Michael Medved Opines Well on Cruz/Fiorina and the Donald

Video Description:

Medved fields some calls both from Trump supporters as well as those who are not rooting for Trump. He brings some historical context (as usual) to the calls (Taft v. Roosevelt; Humphrey, etc).

BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY he distinguishes the nonsense of Trump compared to “Republican ideals.” It amazes me that many of the same people that accused “Dubya” of being a “neo-con” are today rooting for someone far more entrenched in expanding government’s role as well as getting us involved in military operations. Here is a commentary by yours truly on my FaceBook:

I still do not understand what people do not like about Cruz’s positions as compared to Trump’s mess of positions. I would be happy if Rand Paul was put in on the third ballot, because he and Cruz are closest to the Founders idealism. I would be less happy but still pleased if Rubio were put in on the third ticket. Why? Because most ppl that ran were truly Republicans that leaned right in their ideology (except Kasich and more-so Trump).

So I view it as maybe being desperate, but only because many today do not think through these basic (101) delineations today. All the people that complained about Bush being a neo-con and who now like Trump (a crony-capitalist’s capitalists) are stuck between a rock and a hard place. He is more about large government than “Dubya” ever was.

For more clear thinking like this from Michael Medved… I invite you to visit: http://www.michaelmedved.com/

Sarah Isgur Flores Shuts Down MSNBC’s B.S.

(Via Red State) This is just … well it’s beautiful. Sarah Isgur Flores, former deputy campaign manager for the Fiorina campaign, was on MSNBC on Tuesday night to provide analysis of the election returns. And boy howdy she analyzed all right. She analyzed all up in their faces.

Republicans Reject Trump’s Religious Test ~ Rightly So

In Starbucks I overheard a conversation mentioning Republicans not saying much against Trump’s position of a religious test for people coming into the U.S. I wanted to post some audio of Lindsey Graham and Carly Fiorina (from the Michael Medved Show) where they very clearly and strongly deny Trumps position. In fact, as of today, ALL the other Republican Presidential candidates have come out against Trump on this issue.

What Trump has right is that we can (and have) stopped immigration at times from countries… but what he has wrong is that we cannot [Constitutionally] ban people entry from the world who are Muslim. You could stop immigration (all immigration) Constitutionally from, say, Syria and Pakistan… but not, as Medved points out, from Saudi Arabi — who are our “allies.” Here is that audio that includes some challenging phone calls. Take note Zuhdi Jasser was the guest during this hour:

Some Commentary on the Debate via The American Spectator

Some points out of ten posted by The American Spectator: “Ten Things You Need to Know From Last Night’s GOP Debate”

1. Carly Fiorina won. And by “won,” I mean “both debates.” She wasted everyone on stage at the “Happy Hour” kids’ table debate, managed to goad the DNC into creating her very own sexist meme, shut down Chris Matthews, and basically Ronda Rousey’ed the whole night. She punched yesterday in the face. Not a single man in the following debate seemed even remotely capable of delivering her knockout performance, and that’s something to be proud of. With a field of sixteen (eighteen? twenty? eighty?), the initial, Fox News debate — on friendly territory — was essential to solidifying your position among the front runners. Fiorina did that without hesitation. Others, in this case perpetual disappointment Rick Perry, spent the time he should have spent preparing for the debate using his surrogates to manage expectations, and made Bobby Jindal look charismatic by comparison, and Bobby Jindal is the human equivalent of notebook paper.

4. Megyn Kelly asked hardball questions of the prime time debaters, which earned her a spate of terrible Facebook fan page commentary and the honor of being called a “bimbo,” a sentiment which Donald Trump immediately endorsed. Which is convenient for Donald Trump, since he made it through the entire debate without endorsing a single policy, except, perhaps, a national program to relocate Rosie O’Donnell to an inaccessible private island. On that, he is likely to earn widespread support. But while the Donald spent the greatest amount of time yammering, among the candidates, he actually said very little. Except that you should be concerned that he intends to run third party. Which is fine. We always need more candidates to confuse elderly Floridian voters.

6. For the first time in history, observation linked Ted Cruz to Mike Huckabee, which is an intriguing development. Post-debate Luntz polling revealed that those souring on Trump were moving “back” to Cruz and Huckabee, neither of whom made a spectacular showing last night, but definitely share some of Trump’s “anti-establishment” credentials (if there is a such thing). It may turn out that the primary impetus behind Trump’s popularity was simply that neither Cruz or Huckabee had yet hit the trail — certainly Cruz seems to consider Trump his stalking horse — but if neither Cruz nor Huckabee can capitalize on the eventual Trump disengagement, the connections will sink all three. Personally, I see this as no loss. You may differ. In which case, feel free to call me a closeted liberal in the comments section as usual.

9. Marco Rubio “won” the debate itself, which is great for Marco Rubio because it’s high time he’s taken seriously as a candidate. He’s good looking, he’s got a great background story, he’s nuanced on policy and the media already hates him so much they pay for people to scour through hours of footage of Miami Zoning Commission hearings. And now he seems like  he could take on the so-called “heavy hitters” he was supposed to be crushed by. Frankly, it would be fun to see him take on Carly in a one-on-one. We’d all be better for it, too.

GOP Hopeful, Carly Fiorina, Is Looking Good!

I love how Carly handled Hillary apologist, Andrea Mitchell:

I have heard that Carly is thrilling the crowds… not with “pomp-and-circumstance,” but with answers and solutions. I hope she is on the stage in the debates!

Here is Tammy Bruce’s interview of Carly:

Water Pipeline From The North? Greens Say NO

In a GREAT article over at HotAir to compliment my Victor Davis Hanson excerpts, we see that pipelines of water from Washington State have been nixed by the Eco-Fascists!

The United States, a vast nation of near unparalleled natural beauty, might have no more stunning an environment than that which characterizes the state of California.

Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a brief trip to the Bay Area where I sampled some of this landscape’s agricultural pleasures, many of which came in fermented form. The people were lovely and accommodating. The weather was near perfection. The scenery was positively inspiring. But the topic not far from every local’s lips was a worrying one. A debilitating drought that has forced Gov. Jerry Brown to impose draconian water usage restrictions on the public has many in that state genuinely fearing for the future of their erstwhile paradise.

During an Easter morning brunch, I sat across from a pair of middle-aged women who, despite their contentedness, fretted mightily over the perilous environmental challenges facing their state. While staring wistfully over the San Francisco Bay, one of these conversationalists bragged with mock humility about her involvement in The Cause. She noted that she eagerly devotes her time to virtually any organization with an ostensible environmental mission; Sierra Club, Green Peace, Earth First!, and what she claimed was the laudably litigious Earth Justice.

Turning again to the bay, this individual scolded the ill-defined villains whom she has devoted her life to combatting. Corporations, she said, which “only care about profit,” have devoted their time to dredging the bay from Oakland to Sausalito in order to capture every smelt in the ocean. This, she claimed, has driven the native seal population into decline and has forced seal mothers to abandon their seal children in search of the disappearing schools. It was a tragic premise upon which you might base a Disney film. But for all her environmental education, this individual lacked an understanding of public policy, the federal regulations governing smelt, or how this corresponds to her state’s water crisis.

There was a period when the various species of smelt native to California were over-fished, but that was a time largely prior to this fish’s protection by the Endangered Species Act in 1994. And while it would be overly simplistic to lay the entirety of the state’s water crisis at the feet of environmental regulations (In 2013, the state had its driest year on record followed by its third driest year in 2014), the plight of the smelt has led Sacramento and Washington D.C. to tragically mismanage one of the few natural resources in California that is not present in abundance: Water.

In 2014, National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke filed a dispatch from California’s Central Valley, an area that was once an agricultural hub and has now been reduced to a virtual dust bowl as a result of drought combined with severe and unnecessary resource mismanagement. That misallocation of resources is not the result of a frustrating tradeoff between the needs of Central Valley farmers and the desert-dwelling populations of Los Angeles and San Diego, but the eternally threatened smelt.

“In 2007, the pumps were turned down; the Delta’s water output was lowered dramatically, contingent now upon the interests of a fish; and the farms that rely on the system in order to grow their crops were thrown into veritable chaos,” Cooke wrote of the smelt-favoring anthropogenic water crisis. “Predictably, a man-made drought began.”

This is a classic tale of activist government run amok — and, too, of the peculiarly suicidal instincts that rich and educated societies exhibit when they reach maturity. Were its consequences not so hideously injurious, the details would be almost comical. As a direct result of the overwrought concern that a few well-connected interest groups and their political allies have displayed for a fish — and of a federal Endangered Species Act that is in need of serious revision — hundreds of billions of gallons of water that would in other areas have been sent to parched farmland have been diverted away from the Central Valley and deliberately pushed out under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean, wasted forever, to the raucous applause of Luddites, misanthropes, and their powerful enablers. The later chapters of “The Decline and Fall of the United States” will make interesting reading.

Make no mistake: The rare, hard-done-by, and rightly protected manatee the Delta smelt is not. According to some estimates, there are no more than 3,000 manatees left in the United States, and, when left unchecked, human beings have had a nasty tendency to maim and kill them in the service of nothing more exalted than speedboating. By contrast, when the Great Smelt Freakout of 2007 began, there were 35,000 to well over 100,000 of the little buggers, depending on whom you ask. And yet the powers that be have seen fit to decree that no more than 305 of them may be killed in a given year. As an exasperated Harry Cline, of the Western Farm Press, put it in February 2012, last year “800,000 acre-feet of water went to waste based on the science of four buckets of minnows. That is enough water to produce crops on 200,000 acres or 10 million tons of tomatoes; 200 million boxes of lettuce; 20 million tons of grapes. You get the picture?”

The present crisis is not entirely California-based; Washington also plays a role. In December, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill that would have pumped water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta into Central and Southern California, but it died an unceremonious death in the Democrat-dominated Senate. If the measure had passed both chambers of Congress, President Barack Obama pledged to veto it. Why? Environmental groups feared the threat it posed to the smelt.

[….]

Fiorina is right. There is a man-made component to California’s resource crisis, and it is one that has the full support of many of the state’s environmentalist residents. Our well-meaning conservationist, who bemoaned the present state of affairs over brunch while comfortably overlooking one of the planet’s most endowed natural landscapes, cannot see that reality. For her, the perennially victimized smelt are a more pressing concern than the millions driven out of a man-made paradise by man’s folly.

…read it all!…