BITTER CLINGERS: Why Do GOP Detractors Insist That Donald Trump Is Only Popular Among Dumb, Poor Whites?

THE BLACK ESTABLISHMENT chooses Hillary Clinton.

WRONG TIME? Albright: ‘Special place in hell’ comment came at ‘wrong time.’

Former secretary of State Madeline Albright is softening her controversial comment that there’s a “special place in hell for women who don’t help each other” in a New York Times opinion piece released Friday afternoon.

Albright has received significant criticism for making the remark while campaigning for Hillary Clinton. In the op-ed, Albright said she now understands that she “came across as condemning those who disagree with my political preferences.”

“I have spent much of my career as a diplomat. It is an occupation in which words and context matter a great deal. So one might assume I know better than to tell a large number of women to go to hell,” she writes.

“I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another, but this was the wrong context and the wrong time to use that line. I did not mean to argue that women should support a particular candidate based solely on gender.”

She added that she’s made the comment a number of times in the past because she believes that “in a society where women often feel pressured to tear one another down, our saving grace lies in our willingness to lift one another up.”

Funny, Madeleine, I don’t remember you doing that for Sarah Palin, or Carly Fiorina, or any other Republican women targeted by the Democrats.

TOM MAGUIRE: In 2008 Hillary lost to “Yes We Can!”. Now she is going to win with “No We Can’t”?

POLICE BAFFLED AFTER GUY NAMED MOHAMMAD GOES ON MACHETE RAMPAGE AT OHIO DELI.

Gary Larson, call your office.

Related: Was Ohio Restaurant Targeted In Machete Attack Because of Israeli Owner?

SURPRISE! “RICHARD WINDSOR” IS A CLINTON FOUNDATION BOARD MEMBER: “Lisa Jackson, the former Environmental Protection Agency administrator who was caught using an email account under the pseudonym ‘Richard Windsor,’ sits on the board of the Clinton Foundation, the charity of Hillary Clinton, of fame.”

HE’S NO SCOTT WALKER. Time to Talk About John Kasich’s Biggest Failure as Ohio Governor: Union Reform.

IN THE 1930s, A FAMOUSLY “PROGRESSIVE,” GOVERNMENT-EXPANDING PRESIDENT SAID THIS ABOUT THE DEPRESSION:

Two courses were open to us. We might have done nothing. That would have been utter ruin. Instead, we met the situation with proposals to private business and to the Congress of the most gigantic program of economic defense and counterattack ever evolved in the history of the Republic. We put that program in action. Our measures have repelled these attacks of fear and panic. . . . We have used the credit of the Government to aid and protect our institutions, both public and private. We have provided methods and assurances that none suffer from hunger or cold amongst our people. We have instituted measures to assist our farmers and our homeowners. We have created vast agencies for employment.

Name that president — and then pass it along to Bernie Sanders.

(H/T: Arthur Kimes.)

DO THEY STINK ON ICE? Quote of the Day, Debbie Wasserman Schultz Downplays Worries That Her Base Is Revolting edition.

Flashback: Had it occurred to me at the time, I would have linked to Harry Reid openly declaring that his base stinks on ice to my post on Thursday on leftwing elites smearing rank-and-file Democrats.

URGH! A MUSIC WAR.* Team Jeb: Rubio is a phony on family values given some of the hip-hop he listens to.

Good thing Rubio doesn’t chum around with Satan and Aleister Crowley-endorsing heavy metal stars like..err…Jeb’s brother, George W. Bush.

* Classical reference.

CHANGE: West Virginia Is Now The 26th Right-To-Work State.

WELL, YES: The media’s blindness to Bernie’s socialist extremism is telling.

Remember, people on the right are “crazed” and “full of hate.” People on the left are “idealistic” and “full of passion.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: House ethics probe into Alan Grayson’s hedge-fund moonlighting.

CARRIE LUKAS: Euro-feminists in meltdown over immigrant rape. “Of course, there’s a way out for feminists: Refocus on the core principle of defending women’s equal rights and fair treatment. This requires recognizing that the West — including Western men — have actually come a long way in protecting women from physical harm and enabling their full participation in the public sphere.”

When you yammer about a nonexistent “rape culture” at home, and then import millions from a genuine rape culture, it’s not likely to go well. And you can’t acknowledge anything good about Western men, or that would defeat the entire purpose of feminism, which is to cow and silence Western men.

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DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Protesters cheer on ‘refugee attack’ suspects. “Around 100 people spent Friday morning gathered outside a Swedish court where a group of men planning a violent attack at refugee housing were appearing. The protest delayed detention hearings for the 14 suspects linked to an an alleged plan to target refugees living in asylum housing on a campsite in Nynäshamn, a small town in a rural area south of Stockholm.”

ARMY OF DAVIDS, EARTHQUAKE EDITION: Developed by UC-Berkeley scientists, the MyShake Android app uses crowdsourcing to detect earthquakes. From the LAT report:

The cellphone MyShake app would not replace the USGS’ early warning system, Allen said. Smartphones will never be as effective as hundreds of sophisticated earthquake sensor stations installed underground to detect the first subtle signs that an earthquake has begun.

Still, a successful smartphone app, woven into the USGS system, could make the overall warning network even faster in California, Oregon and Washington state, he said. And it would enable the technology to be used in other areas of the world with few or no earthquake sensors.

“Nepal has almost no seismic stations. But they have 6 million smartphones. There are 600,000 smartphones in Kathmandu alone,” Allen said. “So if we can get MyShake working, then we could potentially be providing early warning in Kathmandu.”

Related, ICYMI, my report on the use of smart phone apps and crowdsourcing to collect economic data, especially in less-developed countries.

THE CUTENESS AWAKENS: The epic Calvin And Hobbes meets The Force Awakens mashup continues.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Rational design of protein architectures not found in nature.

IF THEY’RE GOING TO DO TO SEX WHAT THEY’VE DONE TO FACEBOOK AND TWITTER — RUIN THE USER EXPERIENCE IN SUPPORT OF MONETIZATION AND SOCIAL CONTROL — I’LL PASS, THANKS: Silicon Valley Wants to Disrupt Orgasms—With Science!

NO MORE GILMORE-MANIA, ALAS: Jim Gilmore (R-VA) ends campaign for president.

DAMN IT FEELS GOOD TO BE A CLINTON!

“Senator Cruz, this might be my favorite political ad of all time,” Jim Geraghty writes, though he asks if the ad works “if you haven’t seen the Office Space scene? Is it funny enough to watch Hillary and her aides destroying her server?” I think the message comes through loud and clear even if you’ve never seen Office Space — though the copier destroying scene is probably the film’s most viral* clip.

* Explanation of the 21st century usage of this word in case Hillary is reading.

UPDATE: Democrat operatives with bylines “Andrea Mitchell and Chuck Todd were appalled by a new Ted Cruz commercial attacking Hillary Clinton, labeling it ‘vicious’ and ‘rough.'” Because they’re all about sensitive feelings and safe spaces at MSNBC.

SO TRUMP IS A WHITE OBAMA?: Reihan Salam has column in Slate (he is also an executive editor of National Review, btw), “I Can’t Hate Donald Trump: I Do Hate Republicans Who’ve Enabled His Remarkable Popularity.”  The thesis seems to be that Trump is essentially a “white Obama” whose campaign is a dog whistle for working class whites:

I can’t bring myself to hate Donald Trump. Part of this is a quirk of biography. Like a lot of native New Yorkers around my age, I find his outer-borough accent so comfortingly familiar that I can’t help but smile whenever I hear his voice, even when he’s saying something outrageously offensive. To a certain kind of smart, scrappy, lower-middle-class New York youth in the ’80s and ’90s, Trump was the living embodiment of gaudy success—a kind of mash-up of Santa Claus, Scrooge McDuck, and Vito Corleone. . . .

Trump is strongest not in the metropolitan corners of America, where he’s spent most of his life. Rather, his strongholds are the mostly overlooked sections of the South, Appalachia, and the rural and semi-rural North. . . .

Many have been struck by the overwhelming whiteness of Trump’s campaign, not least the small number of self-identified “white nationalists” who’ve rallied around his campaign. I would argue that the Trump coalition illustrates how whiteness as a category is so expansive as to be almost meaningless. The Scots-Irish or “American” whites who see Trump as their champion are profoundly different from the metropolitan whites who dominate the upper echelons of U.S. society—so much so that the convention of lumping them together as “white” detracts far more from our understanding of how they fit into our society than it adds to it. J.D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy, a forthcoming book on the place of Appalachian whites in modern America, estimates that roughly one-quarter of whites belong to the Scots-Irish tribe that has embraced Trump. If we were to separate out these Americans as a race or ethnicity unto themselves, Vance writes, we would finds rates of poverty and substance abuse that would shock our national conscience. But we don’t generally collect detailed statistics on the Scots-Irish. . . .

When Barack Obama first emerged on the political scene, he excited voters who saw in him a reflection of their own experiences. His mixed ancestry, his upbringing as the son of an intellectually curious and at times very poor single mother, and his experience of upward mobility through higher education—all of these experiences resonated with Americans who’d had similar journeys, and who felt validated by Obama’s narrative.

Trump and Obama are almost as different as one American can be from another. Nevertheless, Trump has built a gut-level connection that is no less formidable, and with an entirely different set of Americans. . . .

ANDREW KLAVAN: Porn Star Scuttles My Political Career!

NBC NEWS: VICTIMS NOT TOLD OF ‘SWEETHEART DEAL’ FOR JEFFREY EPSTEIN.

That’s so odd — CTL-F “Clinton” brings zero returns in the article text. Unexpectedly!

(Via John Nolte.)