If the bag doesn’t come spinning around the airport carousel, you shouldn’t have to pay, right?

Good news, comparatively speaking, from Ron Lieber's New York Times article, Reclaiming Fees When Airline Luggage Goes Astray:

Buried in the new bill reauthorizing the Federal Aviation Administration are a few sections addressing the fees that many of us pay to fly. And while the Senate and the House bills still differ a bit, one likely result is going to be this: The carriers are going to have to refund the fees you pay when your luggage isn’t on your flight and you have to wait a long time to get it. …

■ Any attempt to reason with the airline begins with the discovery that it may have declared all baggage fees nonrefundable in nearly every circumstance.

 … While the bill contains other improvements for traveling families, people in wheelchairs and others, those baggage fees are the ones that airlines have been charging for a longer time and are particularly noxious. If the bag doesn’t come spinning around the carousel, you shouldn’t have to pay, right?

… if you did not get what you paid for, you ought to be persistent in your attempts to get the money back. Here’s how the process breaks down — and I mean that in every sense of the term.

HAGGLING WITH THE AIRLINE In December, my family and I checked some bags on a domestic Delta Air Lines flight and did not get them back until 30 hours later. It seemed as if a refund was in order, but it took some effort to get Delta agents to even acknowledge that there was a way to request one. …

DISPUTING FEES WITH YOUR CARD COMPANY Having given Delta an opportunity to fix the problem only to find that I could not get my money back, I called up American Express, my credit card issuer, to dispute the baggage fee charges. The dispute process can be an incredibly powerful tool for aggrieved consumers, and you can learn more about it in my 2013 column on the topic.

When I got a representative on the phone, however, she informed me that I was not allowed to dispute this fee. Why not? Because of an agreement that the airline has with American Express, she said. …

TURN TO WASHINGTON Depending on what happens to the new legislation, it’s possible that some of the bag fee angst will go away. The Senate version of the bill calls for airlines to automatically refund the baggage fees when travelers do not get their luggage within six hours of their arrival on a domestic flight or 12 hours on an international one. The House version gives a 24-hour deadline, and the delivery of the refund would not be automatic.

Both passages are pretty generous to the airlines. Baggage service used to be free. Now that it generally isn’t, should they really get a free pass if your bags come on the next flight four hours later and you have to deal with the logistics of making sure they get to you?

 … if you’re stuck paying fees on a carrier that gives you grief when the bags don’t come on time, dispute those charges and dispute them often. Another thing that gets the carrier’s attention is your filing a complaint with the Department of Transportation.

Related:
• Do airline companies assume that
terrorists can only afford a seat in economy class?

• Airplane Etiquette:
Undue Deference Is Not Applicable When Exiting an Aircraft

Race Is Nothing to Joke About, You… Racist!

Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller

Another Documentary on Jodorowsky's Dune (A Short)

As a Documentary on the Great Cinematic Epic That Never Came to Be, Jodorowsky's Dune, finally hits the screens, there exists a much older documentary on the Chilean's pre-production activity for the film based on the Frank Herbert science-fiction novel, a making-of signed by Julian Myers.

A (Legal) Turkish Immigrant to the U.S. Who Isn't Shocked by How Ghastly the Country's Inhabitants Are Alleged to Be

Isn't it terrible — shameful ?!

A poor Turkish immigrant to the United States does not seem to understand what a horrible nightmare American society is, how racist its inhabitants are, and how much people suffer under capitalism (a.k.a. under the free market system)

Chances are Chobani CEO Hamdi Ulukaya does not read The Guardian and will never vote for Bernie…

Can you believe it?!

NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt

MAKING A DIFFERENCE: 
The founder of the Chobani yogurt empire, who started with nothing as an immigrant to the US, surprised his employees today by giving back to them in a very big way: 

"This community and this country has been so great to us, and I'd like to return that favor..."

Do Airline Safety Rules Make Sense? Yes, But Not in the Way You Were Taught to Think

You know that head-down fetal position that you're supposed to take in the event of a crash landing; has it ever occurred to you that it doesn't make much sense?

Think about it: your face will — seemingly — be protected (which is far from a bad thing), but the top of your head, and thus your brain, which is (arguably?) far more important: aren't they more likely to strike the seat in front of you, and aren't you thus more likely to suffer?

And those yellow life-jackets… You may not know this, but it seems that you are supposed to put them on in the event of any crash, even if you are not flying above the ocean.

Why on Earth (so to speak) might that be?

Helpfully, a reader of the Economist provides a logical explanation
(how reassuring you will find it I leave entirely up to you).

SIR – The bright-yellow lifejackets are not intended to act as flotation devices. They are there to make it easier for the recovery services to spot the bodies strewn across rough terrain. (I was once asked to put on a life-jacket over central Germany, some 300 miles from the sea.)

And the advice to adopt a head-down fetal position in the event of a crash landing does nothing to preserve life, given that the stall speed of a modern airliner means it will connect with the ground at terminal velocity. However, the position does tend to preserve dental data, useful for identifying dilapidated corpses.

Roger Willis

Peel, Isle of Man

Paul Gillions of Hitchin, Hertfordshire, adds that

The most honest briefing I have ever had was on a helicopter flying me to an oil rig in the North Sea:

“Take off your watch because it stops your survival suit making a good seal around your wrist. If we go down and the water gets inside the suit, it's so cold you'll last about five minutes.”

Related:
• Do airline companies assume that
terrorists can only afford a seat in economy class?

• Airplane Etiquette:
Undue Deference Is Not Applicable When Exiting an Aircraft

7 Years After Apologies in Dresden and at Omaha Beach, Obama Sounds Excited to Be Heading for Hiroshima

The BBC reports that, as I predicted seven years ago, the apologizer-in-chief intends to pay a visit to Hiroshima. After issuing a (faint) apology (!) for World War II at Omaha Beach (!) in June 2009 on the 65th anniversary of the Normandy landings during his first summer in the White House (following an airplane ride from… Dresden, of all places), I predicted that eventually Barack Obama would head for the first city ever to be targeted and destroyed by an atomic bomb.

But wait! Doesn't the White House say there would be no apology for the bombings?

That's right. The president's communications adviser

said that Mr Obama would "not revisit the decision to use the atomic bomb at the end of World War II. Instead, he will offer a forward-looking vision focused on our shared future".

And just who is the president's communications adviser?

That's right: he's the fellow we have heard about recently, thanks to the New York Times. His name is Rhodes… Ben Rhodes…

• Required reading (if you will
forgive me for being so bold):
Hiroshima, 70 Years Later

Artists Unite: In this era of integrated information, we are witnessing the most concerted attack on freedom in world history

What is provocative art in a hyper-politicized age?

asks The Remodern Review's Richard Bledsoe (thanks to Ed Driscoll).

It’s art that dares to express dissent from the orthodoxy of the ruling establishment. And despite their best efforts to camouflage the nature of their oppressive and destructive grip on the culture, the establishment these days is a hive mind of Progressive dogma.

In this era of integrated information, we are witnessing the most concerted attack on freedom in world history. The powerful are colluding to manipulate the powerless to act as the shock troops to enforce the agenda of the New Aristocracy of the Well Connected. From positions of power in government, administration, academia, media, and the arts, they promote lynch mob tactics against anyone who does not conform to their Orwellian programs of doublethink, thoughtcrimes, and Two Minutes Hates.

The festering ambition in the corrupt hearts of the elitists is unaccountable power for themselves; now they fancy they have the technology to make their tyranny truly global in scale. They like to proselytize about the direction of history, and appeal to idealism in order to sucker the useful idiots they need to act as their muscle. Yet in practice their proposed model will end up looking like every other attempt since Marx: a small group of privileged thugs standing on top of mass graves, while the enslaved populace toils away in fear and hopelessness.

 

There’s nothing progressive about what the Left proposes: it’s a regression to the same old feudalism that is as old as mankind itself, tarted up with some buzzwords and hypocrisy. The Gramsci long march through the institutions has been effective in degrading the culture to make a society ripe for totalitarianism.

We are on the edge now. All too soon, we will either see their plot succeeded, or we will find out what happens when their overreach crumbles, and their grand designs collapse under the weight of hubris and backlash.

 … The elitists have weaponized art into an assault on the achievements of Western civilization, but they have nothing coherent, useful or enduring to replace those achievements with; all they offer is their lust for domination and self-aggrandizement. This makes their program a very niche market.

So the answer is to bypass the filters of the establishment, and take the change directly to the people. In April, at Lotus Contemporary Art of Phoenix, Arizona, a group show of citizen artists took a stand. This will hopefully be the first show of many.

Coordinated by Provocative Art 2016, this exhibit brought together renowned artists from across the country, including Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist Michael Ramirez, National Review cover artist Roman Genn, and controversial guerilla public artist Sabo.

Guardians Against Slippery Slopes: The members of America's Libertarian Party don’t seem to understand this, uh… liberty thing

Of all parties, you'd expect the Libertarians to stand against the big government insanity of private sector nondiscrimination laws

observes Benny Huang as InstaPundit notes that Libertarian Party membership applications double after Trump becomes GOP nominee.

They don't.

If you’re like me you’re probably searching for a third party candidate in the wake of Donald Trump’s clinching of the GOP nomination. For those of you considering the Libertarian Party (LP), I hope you’ll reconsider.

The party’s current frontrunner, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, doesn’t seem to understand this liberty thing. He thinks it means drugs and abortion but should you decide that you don’t want to engage in a business transaction he wants the government to coerce you. The party’s other candidates aren’t quite as extreme in their statism though none of them will make an unqualified stand for your Thirteenth Amendment right not to be held in involuntary servitude—which is exactly what private sector nondiscrimination laws are.

Johnson is so enamored with the concept of private sector nondiscrimination laws that he wants to force Jewish bakers to make a Nazi wedding cakes. Yes, really. Contrary to the battle cry of his party, “Minimum government, maximum freedom,” Johnson thinks the government should mandate that party A do business with party B. I don’t. My philosophy is that both ends of any economic transaction should be voluntary. That is not, by the way, a return to Jim Crow. Jim Crow was also a statist monstrosity which prohibited businesses from serving whom they wished. Big difference.

Johnson makes the familiar slippery slope argument that permitting businesses to refuse service to one group for one reason will quickly get out of control and then all sorts of businesses will be discriminating for all sorts of reasons. For the life of me, I can’t explain why a libertarian would be upset about this. It certainly puts the lie to the rest of his supposed libertarian beliefs.

 … The moderator, John Stossel, then asked whether Jews should have to bake a Nazi wedding cake and Johnson replied, “That’s my contention, yes.” He then went on to cite the silliest slippery slope argument I have ever heard—and I’ve heard some silly ones. He actually said that a private utility company might decide to shut off someone’s electricity for religious reasons.

Is this really a problem? No really; has this ever happened in the history of the universe? Where do they get these ridiculous scenarios?

I don’t mean to imply that slippery slope arguments are inherently suspect. To the contrary, we’re racing down a slippery slope at breathtaking speed but in the other direction. The idea that business owners can’t discriminate is being taken to absurd lengths and it will only get more bizarre in coming years. It isn’t just nondiscrimination laws either. Once we’ve accepted that private businesses aren’t really private there’s essentially nothing the government can’t mandate or prohibit. If you’re okay with that then please don’t call yourself a libertarian, a conservative, or even an American. Call yourself something else. Please.


 … Strange things start happening when that right disappears. What seems like an absurd application of the law today may seem quite normal in twenty years. The sky’s really the limit. Just imagine if you could go back in time and tell Ralph Abernathy, one of Martin Luther King’s closest advisers and an ordained minister, that the precedent he was setting would one day be invoked to make Christians such as himself bake wedding cakes for homosexual weddings. He would have thought you were mad.

Nondiscrimination laws are now being used to force private businesses to allow men to use the ladies’ room. That’s what Houston’s HERO was about, as well as Charlotte’s recent law which was preempted by the state of North Carolina, which may in turn be preempted by Obama’s dictatorial powers. The Obama Administration’s wacky position isn’t even that we should integrate bathrooms, only that each of us should have the freedom to self-select which group we belong to.

 …  The hottest new fad in nondiscrimination law is protection for convicted felons. Most of us don’t think that being a murderer or rapist is a status deserving of protection but then against most of us don’t work for the Obama Administration. Last month, the US Department of Housing issued a decree saying that refusing to rent to a prospective tenant on account of a criminal record may violate the Fair Housing Act. Actuality, it doesn’t. The act prohibits discrimination based on race but not on felony conviction. The Department maintains that discrimination against felons is de facto discrimination against racial minorities. So there you have it folks—Democrats think minorities are a bunch of criminals. And we’re the racist ones?

‘‘A dynamite bomb” in France's Capital! But what in the world can anyone want to throw a bomb in Paris for?

‘‘A dynamite bomb, and exploded by the Anarchists! ” Such was the cry which flew round Paris at an early hour yesterday morning [May 1, 1891] over telegraph and telephone wire.

This was a rude awakening, a sensational opening to the day of the year which the Anarchists, Nihilists, and Revolutionists claim specially as their own. At first the report received little credence. The Parisian can understand dynamite bombs being thrown in any other city but Paris. 

But what in the world can anyone want to throw a bomb in Paris for? Nevertheless, the story is perfectly true. And the facts are as follows: Yesterday morning, at four o’clock, a dynamite bomb was placed, by some person unknown, in the recess of one of the windows of the hotel of the Marquis de Trévise, 2 rue de Berri. 

The house is a magnificent block forming the corner of the Champs-Elysées, on your right hand as you enter the rue de Berri. The explosion struck terror into the hearts of the inmates of the surrounding dwellings. The people flew out of the doors, some in their nightshirts, and the girls in the laundry opposite were nearly terrified out of their wits.

— In Our Pages, 125 Years Ago
— The New York Herald, European Edition, May 2, 1891

Seeking to Counter Berlin, British Move Towards Securing Iraq's Oil

Strong British forces, believed to include air personnel, have landed at Basra, Iraq’s principal port on the Persian Gulf, an official announcement said here [on April 19, 1941]. The move was seen as a counter-stroke to German maneuvers to gain control of the country’s valuable Mosul oil fields. The imperial forces landed at Basra, it was said, in accordance with the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi treaty, and the new government of Premier Sayid Rashid Ali al-Gailani was said to be co-operating with the British. A warm welcome was said to have been given to the troops by the local population.

— In Our Pages, 75 Years Ago
— New York Herald Tribune, April 20, 1941

In the Era of the Drama Queen, Even Conservatives Turn to the Candidate of Melodramatics and Excitement

As I have written before, we live in the era of the drama queen.

There has been so much of this over the past seven or eight years — melodramatics and excitement — that it has become the national religion, even amongst conservative and traditional Americans against whom the melodrama (the toll of guns! the Confederate flag! a racist on the $20 bill! ugly traditionals not allowing a minority to use the bathroom of their choice!) and the excitement (Obama the most intelligent man to enter the White House! a national health care system! peace with Cuba! peace with Iran!) were constantly being used.

And when a GOP candidate started using the crises of melodramatics and excitement as well, albeit (ostensibly, at least) in the other direction, he started collecting all the support from members of the Republican Party.

The use-your-brain conservative, one of the very best candidates America or the world have seen in the past century, was effectively crowded out. (No wonder I wrote Whoever Emerges Victorious in November, the GOP Loses; and So Does the American People… [Update (3 years later): I have since noted to what extent I was wrong about Donald Trump…])

As Ted Cruz pointed out last Sunday, some 50 (!) days before quitting, the mainstream media (why are so many media types also Democrats? Or leftists? because they too crave melodramatics, they too live for excitement, indeed it is the essential feature of their job) put a stop to the highly profitable televised debates between Republican candidates, debates which would have shown all the seriousness of said Ted's viewpoints while showing the volatility of The Donald's positions (volatility that the mainstream media will start pointing out, from here until November) [Again, I have been totally wrong about Trump, and — luckily! — all has turned out much more differently, and much better, than I had foreseen]…

This is the legacy that Barack Obama, this is the legacy that the Democrats, have hoisted upon America…

Related: The Era of the Drama Queens:
Every Crisis Is a Triumph

And now, incidentally, you know why liberals are so intent on undermining and on overturning the Constitution of the United States: from beginning to end, the document written by the Founding Fathers is a use-your-brain, a take-a-pause, a don't-fall-for-the-crisis-tricks document, in which just about every sentence tells the politicians and the people not to give in, never to give in, to excitement and to melodramatics.

The Founding Fathers knew that it is quite possible to survive, and even to thrive, without leaders and politicians and functionaries not to mention charismatic revolutionaries butting into your life — indeed, the people of the quintessential put-a-brake-on-politicans'-outcries country have surged over the past 240 years and led the planet's nations into making the world a better place.

And now you also know why, for the past two centuries in a half, America has been demonized throughout the old world, and why foreign leaders have constantly pushed for a charismatic revolutionary in the White House to turn America around, and turn the Americans towards more "reasonable" positions.

Related:
• The Left's 2016 Plan: Defining Trump so damningly that Clinton will look comparatively angelic

• Whoever Emerges Victorious in November, the GOP Loses; and So Does the American People

• The Divine Right of Democrats: Kevin Williamson on the liberation of the Donkey party by the practical elimination of the Republican party (America is  "suffering from a kind of infection in the form of the Republican party, which inhibits the normal and healthy — meaning Democrat-dominated — political life of the United States").

Selfishness disguised as selflessness: Democrats know how to make a partisan pitch sound like a nonpartisan appeal for more civic participation

Liberal Democrats wouldn't dream of organizing a voter registration drive

notes Benny Huang wryly, at least not one

that wasn't guaranteed to be a net win for their party.

White House College Reporter Day took an interesting turn last week when President Obama showed up unannounced to deliver a speech to journalism students on the importance of voting Democrat. He didn’t actually tell them to vote Democrat, of course—he just told them to vote, though there’s no doubt which party he was hinting they should vote for. The message was about as subtle as a punch in the face.

The students were listening to Press Secretary Josh Earnest drone on and on when the president suddenly burst onto the stage. Earnest feigned surprised because, you know, everything in the Obama Administration is scripted. The audience’s reaction reminded me of the Beatles’ first Ed Sullivan Show appearance in 1964. I would not have been surprised if some of the girls had started throwing their bras at him.
 
Said Mr. Obama: “If you care about climate change, you care about college costs, you care about career opportunities, you care about war and peace and refugees, you can’t just complain. You’ve got to vote.” Of course he didn’t say “you’ve got to vote for my party” though I think that was implied.

 … Obama knows this. He also knows he can use this issue to encourage young people to vote Democrat without actually saying the word “Democrat.” The same could be said of the other issues he raised. It would be like a Republican president telling an audience that if they really care about overturning Roe v. Wade, protecting the Second Amendment, and eliminating the death tax, they can’t just complain; they’ve got to vote. I think most people would hear the implication of that statement loud and clear.

But Democrats know how to make a partisan pitch sound like a nonpartisan appeal for more civic participation. They don’t fool all of the people all of the time but, with the willing complicity of the media, they fool too many people too much of the time.

Obama’s exhortation to vote (Democrat) reminds me very much of my own college days when I was almost bamboozled by the Democrats’ supposed spirit of cooperation and their alleged zeal for getting people—all people—to the polls. I’m not so naïve anymore. It was 2004, an extremely contentious election year, and I was an active member of the College Republicans.

The University Democrats were coordinating a voter registration drive on campus and, as it turned out, one of those students leading the registration drive lived down the hall from me in the dorm. She asked me if the College Republicans would like to help out. “We just want people to vote,” she said. “We don’t care who they vote for.” I thought that sounded nice and fluffy so I raised the idea at one of our meetings. People said the club was too busy and the idea was shot down.

Looking back, I’m glad we didn’t participate. Was I really supposed to believe that she didn’t care who the students voted for? Yeah, right. That’s easy to say when the students were probably trending twenty to one for John Kerry. That figure is just a guesstimate—I know of no hard data on the voting patterns of students on my moonbat college campus in that election twelve years ago but I think I can safely say that Kerry and the Democrats won handily. People were literally crying when the election results rolled in.

Getting the College Republicans to help out with a voter registration drive would only have given the Democrats more foot soldiers at their disposal to get more students registered to vote (Democrat) while simultaneously giving the effort a bipartisan gloss. If the political tendencies of the campus had been reversed there’s no doubt in my mind that the Democrats would not have agreed to spend their free time registering hundreds of people to vote for George W. Bush.

I don’t mean to imply that the girl was lying to me. If she was deceiving anyone it was probably herself. She had told herself that it didn’t matter who her newly minted voters voted for but what she really meant was that she didn’t care if a few people voted for another party as long as the registration drive was a net gain for the Democrats—an outcome that was virtually assured. She could therefore afford to mouth platitudes about every voice being heard. It was selfishness disguised as selflessness, which is something I’ve noticed liberals do very well.
 
Ever stop and wonder why they use the welfare office to register voters? The egregious 1993 Motor Voter law actually requires the states to encourage welfare recipients to register to vote when they sign up for benefits. Career bureaucrats have an incentive to scare the wits out of welfare recipients with the specter of big, bad Republicans taking their bennies away from them. The bureaucrats, who are already loyal Democrats, want to make the welfare recipients loyal Democrats too. As perpetual wards of the state, welfare recipients will never in a million years dream of voting for anyone but a big government liberal who will reward them for their loyalty with a large portion of their neighbors’ property. Their participation in the electoral process can tip the balance of power from the makers to the takers, which sounds like a great idea—for the takers. Now you know why voter registration is focused on the welfare office and not, say, down the hall where gun licenses are issued.

Another one of these stealth Democratic get-out-the-vote campaigns is Rock the Vote, a laughably “nonpartisan” voter registration organization that focuses on the 18-24 year old demographic.

 … Nothing liberal Democrats do is nonpartisan. Everything is designed to gain them some kind of political advantage. They’re completely unprincipled and they’ll do anything to advance their agenda. Voter register drives are no different. They are always aimed at demographic groups that Democrats think could be milked for a few more votes if only they exerted more effort—blacks, college students, welfare recipients, etc. Everything is calculated and nothing is left to chance.

If Democrats want to lead get-out-the-vote efforts, that’s fine; but they should at least have the decency to call them what they are. It’s called truth in advertising. They should try it sometime.

As I have said before, like many of the amendments to the constitution of the 20th century, the 26th Amendment may have been one of the most destructive decisions in the history of the American Republic.

The Left's 2016 Plan: Defining Trump so damningly that Clinton will look comparatively angelic

Echoing what I wrote yesterday (Whoever Emerges Victorious in November, the GOP Loses; and So Does the American People), Benjamin Weingarten points to a recently released campaign ad by a Democrat running against a Republican in Arkansas (video at link [Update: thanks to Maggie's Farm for the Bird Dog link]), should you want to know how Democrats plan to go about trying to destroy Donald Trump if he is the Republican presidential nominee:

One suspects that we will see a flurry of such campaign commercials in districts across the country in races up and down ballots during the 2016 general election if Trump is to triumph in the GOP primary.

As President Barack Obama did with Mitt Romney [in 2012], Hillary Clinton and a media that has to this point enabled Donald Trump’s rise with $2 billion in free messaging will seek to define Trump so damningly that Clinton will look comparatively angelic — which is saying something — ensuring his fall.

The Donald will be cast as a bigoted, misogynistic, unscrupulous oligarch with no principles except a lust for power. When Trump comes out swinging directly at Hillary, she will become just another one of Trump’s victims.

To his discredit, the New York businessman has provided the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) with a target-rich environment for making this case over his decades in the public eye. And best of all for Democrats, their attacks will not only be powerful, but have the benefit in some instances of being true.

 … The ads write themselves.

And as with Sen. John McCain in 2008, a media that to this point has served effectively as a friend, thanks to its hours of free airtime, will instantly become a foe. Recall that Sen. McCain was labeled a “maverick” by mainstream media outlets, and embraced by Democrats for his willingness to take Leftist positions against his party.

The day he won the Republican presidential nomination, the formerly fawning press turned their guns on him unmercifully.

While the media has certainly proven more hostile to Trump than McCain during this election cycle, mainly in response to his rhetoric and lack of decorum (note: less so his “heterodox” ideology), its efforts to date have had the effect of providing Trump with a reliable enemy to rail against which resonates with his supporters, all while constantly keeping him in the news cycle.

The media in fact has had good reason not to seek to destroy Trump outright to date.

First, Trump is good for ratings, which means he is good for business.

Second, by enabling Trump’s rise, the media has created a candidate that they believe is incredibly weak given his unfavorable ratings and the aforementioned devastating charges that can be leveled against him. While the media may have underestimated Trump’s political acumen, and the mood of the American electorate to date, nevertheless they know that a concerted effort can be used to break him down just as they built him up. If Mitt Romney, a decent man and moderate Republican with a stellar business record, could have his image utterly sullied, imagine what the media can do with The Donald.

Third, especially as more Establishment Republicans signal their approval, even if tacit, of Trump, he will be used as the representative of the party generally and conservatism in particular. The goal? To toxify those with an “R” next to their name in a bid to take back Congress. Trump may very well have the blood on his hands of real conservatives, few though they may be in Washington.

Whoever Emerges Victorious in November, the GOP Loses; and So Does the American People

Isn't it the 1850s all over again?…

Eight years ago or so, Barack Obama promised that he was getting ready for a presidency invested in "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

So what is it that he has, that he and his minions have, succeeded in doing?

They seem to succeeded in imposing a candidate on the Republican Party, a Trojan horse on the path towards a de facto one-party state.

Even if Hillary (or Bernie) doesn't win in November, the Republican Party loses.

The Democrats have effectively succeeded in tarnishing the GOP as a party of wackos and extremists (something President Trump promises to demonstrate within days, or hours, of taking the oath).

Which of course is unfair in Trump's case, in a manner of speaking, because (as Ted Cruz said on Sunday) The Donald is not a conservative but "Democrat lite."
As I wrote yesterday,

The Democrats' and the MSM's motto might be:

Hillary looks terrible (no one can deny it),
so what is needed is a GOP candidate who is,
or who can be depicted as, far worse.

One might wonder whether the Democrats don't
want to effectively make America a one-party state,
with the Republicans being no more than a secondary
party with its ranks filled with either with
alter ego Democrat types or with what
looks like (unelectable) crazed extremists. 

So, either way a Democrat wins.

Either a Democrat wins.

Or a Democrat lite wins.

In all cases, the Party of Lincoln loses.

And, in all cases, so does America.
PS:
There is one small, tiny sliver of hope, though.

And please — do not dismiss this out of hand, because that is what the Democrats, what their minions in the MSM, and what the Trump supporters want you to do.

And that is that John Kasich stays in the race, and that as many people rally around him as soon as possible, for a contested convention in Cleveland.

Update: The Left's 2016 Plan: Defining Trump so damningly
that Clinton will look comparatively angelic

Should Ted Cruz call it quits if he loses to The Donald in Indiana?

Do you think that Ted Cruz needs to call it quits if he loses to Trump in Indiana? 

asks Clash Daily.

Or do you think he needs to keep going and still has a chance? 

There is NO WAY Ted Cruz should call it quits!

Whatever Trump's qualifications or lack thereof,

he is but the latest GOP candidate that the

Democrats and their minions in the MSM dearly — dearly —
want to run in the election, so that they can tear him

to pieces (not without reason), effectively allowing

the White House to go to a supporter of statism

(which will happen whoever is the 2016 victor if

The Donald turns out to be one of the candidates).

As Ted Cruz himself remarked on Sunday,

the networks would earn millions of dollars

by continuing their highly successful rounds of

GOP debates, and they are willing to lose that money

for the simple reason that their preferred GOP

candidate would emerge looking perhaps not 
like a fool when facing Ted, but certainly diminished. 

Like McCain and Romney in 2008 and 2012,

the MSM is holding back on its criticism of

Donald Trump and his financial choices 

through the years and decades, criticism 

which will explode into the open, if and 

when The Donald is chosen as the GOP's
candidate, and never cease until November.

The Democrats' and the MSM's motto might be, 

Hillary looks terrible (no one can deny it),
so what is needed is a GOP candidate who is,
or who can be depicted as, far worse.

One might wonder whether the Democrats don't
want to effectively make America a one-party state,
with the Republicans being no more than a secondary
party with its ranks filled with either with
alter ego Democrat types or with what
looks like (unelectable) crazed extremists.

Meaning that the Democrats, or that people
echoing their ideology (even inside the GOP
— think John Boehner and people of his ilk),
would effectively win every election in the future.

Ted Cruz understands what's at stake, and he will
— rightly — not give in to the forces who want to 

silence American voters while destroying American 

liberty as we know it.

(Note:
Be sure to add your own remarks in 
the Clash Daily comments section…)

Related: • The ultimate political chameleon, Trump was a wealthy, secular, country club Republican who bragged of hiring illegal aliens

• The Last Best Place on Earth

• A Young Charismatic Leader Rose Up, Talking of Hope and Change… (by Rafael Cruz) 

UPDATE: • 5 Reasons Ted Cruz Should Not Have Dropped Out (thanks to Ed Driscoll) 
 • Whoever Emerges Victorious in November,
the GOP Loses; and So Does the American People

The Single Best Joke Told by Every President, from the 1780s to the 21st Century

“He’s not into the classic hokey punchlines,” said Brian Agler, a comedian and speechwriter at the Washington-based West Wing Writers. “There’s a level of detachment and a level of understanding about what’s going on, like, ‘this is kind of weird that the president is up here in a tux making jokes’ — all of his humor has that element baked into it.”

As the mainstream media oohs and ahs over Barack Obama's alleged mastery in the art of telling a joke, the Washington Post's Dan Zak presents The single best joke told by every president, from BO to Washington…

Should the Semicolon follow the diastole, the trigon, the interpunct, and the diple?

INTHEBEGINNINGWASTHEWORD, and the word was run together. Ancient texts (like the Greek of the Gospel of John) had few of the devices that tell readers where words begin and end (spaces), which words are proper names (the upper-lower case distinction), where breaks in meaning come (commas, dashes, semicolons and full stops), who said what (inverted commas), and so on.  

Thus readeth Johnson's Economist column on how punctuation is being changed by computers and the internet (cheers to Bird Dog for the Maggie's Farm link).

Most people take punctuation to be something obvious and settled.

 … The first English writers, when they punctuated at all, availed themselves of long-forgotten symbols like the diastole and trigon, the interpunct and the diple. Printing began the process of settling the punctuation system, but even that took four centuries. Samuel Johnson’s commas, in the mid-18th century, were not only heavy; many would be ungrammatical today, and this style persisted into the first editions of The Economist in 1843.

 … As David Crystal, a linguist, points out in his history of punctuation (“Making a Point”) published in 2015, at the dawn of the 19th century, punctuation prescribers were still divided into those who insisted that punctuation follow grammar and those who wanted it to aid elocution. Even one of the grammarians, Lindley Murray, wrote in 1795, in a hugely influential grammar book, that a semicolon signalled a pause twice as long as a comma; that a colon was twice as long as a semicolon; and that a full stop was twice as long as a colon. (Try that next time you read a text aloud.)

This causes John O’Callaghan to write from Singapore:

One bit of punctuation that should follow the diastole, the trigon, the interpunct and the diple onto the scrap heap of history is the semicolon (Johnson, March 12th). Very few people know how to use semicolons correctly and The Economist’s constant overuse contradicts its advice—contained in its very own style guide—not to overdo them.
Kurt Vonnegut said it best:

“Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.”

Montreal's Mark Lee provides a reply:

A reader called for semicolons to be thrown “onto the scrap heap of history” (Letters, March 26th). I disagree. A good guide is Lewis Thomas’s “Notes on Punctuation”, which says:

The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; to read on; it will get clearer.

• Related: 5 Punctuation Marks That Look Nothing Like They Used To
• 10 Obscure Punctuation Marks That Should Really Get More Play
• Did the Serial Comma Take a Hit?
• The Case Against the Misuse and Overuse of [Square] Brackets (and Parentheses)

From Across the Pond, a Nation of Cat Lovers

The Daily Telegraph sports a collection of photos under the title A nation of cat lovers (favourite British moggies in pictures), including a couple featuring Winston Churchill.

Meeting the rainbow bullies halfway never works because they see their struggle as a new civil rights movement

Yes, the meanings of words can change, agrees Benny Huang; but why is it that they always seem to change just at the moment the Left decides they should? (Update: thanks to Ed Driscoll and to Bird Dog for linking us.)

Gloucester County, Virginia wasn’t expecting to find itself in the midst of the never-ending culture wars when it told a female high school student named Gavin Grimm that she isn’t entitled to use the boys’ facilities just because she suffers from the delusion that she’s a boy. Grimm sued her school with the assistance of the Department of Justice and the ACLU. In a recent 2-1 decision by the 4^th US Circuit of Appeals, Grimm won her case.

In order to find some accommodation for Grimm her high school went as far as installing three single-stall bathrooms throughout the school. I wonder how much those bathrooms cost and what was displaced to make room for them? For that matter, what will happen to those bathrooms after she graduates? This girl’s mental illness sure is a heavy burden on the taxpayers and her fellow students.
 
Grimm refused to use the bathrooms installed just for her because accommodation was never her goal. She wants to be treated like a boy and she will not be satisfied with anything less. Let this be a lesson: Meeting the rainbow bullies halfway never works because they see their struggle as a new civil rights movement. Their aim is absolute victory which necessarily requires your unconditional surrender. “Compromise” is not in their vocabulary; why is it in ours?

 … The bathroom issue can and should be hashed out at the local level because federal law is silent on the matter. The reason that isn’t happening is because control freaks in the Obama Administration won’t allow it. In 2015, the Department of Education issued a policy letter stating: “When a school elects to separate or treat students differently on the basis of sex… a school generally must treat transgender students consistent with their gender identity.” The 4^th Circuit found that a lower court failed to give this policy letter its due deference—probably because the policy letter is not the law. President Obama does not have the authority to tack clauses onto existing statutes just because he wishes they were there. That’s what dictators do, not presidents. The policy letter is, at best, a suggestion. Or at least it should be.

This isn’t even the first redefinition of the word “sex” in Title IX to mean something else entirely. Today “sex” can even mean “sexual orientation,” which is almost always code for sexual conduct. It was not interpreted this way until 2016 when a Clinton-appointed federal judge put a new spin on a 44-year old law. Now Title IX is being treated as if it axiomatically applies to “sexual orientation.” In time people will forget that there was ever a time that it didn’t.

Title IX was supposed to be a women’s rights bill but it became a “gay” “rights” bill, then a “trans” “rights” bill because judges decreed it to be so. Some people I know wouldn’t see the problem with this expansion of “rights,” so let me explain. Besides the fact that it goes far beyond the federal government’s enumerated powers, it also sets a problematic precedent. The lesson people will learn is that they don’t have to go through the process of changing laws as long as they have right on their side. And who, after all, believes that they have wrong on their side? No one I know.

If a law similar to Title IX is necessary to protect homosexuals—and I’m certainly not saying that it is—then it can be passed the old-fashioned way through the legislative process. Merely changing the meaning of the operative word in an old statute is cheating and it will surely diminish the rule of law.

Ironically, all of this word-morphing has gotten out of control precisely because people want to hide behind a false “rule of law” façade while advancing the rule of men. The rule of law is the idea that our law is supreme and must be obeyed by all. The rule of men is what exists in most of the world; the population is obliged to obey powerful people simply because they’re powerful. Powerful people are not subject to the law themselves and can change it at their whim. The law is what they say it is.
 
By changing the meaning of words, powerful people can rule by decree while pretending to hold the law in the highest regard. To see how this works in action, let’s look at an example from New York City where a man named Shawn Thomas was fined for using an e-cigarette on a subway platform, which is not actually illegal. Thankfully, Mr. Thomas decided not to take it sitting down.

Vaping is not smoking and the two words cannot be used interchangeably. The very purpose of e-cigarettes is to allow smokers and ex-smokers to get their nicotine fix in places where smoking is not allowed—which happens to be almost everywhere in New York City these days. Predictably, anti-smoking zealots are beginning to show that they are no more tolerant of odorless, harmless water vapor than they are of actual tobacco smoke. I can only conclude that anti-smoking hysteria isn’t and never was about second-hand smoke.

In the case of the People v. Shawn Thomas, the state argued that there was no need to pass a new law against vaping in public places because the old one covering smoking suffices—which confirms my suspicion that existing law was never about second-hand smoke. In any case, the state was asserting its authority to make up laws on the spot through the redefinition of words. That ought to scare anyone, even the most strident anti-smoking crusader.

Fortunately for Shawn Thomas, this argument didn’t persuade the judge who actually seemed to care what the text of the law said. New York defines smoking as “the burning of a lighted cigar, cigarette, pipe or any other matter or substance which contains tobacco.” E-cigs do not contain tobacco and nothing is burnt or lighted. Shawn Thomas won his case—and so did the rule of law.

Smoking is not vaping. One is illegal on the subway and the other one is not. Pretty simple.

But for people who want to fine their fellow citizens for doing nothing illegal the distinction presents something of a problem. These people unilaterally change the meaning of the verb “to smoke” and then demand that others respect “the law.” What they really want others to respect is their power to issue diktats.

If words have no objective meanings then they are nothing more than tokens of power. Powerful people can change their meanings as they please—and change them back just as easily. As liberals like to whine, “The meanings of words can change!” Yes, I suppose that’s true. But why do the definitions of words only change when leftists want them to? Who died and made them the final arbiter of the English language? The rest of us need to stop letting them get away with this nonsense. 

Do the Rich Not Pay Their Fair Share?

… retribution is a poor rationale for taxation

writes The Economist.

Nor is the current pattern of contribution to the public purse obviously "unfair": the richest 1% of Americans pay more than a quarter of all federal taxes (and fully 40% of income taxes), while taking less than 20% of pre-tax income.