9-Year-Old Girl Loses Left Hand in Illegal Fireworks Explosion in Compton

She lost some fingers on her right hand too.

God, this is horrible!

Watch, at ABC News 7 Los Angeles, "9-YEAR-OLD GIRL LOSES HAND, FINGERS IN COMPTON FIREWORK EXPLOSION."

Suicide Bombers Attack Across Saudi Arabia, Including Holy Site of Medina (VIDEO)

My god!

It's never ending terror jihad!

At the Washington Post, "Three suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia extend global wave of bombings and a bloody week":

BEIRUT — Suicide bombers suspected of links to the Islamic State struck for the fourth time in less than a week on Monday, targeting three locations in Saudi Arabia in an extension of what appeared to be a coordinated campaign of worldwide bombings coinciding with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

Initial reports suggested there were relatively few casualties in the attacks at a U.S. consulate, a mosque frequented by Shiite worshippers and a security center in one of Islam’s holiest sites, the historic city of Medina. Security officials told news agencies that two security guards died in the Medina attack.

The attacks nonetheless offered further evidence that in the three years since it declared the existence of its so-called caliphate, the Islamic State has developed the capacity to strike at will at the time of its choosing in diverse locations around the world...

Keep reading.

And at CNN:

Nigel Farage Resigns as Leader of U.K. Independence Party (VIDEO)

From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit, "NIGEL FARAGE RESIGNS AS HEAD OF UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY."

I'm not linking, but they're absolutely tipsy at the news over at the far-left Guardian UK.

Bella Hadid White Sheer Crop Top in Manhattan

At Egotastic!:

Bella Hadid absolutely kills me, in the way I prefer to be killed. Wicked hot young model busty body perennially on some kind of exhibitionist display. Sometimes it's revealing photoshoots, or beach candids, or other times she's just in some fashionable outfit that cost more than my rent but shows off her incredibly boobtastic female form in absolutely hot spotlight.

More at the click-through.

The Enduring Legacy of George Washington

From Salena Zito, at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, "Independence and the enduring legacy of George Washington":

What drives a man to service, leadership, sacrifice, greatness? Whatever it is, Washington possessed it, and every American has benefited.

At great piece.

Zito's a patriot herself.

Washington took stock: half his men were wounded, some drunk the gun powder soaked & most of the livestock was dead https://t.co/EfMtYiDFlX

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZitoTrib) July 4, 2016

Independence & the Enduring Legacy of George Washington | RealClearPolitics https://t.co/EfMtYiDFlX

— SalenaZito (@SalenaZitoTrib) July 4, 2016

How the Global Elite Weaponized Immigration

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Using migrants to push multiculturalism has been a disaster":

Freedom of movement ought to be one of the cornerstones of an open, liberal society. The freedom, that is, not just to seek refuge, but to search for a better life elsewhere, to pursue one’s dreams and ambitions in territories far from one’s birthplace.

Yet if the commitment to free movement is to be more than a shallow, feelgood posture, we need to recognise, in the here and now of a 21st-century Britain, that immigration troubles and discomfits people. Indeed, it appears as a socially disorienting force, overturning the everyday rituals, customs and other unspoken components that make up a community’s way of life. ‘I feel we are losing our country’, ran the pre-referendum refrain.

So why does immigration appear as a profound threat to the way of life of so many? The answer is to be found not in immigration itself, but in the context in which immigration has assumed, almost inadvertently, a quasi-missionary role – the context, that is, of a Britain that no longer knows what it is, or what it is for.

This is not the cry of the everyman, who feels he is losing his cultural moorings; it is principally the angst of Britain’s ruling elite, which feels it has already lost its cultural moorings. The historical sources of British national identity – Empire, Unionism and, latterly, the Second World War and the Cold War – and the moral confidence that flowed from them, have long since dried up.

National traditions, canons, values are now experienced by Britain’s elite not as the substance of Britishness, but as dead weights around modern Britain’s neck – to be cast off, dumped. And the political elite’s wilful estrangement from its own traditions has transformed the role of immigration, and, crucially, diminished the significance and meaning of national borders...

More.

Why the World Is Rebelling Against 'Experts'

From Joel Kotkin, at the Daily Beast, "An unconventional, sometimes incoherent, resistance arises to the elites who keep explaining why changes that hurt the middle class are actually for its own good":

Why the World Is Rebelling Against 'Experts' (Joel Kotkin / The Daily Beast) https://t.co/7BpR09XZUk https://t.co/y0xRnWkw4n

— memeorandum (@memeorandum) July 4, 2016

The Great Rebellion is on and where it leads nobody knows.

Its expressions range from Brexit to the Trump phenomena and includes neo-nationalist and unconventional insurgent movement around the world. It shares no single leader, party or ideology. Its very incoherence, combined with the blindness of its elite opposition, has made it hard for the established parties across what’s left of the democratic world to contain it.

What holds the rebels together is a single idea: the rejection of the neo-liberal crony capitalist order that has arisen since the fall of the Soviet Union. For two decades, this new ruling class could boast of great successes: rising living standards, limited warfare, rapid technological change and an optimism about the future spread of liberal democracy. Now, that’s all fading or failing.

Living standards are stagnating, vicious wars raging, poverty-stricken migrants pouring across borders and class chasms growing. Amidst this, the crony capitalists and their bureaucratic allies have only grown more arrogant and demanding. But the failures of those who occupy what Lenin called “the commanding heights” are obvious to most of the citizens on whose behalf they claim to speak and act.

The Great Rebellion draws on five disparate and sometimes contradictory causes that find common ground in frustration with the steady bureaucratic erosion of democratic self-governance: class resentment, racial concerns, geographic disparities, nationalism, cultural identity. Each of these strains appeals to different constituencies, but together they are creating a political Molotov cocktail...

RTWT.

Leftist 'Anti-Fascist' Yvette Felarca Caught on Video Attacking Peaceful Protester in Sacramento (VIDEO)

The most gobsmacking thing is that she's a junior high school teacher in Berkeley!

Shouldn't be surprised, I guess. We've got enclaves in this country that've been literally taken over by the forces of global anti-Americanism. It's pretty bad.

I saw the raw video last week after the rioting, but CBS News 5 San Francisco covered it on the local news. And at the Los Angeles Times, "Bay Area school threatened after teacher clashes with neo-Nazis at state Capitol."

Here's Sacramento Police refusing their oath to protect the Constitution

Call their Internal Affairs (916) 808-2290 pic.twitter.com/SqpubPvFyA

— Jared Wyand (@JaredWyand) June 28, 2016

Previously, "'No Free Speech for Fascists!' — Leftist Extremists Launched Violent Attack at Sacramento Rally (VIDEO)."

Taylor Swift Bikini Shots

Looks like she had breast augmentation surgery.  I saw something about that earlier, but here's your proof.

At London's Daily Mail, "PICTURE EXCLUSIVE: Tom loves Taylor... and he's got the T-shirt! Hiddleston declares his devotion to Swift with a tattoo and vest in her name as the couple frolic in the sea with their A-list friends."

Tom Hiddleston declares his love for Taylor Swift with 'tattoo' and a t-shirt https://t.co/gC5gXzeoXu pic.twitter.com/AGjXzEL1EL

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) July 4, 2016

BONUS: "Actress Ruby Rose and new girlfriend Harley Gusman frolic in the sea at Taylor Swift's party," and "Karlie Kloss stuns in red bikini at BFF Taylor Swift’s beachfront home."

Hey Ungrateful Leftists, Catch a Flight to Cuba, LOL!

Michelle Malkin cracks me up.

She's got an Independence Day video, at the link.

I think conservatives took over the #AmericaWasNeverGreat hashtag, lol.

To the #AmericaWasNeverGreat ingrates: It's our day to tell you to SIT DOWN==> https://t.co/GRYH1xmaST #IndependenceDay

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 4, 2016

Celebrate 4th of July with Super Model Nina Agdal (VIDEO)

She's a fine Danish babe, and honorary American!

Via Sports Illustrated:

Our Eternal War for Independence

From Daniel Geenfield, at FrontPage Magazine, "We are a nation of rebels":

How will you celebrate the Fourth of July?

With fireworks and parades, hamburgers and hot dogs, sweating bands playing Sousa marches and parades down Main Street? Will you remember the men who fell in the first war and all the following wars that were fought to preserve our political and personal independence from foreign and domestic tyrannies? Will you consider what you might have done in the days when revolution was in the air?

Those are all good things. They remind us to celebrate and what it is we are celebrating.

I sat on the warm grass beneath the shade of a spreading fig tree listening to a band run through a repertoire of everything from Yankee Doodle Dandy to Over There. An elderly disabled veteran with a flag listened intently to the orchestra and a small child clambered awkwardly up a tree as his father worriedly urged him to climb down. It could have been a scene from any century. The Fourth is timeless.

It is timeless because it is still going on. The War of Independence went on underneath that fig tree, it continues on in your town, your city and in your community on this day and on every day.

Independence Day is a commemoration, but it is not a mere commemoration. The struggle is not over.

America became America out of a hatred of powerful central government. The War of Independence was not a battle between two countries. America’s Founding Fathers started out as Englishmen who wanted to preserve their rights from a distant and out of touch government.

The War of Independence was a civil war between those who wanted a strong central government and those who wanted to govern themselves. The fundamental breach between these two worldviews led to the creation of an independent nation dedicated to the preservation of independence. This independence was not mere political independence. It was personal independence.

America as a separate nation did not yet exist. Even the Constitution that embodies its purpose was a decade, a war, a failed experiment in government and many bitter debates away.

Nations come and go. Political unions are created and dissolved. There are nations today named Egypt and Greece that have little in common with the historical entities that once bore those names. The Declaration to which those remarkable men pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor was not for a flag, which then still bore the Union Jack, or for the invention of yet another administrative body, but for the rights of peoples, nations and individuals to be free to exercise their personal and political rights.

The war for these things was fought, but it has not ended. It began then, but it continues today.

It is not a war against King George III. It is the ongoing struggle between the people and those who would govern them that is at the heart of our independence.

There are two visions of how men are meant to live today, just as there were in 1776. Revolutions and wars may occasionally clarify these visions, but they do not permanently resolve them. New governments are quick to adopt old tyrannies. Freedom is a popular rallying cry for rebels. But few rebels wish to be rebelled against. That is what made America unique. That is what still does.

We were not meant to be a society of sinecures for public servants. We did not come into being to be ruled by bureaucrats. Our birth of freedom was not meant to give way to the repression of a vast incomprehensible body of regulations administered by an elite political class in Washington D.C.

Americans are rebels. And if we are not rebels, then we are not Americans.

We are not a nation founded by men and women who followed the rules. It is not our capacity for obedience that makes us true Americans, but our capacity for disobedience.

The Declaration of Independence was a document of rebellion by a band of rebels. “Damned rebels” as the big government monarchists saw them. The men who signed it pledged their lives because they expected to be executed for treason. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were acts of rebellion against the entire order across what was then seen as the civilized world.

American greatness came about because we were willing to break the rules. It was only when we began following the rules, when as a nation we made the maintenance of the international order into our notion of the greatest good and when as individuals we accepted the endless expansion of government as a national ideal that we ceased to be great.

When we think of great Americans, from Thomas Jefferson to the Wright Brothers, from Andrew Jackson to Daniel Boone, from Theodore Roosevelt to today’s true patriots, we think of “damned rebels” who broke the rules, who did what should have been impossible and thumbed their noses at the establishments of the day. American greatness is embodied in individual initiative. That is why the Declaration of Independence places at the center of its striving, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

It was for these individualistic ends of freedom that government had to be derived from the consent of the governed, that a war was fought that changed the world and it is these ends that we must celebrate.

Rebellion does not always mean muskets and cannon. Long before the War of Independence, we had become a nation of rebels who explored the wild realms of forests and streams, who forged cities out of savage lands, who argued philosophy and sought a higher purpose for their strivings, who refused to bow to their betters out of an accident of birth. And at our best, we are still rebels today.

When we dissent from the system, we rebel. When we refuse to conform, when we think differently, when we choose to live our own lives instead of living according to the dictates of our political rulers and pop culture arbiters, then we are celebrating the spirit of freedom that animates the Fourth.

When we defy the government, when we speak out against Obama and the rest of our privileged ruling class, when we demand the right to govern ourselves, when we fight to hold government accountable, when we question what we are told and the need to be told anything at all, then we are keeping that old spirit of rebellion alive. We are still fighting for our independence from government every day and every year that we choose to live as free people. That is the glorious burden of freedom.

Freedom is not handed to us. It is not secured for us by politicians. Like the Founding Fathers, we are made free by our fight for freedom. Preserving their legacy cannot be meaningfully recreated through any means other than the committed struggle for the same ideals.

This Fourth of July, celebrate by continuing to be a rebel, question and challenge the left’s worship of government. And don’t stop on the Fifth or in July. Or in any year or any decade or any century.

We here at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and at Front Page Magazine don’t.

Our family of writers, activists and commentators, and that includes you, inspired by David’s courageous spirit continue to question authority, challenge government and fight for the independence of the individual against the tyrannies of the radical left and Islamic theocracy, every day, week and month of the year.

And we welcome you to our revolution.

Evelyn Taft's Fourth of July Weather

Ms. Evelyn's back!

Man, she took something like six months off for maternity. She's a smokin' hot lady.

At CBS News 2 Los Angeles:



FLASHBACK: "Evelyn Taft, Political Scientist."

Islamic State Uses Ramadan for New Terrorist Attacks

Following-up from yesterday, "Baghdad Car Bombing is Third Mass Attack in Days (VIDEO)."

As the Muslim holy month of Ramadan approached, ISIS told jihadists that it was a good time to kill people https://t.co/N37QItAn96

— The New York Times (@nytimes) July 3, 2016

Baghdad Car Bombing is Third Mass Attack in Days (VIDEO)

It's a daily thing now.

Daily, and on an apocalyptic scale.

At NYT, "More Than 140 Dead in Terror Assault Claimed by ISIS":

BAGHDAD — As celebrations for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan stretched past midnight into Sunday in central Baghdad, where Iraqis had gathered to eat, shop and just be together, a minivan packed with explosives blew up and killed at least 143 people — the third mass slaughter across three countries in less than a week.

The attack was the deadliest in Baghdad in years — at least since 2009 — and was among the worst Iraq has faced since the American invasion of 2003. The bombing came barely a week after Iraqi security forces, backed by American airstrikes, celebrated the liberation of Falluja from the Islamic State, which almost immediately claimed responsibility for the attack.

Even as fires still blazed Sunday morning at the bombing site, Iraq’s machinery of grief was fully in motion: Hospitals tried to identify charred bodies, workers sorted through the rubble searching for more victims, and the first coffins were on their way to the holy city of Najaf and its vast cemetery, always expanding, where Iraq’s Shiites bury their dead. By Sunday evening, a worker at the cemetery said more than 70 bodies had arrived, and many more were expected on Monday.

Less than two days earlier, two police officers and 20 hostages, many of them foreigners, were killed after gunmen invaded a restaurant in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The Islamic State claimed to be behind that attack. In Turkey, the authorities blamed the Islamic State for a coordinated suicide attack on Istanbul’s main airport that killed more than 40 people, although the terrorist group has not claimed responsibility.

Many of the victims in Baghdad on Sunday were children; the explosives detonated near a three-story complex of restaurants and stores where families were celebrating the end of the school year, residents said...

Keep reading.

Sen. John McCain on Islamic State: 'What we need to do is go to Raqqa and kill them...' (VIDEO)

It's pretty straightforward, and McCain's just the latest in a long line of folks who've said the same thing.

But oh my goodness, it's "Islamophobia" to call this radical Islam. Actually killing jihadists "harms" the fight against "violent extremism," or some such bullshit.

Watch, at CBS Face the Nation, "McCain on ISIS: 'What we need to do is go to Raqqa and kill them'."

Deal of the Day: GreenWorks 19-Inch Cordless Lawn Mower

At Amazon, GreenWorks 25223 G-MAX 40V Li-Ion 19-Inch Cordless Lawn Mower w/ (1) 4Ah (1) 2Ah Batteries & Charger.

More, Lawn and Garden Promotions: Save on Pest Control Products.

Also, Patio, Lawn & Garden : Patio Furniture & Accessories - 25% Off or More.

Plus, Save Up to 20% in Books.

And, Jonathan Harris, The Lost World of Byzantium.

Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages: A Completely Revised and Expanded Edition of Medieval History.

More, from Victor Davis Hanson, Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom.

BONUS: Kim Strassel, The Intimidation Game: How the Left Is Silencing Free Speech.

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



And at Proof Positive, "Our Fumbling Fathers," and Theo Spark's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: Legal Insurrection, "Branco Cartoon – Itchy & Scratchy."

'The Hunt'

Tonight, on BBC America, "Kill or Die":

Great White Shark Attacks from Behind (VIDEO)

Tonight's the last night of Shark Week.



Previously, "Alien Sharks: Close Encounters (VIDEO)," and "More Alien Sharks (VIDEO)."