Sunday roundup

Squirrel-Hair whines about how he does in states that have the kinds of convention / primary / caucus rules that require a candidate to have a good ground game, but as Rick Moran at PJ Media points out:

The rules governing the selection of delegates are available to anyone who asks for them. It's not like they're locked up in a closet guarded 24 hours a day by CIA agents. The Cruz team is out-hustling, out-organizing, and out-maneuvering the Trump campaign at every single turn. Is it any wonder Trump is constantly throwing tantrums about a "rigged" process?

Trump's whining is an attempt by the candidate to distract voters from the incredible incompetence, mismanagement and ignorance of his campaign team. His people better get their stuff together quickly or the candidate may find himself coming up empty at the convention.

Per a recent Pew survey, religious Americans are happier with their lives than the non-religious. It seems they are more inclined to foster family and civic connections as well:

Religious Americans also gather with extended family more often and donate their time and money to the poor more frequently. Sixty-five percent of those identified as “highly religious” said they gave their time and/or money to help the poor in the past week, while only 41 percent of less religious Americans did so.

On the heels of the buzzing of the USS Donald Cook in the Baltic Sea comes this provocation:

A Russian fighter jet flew dangerously close to a U.S. RC-135 reconnaissance aircraft on Thursday in the latest military provocation by Moscow over the Baltic Sea, the U.S. European Command said Saturday.

“On April 14, a U.S. Air Force RC-135 aircraft flying a routine route in international airspace over the Baltic Sea was intercepted by a Russian Su-27 in an unsafe and unprofessional manner,” said Navy Capt. Danny Hernandez.

“This intercept comes shortly after the unsafe Russian encounters with USS Donald Cook,” he added. “There have been repeated incidents over the last year where Russian military aircraft have come close enough to other air and sea traffic to raise serious safety concerns, and we are very concerned with any such behavior.”

Hernandez said the U.S. aircraft, a militarized Boeing 707 jet, was operating in international airspace “and at no time crossed into Russian territory.”

And North Korea is hardly sitting idle:

North Korea is likely to conduct its fifth nuclear test in the near future, possibly before its party congress in early May, a media report said on Sunday, citing South Korean government sources based on their reading of activity around the test site.

The news of signs indicating the North is readying a nuclear test comes as Pyongyang is gearing up for a ruling Workers Party congress in early May, where leader Kim Jong Un is likely to boast about his achievements in building a weapons program.

The likelihood of North Korea conducting a fifth nuclear test, possibly within weeks, has increased because of a failed missile launch on Friday that was an embarrassing setback for leader Kim, South Korean officials and international experts said.

"Compared to last month, the frequency of vehicle, workforce and equipment movements increased two-to-threefold recently," Yonhap News Agency said, quoting multiple government sources.

The possible test, if it happens, follows a fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, which led to new U.N. sanctions that have failed to halt Pyongyang's weapons programs.

And Kevin Williamson at NRO speaks plainly about what the move to find some kind of criminal charge to lob at Exxon, Chevron and the Competitive Enterprise Institute for not getting on board with the our-global-climate-is-in-some-kind-of-trouble narrative is:

We should, while it is permitted, be as plain as possible about what is happening here: This is an act of obvious, gross, and indefensible political suppression, with two ends: One is riling up young, white, middle-income progressives before the 2016 election (in which California’s Democratic attorney general, Kamala Harris, is a Senate candidate), voters who care a great deal about global warming and not very much about freedom of speech; the second is financial, in that Exxon, the second most valuable firm on Earth by market capitalization, has a great deal of money, and may be bullied into a settlement that will fund a great deal of Democratic activism for years to come.

This is banana-republic stuff.  Kamala Harris, Eric Schneiderman, Claude Earl Walker, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch should not resign — they should be hounded from office, and from polite society. Prosecuting political institutions and businesses for political activism is brown-shirt business, plain and simply and ugly and heinous. If you believe that this will stop at prosecuting wicked, evil “corporations,” you are deluding yourself. 

You’re next. 

And thus does the twilight battle between light and darkness rage on.