America

Former ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton administered a heavy dose of alarmism to CPAC during his speech on Thursday morning.

Now a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Bolton primarily used the platform to bash Hillary Clinton, even though there were presumably no Clinton supporters in the audience to be persuaded. He framed his argument by systematically critiquing her foreign policy, but the statements he made on the South China Sea bordered on fear mongering.

An extraordinary article by Rusty Reno, who says he believes Trump is a dangerous figure, but who admits that the rise of Trump has taught him about his own errors of judgment. Trump, says Reno, reveals that the Republican Party is no real friend of Main Street and traditional American values. Excerpts:

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

By nominating Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party is handing over the presidency to Donald Trump.

I’ve been pretty explicit in this space for some time about how I think the Donald J. Trump phenomenon is based in something real. I mean, the grievances to which he speaks are not phantoms. What I find impossible to accept is that Trump is anything other than a voice of resentment. If he offered some kind of way to redress those grievances, to do something concrete about them, things would be different. If he had the moral probity and personal character to lead others to solutions, things would be different.

Overnight both freedom of press and democracy officially died in Turkey, with time of death just before midnight, when Turkish authorities stormed the Zaman daily, a newspaper staunchly opposed to president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and after using tear gas and water cannon they seized its headquarters in a dramatic raid that raised fresh alarm over declining media freedoms.

The police used water cannon late on Friday at a hundreds-strong crowd that had formed outside the headquarters of the Zaman daily in Istanbul following a court order issued earlier in the day.