indeed, the Vermonter whose insurgent campaign tapped into latent frustration with America’s political system, is now finding that many of those he inspired are unwilling to fall into line. Sanders delegates here emphasize that he’s not directing them, and that any protest activity on the floor is a result of grass-roots activism. That makes the push for unity, now coming from both Mrs. Clinton and Sanders, an even more daunting challenge. 

“If we learned one thing from Bernie Sanders, it’s that the movement is about all of us, not him,” says Justin Molito, a union organizer from Connecticut who is attending the convention as a Sanders delegate. “So when he asks us not to protest, I’d respectfully disagree. You have to make a moral choice about what your role is here.”...

Democrats trip over low bar set by GOP convention

After last week's "Mad Max: Fury Road"-themed Republican National Convention, the bar for Hillary Clinton's coronation this week in Philadelphia had been set fairly low.

Low enough, apparently, that the Democratic Party managed to trip over it and land face-first in the mud.

The weekend release of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee showed Clinton was unquestionably the party's favored candidate, enraging the perpetually enraged supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders and prompting party chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign.

Hours before the convention began Monday afternoon, Sanders tried to preach unity to some of his most ardent supporters, but they broke into a chorus of boos when he said they needed to support Clinton. The monster Sanders created was no longer taking orders from him...

See also: Trump Bounces into the Lead 

The fight of Hillary Clinton’s life

First things first. Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton. To many Americans, mere talk of it is preposterous. They should get used to it. At some point, Mr Trump is likely to take a lead in the polls. It might last for two days or persist for weeks. Liberal Americans should steel themselves. As author Nancy Isenberg put it: “When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance the dancing bear will win.”

Mrs Clinton, moreover, is capable of squandering her inbuilt advantage. Whatever happens at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia this week, the next three months will be the battle of her life.

What should most concern the anti-Trump forces? Mrs Clinton’s biggest hurdle is the depth of hatred for her across large parts of America...

See also:   Election Update: Clinton’s Lead Is As Safe As Kerry’s Was In 2004

From Michael Moore: 5 REASONS WHY TRUMP WILL WIN

From Michael Moore (yes, THAT Michael Moore):

I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president. And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”

Never in my life have I wanted to be proven wrong more than I do right now.

I can see what you’re doing right now. You’re shaking your head wildly – “No, Mike, this won’t happen!” Unfortunately, you are living in a bubble that comes with an adjoining echo chamber where you and your friends are convinced the American people are not going to elect an idiot for president. You alternate between being appalled at him and laughing at him because of his latest crazy comment or his embarrassingly narcissistic stance on everything because everything is about him. And then you listen to Hillary and you behold our very first female president, someone the world respects, someone who is whip-smart and cares about kids, who will continue the Obama legacy because that is what the American people clearly want! Yes! Four more years of this!

You need to exit that bubble right now. You need to stop living in denial and face the truth which you know deep down is very, very real. Trying to soothe yourself with the facts – “77% of the electorate are women, people of color, young adults under 35 and Trump cant win a majority of any of them!” – or logic – “people aren’t going to vote for a buffoon or against their own best interests!” – is your brain’s way of trying to protect you from trauma. Like when you hear a loud noise on the street and you think, “oh, a tire just blew out,” or, “wow, who’s playing with firecrackers?” because you don’t want to think you just heard someone being shot with a gun. It’s the same reason why all the initial news and eyewitness reports on 9/11 said “a small plane accidentally flew into the World Trade Center.” We want to – we need to – hope for the best because, frankly, life is already a shit show and it’s hard enough struggling to get by from paycheck to paycheck. We can’t handle much more bad news. So our mental state goes to default when something scary is actually, truly happening. The first people plowed down by the truck in Nice spent their final moments on earth waving at the driver whom they thought had simply lost control of his truck, trying to tell him that he jumped the curb: “Watch out!,” they shouted. “There are people on the sidewalk!”

Well, folks, this isn’t an accident. It is happening. And if you believe Hillary Clinton is going to beat Trump with facts and smarts and logic, then you obviously missed the past year of 56 primaries and caucuses where 16 Republican candidates tried that and every kitchen sink they could throw at Trump and nothing could stop his juggernaut...

See Also, Dilbert creator Scott Adams on:  Clinton’s VP Pick

This is CNN

And so is THIS

The Democratic Convention will be like a big gala to award the 2nd place prize in a beauty contest

Hillary Clinton is like the Lena Dunham of politics. She's unappealing and untalented, but the media and the faction of people who refer to themselves using the terms "social justice" and "activist" in their social media profiles keep trying to convince the rest of us how great she is in spite of our disbelief.

Which is why Mrs. Clinton faces an extremely difficult obstacle to overcome at next week's Democratic National Convention.

Imagine if you went to a burlesque club, where you were promised the most fantastic, beautiful stripper imaginable as the star of the show. The lead-up act is a stunningly gorgeous woman, with smooth, shiny auburn hair, sparkling, emerald colored eyes, lush round breasts, in perfect physical condition, and she performs astounding acrobatics and amazing contortions. The act brings down the house and then, you get the featured performer, who is billed as the most wonderful thing you've ever seen.

Then Lena Dunham comes out to display her flabby, globule, cellulite-ridden body, with a miserable, scowling face that looks like it's better suited to an obese, ill-tempered Lhasa Apso, but lacking the spark of alertness and intellect one expects from a canine.

It would be anticlimactic, to put it mildly.

That, in analogous terms, is the danger the Democrats face next week when Bill Clinton gives the keynote address the Tuesday night before Hillary makes her acceptance speech on Thursday.

Bill Clinton is one of the great political orators or our generation. He has a natural feel for the public, warmth, and a genuine desire to connect with people from all walks of life, and the ability to relate to an audience in a packed stadium as easily as an individual in an intimate conversation.

Hillary, however, is something very different. She's cold, distant, and calculating, with an inability to conceal her self-interested ambition. Her efforts to be more human seem awkward and contrived. Her laugh is a hideous, unnatural cackle that sounds like she's trying out for a role in a repertory company production of Macbeth as one of the witches, and she has all the warmth of an IRS audit.

What she will do is remind Americans how much she is unlike her husband and what a disappointment she is in comparison.

Bernie Sanders, for all the intellectual vacuity of his policies, managed to arouse widespread excitement in his unexpected surge in the primaries. Hillary's nomination was supposed to be a fait accompli from the day she announced her candidacy, and Sanders' ability to have breathed down her neck for so long in the race highlights the genuine desire that even the Democrats have for any alternative to the woman Donald Trump describes as "The Secretary of the Status Quo."

Sanders too will be speaking at the Democratic Convention, and will in effect remind America that they didn't end up with the nominee who captured their imagination, but the one who commanded the entrenched Super Delegates.

Inevitably, as the Democrats raise their banners to Hillary, the media, which despises her Republican rival, will be trumpeting Mrs Clinton as a saviour.  But it will be impossible to hide from the public that the star of the Democratic show is going to be a big dud.

New study shows Hillary Clinton is the preferred candidate of people who want more political correctness

“people need to be more careful about the language they use to avoid offending people with different backgrounds.”

A new national survey by Pew Research Center finds substantial partisan, racial and gender differences on this question.

Trump making the media crazy could help him win in November

"...we can’t really understand Trump just by looking at Trump. We have to look at his supporters — including the many millions of Americans who feel they’ve lost out to globalization.

If Trump’s opponents and critics don’t understand that, and instead just focus their efforts on criticizing the man, they risk underestimating his movement — as we all have for the past year..."

That quote is from one of two interesting recent articles about how Donald Trump is changing the political landscape, the other from Dilbert creator Scott Adams. It sums up a great deal about why Trump stands a very good chance of winning in November. The media, his opponents and the people that hate him have been unsuccessful in their relentless attacks because the people that support Trump don't care about what his enemies say about him.

If you want to defeat Trump, you have to come up with a better alternative; something inspiring. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Bernie Sanders are fit to lead the US. Is Trump? Maybe not, but when you have masses of the public who feel alienated and the option you're offering them is "well, she may be awful, but she's not as awful as Trump," it might not work. Sometimes, and very often in politics, the devil you know isn't better than the devil you don't know.

Further to media histrionics about Trump, how he drives people who hate him batshit crazy, and how the media is reinforcing his accusations that they are completely unreliable in their reports about him is the following item from The Toronto Star.

Trump gave Mike Pence an 'air kiss' after the latter's speech last night and The Star devoted an entire article to going apeshit over it.

It starts with:

"Donald Trump tried to connect with a manly embrace and kiss with his vice-presidential running-mate, Mike Pence, and wound up sucking air like a dying grouper.

The moment, which redefined “cringeworthy,” came during the third night of the Republican national convention in Cleveland on Wednesday.

Pence might be happy with the nomination but not enough to let The Donald’s lips land on him..."

And goes on in that vein.

Yes, it's The Star, a Canadian media outlet the work environment drove at least one of its writers to suicide and which ceased being an actual newspaper to become an only slightly less hysterical version of rabble.ca years ago, but even so, it's in their "News" section. Really.

Canadian Fascism - Free Speech takes a hit as comedian is fined for making a joke by "Human Right Tribunal"

In Canada, Orwellian "Human Rights" Tribunals exist to deprive citizens of human rights and liberty, not give them freedoms:

...Mike Ward is ready to take on a Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ruling that says he must pay $35,000 to Jérémy Gabriel for making jokes that violated the rights of the child singer with disabilities...

...The tribunal ordered Ward to pay Gabriel $25,000 in moral damages and $10,000 in punitive damages for a joke dating back to 2010. The decision also requires Ward to pay an additional $5,000 for moral damages and $2,000 for punitive damages to Jérémy's mother, Sylvie Gabriel...

...In Ward's 2010 comedy bit, he said he was happy Gabriel  — or as he called him, Petit Jérémy — was getting so much attention following the papal visit because he believed Gabriel had a terminal illness and was going to die.

Ward thought the papal visit was part of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, an organization that grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions.

"But now, five years later, and he's still not dead! … Me, I defended him, like an idiot, and he won't die!" Ward said, adding that Gabriel wasn't dying, but "ugly."...

Wynne Government Advertises In & Endorses Virulently Anti-Semitic Muslim Newspaper

B’nai Brith has alerted the public to the publication of a virulently anti-semitic article carried in a London Ontario based Arabic newspaper – Al-Saraha.

The article is entitled  “The Question Which Everyone Ignores: Why Did Hitler Kill the Jews?

B’nai Brith states:  In more lurid detail, the piece asserts that “The first theatres of homosexuality appeared in Berlin in the 1920’s, and the first presentations of pornography appeared in 1880 and 1890 by the hands of Jewish authors”. It concludes by claiming that Adolf Hitler created 6-million new jobs upon his rise to power in 1933, and that this is the source of the “Jewish propaganda” figure of 6-million Jewish casualties in the Holocaust.

Al-Saraha is not only endorsed by an agency of the government of Ontario but Wynne’s Liberals took out a full page spread wishing a Happy Ramadan to its readership...

Daily Show turns tail and runs when conservative films them ambushing guests at the RNC gay party

h/t Small Dead Animals

Iran's ongoing cooperation with al Qaida shows the failure of Obama's deal with terror-sponsors

The US Treasury announced Wednesday sanctions on three Iran-based senior Al-Qaeda officials allegedly involved in moving funds and weapons around the Middle East for the group.

The Treasury said Faisal Jassim Mohammed al-Amri al-Khalidi, Yisra Muhammad Ibrahim Bayumi and Abu Bakr Muhammad Muhammad Ghumayn have important logistics roles in Al-Qaeda, which is officially designated by the United States and the United Nations as a global terrorist organization.

The Treasury said Khalidi, a 31-year-old Kuwait-born Saudi national, was "part of a new generation" of Qaeda operatives who in May 2015 participated in a senior leadership meeting as the military commission chief.

Egyptian Bayumi, 48, is a Qaeda veteran involved recently in raising and deploying funds for the group.

Ghumayn, a 35-year-old Algerian, took control of the financing and organization of Iran-based Qaeda members last year...

German politician stirs debate after criticizing police for shooting ax-wielding attacker

The response from the German Green Party politician in this item is remarkably stupid, but entirely typical of the things one hears from people who have absolutely no understanding of either firearms or the types of situation in question. Most of these critics evidently get their conception of how armed law enforcement responds by watching old Lone Ranger episodes where he shoots the gun out of a bad guy's hand.

It doesn't work like that.

When police are threatened with potentially deadly force, they're trained to shoot to kill. For good reason. Despite what TV shows may have suggested, the ability to make precise shots with a pistol, even if you have the time to aim and calmly take the shot is unreliable. When someone is coming at you with a weapon and you have a split second to respond, not only is there a high probability that if you aimed for a leg or shoulder you'd miss, but even if you hit the assailant, he might still be able to reach you and kill you before you could stop him.

After a 17-year-old Afghan asylum seeker allegedly injured train passengers Monday night, a special police unit closed in on the assailant — and fatally shot him when he tried to attack the officers, authorities said Tuesday.

But amid a long-held skepticism of firearms use by officers in Germany, questions soon arose over whether officers were right to shoot the man.

Renate Künast, a prominent politician and former leader of the country's Green Party, suggested that police officers should not have killed the 17-year-old. On Twitter, the politician said it would have been sufficient to injure the attacker to an extent that he would have been put out of action...

See also:  Islamic State claims Afghan teen implicated in German train attack as its own

Financial Post: Toronto has become a monolithic, suffocating liberal swamp

...A basic tenet of Toronto liberalism is that all problems can be addressed by the public sector with the proper mix of data, analysis and bureaucratic oversight. Problems are not given market solutions nor time to resolve themselves; they always require government intervention. Business is regarded as cynically greedy, while the saintly public service is above self-interest, despite conspicuously soaring salaries and benefits. Liberalism is relentlessly prescriptive in telling people how to think and behave, all in the name of freedom and justice. Individual actions are divorced from consequences; moral hazard does not exist for liberals.

The most obvious symptom of Toronto’s capture by left-wing ideology is how media elites and the intelligentsia (most of whom live off the public payroll) have come to believe that their perspective is no longer a point of view but an objective account of reality that will brook no discussion. One of their most central truths is that conservatives are ill-informed or borderline idiots in the vein of Rob Ford or Donald Trump. Ignoring their ideas is not therefore proof of an anti-conservative bias at the CBC or TV Ontario, but the justifiable sheltering of a puerile public from unsettling exposure to dangerously uninformed opinions. Questioning the factual basis of commonly repeated claims, such as that crime is falling, that fossil fuels are anachronistic, or that government spending stimulates growth proves your unfitness to participate in public debate. Never mind that Toronto is the only provincial capital whose unemployment rate consistently exceeds its province’s average, despite the large number of government jobs there.

What explains the ubiquity of left-wing ideology in Toronto? Start with an intolerance of dissenting ideas. William F. Buckley Jr. quipped that “a liberal is someone who claims to be open to all points of view — and then is surprised and offended to find there are other points of view.” ...

On The Hague’s South China Sea Decision

From The Wall Street Journal:

The July 12 arbitration award in the Philippines case against China under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos) isn’t only significant for East Asia and maritime law. It will also have implications for public international law and the peaceful settlement of international disputes generally.

Until now, arbitration hasn’t enjoyed much prominence in international relations. Cannon fire, even from water cannons, makes headlines. The tragic, albeit accidental, death of a single foreign fisherman produces more television coverage.

Even important arbitration awards, such as the 2014 Unclos tribunal’s decision to award 80% of the disputed area in the Bay of Bengal to Bangladesh rather than India, barely receive international media coverage at all. This helps China to argue that arbitration, like international court adjudication, is inconsistent with Asian values and not an accepted mode of peacefully settling disputes...

And indeed, China isn't at all happy about the arbitration process. According to China's official news agency Xinhua:

BEIJING, July 19 (Xinhua) -- The arbitration over the South China Sea dispute unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government is in fact a celebration among rogue arbitrators, who have hidden their selfish motives under the guise of the rule of law...

Rudy Giuliani's speech to the Republican National Convention

Are Universities Killing Free Speech and Open Debate?

Sheriff David Clarke tells it like it is about Black Lives Matter to a flustered Don Lemon on CNN

It appears Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni may be both astoundingly stupid and mentally ill

But at least he's good for a laugh.

White House responds to petition to label Black Lives Matter a "terror" group

After days of violence and heightened racial tensions in the U.S., the White House responded this week to an online petition asking the federal government to formally label the Black Lives Matter movement as a "terror group."

"Terrorism is defined as 'the use of violence and intimidation in pursuit of political aims,'" read the "We The People" petition, created July 6 on the White House website. "This definition is the same definition used to declare ISIS and other groups, as terrorist organizations."

Black Lives Matter, the petition said, "earned this title due to its actions in Ferguson, Baltimore, and even at a Bernie Sanders rally, as well as all over the United States and Canada." It asked the Pentagon to recognize the group as such "on the grounds of principle, integrity, morality, and safety."

Because the online document received at least 100,000 signatures -- at the time of this reporting, it had garnered over 141,000 names -- the White House was automatically prompted to respond.

The "We the People" team noted that "The White House plays no role in designating domestic terror organizations," nor does the U.S. government "generate a list of domestic terror organizations."...

Why Toronto's City Hall is the safest place in Canada in the event of a terrorist attack

For good reason, the public tends to be cynical about politicians. There are a handful of decent ones who are honest and genuinely work to make the country better. Marc Garneau and Jason Kenney come to mind in that regard. But most are either corrupt, egotistical, dishonest, or possess some combination of those base characteristics. Nowhere is that more the case than at the municipal level.

In the last month or so, Torontonians have learned a lot about how worse than useless their politicians are.

In June, in response to a mass shooting in which 49 gay clubgoers were murdered by a terrorist who had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. So what the response of many of Toronto's politicians? To condemn 'Islamophobia' rather than to condemn the ideology the inspired the massacre of innocent Floridians.

That response was only slightly less imbecilic than that of the Toronto chapter of the Black Lives Matter group. In what sounds like a parody of what would happen if a Gender and Equity Studies class were conducted by patients in a psychiatric ward, Janaya Khan, the most prominent leader of that group, blamed a mass murder of gays committed by a Muslim of Afghan background in the name of Islam, in what was part of a string of Islamic terror attacks perpetrated in the west, on "white supremacy" and "imperialism."

Black Lives Matter is made up to a great extent by Marxist, anti-capitalist, anti-police, professional protesters who have added nothing constructive to the conversation needed about racism in Toronto.

There are significant issues of racism and discrimination that the black community in Toronto has to face, but they come nowhere near approaching those in the United States. Canada does not have America's legacy of slavery, and in Toronto prior to the late 1960's, when Pierre Trudeau initiated national policies of mass immigration and multiculturalism to diffuse Quebec separatism, the black population of Toronto was minuscule. Many of the problems within Toronto's black community is one of culture rather than skin color, and tends to be concentrated mainly within two national groups, Jamaican and Somali. Many black Torontonians of other national backgrounds actually resent Jamaicans and Somalis for the problems so rife within their communities.

But rather than a thoughtful contribution, Toronto's Black Lives Matter has thrown public temper tantrums, hijacked roadways, committed vandalism, held Toronto's Pride parade hostage, inconvenienced and insulted their fellow citizens, and largely acted as if its main purpose is to be a vanity project for Janaya Khan and a couple of its other prominent activists to get attention for themselves.

And what was the response of Toronto's politicians and bureaucrats to that? To pay lip service to Black Lives Matter, to effectively endorse them by giving them a municipal award, and to do nothing to address the real issues of racism facing the city.  Instead, in an act of characteristic uselessness, Toronto's politicians invested time, energy and taxpayer expense in passing a bylaw that bans pedestrians from texting.

Terrorists attacking the west want to undermine our strength, security, freedoms, and the basic pillars of a sane civilization. However, I can think of no terrorist group that has been consistently doing a better job of that over the last two years in Canada than Toronto's City Council.

Were Toronto to face a terror attack, City Hall is probably the safest place to be, because, unwittingly or not, the terrorists have no more reliable allies than the city's politicians.