Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Hillary Clinton Fan Threatens Mosque; Media Blame Trump

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by JOEL B. POLLAK21 Dec 2015127

The mainstream media are reporting that a Bay Area plumber who allegedly planned to bomb a California mosque was a Donald Trump supporter–though he explicitly supported Hillary Clinton.

On Sunday, police arrested 55-year-old William Celli “on suspicion of possessing an explosive device and making criminal threats,” CBS San Francisco reported. A bomb squad detonated a device at his house. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) cheered the arrest.

CBS elaborated further: “On Facebook, Celli repeatedly praised Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, whose plan to bar any Muslims from entering the United States has drawn criticism even as he continues to rise in the polls.”

The Huffington Post and other left-wing sites played up Celli’s support of Trump, implying that Trump was responsible for “propelling” bigotry and “white domestic terrorism” into the “mainstream” of political debate.

What the media left out, however, is that Celli also praised Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

In one post, Celli wrote: “Hillary Would make a great president. If she would commit to what she is hiding. But she has to crucify the president. Then her run for the White house is over.”

The post praising Hillary Clinton is dated Oct. 22–the day Clinton testified for 11 hours at the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

The Huffington Post and other outletsclaimed the story has been overlooked because

Celli doesn’t fit the profile of the “terrorist” who is likely to be invoked on cable news or on a GOP debate stage. In fact, judging by Celli’s Facebook page, he seems to be the exact inverse: a disgruntled white man who has bought into the xenophobic rhetoric of people like GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump.


Or Hillary Clinton. But never mind the facts.

Update: The Contra Costa Times follows the same pattern, calling William Celli a “Donald Trump supporter” in the headline and throughout the piece, quoting extensively from his Facebook page without mentioning his support for Hillary Clinton.

(Screenshot of Contra Costa Times 11 p.m. Monday Dec. 21, 2015)

The article uses Celli’s arrest as a way to slam Trump:

Trump has received mounting criticism from both political parties for inflammatory comments about the Muslim community, such as the idea to create databases to track American Muslims and restrict Muslims from entering the country. Critics have warned that such comments could fuel Islamophobia.


No mention of Clinton whatsoever appears in the article.

One of the authors, Thomas Peele, mocked “Bill the Plumber” on Twitter:

Peele’s website boasts that he has won “more than 50 journalism awards.”

Update 2: Here’s Mediaite‘s Ken Meyer, linking to Talking Points Memo‘s Caitlin Cruz, linking to Raw Story‘s Travis Gettys, all regurgitating the “Trump supporter” claim, all quoting extensively from Celli’s Facebook page, and none mentioning his remarks about Hillary Clinton.

Update 3: The San Francisco Chroniclementions Celli’s posts about Trump but not his comments about Clinton. It also quotes CAIR–an organization that has been helping the family of the San Bernardino terrorists–raising concerns about Trump.

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Sen. Ted Cruz Goes After Sen. McConnell For Being Democrats’ Puppet

AP/J. Scott Applewhite

by MICHELLE FIELDS21 Dec 20151,790

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) went after House Majority LeaderSen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)Monday, arguing that he works for Democrats — including Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) — to help get their liberal policies passed in Congress.

“I have said that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is the most effective Democratic leader in modern times” wrote Cruz in Politico. He added:

But don’t take my word for it. Take Sen. Chuck Schumer’s, the vice chair of the Senate Democratic conference. Today Sen. Schumer summed up what’s wrong with Washington when he told Politico, “Sen. McConnell wants to see the Senate work. But the good news for [Democrats] is, to make it work, he has to do basically our agenda.”


Cruz also went after the record of Republican leadership in the Senate.

“Since taking control of the Senate, Republican leadership has joined hands with a majority of Democrats to thwart their own caucus’ efforts to stop the Obama agenda 24 times. During each of these 24 votes, this so-called Republican majority successfully passed legislation with a majority of Democrats in support and a majority of Republicans opposed.”


Last week, Schumer gloated over the Democrats’ win in the 2016 budget talks, and declared that:

“Well, if you would’ve told me this year that we’d be standing here celebrating the passage of an omnibus bill, with no poison pill riders, at higher [spending] levels above sequesters than even the president requested, I wouldn’t have believed it, but here we are… Almost anything, the Republican leadership in the Senate achieved this year, they achieved on Democratic terms… Democrats had an amazingly good year.”


Since his election in 2012, Cruz and McConnell have clashed repeatedly over conservative priorities.

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Bill Kristol: ‘We’ll Have to Start’ New Party If Trump Wins Nomination

AP Photos

by BEN SHAPIRO21 Dec 20152673

‪On Monday, Weekly Standardeditor-in-chief Bill Kristoltweeted out what the rest of the Republican establishment is thinking: better Hillary than Donald. Here’s the tweet:

Crowd-sourcing: Name of the new party we’ll have to start if Trump wins the GOP nomination? Suggestions welcome at editor@weeklystandard.com

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 20, 2015


Kristol isn’t alone. As I wrote at Daily Wiretoday, Politico’s Jeff Greenfield says, “If the operatives I talked with are right, Trump running as a Republican could well face a third-party run – from the Republicans themselves.” That follows last Thursday’s Politico column from former New Jersey governor Christine Todd Whitman, who compared Trump to Hitler and called him “evil,” and last Wednesday’s Politico column reporting that Jeb Bush’s aides “began looking into the possibility of making a clear break with Trump – potentially with the candidate stating that, if Trump were the nominee, Bush would not support him.”

Last week, MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said that former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour “and a lot of the Republican leaders would much rather Hillary Clinton be President of the United States than have Donald Trump represent them as a Republican.” And in November, The Hillreported that “GOP establishment donors have confided to The Hill that for the first time in recent memory, they find themselves contemplating not supporting a Republican nominee for president.”

I’m old enough to remember when it wasscandalous for Trump not to pledge his allegiance to the eventual Republican nominee. Now, day after day, reports from party leaders leak, stating that should Trump gain control over the party apparatus, they will simply smash the machinery.

Classy.

This wouldn’t be the first time.

As Greenfield points out, when iconic conservative Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) won the nomination for president, many of his rivals refused to endorse him for the Oval Office, including Governor Nelson Rockefeller (R-NY) and Governor George Romney (R-MI). Romney ripped Goldwater’s “extremist” supporters” and would later support Gerald Ford over Ronald Reagan in 1976 and George H.W. Bush over Reagan in 1980.

These liberal Republicans, who believed in bigger government, didn’t appreciate Goldwater’s libertarianism and forcibly undercut his doomed bid. Greenfield cites the New York Herald-Tribune going so far as to endorse LBJ, the most leftist president until Barack Obama, for the White House over Goldwater.

And while the Republican establishment would like everyone to think that they were the reason for the rise of Ronald Reagan, they did everything they could to stop Reagan. Not only did establishment Republicans back George H.W. Bush over Reagan in the 1980 primaries – Bush infamously bragged about his support from liberal Republicans like Henry Cabot Lodge – but a few went so far as to support the independent candidacy of former liberal Republican Rep. John Anderson of Illinois, who dumped the Party after Reagan won the nomination. Anderson explained, “I would be more comfortable with Teddy Kennedy in the sense that I do believe that Ronald Reagan’s view of the problems of our day is so utterly inappropriate.”

Obviously, the establishment failed in stopping Reagan. But with the election of H.W. Bush, they grabbed control of the Party again, and they haven’t given it up since.

Today’s establishment Republican “saviors” of the Party like to think of themselves as fighting not Reagan or Goldwater, but David Duke – they color Trump a racist and a xenophobe. The truth, however, is that it wouldn’t matter at all whether Trump were the establishment’s enemy or whether it was Senator Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), currently the second-place finisher in national polls. So long as the frontrunner remains an outsider, the establishment will use all of its power to stop them, including the threat of a third-party run.

Which shows, as always, that they care more about maintaining control of the party apparatus than about beating Hillary Clinton. After all, they said the same about Trump when he was threatening a third-party run.

Ben Shapiro is Senior Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News, Editor-in-Chief of DailyWire.com, and The New York Times bestselling author, most recently, of the book,The People vs. Barack Obama: The Criminal Case Against The Obama Administration (Threshold Editions, June 10, 2014). Follow Ben Shapiro on Twitter @benshapiro.

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Monday, December 21, 2015

Polls may actually underestimate Trump's support, study finds

www.latimes.com
Donald Trump leads the GOP presidential field in polls of Republican voters nationally and in most early-voting states, but some surveys may actually be understating his support, a new study suggests.
The analysis, by Morning Consult, a polling and market research company, looked at an odd occurrence that has cropped up repeatedly this year: Trump generally has done better in online polls than in surveys done by phone.
The firm conducted an experiment aimed at understanding why that happens and which polls are more accurate -- online surveys that have tended to show Trump with support of nearly four-in-10 GOP voters or the telephone surveys that have typically shown him with the backing of one-third or fewer.
Their results suggest that the higher figure probably provides the more accurate measure. Some significant number of Trump supporters, especially those with college educations, are "less likely to say that they support him when they’re talking to a live human” than when they are in the “anonymous environment” of an online survey, said the firm's polling director, Kyle Dropp.
With Trump dominating political debates in both parties, gauging his level of support has become a crucial puzzle. The Morning Consult study provides one piece of the solution, although many other uncertainties remain.
Among the complicating factors is this: The gap between online and telephone surveys has narrowed significantly in surveys taken in the last few weeks. That could suggest that Republicans who were reluctant to admit to backing Trump in the past have become more willing to do so recently.
Another issue is that not only can polls change over time, but Trump's support in pre-election surveys might not fully translate into actual votes. He has not invested as heavily as some of his GOP rivals in building the kind of get-out-the-vote operation that candidates typically rely on, particularly in early voting states.
Some of the polls that show heavy support for Trump have also shown him doing better among self-identified independents who lean Republican than among regular GOP voters. At least some of those independents may not be in the habit of voting in primaries and caucuses, which could make a robust turnout operation even more necessary.
On the other hand, a candidate of Trump's level of celebrity may simply not need much of a get-out-the-vote operation. No one really knows.
Another complication is that most polls made public this year have been of people nationwide, not of voters in the states that actually hold the first primaries. In Iowa, which will kick off the election season with party caucuses on Feb. 1, Trump has slipped into second place, trailing Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas in the majority of recent polls.
In New Hampshire, which holds the first primary, on Feb. 9, Trump leads, but less dramatically than in national polls. In recent weeks, he has averaged a bit more than one-quarter of the vote there.
Still, the Morning Consult experiment sheds considerable light on an issue that has puzzled pollsters for months.
The firm polled 2,397 potential Republican voters earlier this month, randomly assigning them to one of three different methods -- a traditional telephone survey with live interviewers calling landlines and cellphones, an online survey and an interactive dialing technique that calls people by telephone and asks them to respond to recorded questions by hitting buttons on their phone.
By randomly assigning people to the three different approaches and running all at the same time, the researchers hoped to eliminate factors that might cause results to vary from one poll to another.
The experiment confirmed that "voters are about six points more likely to support Trump when they’re taking the poll online then when they’re talking to a live interviewer,” said Dropp.
The most telling part of the experiment, however, was that not all types of people responded the same way. Among blue-collar Republicans, who have formed the core of Trump's support, the polls were about the same regardless of method. But among college-educated Republicans, a significant difference appeared, with Trump scoring 9 points better in the online poll.
The most likely explanation for that education gap, Dropp and his colleagues believe, is a well-known problem known as social-desirability bias -- the tendency of people to not want to confess unpopular views to a pollster.
Blue-collar voters don't feel embarrassed about supporting Trump, who is very popular in their communities, the pollsters suggested. But many college-educated Republicans may hesitate to admit their attraction to Trump, the experiment indicates.
In a public setting such as the Iowa caucuses, where people identify their candidate preference in front of friends and neighbors, that same social-desirability bias may hold sway.
But in most primaries, where voters cast a secret ballot, the study's finding suggests that anonymous online surveys -- the ones that typically show Trump with a larger lead -- provide the more accurate measure of his backing.
"It’s our sense that a lot of polls are under-reporting Trump’s overall support," Dropp said.

Obama Goes Beyond Mere Gun Control, Hints at Confiscation

AP

by AWR HAWKINS3 Oct 201539,237

When President Obama spoke in reaction to the heinous October 1 attack on Umpqua Community College, he went beyond his usual calls for more gun control and suggested instead that America consider following the path blazed by Australia and Great Britain.

In the mid-1990s Australia and Great Britain both instituted what were virtually complete bans on firearm possession.

Obama referenced the bans thus:

We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings.  Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours.  So we know there are ways to prevent it.


And Obama is not the only one who suggested taking a gun-free approach to American life. The anti-Second Amendment message was also pushed by Slate, Vox, and Dan Savage.

For example, on October 1 Slate ran a story reminding readers that Australia enacted their gun ban in response to an attack on April 28, 1996, wherein a gunman “opened fire on tourists in a seaside resort in Port Arthur, Tasmania.” Thirty-five were killed and 23 others wounded in the attack. Twelve days later Australia’s government banned guns, period.

On October 2 Vox explained that Australia “confiscated 650,000 guns” via a “mandatory gun buyback” program which forced gun owners to hand their firearms over for destruction. Vox claims the result was that “murders and suicides plummeted’ and suggested such a path might be an option for America following “the murder of at least 10 people at Umpqua Community College.”

Vox did not mention that “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” began plummeting in America in the mid-1990s as well. But in America, the decrease in violent crime did not correlate with a gun ban but with a rapid expansion in the number of guns privately owned. The Congressional Research Service reported that the number of privately owned firearms in America went from 192 million in 1994 to 310 million privately owned firearms in 2009. Subsequently, the “firearm-related murder and non-negligent homicide” rate fell from 6.6 per 100,000 in 1993 to 3.6 per 100,000 in 2000 and finally to 3.2 per 100,000 in 2011.

But none of this made any difference to Dan Savage, who responded to the attack on Umpqua Community College by calling for the Second Amendment’s repeal. Savage tweeted, “F**k the NRA, f**k the gun nuts, f**k the Second Amendment — better yet, repeal the Second Amendment.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter:@AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.

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Police “Uncomfortable” About Revealing Motive of Las Vegas Strip Killer

According to another eyewitness account, the woman screamed “Allahu Akbar”

www.infowars.com

Police are refusing to reveal the motive behind yesterday’s shocking attack when a woman deliberately ploughed her car into dozens of people in Las Vegas.

The culprit responsible for the horrifying incident, which killed one person and injured another 35, has been named as Lakeisha N. Holloway.

Immediately following her rampage, Holloway drove to a nearby hotel and told a valet to call 911, explaining why she had carried out the attack, although her motive remains a mystery because police are “uncomfortable” about disclosing it, according to Fox News’ Will Carr.

Sheriff: not comfortable disclosing what driver said about why she crashed into so many people on Las Vegas Strip#FoxNews

— Will Carr (@WillCarrFNC) December 21, 2015

Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Sheriff Joe Lombardo said he doubted the attack was “militant” in nature, but refuses to rule it out at this stage. He added that Holloway “didn’t appear to be distressed due to her actions” and was “stoic” when she was arrested.

Holloway reportedly had a falling out with her father before the attack and had been living homeless in her car with her 3-year-old child for the past week.

Some respondents on Twitter speculated that the attack may have been racially motivated.

According to another eyewitness account, the woman screamed “Allahu Akbar” during the attack, although this is from a dubious source and cannot be considered genuine at this time.

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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

AZ Sheriff Babeu: We've Had 10,000 Unaccompanied Juveniles In Two Months

AZ Sheriff Babeu: We've Had 10,000 Unaccompanied Juveniles In Two Months Obama Admin Says 'Border Is Wide Open' - Breitbart

www.breitbart.com

Pinal County, AZ Sheriff and Congressional candidate Paul Babeu (R) stated, “just the last two months alone, we’ve had 10,000 unaccompanied juveniles” who are “staying here” and that “the Obama administration says the border is wide open, that there is no law it comes to immigration” on Monday’s “Cavuto: Coast to Coast” on the Fox Business Network.

Babeu said, “just the last two months alone, we’ve had 10,000 unaccompanied juveniles, and also with some family members. And the arms are open, and that’s the message that’s been sent. The last wave, 100,000 from Central America and–.”

He added, “We’re a compassionate nation. We always have been. And this is where I’m tired of being shouted down by President Obama, like somehow we’re not good Americans if we don’t do everything that he says we should to do. And we’ve had a million legal immigrants last year, and we do this every year.” Babeu continued, “I think it’s the most compassionate thing we can do, is reunite them with their families in Central America. What America should be doing is finding ways to solve the problems of violence in Central America, support their governments, because if we don’t solve that core problem, this isn’t going to end. We’re going to have this problem next month, next year, and then we own these people, and all the social network to support them for their entire lives. Because if you think that these kids are going anywhere, think again. They’re staying here.”

Babeu further argued, “our compassion, there has to be a limit to this. And we don’t see people in Europe, in the countries there, taking kids — refugees from central america, yet everybody wants us to take Syrian refugees from halfway across the world. So, where’s the fairness here?”

He concluded, “the new norm here is the Obama administration says the border is wide open, that there is no law it comes to immigration.”

Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter@IanHanchett