Should good and qualified persons, despite serious reservations about the suitability of Trump for the presidency, make themselves available if asked? The risk of doing so, besides the danger of becoming tainted by association, is that it might once again add a measure of credibility to a campaign. The advantage is the chance that Trump, as both candidate and president, will receive competent advice and perhaps prove willing to accept some part of it. As for a cabinet, what would clearly be best for the country are appointees of substance, who might have opposed Trump but have not burned every bridge with him and who if asked to serve would do so with a certain degree of independence and with a willingness to depart if the president did not deal with their counsel responsibly. By this reasoning, even ardent supporters of a Stop Trump movement should see the wisdom of maintaining a potential group of quality cabinet appointees from whom Trump might pick. These people should be shielded, rather than shunned.

Sarsour and the Progressive Zeitgeist
by Caroline Glick

{truthrevolt.org} ~ In US academic tradition, university administrators choose commencement speakers they believe embody the zeitgeist of their institutions and as such, will be able to inspire graduating students to take that zeitgeist with them into the world outside.

In this context, it makes perfect sense that Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy at City University of New York (CUNY), invited Linda Sarsour to serve as commencement speaker at his faculty’s graduation ceremony.

Sarsour embodies Mohandes’s values.

Mohandes’s Twitter feed makes his values clear. His Twitter feed is filled with attacks against Israel.

Mohandes indirectly accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of wishing to commit genocide. Netanyahu, he intimated, wishes to “throw the Arabs in the sea.”

He has repeatedly libeled Israel as a repressive, racist, corrupt state.

Mohandes has effectively justified and legitimized Islamic terrorism and the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza. The Islamic terrorist assault against Israel, led by Hamas from Gaza, is simply an act of “desperation,” he insists.

By Mohandes’s lights, Hamas terrorists are desperate not because they uphold values and beliefs that reject freedom, oppress women and aspire to the genocide of Jewry and the destruction of the West. No, they are desperate because Israel is evil and oppressive.

Who could Mohandes have chosen to serve as his commencement speaker other than Sarsour, given his positions? Sarsour, the rising star of the Democratic Party, not only shares Mohandes’s values and positions, she has taken those common values and positions and amplified them on the national stage.

Sarsour has taken support for Islamic terrorism and Jew hatred – positions that not long ago were considered beyond the pale in the Democratic Party – and moved them into the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

In fact, Sarsour has gone far beyond Mohandes. She has left him in the dust with her willingness to shill for radical Islam and its oppression of women and express openly her desire to see Israel destroyed while embracing Islamic terrorists and murderers.

Whereas Mohandes generally has shielded himself from accusations of bigotry, support for Hamas, and misogyny by basing his Twitter posts on statements by non-Muslim opponents of Israel like Kenneth Roth from Human Rights Watch, Sarsour has publicly embraced Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists.

She unapologetically justifies Islamic misogyny, attacks opponents of Islamic misogyny and terrorism and whitewashes Islamic violence against women.

Indeed, Sarsour has mainstreamed all of these things by fusing support for Islamic terrorism, misogyny and antisemitism with black anti-white racism and leftist hatred for police and law enforcement agencies more generally.

So in light of Sarsour’s trailblazing role in advancing Mohandes’s apparent values as signaled through his Twitter feed, his decision to have her speak to his graduating class this Thursday is entirely understandable.

The only truly challenging aspect of Mohandes’s invitation is that he didn’t tell the truth about why he chose to honor her. He didn’t say he invited her for her pioneering work in mainstreaming antisemitism, anti-Americanism, anti-white bigotry, Islamic misogyny and terrorism in the Democratic Party.

To the contrary, he hid those things.

Mohandes wrote that he invited Sarsour to speak at commencement because her work “has emphasized women’s health issues in the New York area.”

No it hasn’t.

At least, not unless you consider calling for women to have their vaginas carved out “emphasizing women’s health issues.”

In 2011, Sarsour used her Twitter feed to call for precisely that in a shocking verbal assault against two female icons – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has dedicated much of her career to protecting Muslim girls from female genital mutilation and was herself victimized by the barbaric practice, and Brigitte Gabriel, who as a Lebanese Christian suffered firsthand the wrath of Islamic supremacism during the Lebanese Civil War.

In Sarsour’s words, “Brigitte Gabriel= Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She’s asking 4 an a$$ whippin’. I wish I could take their vaginas away – they don’t deserve to be women.”

Earlier this month, during a speech at Dartmouth College, Sarsour was asked by a student how her professed feminism could be squared with her expressed support for genital mutilation of her ideological opponents.

Sarsour’s response was telling.

First, she delegitimized the student, insisting that since he is “a young white man” he had no right to ask her such a question.

Then, she intimated that she never wrote the offensive post.

Then, she insisted that her words are unimportant because she wrote them when she was in her 20s. (She was 31 in 2011).

In her uplifting words, “People say stupid sh*t sometimes, right?” Finally, Sarsour insisted that what she said is irrelevant.

“I will be judged by my impeccable record for standing for black lives and immigrant rights, and women’s rights and LGBT rights. You judge me by my record and not by some tweet you think I did nor did not tweet 10 years ago or seven years ago, or whenever it was.”

But if we judge her by her record, we see the only thing that is impeccable about it is her consistent, unapologetic defense of Islamic misogyny, terrorism and Jew hatred.

Sarsour has been extolled for her championing of women’s rights by former president Barack liar-nObama, and New York Senator Kristin Gillibrand. But it is not clear when she has ever done so in her own community.

For instance, as Ian Tuttle reported in National Review, in 2014 Sarsour who was then leading efforts to fuse the Black Lives Matter movement with anti-Zionism published an article on CNN.com titled, “My hijab is my hoodie.”

There Sarsour conflated the death of Trayvon Martin with the 2012 murder of Shaima Alawadi.

Alawadi was a Muslim woman who was beaten to death in her California home.

Sarsour alleged that Alawadi was murdered because of Islamophobia. But this was a lie. And it would be bizarre if Sarsour didn’t realize it was a lie when she wrote the article.

If Islam had anything to do with Alawadi’s murder, it may have served as a justification for her Muslim husband’s decision to beat her to death. Her husband was arrested for her murder in 2012. He was convicted and sentenced to 26 years to life in prison in 2014.

That wasn’t the only time that Sarsour used false allegations of American anti-Muslim bigotry to whitewash Islamic misogyny.

In 2014 she took to her Twitter feed to defend Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women while belittling Saudi gender apartheid that among other things, bars women from driving cars.

In her words, “10 weeks of PAID maternity leave in Saudi Arabia. Yes PAID. And ur worrying about women driving. Puts us to shame.”

In 2015, she extolled Sharia law, which among other things allows men to marry four women and sanctions wife beating and child brides.

As she did in her defense of Saudi misogyny, Sarsour defended Sharia by ignoring its hatred of women and pretending it is no different from progressive socialism.

Again turning to Twitter, she wrote, “You’ll know when you’re living under Sharia law if suddenly all your loans and credit cards become interest free. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?” As for LGBT rights, Sarsour pretends to support them. But she is silent about the systematic oppression of homosexuals in Muslim society.

With everything related to Jews and Israel, Sarsour has been outspoken in her bigotry, support for terrorism and anti-Jewish supremacism. Sarsour is a leader of the antisemitic boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that seeks to bar pro-Israel voices from college campuses and wider American society.

Sarsour was one of the organizers of the anti-President Donald Trump woman’s marches in January. Yet, Sarsour insists Zionist women cannot be feminists.

She recently publicly embraced a Hamas terrorist. She rejects any cooperation with Jewish groups that support Israel. Her relatives have been served time in Israeli prisons for terrorist activities on behalf of Hamas. Hamas of course, calls for the genocide of world Jewry in its charter.

Sarsour supports the Palestinian terrorist Rasmea Odeh who murdered two Israeli students in a bombing in a Jerusalem supermarket in 1970.

The most notable aspect of Sarsour’s “impeccable record” is that it is all in the public square. She has hidden nothing.

This tells us the most distressing thing about the Left’s decision to promote her. The Left is empowering Sarsour not despite her views, but because of them.

She is being elevated by CUNY, by the Democratic Party and by major American media outlets because she mainstreams Jew hatred, anti-Zionism and Islamic misogyny, not despite the fact that she does those things.

Sarsour has been rightly condemned by opponents of Islamic misogyny, supremacism and terrorism and by supporters of Israel.

But the truth is she’s not the real problem.

The real problem is that Mohandes was right to invite her. Not only does she share his values, she embodies the zeitgeist of the American Left today.

by Stephen Moore
{townhall.com} ~ It's finally official. The Affordable Care Act is a public-policy flop of epic proportions. That's the only possible conclusion from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas City announcement last week that it will drop out of many markets in Kansas and Missouri. The firm lost $100 million under the liar-nObamacare insurance exchanges from 2014 to 2016. This is another body blow to the government-insurance system Barack liar-nObama created in 2010. Blue Cross is one of the biggest health insurers in the nation, and now 25 more counties in these states will have no insurer left.

Nearly every news outlet buried this alarming story and instead shouted in headlines across the country: "23 Million More Uninsured Under GOP Plan." This was based on the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the impact of the House repeal and replace plan.

Those are troubling numbers for sure, but they're misleading given the Blue Cross news. If we stay with liar-nObamacare, within a few years tens of millions will have no insurance that is even remotely affordable. Aetna, Humana and other major insurers in just recent months have fled liar-nObamacare. The Titanic has hit the iceberg, and it is rapidly sinking; yet the left and the media keep fiddling on the deck. They act as though this can be fixed with "minor reforms," but there aren't enough bandages in America to stitch this back together.

Even more absurd is the idea that Donald Trump and the Republicans are the ones responsible for the insurers' leaving and the premiums' skyrocketing. If you want a bellyaching laugh, here is an excerpt from a lead story from The New York Times last week: "(Insurers complain that) the Trump administration and Congress are rattling the markets. The administration's refusal to guarantee payment of subsidies to health insurance companies, the murky outlook for the Affordable Care Act in Congress and doubts about enforcement of the mandate for most people to have insurance are driving up insurance prices for 2018, insurers say in rate requests filed with state officials."

Stop the presses! What a shock: The insurers say they want more handouts from the government. Trump is supposedly the villain because he won't force families to buy insurance that they can't possibly afford given the massive premium hikes that liar-nObama promised would never happen. This is rich.

Then this showstopper, also from The New York Times: "Opponents of President Barack liar-nObama's signature legislative achievement have made what may be a self-fulfilling prophecy: They repeatedly forecast the collapse of the health law, and then push it along."

Now let's get serious. Blue Cross Blue Shield Kansas is leaving the market because they lost tens of millions of dollars two and three years ago -- long before anyone even imagined Trump running for president. The Wall Street Journal, Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute and others predicted this exact collapse from the day the bill was enacted seven years ago. Trump isn't the one who caused the recent nationwide 25 percent increase in premiums.

It is true that many of the insurers say one reason they are leaving the exchanges is because of "uncertainty" about what will happen with the insurance market next year. But liar-Hillary Clinton would have been facing the same crisis. It is the height of anti-Trump derangement to say that Trump caused that uncertainty. How in the world can you blame the growth of a cancerous tumor on the doctor who is brought in to treat it?

Republicans have to do a much better job of explaining their plan and providing Americans better and cheaper options.

But liberals have to get over themselves and acknowledge that liar-nObamacare is long beyond fixable. Cynthia Cox of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a supporter of liar-nObamacare, glumly told Business Insider last week after the BCBS retreat from the exchange markets, "If the Blue Cross Blue Shield plans or Anthem pull out of the exchanges, then that would be a serious problem for many parts of the country. ... Whenever there is one insurance company right now, it almost always is either a Blue Cross Blue Shield or Anthem plan. It goes to show how much the exchanges rely on those plans."

By the end of the year we could have nearly half the country without insurers if this spiral continues. What we have here is the domestic policy equivalent of the Bay of Pigs.

And make no mistake about it: This calamity is liar-nObama's legacy, not Trump's.

https://townhall.com/columnists/stephenmoore/2017/05/30/no-trump-didnt-cause-obamacare-to-fail-n2332881?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=

by John Stossel
{townhall.com} ~ The New York Times' hostility to industry gets worse every day.

Last week, the Times ran a big picture of a bay in Alaska with the headline "In Reversal, E.P.A. Eases Path for a Mine Near Alaska's Bristol Bay."

While this was just another of their stories about how Donald Trump will poison America, it caught my eye because of the big photo and because I once reported on that mine.

Attempted mine, I should say. No holes have been dug.

I reported on Pebble Mine because the EPA rejected the mine even before its environmental impact statement was submitted. The liar-nObama EPA squashed Pebble like it squashed the Keystone XL pipeline. It just said no.

This shocked CEO Tom Collier. He's a Democrat who managed environment policy for Al Gore and Bill liar-Clinton. He was convinced Pebble could be developed safely and assumed EPA regulators would follow their own rules. They didn't.

"They killed this project before any science was done, and there are memos that show that!" Collier complained.

I'm skeptical when sources say things like that, but in this case, there are documents that reveal collusion between the EPA and Pebble's political opponents.

One of America's richest environmental groups they collect more than $10 million per month is the Natural Resources Defense Council. Their website claims "Science empowers NRDC's work," but the NRDC is run by lawyers, not scientists, and many are anti-progress activists upset about "corporate greed."

NRDC spokesman Bob Deans told me that the NRDC isn't anti-progress -- it just wants the "right" kind: "Wind turbines, solar panels ... this is what the future needs."

"But we also need copper and gold," I said.

"Well, that's right," he replied. "But we have to weigh those risks."

"Are there some mines where NRDC says, 'Go ahead!'?" I asked.

After thinking for a while, he said, "It's not up to us to greenlight mines."

I asked, "Are there any you don't complain about?"

"Sure," he told me. He said he'd send us names. He never did.

Unfortunately, there's a revolving door between groups like the NRDC and the EPA.

One NRDC activist who walked through that door was Nancy Stoner. EPA administrators aren't supposed to conspire with former activist colleagues, but she did, telling them that she couldn't coordinate with them directly but could meet with them so long as they communicated via other people and invited people besides her to meetings.

After her correspondence about that was revealed, Stoner left the EPA, but Pebble had already been rejected.

Now Trump's in charge and his EPA says it will reevaluate the mine. Good. It should.

But New York Times reporters can't stand that. They've smeared Pebble year after year in their headlines.

2008: "Mine would irreparably harm a centuries-old salmon fishing industry."

2012: "A Threat to Bristol Bay."

2013: "Native Alaska, Under Threat."

Last week's smear piece was written by Tatiana Schlossberg. Name sound familiar? She's Caroline Kennedy's daughter, granddaughter of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

Her Times articles are a litany of enviro-hysteria: "Mass Die-off of Whales"; "...Bring Coal's Hidden Hazard to Light"; "How Lowering Crime Could Contribute to Global Warming."

I'm not making this up.

Her last anti-Trump column was headlined: "23 Environmental Rules Rolled Back." But the article lists only nine. Fourteen others were "under review" or in "limbo" -- not rolled back.

Her Bristol Bay story claimed the proposed Pebble Mine was "on" Bristol Bay. But it isn't. It's more than 100 miles away.

When we asked Schlossberg about that, she replied, "I'm not going to comment on that. If you have a problem or a question, you can direct it to the standards editor."

So we did, and to my surprise, the standards editor published a correction: "The mine is not on Bristol Bay itself."

But he defended the Times' headline saying "near Bristol Bay" because "it is in the watershed of Bristol Bay ... The mine could affect the fishery."

I suppose it "could." Most anything "could." But "near" the bay? To me, "near" is 200 yards, or maybe half a mile, but not 100 miles.

Forget the anti-development phrase NIMBY (Not In My Backyard). Now it's BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anybody).

The Schlossberg-Kennedys have hundreds of millions of dollars and already own 300 acres of waterfront property. They won't be crushed by insane environmental restrictions.

You, however, may be.

https://townhall.com/columnists/johnstossel/2017/05/24/times-green-baloney-n2330908?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=