Correia crossed the line when said she hoped the champion 'didn’t commit suicide' after losing.
The UFC women’s bantamweight champion plans to punish the unbeaten Brazilian inside the Octagon...
.@RSMcCain Rutgers University @ProfessorKumar says U.S. is MORE 'brutal' than #ISIS. http://t.co/DEeunyKFIE cc. @Instapundit
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) August 1, 20151968 IS BACK. A growing chorus of voices on the right is arguing that the riots in Baltimore and Ferguson are ushering in a new round of the culture wars. On the website Breitbart, for example, Robert W. Patterson, a former George W. Bush administration official, wrote, “The Grand Old Party must decide: Go libertarian, and sympathize with the protesters and rioters? Or does it want to be conservative, and side with the police, the rule of law, and the forces of order? The lessons of the 1960s suggest the latter is the path to victory.” William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, observed during the recent riots in Ferguson, “It does feel like a Nixon ’68 moment. Who will speak for the Silent Majority?”Sounds familiar.
It was a revealing question. In 1968, Richard Nixon tapped into white working-class antipathy toward student and black radicalism to defeat Hubert Humphrey. The Southern Strategy was born. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had won election as governor of California by denouncing the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and promising to “throw the bums off welfare.” Reagan would go on to midwife what became a potent alliance between the emerging neoconservative movement and traditional conservatives. The neocons began to share the traditionalists’ belief that, as Burke put it, “Men of intemperate mind can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
The maiden neocons had themselves emerged from the intensely partisan milieu of the 1930s to become respected public intellectuals. They viewed the scaturient passions of the New Left that had suddenly emerged in the 1960s as a clear and present danger—what the literary critic Lionel Trilling deemed an “adversary culture.”
Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and a number of other neoconservatives were deeply influenced by Trilling’s criticism of liberalism from inside the movement. They were also influenced—Kristol and Himmelfarb in particular—by the political philosopher Leo Strauss, who had fled Nazi Germany. Strauss believed that the culprit for much of what had gone wrong in Western civilization could be traced back to Machiavelli, who had lowered man’s sights away from a transcendent good. The result was the rise of relativism, in which one view of how humans should behave is as good as another. Strauss, by contrast, promulgated a different message, one that resonated with the new generation of conservatives—a return, after centuries of neglect, to classical virtue.
Kristol assailed what he called a “new class” of managers, lawyers, bureaucrats and social workers who promoted new issues such as women’s rights, sexual liberation and minority rights. Himmelfarb’s numerous books lauded the idea of Victorian virtue, stressed self-help and charity, and argued that the public dole had profoundly corrosive moral effects, foremost among them creating a culture of dependency on government.
Though it has tended to be scanted in recent years, neoconservatives—“Liberals mugged by reality,” as Kristol once put it—were initially much less preoccupied with foreign than domestic issues. Domestic policy is where they made their bones. Kristol and Daniel Bell founded the Public Interest in 1965 (though Bell ended up resigning as coeditor in 1973). The National Interest didn’t appear until 1985, just as the Cold War was beginning to reach its terminal phase. Political scientist James Q. Wilson, a regular contributor to Commentary and the Public Interest, devised the “broken windows” theory, which holds that stopping petty crimes is a vital step toward preventing major ones from occurring. RIOTING IN the inner cities in 1968, the disintegration of New York City, the rise of black militants and the introduction of affirmative action hardened neocon attitudes. Nathan Glazer called affirmative action “affirmative discrimination.” In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan issued a report warning about the collapse of the black family. Two years later, he delivered a speech to the Americans for Democratic Action stating that “liberals must somehow overcome the curious condescension that takes the form of defending and explaining away everything, however outrageous, which Negroes, individually or collectively, might do.” Other neocons blamed a new antinomianism for America’s ills. The emphasis on individual needs and wants—feminism, multiculturalism and the like—meant that the idea of a common civic good was disappearing. In their view, it was being replaced by a society of disgruntled supplicants.
Neocon apprehensions about crime and the sexual revolution were also acutely reflected in literary form. In novels like Mr. Sammler’s Planet and The Dean’s December, Saul Bellow vividly evoked the racial tensions of the 1970s, prompting charges that he was himself a racist. The Dean’s December focuses on the murder of a white graduate student named Rick Lester by a black hoodlum and a female prostitute. The protagonist Alfred Corde, a dean at the University of Chicago, registers his sympathy with the underclass but suggests that the basic problem is insoluble:
We do not know how to approach this population. We haven’t even conceived that reaching it may be a problem. So there’s nothing but death before it. Maybe we’ve already made our decision. Those that can be advanced into the middle class, let them be advanced. The rest? Well, we do our best by them. We don’t have to do any more. They kill some of us. Mostly they kill themselves.
CALAIS, France — The sun had barely set when a 23-year-old Eritrean woman who gave her name as Akbrat fell into step with dozens of other men and women and started scaling the fence surrounding the entrance to the French side of the Channel Tunnel.Still more.
The barbed wire cut her hands, but she did not feel the pain. The police seemed to be everywhere. She thought of her 5-year-old son back in Africa and ran, zigzag through the falling shadows, once almost colliding with an officer in a helmet.
Then she was alone. She slipped under the freight train and waited, clambering out just as it began moving.
But before she could hurl herself onto the train bed transporting trucks filled with Britain-bound produce, a French officer caught up with her, she recalled in an interview on Thursday. Blinded by tear gas, she stumbled and bruised her right ankle. After being ejected from the complex around the tunnel, it took her five hours to limp the nine miles back to the refugee camp of makeshift shelters that its 3,000 inhabitants call the “jungle.”
“You’re lucky you weren’t killed,” someone told her.
“I’m not lucky,” she responded. “I’ll be lucky when I’m in England.”
The desperate scene playing out each night and day in Calais, with migrants trying to vault fences or cut their way through them and climb onto trains or into trucks going across the Channel to England, is just one chapter in a painful drama playing out across Europe.
For many of the migrants who have been coming to the Continent from Africa, the Middle East and beyond, Calais, a mere 21 miles from the white cliffs of Dover, is their last stop. If they make it across to Britain, many believe they will have reached safety and a better life. Some are attracted to Britain because they speak some English, others because they see better job prospects there than on the Continent. A few even cite a strong pound.
Those who make it as far as this port city often express striking and implacable certainty about their right to go the rest of the way, having come so far.
Nursing her sprained ankle outside the tent she shares with a dozen of other men and women, Akbrat lamented the fact that she would have to rest for a few days before making another attempt. “I’ve crossed the sea and walked for many months,” she said. “I am not giving up now.”
Like others here, she declined to give her full name or have her photograph taken for fear of jeopardizing her chances of slipping across the border undetected.
Akbrat arrived in Calais five days ago. But she has spent much of her life as a refugee. When she was 13, her father was killed, a political assassination in Eritrea, she said. Her mother fled with her and her two sisters to Sudan. When her mother died seven months ago, Akbrat left her son with her aunt and began her own journey to Turkey and then across the Mediterranean to Greece. She hopes to bring her boy to Britain once she has papers and has found work, she said.
“I thought I would die on that boat,” she said. “Until I die, I will try to go to England.”
One measure of America’s lowered expectations is that so many economists cheered Thursday’s second quarter growth estimate of 2.3%. It’s a rebound from the first quarter slump! The consumer is resilient, net exports are up, the plow-horse marches on! All true, but those silver linings obscure the larger reality that six long years after the recession ended in June 2009 the American economy has become a slow-growth machine.Keep reading, and pay special attention to the comparative graphic on relative post-recession economic expansions. It's mind-boggling, the growth-killing collectivism of the current administration.
That’s the story underscored by the annual government revisions in historical GDP that accompanied the second-quarter report. The news, which most Americans have long felt in slow-growing wages, is that the worst expansion in 70 years has been even weaker than we thought.
The gnomes at the Bureau of Economic Analysis ran the numbers based on new data and analytical methods and downgraded the recovery since 2011 nearly across the board. From 2011 through 2014, the economy grew at a paltry annual rate of 2%, down from the previous estimate of 2.3%. This means the overall U.S. economy is smaller—with GDP slashed by $105 billion in 2013 and $71 billion in 2014 to $17.35 trillion.
Those numbers are abstractions, but another way to put it is that national income, corporate profits and personal income were all revised down. From 2011 through 2014, the average annual growth of real disposable personal income was slashed to 1.5% from 1.8%. That’s a giant cut in the standard of living.
Since the recession ended in June 2009, the economy has grown at an annual rate of about 2.1%. That’s 0.6-percentage points worse than even during the much-maligned George W. Bush expansion. Growth averaged more than 3% from 2003-2006, but the best growth during the Obama years has been 2.5% in 2010, and in both 2011 and 2013 it nearly slipped back into recession.
The nearby chart compares this expansion to the growth periods in the 1980s and 1990s, showing what might have been. Real GDP growth averaged 4.6% in the first six years of the Reagan expansion, and more than 3.6% a year in the first six years of the George H.W. Bush-Bill Clinton expansion (gaining speed after that). Had the current expansion been as robust as the average expansion since 1960, GDP would be some $1.89 trillion larger today, according to Congress’s Joint Economic Committee.
The slow-growth Obama era has given way to multiple explanations and excuses from the President’s economic advocates. They blame the hangover from the financial crisis (even six years later), foreign economic problems, the failure of government to spend and tax more, an aging population—anything but the policy differences between those previous eras and this one.
Leading lights on the left have even thrown up their hands to suggest we no longer really know what produces faster growth. Larry Summers calls it “secular stagnation,” as if it’s an illness we somehow caught. Others claim 2%-2.5% growth is about as good as we can now do, so get used to it—and keep interest rates at near-zero for as far as the eye can see.
This is a false counsel of despair, much as we heard similar advice in the malaise years of the 1970s. There’s no great mystery about why growth has been so slow. The natural dynamism of the U.S. economy has been swamped by waves of bad policies.
Unprecedented new regulation has hamstrung finance, health care, the coal and power industries, for-profit education, and so much more. Two of the biggest growth exceptions—tech and oil and gas—escaped this maw because drilling is regulated by the states and the FCC only got around to ensnaring the Internet in new rules this year.
Higher taxes—their anticipation and then the reality in 2013—slowed risk-taking and investment. Profits fell in the first quarter of 2013 thanks to the tax cliff, and growth for 2013 was a mere 1.5% after the latest revisions.
The Federal Reserve has tried to overcome all this with near-zero interest rates and bond-buying, and it has succeeded in raising asset prices that have further enriched those lucky enough to hold assets. But it hasn’t succeeded in lifting the economy out of its slow-growth trend, and the Fed’s own growth predictions have been revised down year after year...
Republicans are rallying behind a bare-knuckle strategy to strip Planned Parenthood’s government support via a must-pass fall spending bill, a momentum shift that dramatically increases the chances of a government shutdown fight this fall.Still more. (Via Memeorandum.)
What started out as a push from socially conservative firebrands like Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and 18 House members on Wednesday, is spreading to include more centrist members of the Senate GOP. On Thursday, Arizona Republican John McCain, who often tacks to the middle in the Senate, not only backed a plan to link Planned Parenthood defunding with spending legislation, he suggested the move was inevitable.
“It could invite a fight, but I think most Americans do not believe that their tax dollars should be used to fund the kind of grotesque procedures we’ve seen authenticated,” said McCain, who is trying to box out any primary challenge. “I would vote for a spending bill that defunded it, and that’s the way it’s going to be … it’s pretty obvious.”
Asked about eliminating the organization’s $528 million in government funding in a spending bill, Orrin Hatch of Utah, the chamber’s most senior senator replied: “It’s the right way to go.” Meanwhile, Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.) said dozens of House Republicans will back his threat — delivered in a letter to Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — to shoot down any legislation that funds Planned Parenthood this fall.
“We have to find a way to fund the government without giving any more money to this” organization, Mulvaney said Wednesday evening.
The growing momentum comes as the anti-abortion Center for Medical Progress on Thursday released its fourth undercover video going after the women’s health organization, this time with recordings of a doctor discussing how to avoid the perception of “selling fetal parts across states.” The group says the video proves that Planned Parenthood is trafficking human fetal organs — and both parties expect more videos to come this summer. Planned Parenthood denies that it did anything illegal.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has scheduled a standalone vote on defunding the organization for next week, but it will fail amid Democratic resistance and may only temporarily satisfy the party’s right flank...
There are times when Dan Price feels as if he stumbled into the middle of the street with a flag and found himself at the head of a parade.Corporate socialism doesn't work, obviously, to say nothing of state socialism.
Three months ago, Mr. Price, 31, announced he was setting a new minimum salary of $70,000 at his Seattle credit card processing firm, Gravity Payments, and slashing his own million-dollar pay package to do it. He wasn’t thinking about the current political clamor over low wages or the growing gap between rich and poor, he said. He was just thinking of the 120 people who worked for him and, let’s be honest, a bit of free publicity. The idea struck him when a friend shared her worries about paying both her rent and student loans on a $40,000 salary. He realized a lot of his own employees earned that or less.
Yet almost overnight, a decision by one small-business man in the northwestern corner of the country became a swashbuckling blow against income inequality.
The move drew attention from around the world — including from some outspoken skeptics and conservatives like Rush Limbaugh, who smelled a socialist agenda — but most were enthusiastic. Talk show hosts lined up to interview Mr. Price. Job seekers by the thousands sent in résumés. He was called a “thought leader.” Harvard business professors flew out to conduct a case study. Third graders wrote him thank-you notes. Single women wanted to date him.
What few outsiders realized, however, was how much turmoil all the hoopla was causing at the company itself. To begin with, Gravity was simply unprepared for the onslaught of emails, Facebook posts and phone calls. The attention was thrilling, but it was also exhausting and distracting. And with so many eyes focused on the firm, some hoping to witness failure, the pressure has been intense.
More troubling, a few customers, dismayed by what they viewed as a political statement, withdrew their business. Others, anticipating a fee increase — despite repeated assurances to the contrary — also left. While dozens of new clients, inspired by Mr. Price’s announcement, were signing up, those accounts will not start paying off for at least another year. To handle the flood, he has already had to hire a dozen additional employees — now at a significantly higher cost — and is struggling to figure out whether more are needed without knowing for certain how long the bonanza will last.
Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Some friends and associates in Seattle’s close-knit entrepreneurial network were also piqued that Mr. Price’s action made them look stingy in front of their own employees.
Then potentially the worst blow of all: Less than two weeks after the announcement, Mr. Price’s older brother and Gravity co-founder, Lucas Price, citing longstanding differences, filed a lawsuit that potentially threatened the company’s very existence. With legal bills quickly mounting and most of his own paycheck and last year’s $2.2 million in profits plowed into the salary increases, Dan Price said, “We don’t have a margin of error to pay those legal fees.”
As Mr. Price spoke in the Gravity conference room, he could see a handful of employees setting up beach chairs in the parking lot for an impromptu meeting. The office is in Ballard, a fast-gentrifying neighborhood of Seattle that reflects the wealth gap that Mr. Price says he wants to address. Downstairs is a yoga studio, and across the street is a coffee bar where customers can sip velvet soy lattes on Adirondack-style chairs. But around the corner, beneath the elevated roadway, a homeless woman silently appeals to drivers stopped at the red light with a cardboard sign: “Plz Help.”
In his own way, Mr. Price is trying to respond to that request.
“Income inequality has been racing in the wrong direction,” he said. “I want to fight for the idea that if someone is intelligent, hard-working and does a good job, then they are entitled to live a middle-class lifestyle.”
The reaction to his salary pledge has led him to think that if his business continues to prosper, his actions could have far-reaching consequences. “The cause has expanded,” he said. “Whether I like it or not, the stakes are higher.”
Ali Dawabsha buried, doctors try to save rest of family; Israel condemns alleged Jewish terrorists who set fire to home; Abbas blames Israeli support for settlers; world slams attack; IDF sends extra troops to West Bank.And from the IDF, "We condemn all acts of terrorism. Our thoughts are with the families of the victims. We wish all a peaceful Shabbat."
Atlanta police said surveillance footage shows two men placing Confederate battle flags at two of Atlanta’s most notable landmarks early Thursday: Ebenezer Baptist Church and Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historic Site.The National Park Service also received a "threatening message" just days ago that mention the historic site, although authorities are not yet linking it to events overnight.
As investigators worked to identify the men and their motive, church and civic leaders decried the act as terrorism, vowing not to be threatened.
Police later Thursday released several black and white videos from Ebenezer’s surveillance cameras showing images of two men walking and placing flags at various spots...
You aren’t just betraying your principles.What a load of crap, and there's still more.
Dear Cuckservative,
You are not alone. Like you, Erick Erickson at RedState.com, Matt Lewis at the Daily Caller, Taylor Millard at Hot Air, the blogger Ace of Spades, and Jim Harper with the Cato Institute are all squirming under the lash of this new coinage. They are squirming because a single word–cuckservative–lays bare the rot at the heart of your movement: American conservatism can conserve nothing if it cannot conserve the nation’s founding stock. I’ll put it bluntly: Nothing you love will survive without white people.
Do you stand for limited government and a balanced budget? Count your black and Hispanic allies. Do you admire Thomas Jefferson? He was a slave-holder who will end up on the dung heap with the Confederate flag. Do you care about stable families and the rights of the unborn? Look up illegitimacy, divorce, and abortion rates for blacks and Hispanics. Do you cherish the stillness at dawn in Bryce Canyon? When the park service manages to get blacks and Hispanics to go camping they play boom-boxes until 1:00 a.m. Was Ronald Reagan your hero? He would not win a majority of today’s electorate.
Do you love Tchaikovsky? Count the non-whites in the concert hall. Do you yearn for neighborhoods where you can leave the keys in your car? There still are some; just don’t expect them to be “diverse.” Are hunting and firearms part of your heritage? Explain that to Barack Obama or Sonia Sotomayor. Are you a devout Christian? Muslim immigrants despise you and your faith. Do you support Israel? Mexicans, Haitians, Chinese, and Guatemalans don’t.
Your great festival – CPAC – is as white as a meeting of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. That’s because blacks and Hispanics and even Asians don’t share your dreams. You’ve heard the old joke: “What do you call the only black person at a conservative meeting? The keynote speaker.” Outreach doesn’t work. You can’t talk someone into loving what you love. Faith, patriotism, duty, and honor come from deeply cultural, religious, and ancestral sources you can’t reach.
Why do you evoke Martin Luther King when you call for a “colorblind” America? You know he wanted quotas for blacks. You evoke King because you think he’ll help you silence blacks and liberals. But it doesn’t work, does it? That’s because only whites–and Asians, when it suits them–even think in terms of “colorblindness.” Blacks and Hispanics will squeeze every unfair advantage out of you they can. At what point will they ever abandon their aggressive racial agenda? When they’re the majority just think how hard they’ll squeeze your grandchildren...
Donations to family foundation increased after secretary of state’s involvement in tax case.Classic Clinton Cash.
A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts.
If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court.
Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS, an outcome that drew criticism from some lawmakers who wanted a more extensive crackdown.
From that point on, UBS’s engagement with the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased. Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank.
The bank also joined the Clinton Foundation to launch entrepreneurship and inner-city loan programs, through which it lent $32 million. And it paid former president Bill Clinton $1.5 million to participate in a series of question-and-answer sessions with UBS Wealth Management Chief Executive Bob McCann, making UBS his biggest single corporate source of speech income disclosed since he left the White House.
There is no evidence of any link between Mrs. Clinton’s involvement in the case and the bank’s donations to the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, or its hiring of Mr. Clinton. But her involvement with UBS is a prime example of how the Clintons’ private and political activities overlap.
UBS is just one of a series of companies that engaged with both the Clinton family’s charitable organization and the State Department under Mrs. Clinton. And it is an unusual one: Unlike cases in which Mrs. Clinton went to bat for American companies seeking business abroad, such as General Electric Co. and Boeing Co., the UBS matter involved her helping solve a problem for a foreign bank—not a popular constituency among Democrats—and stepping into an area where government prosecutors had been taking the lead.
The flood of donations and speech income that followed exemplifies why the charity and its fundraising have been a running problem for the presidential campaign of Mrs. Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. Republicans as well as some Democrats have raised questions about potential conflicts of interest.
“They’ve engaged in behavior to make people wonder: What was this about?” says Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who is a Democrat. “Was there something other than deciding the merits of these cases?”
Critics also have hit the charity for accepting donations from foreign governments, which they say could pose problems for her if she is elected, potentially opening her to criticism that she is obligated to foreign donors.
The Clintons have said accepting donations posed no conflicts of interest and broke no rule or law. To address the criticism, the Clinton Foundation decided to release donation information more frequently, and the foundation said earlier this year that the first disclosure is expected by the end of July.
UBS officials deny any connection between the legal case and the foundation donations. “Any insinuation that any of our philanthropic or business initiatives stems from support received from any current or former government official is ludicrous and without merit,” a bank spokeswoman said. UBS said the speeches by Mr. Clinton and the donations were part of a program to respond to the 2008 economic downturn.
A Clinton campaign spokesman said Mrs. Clinton is proud of the foundation’s work and her record as secretary of state. “Any suggestion that she was driven by anything but what’s in America’s best interest would be false. Period,” he said. He referred questions about the UBS matter to the State Department.
A State Department spokesman said that “UBS was a topic of serious discussion, among other issues, in our bilateral relations at that time” with the Swiss government. A spokeswoman in the Swiss embassy in Washington said the government had no comment.
In a CNN interview last month, Bill Clinton was asked if any foundation donors ever sought anything from the State Department. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I know of no example. But I—you never know what people’s motives are.”
During the first six months of this year, right-wing extremists in Germany committed attacks against places housing asylum-seekers on an almost daily basis. Many refugees living in the country fear for their lives.Keep in mind that the swastika is banned in Germany, so I'm always skeptical of these reports on the rise of so-called "right-wing extremists" there. Frankly, Islamic anti-Semitism is a far larger threat. Not only that, no ideological group has the market cornered on anti-immigrant nativism. It's a nationwide (and continent-wide) problem, as folks in Southern Europe are now witnessing with the massive refugee crisis.
It's a Monday night in July and Samuel Osei is frightened to death. Two neo-Nazis have entered the concrete bloc apartment building where Osei is staying, on the edge of Greifswald, a city in eastern Germany. The two men are drunk and swearing. Osei, an asylum-seeker from Ghana, steps out on his balcony and tries to placate them. "I'm sorry," he calls out. But the right-wing extremists only grow more aggressive. They begin shouting. One of the two takes off his shirt and Osei recognizes a swastika on his chest.
The men storm into the building and begin pounding on the door to Osei's apartment. They then go down to the basement and remove the fuses, cutting off the power. Osei cowers in his room in the dark. He calls a friend who in turn alerts the police. The attackers have already left by the time officers...
Osei chokes up when he talks about that evening a week and a half ago. Traces of the attack are still visible -- the door is dented and its peephole shattered. "These guys wanted to put an end to something," he says.
Osei, who is 29, has been living in Germany for eight months. He's taking German lessons and earns his money by helping other refugees move. Osei likes Greifswald, which is located on the Baltic coast -- he especially likes the sea and the Old Town. He says most people in the city are friendly and helpful. At the same time, he's struggling with the animosity he has experienced at the hands of racists.
One of the men involved in the attack had already cursed at him on the street. His mailbox at the apartment was also vandalized several times. The Ghanaian also has photos of the two attackers and has given a statement to the police. The state Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which is responsible for monitoring extremists, including neo-Nazis, in Germany, has also opened an investigation. "It was mental torture," Osei says.
Germany these days is a nation split in two. On the one side is a populace that is showing greater solidarity with refugees than ever seen before. Initiatives have been created across the country to assist asylum-seekers in their everyday lives.
The other half of the country is extremely difficult to tolerate in some places. Racist violence is on the rise. The German Interior Ministry registered 173 instances of criminal right-wing offenses against accommodations for asylum-seekers during the first six months of this year, almost three times as many as during the same period the previous year...
On Monday night I joined Sean Hannity at Fox News to discuss Planned Parenthood and Donald Trump.It's a very bad thing, but then, leftists are very bad, particularly American leftists.
Judging from Twitter commentary, many Americans are prepared to defend the harvesting of baby body parts by Cecile Richards and her staff. If so, shame on you. I wrote last week that no other country in the civilized world has a "Planned Parenthood": a billion-dollar abortion conglomerate. One Tweeter said so what? Abortion is only "three per cent" of what Planned Parenthood does. In fact, as I pointed out on the air, they perform a third of a million abortions a year, which is as many as France, Germany and Canada combined.
And, putting aside whether one is "pro-life" or "pro-choice", the nature of the abortions in those other countries is different: again, as I told Sean, in France abortion is legal up to 12 weeks; Italy, 13 weeks; Norway, 18 weeks, but it requires the approval of a government commission. Nowhere else in the western world takes 39-week-old "fetuses", delivers them sufficiently to preserve the commercially valuable parts and then crushes the non-sellable parts in order to preserve a technical denial of infanticide. That is a uniquely American evil, and Americans should be utterly ashamed of it. American liberals ought to understand that in far more left-wing societies (Scandinavia, the Netherlands, France) they do not do this - because it's not a left/right thing, it's a good/bad thing, and Planned Parenthood's abortion-industrial complex is on the wrong side of that divide...
LOS ANGELES - A temporary restraining order has been issued preventing an anti-abortion group from releasing any video of leaders of a California company that provides fetal tissue to researchers. The group is the same one that previously released three covertly shot videos of a Planned Parenthood leader discussing the sale of aborted fetuses for research.More at that top link.
The Los Angeles Superior Court order issued Tuesday prohibits the Center for Medical Progress from releasing any video of three high-ranking StemExpress officials taken at a restaurant in May. It appears to be the first legal action prohibiting the release of a video from the organization.
The Center for Medical Progress has released three surreptitiously recorded videos to date that have riled anti-abortion activists. The Senate is expected to vote before its August recess on a Republican effort to bar federal aid to Planned Parenthood in the aftermath of the videos' release.
In a statement Wednesday, center leader David Daleiden said StemExpress was using "meritless litigation" to cover up an "illegal baby parts trade."
"The Center for Medical Progress follows all applicable laws in the course of our investigative journalism work," he said.
StemExpress is a Placerville-based company started in 2010 that provides human tissue, blood and other specimens to researchers. Planned Parenthood is one of the company's providers of fetal tissue.
A company spokesman said StemExpress is "grateful its rights have been vindicated in a court of law."
The Tannery Arts Center sprang from the utopian ideal of creating a sanctuary for artists and their families — one intended to shield painters and sculptors from Santa Cruz's rising rents, while providing a cocoon around the creative community's many children.Yeah, those leftist "safe spaces" aren't so safe after all.
But the creative Eden could not keep out a parent's worst nightmare. Police on Tuesday arrested a 15-year-old neighbor of Madyson “Maddy” Middleton, saying the boy lured the 8-year-old girl into his family's apartment Sunday and killed her, then hid the body in a dumpster-sized recycling bin.
Many residents had held out hope that Maddy, a vivacious girl last seen riding a scooter Sunday afternoon, would be found alive. The discovery of her body Monday night was a stunning blow to many in the complex.
To learn on Tuesday that another resident was suspected in the killing was too much.
“We're just devastated. These are two of our kids, and one is dead and one has been taken away. And it's horrible. It's just horrible,” said resident Yasmina Porter, a dance professor at Cabrillo College. Her children, ages 11 and 13, played with both the victim and the suspect, she said.
“From the community's standpoint, we mostly feel like these are our babies,” Porter said. “This is the most horrible thing you can imagine.”
Authorities said they believe Maddy willingly went into the boy's apartment, where they were alone.
“She was 8 years old,” said Santa Cruz Police Chief Kevin Vogel. “I think she had a reasonable amount of trust in him.”
Vogel said police were waiting for forensic results and did not give a cause of death.
Authorities did not identify the suspect because he is a minor. Shocked residents described him as “sweet” and said he was well-known for his prowess with a yo-yo.
Porter said the suspect was quiet and polite, and that his mother prepared food and invited neighbors over during holidays.
The eight-acre complex resembles a modern college campus — one especially welcoming for children who play, paint sidewalks with chalk and ride bicycles on its landscaped grounds.
It opened at the site of the historic Salz Tannery, which once supplied more than half of all saddle leather produced in California. The center's 100 housing units were completed in 2009, funded by the Santa Cruz Redevelopment Agency and a nonprofit developer.
Denise Kiser Shaw said she was taking a class Sunday afternoon and remembered seeing Maddy wearing a purple dress and riding the silver scooter.
“She was going back and forth on her scooter,” Shaw said. “She would peek into the door while we were working.”
By the end of the class, there was a commotion in the courtyard about the missing girl.
“We knew that there was something terribly wrong,” Shaw said. “It was like, it must be some stranger who grabbed her.”
Shaw called the complex an oasis for artists that “feels safe.”
“The children are out like little butterflies,” Shaw said. “It's a contained area … it's like, OK, you stay here in the courtyard and you ride around and you wait for your friend.”
“Thank you, Planned Parenthood. God bless you.”Well, public support for homosexual "marriage" and licentiousness has already tanked since the Obergefell decision, and folks are having second thoughts about the legalization of marijuana. What's going to take is a change in leadership at the very top. We know that the left is moving into its Thermidorean phase. Now's the time to crush the death-worshiping regressives while their down.
— Barack Obama, address to Planned Parenthood, April 26, 2013
Planned Parenthood’s reaction to the release of a clandestinely recorded conversation about the sale of fetal body parts was highly revealing. After protesting that it did nothing illegal, it apologized for the “tone” of one of its senior directors.
Her remarks lacked compassion, admitted Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. As if Dr. Deborah Nucatola’s cold and casual discussion over salad and wine of how the fetal body can be crushed with forceps in a way that leaves valuable organs intact for sale is some kind of personal idiosyncrasy. On the contrary, it’s precisely the kind of psychic numbing that occurs when dealing daily with industrial scale destruction of the growing, thriving, recognizably human fetus.
This was again demonstrated by the release this week of a second video showing another official sporting that same tone, casual and even jocular, while haggling over the price of an embryonic liver. “If it’s still low, then we can bump it up,” she joked, “I want a Lamborghini.”
Abortion critics have long warned that the problem is not only the obvious — what abortion does to the fetus — but also what it does to us. It’s the same kind of desensitization that has occurred in the Netherlands with another mass exercise in life termination: assisted suicide. It began as a way to prevent the suffering of the terminally ill. It has now become so widespread and wanton that one-fifth of all Dutch assisted-suicide patients are euthanized without their explicit consent.
The Planned Parenthood revelations will have an effect. Perhaps not on government funding, given the Democratic Party’s unwavering support and the president wishing it divine guidance. Planned Parenthood might escape legal jeopardy as well, given the loophole in the law banning the sale of fetal parts that permits compensation for expenses (shipping and handling, as it were).
But these revelations will have an effect on public perceptions. Just as ultrasound altered feelings about abortion by showing the image, the movement, the vibrant living-ness of the developing infant in utero, so too, I suspect, will these Planned Parenthood revelations, by throwing open the door to the backroom of the clinic where that being is destroyed.
It’s an ugly scene. The issue is less the sale of body parts than how they are obtained. The nightmare for abortion advocates is a spreading consciousness of how exactly a healthy fetus is turned into a mass of marketable organs, how, in the words of a senior Planned Parenthood official, one might use “a less crunchy technique” — crush the head, spare the organs — “to get more whole specimens.”
The effect on the public is a two-step change in sensibilities. First, when ultrasound reveals how human the living fetus appears. Next, when people learn, as in these inadvertent admissions, what killing the fetus involves.
Remember. The advent of ultrasound has coincided with a remarkable phenomenon: Of all the major social issues, abortion is the only one that has not moved toward increasing liberalization. While the legalization of drugs, the redefinition of marriage and other assertions of individual autonomy have advanced, some with astonishing rapidity, abortion attitudes have remained largely static. The country remains evenly split...
Donald Trump has succeeded in alienating many of his fellow Republicans with his personal attacks, but if he does win in November 2016 and is forced to assemble a cabinet of GOP allies, he knows exactly whom he would call on: Sarah Palin.Also at the Hill, "Trump: 'I'd love' to have Sarah Palin in my administration."
When asked on Sarah Palin’s Mama Grizz Radio’s “The Palin Update” Monday whether he would seek the former Alaska governor’s advice as president or potentially appoint her to an executive-branch position, Trump said, “I’d love that.”
A renegade trawler, hunted for 10,000 miles by vigilantes http://t.co/SMTVQkp50N pic.twitter.com/lnFX6IiwZr
— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) July 29, 2015ABOARD THE BOB BARKER, in the South Atlantic — As the Thunder, a trawler considered the world’s most notorious fish poacher, began sliding under the sea a couple of hundred miles south of Nigeria, three men scrambled aboard to gather evidence of its crimes.Keep reading.
In bumpy footage from their helmet cameras, they can be seen grabbing everything they can over the next 37 minutes — the captain’s logbooks, a laptop computer, charts and a slippery 200-pound fish. The video shows the fishing hold about a quarter full with catch and the Thunder’s engine room almost submerged in murky water. “There is no way to stop it sinking,” the men radioed back to the Bob Barker, which was waiting nearby. Soon after they climbed off, the Thunder vanished below.
It was an unexpected end to an extraordinary chase. For 110 days and more than 10,000 nautical miles across two seas and three oceans, the Bob Barker and a companion ship, both operated by the environmental organization Sea Shepherd, had trailed the trawler, with the three captains close enough to watch one another’s cigarette breaks and on-deck workout routines. In an epic game of cat-and-mouse, the ships maneuvered through an obstacle course of giant ice floes, endured a cyclone-like storm, faced clashes between opposing crews and nearly collided in what became the longest pursuit of an illegal fishing vessel in history.
Industrial-scale violators of fishing bans and protected areas are a main reason more than half of the world’s major fishing grounds have been depleted and by some estimates over 90 percent of the ocean’s large fish like marlin, tuna and swordfish have vanished. Interpol had issued a Purple Notice on the Thunder (the equivalent of adding it to a Most Wanted List, a status reserved for only four other ships in the world), but no government had been willing to dedicate the personnel and millions of dollars needed to go after it.
So Sea Shepherd did instead, stalking the fugitive 202-foot steel-sided ship from a desolate patch of ocean at the bottom of the Earth, deep in Antarctic waters, to any ports it neared, where its crews could alert the authorities. “The poachers thrive by staying in the shadows,” Peter Hammarstedt, captain of the Barker, said while trying to level his ship through battering waves. “Our plan was to put a spotlight on them that they couldn’t escape.”
The pursuit of the Thunder until its sinking in April, pieced together from radio transmissions, interviews, ship records and reporting on board the Bob Barker and its fellow ship, the Sam Simon, demonstrates the anything-goes nature of the high seas, where weak laws and a lack of policing allow both for persistent criminality and, at times, bold vigilantism.
Illegal fishing is a global business estimated at $10 billion in annual sales, and one that is thriving as improved technology has enabled fishing vessels to plunder the oceans with greater efficiency. While countries, with varying degrees of diligence, typically patrol their own coastlines, few ever do so in international waters, even though United Nations maritime regulations require them to hold vessels flying their flags accountable for illicit fishing.
That leaves room for organizations like Sea Shepherd, which describes itself as an eco-vigilante group, flies a variation of the Jolly Roger on its ships and often cites the motto, “It takes a pirate to catch a pirate.” In chasing the Thunder, Sea Shepherd’s goal was not just to protect a rapidly disappearing species of fish, its leaders said, but to show that flagrant violators of the law could be brought to justice...
"How many dry riverbeds do I have to walk before I stop feeling shocked?" #drylandsCA: http://t.co/gZWXhgkqLw pic.twitter.com/zFTtAJHqLe
— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) July 28, 2015Planned Parenthood has hired high-profile Washington public relations firm SKDKnickerbocker as it scrambles to deal with the ongoing scandal and release of a third undercover video Tuesday showing a clinic’s staff handling fetal tissue after an abortion.Well, Anita "Mao Tse" Dunn is no slouch at damage control, to say nothing of Hilary "Ann Romney Stay-at-Home Mom" Rosen.
The additional PR firepower reflects the growing pressure on the women’s health organization amid building GOP calls to cut its $540 million in government funding. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) earlier this week called to halt Planned Parenthood’s federal funding while Congress investigates whether the organization broke a federal ban on profiting from fetal tissue donation. The Senate plans to hold a vote on a defunding amendment from Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and others that is likely to fail.
SKDKnickerbocker is no newbie to working on Planned Parenthood issues. The Democratically aligned firm is run by well-connected operatives, including Anita Dunn and Hilary Rosen. It also worked with the group during the 2012 election cycle, according to SKDKnickerbocker’s website...
