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Saudi-Royal-Family-AP

Members of the royal family, including Saudi Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, left, who is one of the men allegedly responsible for funding Bin Laden. (Photos: AP/Getty/AFP)

President Barack Obama is deciding whether to declassify 28 pages of sealed 9/11 documents, which some believe will show a Saudi connection to the terrorist attacks. Former Florida Sen. Bob Graham, who co-chaired the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, said Tuesday the White House had informed him that a decision whether or not to declassify the documents will be made in 60 to 90 days.

Sen. Graham has pressed for the documents to be made public since George W. Bush was president, but has ramped up efforts during the last two years of the Obama administration. He said he was “pleased that after two years this matter is about to come to a decision by the president.”

President Bush, and later Obama, refused to declassify and release the documents on the basis it would jeopardize national security. However, critics say the refusal to unseal the documents is part of a long-term effort to cover up Saudi Arabia’s involvement in the September 9, 2001 terror attacks that killed roughly 3,000 people.

The decision comes as President Obama is gearing up to go on a planned presidential trip to Saudi Arabia for a summit of Gulf leaders next week. But for some, the two- to three-month timeframe just isn’t good enough.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., who has seen the documents, said she believes they should be made available to the family members of 9/11 victims.

“I don’t know how the Saudi government will react to it, but I think it’s just information,” Gillibrand said Sunday.

Sens. Gillibrand and Graham are among a growing bipartisan group of lawmakers and other public figures, to include Republican front-runner Donald J. Trump, who are pushing for the release of the documents.

“If the president is going to meet with the Saudi Arabian leadership and the royal family, they think it would be appropriate that this document be released before the president makes that trip, so that they can talk about whatever issues are in that document,” Gillibrand said.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Tuesday claimed he didn’t know whether Obama had read the 28 pages, but did mention that they are the subject of an intelligence community “classification review.” He only said President Obama has “confidence” in their ability to “consider those documents for release.”

When asked about any potential Saudi ties to 9/11, Earnest cited the 9/11 Commission’s findings that there was no evidence the Saudi government or senior Saudi officials funded Al Qaeda. But whether the documents demonstrate a link between terrorism and the Saudis, which was suggested last year by top Al Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui, the release will raise a number of questions.

Saudi connections to the Islamic terrorists behind the 9/11 attacks are already well-known, including the fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. However, Moussaoui, the so-called 20th 9/11 hijacker, implicated Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal by name, as well as other Saudi government officials. He claimed they financed Al Qaeda, which was an embarrassing disclosure made during a segment on “Special Report” hosted by Fox News anchor Bret Baier.

In addition to being a “major investor in the parent company” of Fox News, Al-Waleed is a very close friend of Rupert Murdoch and his family.

While the Saudis called the allegation “delusional” and pointed to Moussaoui’s own lawyer’s assertion that he was incompetent, it is well-known that Osama bin Laden was the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian contractor who had close ties to the Saudi royal family. Worth noting, shortly after the report was filed by James Rosen, Al-Waleed announced his company–Kingdom Holding Company–was dumping most of its stake in Murdoch’s News Corp., down from 6.6% to 1%.

The Saudi prince recently called Mr. Trump “a disgrace” for proposing a temporary moratorium on Muslim immigration to the U.S. until “our representatives find out what the hell is going on” with radical Islam. But he didn’t stop there. The billionaire Saudi also called on Trump to “withdraw from the U.S presidential race,” adding “as you will never win.”

Consequently, Mr. Murdoch has indicated multiple times in private that he would support Hillary Clinton over the Republican nominee, the former being far more friendly with the Saudi royal family.

In 2002, it was revealed Al-Waleed contributed $500,000 to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Muslim Brotherhood front group that threatened to sue Fox anchor Megyn Kelly. The group frequently brags about influencing 21st Century Fox through Al-Waleed, who had Murdoch tell Fox News Channel to alter its coverage of Muslim riots in France “in order to eliminate references to the religious affiliation of the Muslim extremists.”

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said she also supports declassifying the 9/11 documents.

“As the former Ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee and top the House Democrat on the Joint Congressional investigation looking into the 9/11 attacks, I agree with former Senator Bob Graham that these documents should be declassified and made public, and that the Bush Administration’s refusal to do so was a mistake,” Minority Leader Pelosi said in a statement. “I have always advocated for providing as much transparency as possible to the American people consistent with protecting our national security.”

But Pelosi stopped short of backing the claims by Sen. Graham, who said during an interview with CBS News that he has little doubt about the role of the Saudis, to include the government, in the spread and implementation of Islamic extremism.

“There are a lot of rocks out there that have been purposefully tamped down, that if were they turned over, would give us a more expansive view of the Saudi role,” Sen. Graham said during “60 Minutes” on CBS News. “The Saudis know what they did. We know what they did.”

“You believe that support came from Saudi Arabia?” asked CBS reporter Steve Croft.

“Substantially,” Sen. Graham added.

Kroft also followed up by asking: “And when we say, ‘the Saudis,’ you mean the government, the — rich people in the country? Charities?”

“All of the above,” Sen. Graham said in response.

Graham has said in the past the 28 classified pages lay out a network of people he believes helped the hijackers obtain housing in the U.S. and enroll in flight school. He said the redacted and still-classified missing 28 pages “point a very strong finger at Saudi Arabia as the principal financier” of the 9/11 hijackers.

While not all lawmakers on Capitol Hill would publicly agree with Sen. Graham,  a State Department review concluded the Sunni-led Kingdom of Saudi Arabia hasn’t yet done enough to break their ties to Islamic terror groups.

“Still, donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide,” blatantly reads a State Department cable dated Dec. 30, 2009, which was obtained and published by Wikileaks. “More needs to be done since Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qaeda, the Taliban, LeT and other terrorist groups.”

President Barack Obama is deciding whether to

jp-morgan-building

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. headquarters in New York City. (Photo: Reuters)

JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) on Wednesday revealed first-quarter (1Q) earnings per share of $1.35 on revenue of $24.1 billion, beating estimates. Analysts expected profit per share of $1.26 on revenue of $23.399 billion.

“We delivered solid results this quarter with strong underlying drivers. The consumer businesses continue to grow loans and deposits impressively, attracting deposits faster than the industry,” said Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of the nation’s largest bank by assets. “The U.S. consumer remains healthy and consumer credit trends are favorable.”

The company reported average core loans were up 25% in the first quarter (17% year-over-year) and record growth in average deposits of $50 billion, marking an increase of 10%.

“While challenging markets impacted the industry, we maintained our leadership positions and market share in the Corporate & Investment Bank and Asset Management, reflecting the strength of our platform,” Mr. Dimon added. “Even in a challenging environment, clients continue to turn to us in the global markets and we saw positive net long-term asset flows in Asset Management.”

Still, net income was $5.5 billion, a decrease of 7% and net revenue was $24.1 billion, down 3%.

“We are one of the most trusted financial institutions in the world, delivering consistently for our clients, communities and shareholders. We plan to increase capital return in the first half of 2016 as the board approved an incremental $1.9 billion in share buybacks,” Mr. Dimon concluded. “As we build for the future, we are continuously innovating and investing to succeed. We are strengthening the Firm to withstand any environment and to maintain scale and profitability through the cycle.”

JP Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) on

Paul Manafort, the Trump convention manager and delegate hunter, slammed the “backroom tactics” that he said is now “the hallmark” of the Cruz campaign.

Mr. Manafort, who said there is a pattern of abuse, made the comments during an interview on “Hannity” interview and after a convoluted insider system in Colorado resulted in Sen. Ted Cruz sweeping the delegates without a single vote.

“He’s not winning delegates,” he said. “He’s winning bodies. He not turning Trump delegates, he’s trying to put Cruz delegates in their place. The whole premise of the Cruz campaign misses the point. There’s not going to be a second ballot.”

Paul Manafort, the Trump convention manager and

Ted-Cruz-NY

Ted Cruz, R-Texas, speaks during a campaign event at Mekeel Christian Academy on Thursday, April 7, 2016, in Scotia, N.Y. (Photo: PolitiFact)

If you took all the lies out of political rhetoric, how much would be left? Apparently even less than usual this year.

The latest, and perhaps biggest, lie — thus far — is that Donald Trump was cheated out of delegates in Colorado because the voters did not select the delegates.

Two very different questions have gotten confused with each other. One question is whether this is the best way to choose delegates. Most of us would say “No,” but most of us don’t live in Colorado, and each state is allowed great leeway in how it chooses to pick its delegates.

The more fundamental question is whether this was some trick cooked up to deprive Donald Trump of the delegates needed to win the Republican nomination. That is of course how Donald Trump and his followers automatically depict anything that doesn’t work out to his advantage.

But the Colorado rules were written and known to all before anybody cast a single vote in the primary elections, anywhere in the country.

If the people who ran the Trump campaign were not aware of what the rules in Colorado were, and Ted Cruz’s people were, that is what happens when you hire people who are not up to the challenges of their job. The fact that one of those people has been fired and replaced has gotten much less media attention than Trump’s loudly repeated charges that he was robbed.

With so many primary election rules that vary from one state to another, some of these rules are bound to work out to one candidate’s advantage and another candidate’s disadvantage.

When Trump, for example, wins less than a majority of a state’s votes and yet gets 100 percent of its delegates, you don’t hear other candidates yelling or whining that they have been robbed. But the cold fact is that Trump’s percentage of the delegates is still higher than his percentage of the people who actually voted for him.

Apparently it all depends on whose ox is gored — and who yells the loudest, with the most irresponsible charges. It also depends on how conscientious the media are and how gullible the voters are.

Other political campaign lies have been repeated so often, over so many years, that they have become part of a tradition that is almost never questioned. Demands for “equal pay” for women, for example, proceed without even a definition of what that means.

Some years ago, I was shocked when my research turned up the fact that young male physicians earned substantially more than young female physicians. But, when my research also turned up the fact that young male physicians work hundreds of hours more per year than young female physicians, it was not shocking any more.

Other researchers, many of them female, have found the same pattern in other fields where there are income differences between the sexes. Women work fewer hours annually than men, and do not work full-time and continuously over the years as often as men do.

Among college graduates, women receive more than three-quarters of the degrees in education, while men receive more than three-quarters of the degrees in engineering. When engineers are paid more than teachers — partly because engineers work year round, while teachers work 9 months — do not be surprised by sex differences in earnings among college graduates.

None of this is news for people who have checked out the facts. Researchers — including female researchers — have repeatedly turned up such facts for decades. But the politicians, and much of the media, prefer a moral melodrama, starring themselves on the side of the angels against the forces of evil.

That wins votes, helps TV ratings and lets lots of people feel good about themselves. But this also requires a gullible public.

A very similar game can be played with racial statistics. What if I said that basketball officials call fouls on black players out of all proportion to the share of blacks in the general population? You might well say, “Wait a minute! The proportion of black players is far higher in the NBA than in the population.”

Yet that simple difference between the proportion of blacks in the general population and blacks involved in whatever activity is being measured statistically is repeatedly ignored, both by politicians and the media.

The success of campaign lies depends ultimately on how willing the public is to be stampeded without bothering to stop and think.
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The latest campaign lie is that Donald

Hillary-Trump-Johnson

Presidential candidates Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson, center, and New York businessman Donald J. Trump, right. (Photos: AP)

The Libertarian Party might get more votes this year.

Before the primaries, Time Magazine, frequent pusher of trends that do not exist, put Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.) on its cover and called him the “most interesting man in politics.” Then Paul fizzled, and pundits said the “libertarian moment,” if there ever was one, had ended.

But Sen. Paul never ran as a libertarian. He ran as a libertarian-ish Republican, and he wasn’t particularly convincing when he got to speak in debates. Americans were unimpressed.

But now that, according to ElectionBettingOdds.com, the presidential race will be a choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Americans may give libertarianism a second look.

My TV show recently held a debate between the Libertarian Party’s three leading presidential candidates. Compared to the Republican and Democratic contenders, the Libertarians sounded so reasonable to me. Take immigration.

While Democrats pretend they will carefully vet refugees from Muslim parts of the world, Republicans talk about deporting 11 million people. By contrast, the Libertarians on my show talked about reducing border problems by simplifying our complicated immigration laws.

Immigrants often break our current laws because the alternative is waiting years while trying to wade through our immigration bureaucracy. According to some estimates, that wait could last forever — up to 100 years.

“Incentivize legal immigration so that we can cut down on illegal immigration,” said Libertarian candidate Austin Petersen. “If we make a simpler path to citizenship, then people will not break the law, if they know that there’s a chance that they can come here.”

Republicans like Trump talk about illegal immigrants as if they’re bad people who are bound to break other laws because they climbed over border fences. But as Petersen asked, “If you were living in a Third World country and your family was starving to death, who would not cross that wall?”

My parents came here from Germany in 1930. They wanted to get away from European stagnation. Who can blame them? I wouldn’t be embarrassed if they had come here illegally.

Donald Trump shouts about bad effects of global trade, but his destructive bans and tariffs would do much more harm
.
Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson asked during the debate, “Who benefits from free trade but you and I as consumers? If China wants to subsidize goods and services that they send to the United States, who benefits? We do!”

He’s absolutely right. Cheaper goods from abroad mean Americans have more money to spend on other things, and cheaper ingredients for products we manufacture. Yes, some Americans lose jobs, but more gain work, and better work, because free trade helps Americans expand businesses — in America.

Republicans and Democrats also engage in foolish talk about “creating jobs.” Donald Trump promises, “I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created!”
God has yet to speak up, but Hillary Clinton says not only will she create jobs, she’ll create “good-paying jobs”!

That’s why Johnson was so refreshing in the debate. He said that in eight years as New Mexico’s governor, “I didn’t create a single job! Government doesn’t create jobs. The private sector does.”

Right. But government sure can get in the way.

“To start a business, I have to fill out a thousand forms and report to OSHA,” the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, said candidate John McAfee during the debate. “This is the fundamental problem. If we remove these barriers, industry will take care of itself and jobs will improve.”

The Libertarian candidates were also skeptical about government imposition on drug users, on cellphone owners who don’t want their phones hacked into and on people trying to accomplish things without first begging for approval from bureaucrats.

I liked how McAfee put it: “Some fundamental principles are all that we need to live together in a sane and harmonious fashion. We cannot hit one another. We cannot take each other’s stuff. We must keep our word, our agreements and our contracts.”

That’s right. And that’s enough. Government should enforce those contracts but otherwise stay out of our lives. I nodded in agreement when McAfee said, “Personal privacy and personal freedom are paramount to any society in which I would want to live.”

Now that the presidential race will be

Donald-Trump-Hillary-Clinton-Palm-Beach-March-15

Donald Trump, left, and Hillary Clinton, right, give thumbs up to the crowd after their victory speeches in Palm Beach, Florida, on March 15, 2016. (Photos: Win McNamee/Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Frontrunners Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton picked up additional delegates after Missouri certified the results of their state’s primaries. On the Democratic side, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also picked up another delegate.

The certified vote take into account provisional and overseas ballots that were counted after Election Day, which resulted in Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton both increasing their delegate hauls, by 12 and 2, respectively. Mr. Trump’s margin of victory also increased by 239 votes, while the former secretary of state received another 43 votes.

On the Republican side, 12 of the state’s 52 delegates are awarded to the winner of the statewide vote. The rest of the delegates are awarded by congressional district. Mr. Trump carried five congressional districts his closest rival Texas Sen. Ted Cruz carried three. Despite the rhetoric, the loss was a devastating development for Sen. Cruz, who hired Jeff Roe as his campaign manager. Roe was the former party head in The Show Me State.

Mr. Trump leads in the GOP delegate count Mrs. Clinton leads Sen. Sanders in pledged delegates 1,289 to 1,038, but her lead grows when superdelegates are taken into account by 1,758 to 1,069.

VIEW REPUBLICAN DELEGATE COUNT

VIEW DEMOCRATIC DELEGATE COUNT

Frontrunners Donald J. Trump and Hillary Rodham

[brid video=”33165″ player=”2077″ title=”Ted Cruz on the John and Ken Show April 11 2016″]

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the closest rival to Republican front-runner Donald Trump, turned three caucuses and one primary into an eleven-state winning streak. During an interview on the Ken Show in Southern California, Sen. Cruz spun the contests in Utah, North Dakota, Wisconsin and Colorado as “eleven elections” and said Trump “doesn’t handle losing very well.”

“Here’s the simple fact, in the last three weeks there have been a total of eleven elections all across the country,” Sen. Cruz said. “We’ve beaten Donald Trump in all eleven elections.”

The Texas senator indeed won the contests in the aforementioned states. But of the last 11 “elections,” Trump won six, Ohio Gov. John Kasich won one (his home state), and Sen. Cruz won just 3. The party-picked delegates at the Colorado caucuses were selected during a process that began on March 1.

The Rocky Mountain State is a special case and those who select the delegates don’t at all represent the electorate voting in November, let alone in a typical primary. The state party, which tweeted out “We did it! #NeverTrump” on Saturday, changed their rules to protect the Establishment candidate after former Sen. Rick Santorum defeated Mitt Romney in 2012.

Three of four states mentioned by Sen. Cruz were caucus states, with Wisconsin being the only primary state.

In fact, this isn’t the first time Sen. Cruz has put forward fuzzy math. He routinely claims to have won more contests than he has on the campaign trail, or at least spin the victories into something they are not.

Though the host didn’t push back on the false claim, he did tactically question Sen. Cruz about the “delegate convention” process, which was a subtle way of telling his listeners that he isn’t winning the bulk of these states in a typical primary electorate. Sen. Cruz has won just three primaries, to include his home state of Texas where he failed to get a majority.

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, the closest rival

Trump-Cruz-Kasich-AP

Republican presidential candidates Donald Trump, left, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, center, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, right. (Photos: AP/Associated Press)

I have been concerned for some time that forces supporting Donald Trump have intentionally been laying the groundwork for claiming that Trump will have been cheated if he doesn’t earn the GOP nomination.

When this primary season began, few people gave Ted Cruz a snowball’s chance to be in serious contention, but he has repeatedly demonstrated just how much people underestimated him.

He not only is the most informed and consistent on policy but also has assembled a grass-roots organization whose sophistication makes Obama’s then-cutting-edge 2008 campaign look like 1990.

Cruz has been ganged up on from the beginning but has outlasted the vicious charges and is now on an upward arc. He is the only candidate who has survived the damning mini-labels of Trump that helped undo Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and others.

But Trump is no dummy, either. By relentlessly bellowing “Lyin’ Ted,” he planted seeds for defamatory remarks against Cruz in case the tide of the campaign would tilt in his favor, as it appears to have done.

Cruz is systematically fulfilling the prophecy he made that he would begin to defeat Trump as the field narrowed, when people would focus more on the contrast between him and Trump. Since Rubio dropped out, Cruz has won far more delegates than Trump, whose negatives are through the roof, especially with women.

Cruz is also mopping up delegates in caucuses and primaries in the various states because he is more prepared, more organized and more committed — and because he is humble enough to know he has to attend to details in every aspect of this campaign. And the delegates who Trump claims are being stolen are choosing Cruz because they see him as the more presidential and reliable of the two.

Yet Trump-favoring media and commentators, as if on cue, spread the canard that Cruz is strong-arming delegates and “stealing” them. That some are receptive to this is a testament to the effectiveness of all the previous slanders against Lion Ted Cruz.

Many Trump supporters seem to think they have an exclusive claim to angst against the ruling class. They alone are “we the people.” They alone are entitled to their nominee, especially because he has a lead in the delegate count.

I’ve had many suggest that at such time as it becomes mathematically impossible for Cruz to win a majority of delegates going into the convention, he should withdraw — “because he can’t win.” Moreover, the people have spoken, they say, and they support Trump, so everyone must get out of the way — rules be damned.

I assume that many of these Trump supporters are green about the process and are just overly eager for their guy, but others know better. For the incontrovertible fact is that the rules for a century and a half have provided that a candidate must get a majority of delegates to win.

That threshold happens to be 1,237 delegates. No one has ever credibly suggested that a candidate with a plurality of delegates must be anointed as the nominee. Those now arguing this are the ones wanting to suspend the rules, not those who support the time-honored rule. If this thinking had prevailed in 1860, Abraham Lincoln would not have been nominated that year. He was a distant second to William Seward on the first ballot and prevailed on the third ballot.

The delegates of most states are pledged to a certain candidate for the first ballot — and some through the second ballot — but afterward they are released to vote for whomever they choose on subsequent ballots.

Unhappily for the Trump camp, Trump is, according to renowned statistician Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, the weakest GOP front-runner in modern history. Also, even people who have voted for him in earlier states may very well have buyer’s remorse at this point.

But Team Trump, sticking to its message that Trump is inevitable, has adopted another clever tactic in trying to establish a fallback narrative in case he fails to reach 1,237 before Cleveland. The Trump folks spawned the conspiracy theory that Cruz is colluding with the establishment in the states to deny Trump the nomination. This dovetails with their consistent theme that Trump is the only outsider in the race.

But in fact, the party hasn’t united around Cruz. Most establishment people probably prefer Cruz over Trump, but it’s not because he is any less anti-establishment or less of a threat to business as usual in Washington. It’s because they fear that Trump is volatile, unpresidential and authoritarian and know that Cruz is the only one who can beat him.

Over the weekend, Cruz continued to outwork, outmaneuver and outshine Trump, especially in Colorado, where Cruz won all 34 delegates. Immediately, the Trump forces cried that they were cheated out of the process. The implication is that “Lyin’ Ted” broke the rules and “stole” the delegates. But there was no cheating. As FiveThirtyEight also reported, Trump “slipped up in Colorado. … Instead of putting together a top-notch convention team, Trump’s campaign was a mess.” Ari Armstrong, a Colorado Republican who participated in the caucuses, wrote, “The simple fact is that the Republicans in my precinct caucus mostly disfavored Trump, and evidently that is true of most other precincts as well.” And though Trump blasted the GOP’s delegate rules Sunday and said a “corrupt” system is robbing him of delegates, NBC analysts say Trump has benefited more than Cruz “under the party’s arcane rules for allocating delegates,” having been awarded 45 percent of the delegates despite having won just 37 percent of all the votes.

Trump is not entitled to the nomination unless and until he reaches the magic number, and neither is Cruz. It is sad that some who are claiming their votes don’t count are the same ones who are saying Cruz votes shouldn’t count — that Trump should be anointed now or when it becomes mathematically impossible for Cruz to win on the first ballot.

Team Cruz is not suggesting we twist the rules but insisting we adhere to them. Let’s all agree to honor and play by the rules and recognize the winner of a majority of delegates when that moment occurs.
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Trump is not entitled to the nomination

Bernie Sanders Holds Campaign Rally In The Bronx

NEW YORK, NY – MARCH 31: Democratic Presidential Candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at a rally at St. Mary’s Park in the Bronx borough March 31, 2016 in New York City. Sanders and opponent Hillary Clinton are campaigning ahead of the April 5 primary in New York. (Photo by Andrew Renneisen/Getty Images)

If the polls hold, scoring tickets to “Hamilton” will be as good as it’s going to get for Bernie Sanders in New York. But let us first linger in Wisconsin, where Democrats and independents gave Sanders what looked like a decisive win.

It seems that 15 percent of Sanders’ Wisconsin supporters voted only for Bernie, leaving the rest of the ballot blank. By contrast, only 4 percent of Hillary Clinton voters skipped the down-ballot races.

It happens that one of the down-ballot races was for Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. The progressive, JoAnne Kloppenburg, had a good chance of toppling Rebecca Bradley, a right-wing appointee of Gov. Scott Walker’s. But Kloppenburg lost, in part because of the laziness of Snapchat liberals.

Snapchat is a messaging app that makes photos and videos disappear after they are viewed. Its logo is a ghost. Snapshot liberals are similarly ephemeral. They regard their job as exulting in the hero of the moment. Once the job is done, they vanish.

(An interesting wrinkle is that 10 percent of Sanders’ voters checked the box for Bradley. This suggests that a good chunk of his win came not from fans but from conservatives seeking to frustrate the Clinton candidacy.)

Anyhow, three days later, a Wisconsin circuit court judge struck down an anti-union law backed by Walker. The law ended unions’ right to require that private-sector workers benefiting from their negotiations pay dues or an equivalent sum.

The ruling was hailed as a “victory for unions,” but that victory will almost certainly be short-lived because the matter now heads to a divided state Supreme Court. As a Supreme Court justice, Kloppenburg could have helped save it.

Sanders can’t directly take the rap for this. He, in fact, had endorsed Kloppenburg.

But the Sanders campaign rests on contempt for a Democratic establishment that backs people like Kloppenburg. It sees even the normal give-and-take of governing as thinly veiled corruption. Liberals involved in the necessary horse trading are dismissed as sullied beyond repair.

TV comedy news reinforces this cartoonish view of what governing entails. The entertainers deliver earnest but simple-minded sermons on how all but a chosen few folks in Washington are corrupt hypocrites. (I find their bleeped-out F-words so funny. Don’t you?)

Snapchat liberals tend to buy into the “great man” theory of history. So if change comes from electing a white knight on a white horse, why bother with the down-ballot races?

Hence the irritating pro-Sanders poster: “Finally a reason to vote.”

Oh? Weren’t there reasons to vote all these years as tea party activists stocked Congress with crazy people? Wasn’t giving President Obama a Congress he could work with a reason to vote? (The liberal savior in 2008, Obama saw his own Snapchat fan base evaporate come the midterms.)

When asked whether he’d raise money for other Democrats if he were to win the nomination, Sanders replied, “We’ll see.”

Bernie doesn’t do windows and toilets. That’s for establishment Democrats.

The difference between the pitchfork right and the Snapchat left is this: The right marches to the polls to vote the other side out. The left waits for saintly inspiration. If the rallies are euphoric and the Packers aren’t playing the Bears, they will deign to participate. Then they’re gone in a poof of righteous smoke.

It is a crashing irony that many liberals who condemn voter suppression by the right practice voter suppression on themselves. The liberal version doesn’t involve onerous ID requirements at the polls. It comes in the deadening message that few candidates are good enough to merit a vote.

And that’s why progressive America routinely punches below its weight on the national stage.

If the polls hold, scoring tickets to

Ted-Cruz-Wisconsin-Victory-Speech

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz gives his victory speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Tuesday April 5, 2016. (Photo: Reuters/Kamil Krzaczynski)

We hear many fallacies in election years. The fallacy that seems to be most popular this year is that, if Donald Trump comes close to getting the 1,237 delegates required to become the Republican nominee, and that nomination goes instead to someone else, then the convention will have ignored “the voice of the people.”

Supposedly Republican voters would be outraged, many would stay home on election day, and some might even vote for the Democrats’ nominee, whether Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders.

Mr. Trump has more than once made the veiled threat that he would run as a third-party candidate if the Republicans failed to “respect” him. And of course Trump would himself decide what “respect” means.

In so far as the voting public believes the fallacy that choosing someone other than Trump is ignoring “the voice of the people,” when Trump has the most delegates, his threat carries weight.

In reality, Trump has never gotten a majority of the votes in any state. In other words, “the voice of the people” has been consistently against nominating Trump.

In a poll of Republican voters in Wisconsin, 20 percent of them said that they would be “concerned” if Trump became President of the United States, and 35 percent said that they would be “scared.”

If “the voice of the people” has spoken, whether in Wisconsin or nationally, what it has said repeatedly is “No” to Donald Trump. The illusion of Trump’s overwhelming appeal to the Republican voters has been maintained by the fragmenting of Republican votes because so many candidates were running as conservatives that Trump won primaries without ever getting a majority of the votes.

This would not be the first time that the conservative majority votes in a Republican primary season have been split so many ways that someone who is not a conservative ends up with the nomination.

That is how the Republicans ended up with Mitt Romney in 2012 and lost the election. That is also how the Republicans can end up with Donald Trump and lose this year’s election. Worse yet, from the standpoint of the country, that is how Donald Trump might end up in the White House.

The Republicans in Wisconsin who were scared of the possibility of Trump as President were on to something. We should all be scared.

Why? There is not room enough to list all the reasons. But Trump himself has demonstrated, over and over, how he lacks the depth of knowledge — and sometimes any knowledge at all — of complex life and death issues that are inescapable for any President of the United States.

Ignorance is dangerous enough in itself. But ignorance on the part of an egomaniac, who announces that he is his own best advisor, is incorrigible ignorance. He can surround himself with the best minds in the country and it will not do any good if they are just there for window dressing.

Barack Obama has already demonstrated what disasters a President can create when he ignores the warnings of the country’s top military leaders, as he did when he pulled American troops out of Iraq, setting the stage for the emergence of ISIS.

Obama dealt with that problem, as he has dealt with other problems, by coming up with glib rhetoric — in this case, dismissing ISIS as the junior varsity. The horrors that have followed — especially for women and girls — wherever ISIS has taken over in the Middle East make Obama’s slick words grotesque.

So too do the terrorist slaughters in Europe that are virtually guaranteed to be repeated in America.

The unprecedented public criticisms of President Obama by four of his former Secretaries of Defense, not to mention retired four-star generals, demonstrate that having knowledgeable and experienced advisors cannot make up for headstrong ignorance on the part of a President.

A headline on Bret Stephens’ column in the Wall Street Journal — “Trump Is Obama Squared” — hit the nail on the head. After seven long years of disaster after disaster, at home and abroad, under the Obama administration, have we learned nothing about the dangers of choosing an untested candidate for President of the United States on the basis of his saying things we want to hear?

Elections are not held to make us feel good at the time, but to select someone with the depth of knowledge and character to be entrusted with our lives and the future of the nation.

Economist Thomas Sowell refutes the idea that

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