Could Islamic State Slip Right Into the U.S. Amid Surge of Syrian Refugees?

Watch, "Lisa Daftari on Fox News Justice with Judge Jeanine – Hosted by Katie Pavlich: Could ISIS slip into the U.S.?"

Graeme Wood: Islamic State Seeking the Apocalypse (VIDEO)

Watch, from Jake Tapper's show, "The Atlantic magazine's Graeme Wood joins CNN to discuss his article 'What ISIS really wants and how to stop it'."

And ICYMI, "An Administration Adrift on Denial."

Frances Townsend: Irresponsible for Obama to Leak Military Plans for Mosul Offensive

She's a good lady.



Plus, at NYT, "Battle to Retake Iraqi City Looms as Test of Obama's ISIS Strategy."

Stacey Poole and Joey Fisher Mega-Bouncy Fun

At Zoo Today, "Slow-Motion Bouncing Breasts - Stacey Poole and Joey Fisher."

Intimates Emily Ratajkowski

Via Theo Spark.

The Obama Administration's Accountability-Free Scandal Machine

Tucker Carlson interviews Katie Pavlich:

Rudy Giuliani Causes Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin to Spontaneously Combust

Heh.

It's Ed Driscoll, via Instapundit, "OBAMA IS THE PATRON SAINT OF THE NEW CLASS, SO WHEN YOU ATTACK HIM, YOU’RE ATTACKING THEM."

More here:

IT’S FUN ON TWITTER RIGHT NOW, watching journos who’ve been pushing negative spin on the Rudy Giuliani and Scott Walker stories trying to grasp why they’re being so roundly mocked — including by many right-leaning journos who ordinarily would extend professional courtesy.

Gisele Bundchen for Sandals Stuart Weitzman (Mario Testino)

At Egotastic!, "Gisele Bundchen Braless Leggy Shoe Pimpstress."

Very leggy, heh.

Frank Marshall Davis, 'The Communist' — President Barack Obama's Radical Mentor

If leftists want to have this debate on the veracity of Rudy Giuliani's comments, bring it on.

There's been an enormous about of investigative journalism and historical scholarship on Obama's background since the election of 2008. The cumulative weight of evidence is simply devastating for the White House, the Democrats, and the hardline collectivist-regressive left.

Obviously, control of the presidency in 2017 is at stake, and given partisan trends in the electorate (with working-class white defections from the Democrats at all-times highs), a fresh look at the ideological foundations of American politics this last six years could have monumental ramifications for American politics going forward. Hence, folks can see why leftists and their MSM attack dogs are now frothing at mouth with an unhinged backlash.

A great place to start on Obama's communist upbringing is by Paul Kengor's, The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis - The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mentor.

“I admire Russia for wiping out an economic system which permitted a handful of rich to exploit and beat gold from the millions of plain people. . . . As one who believes in freedom and democracy for all, I honor the Red nation.” —FRANK MARSHALL DAVIS, 1947

In his memoir, Barack Obama omits the full name of his mentor, simply calling him “Frank.” Now, the truth is out: Never has a figure as deeply troubling and controversial as Frank Marshall Davis had such an impact on the development of an American president.

Although other radical influences on Obama, from Jeremiah Wright to Bill Ayers, have been scrutinized, the public knows little about Davis, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party USA, cited by the Associated Press as an “important influence” on Obama, one whom he “looked to” not merely for “advice on living” but as a “father” figure.

While the Left has willingly dismissed Davis (with good reason), here are the indisputable, eye-opening facts: Frank Marshall Davis was a pro-Soviet, pro–Red China communist. His Communist Party USA card number, revealed in FBI files, was CP #47544. He was a prototype of the loyal Soviet patriot, so radical that the FBI placed him on the federal government’s Security Index. In the early 1950s, Davis opposed U.S. attempts to slow Stalin and Mao. He favored Red Army takeovers of Central and Eastern Europe, and communist control in Korea and Vietnam. Dutifully serving the cause, he edited and wrote for communist newspapers in both Chicago and Honolulu, courting contributors who were Soviet agents. In the 1970s, amid this dangerous political theater, Frank Marshall Davis came into Barack Obama’s life.

Aided by access to explosive declassified FBI files, Soviet archives, and Davis’s original newspaper columns, Paul Kengor explores how Obama sought out Davis and how Davis found in Obama an impressionable young man, one susceptible to Davis’s worldview that opposed American policy and traditional values while praising communist regimes. Kengor sees remnants of this worldview in Obama’s early life and even, ultimately, his presidency.

Kengor charts with definitive accuracy the progression of Davis’s communist ideas from Chicago to Hawaii. He explores how certain elements of the Obama administration’s agenda reflect Davis’s columns advocating wealth redistribution, government stimulus for “public works projects,” taxpayer-funding of universal health care, and nationalizing General Motors. Davis’s writings excoriated the “tentacles of big business,” blasted Wall Street and “greedy” millionaires, lambasted GOP tax cuts that “spare the rich,” attacked “excess profits” and oil companies, and perceived the Catholic Church as an obstacle to his vision for the state—all the while echoing Davis’s often repeated mantra for transformational and fundamental “change.”

And yet, The Communist is not unsympathetic to Davis, revealing him as something of a victim, an African- American who suffered devastating racial persecution in the Jim Crow era, steering this justly angered young man on a misguided political track. That Davis supported violent and heartless communist regimes over his own country is impossible to defend. That he was a source of inspiration to President Barack Obama is impossible to ignore.

Is Obama working to fulfill the dreams of Frank Marshall Davis? That question has been impossible to answer, since Davis’s writings and relationship with Obama have either been deliberately obscured or dismissed as irrelevant. With Paul Kengor’s The Communist, Americans can finally weigh the evidence and decide for themselves.

***

There were hundreds of thousands of American communists like Frank who agitated throughout the twentieth century. They chose the wrong side of history, a horrendously bloody side that left a wake of more than 100 million corpses from the streets of the Bolshevik Revolution to the base of the Berlin Wall—double the combined dead of the century’s two world wars. And they never apologized. Quite the contrary, they cursed their accusers for daring to charge (correctly) that they were communists whose ideology threatened the American way and the greater world and all of humanity. They took their denials to the grave, and still today their liberal/progressive dupes continue to conceal their crimes and curse their accusers for them. We need hundreds and thousands of more books on American communists like Frank, so we can finally start to get this history right— and, more so, learn its vital lessons. To fail to do so is a great historical injustice.

We especially need to flesh out these lessons, which are morality tales in the truest sense of the word, when we find the rarest case of a man like “Frank” managing to influence someone as influential as the current president of the United States of America—the leader of the free world and driver of the mightiest political/economic engine in history. Such figures cannot be ignored.

The people who influence our presidents matter.

Rudy Giuliani Claims President Obama Grew Up as a Communist

I'm getting a kick out of this.

We should've been having this heated debate on Obama's communist anti-Americanism (and Islamic ties) back in 2008.

At the New York Daily News, "Rudy Giuliani clarifies Obama comments by claiming the President has been influenced by communism, socialism":

Trying to explain his controversial comments that President Obama doesn’t love America, Rudy Giuliani said Friday that he believes the President has been influenced by communism and socialism.

“Look, this man was brought up basically in a white family, so whatever he learned or didn’t learn, I attribute this more to the influence of communism and socialism” than to his race, Giuliani told the Daily News.

“I don’t (see) this President as being particularly a product of African-American society or something like that. He isn’t,” the former mayor added. “Logically, think about his background. . . The ideas that are troubling me and are leading to this come from communists with whom he associated when he was 9 years old” through family connections.

When Obama was 9, he was living in Indonesia with his mother and his stepfather. Giuliani said he was referencing Obama’s grandfather having introduced him to Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the Communist Party.

The former mayor also brought up Obama’s relationship with “quasi-communist” community organizer Saul Alinsky and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Giuliani, a 2008 presidential hopeful, set off a national firestorm when he told an exclusive gathering of conservatives, pols and media figures on Wednesday night, “I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that this President loves America.

“He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up: To love this country,” Giuliani said of Obama at the Manhattan dinner, which was arranged for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker...

Keep reading.

Also at the New York Post, via Memeorandum, "Giuliani: Obama influenced by communists since youth."

An Administration Adrift on Denial

From Peggy Noonan, at WSJ, "Why won’t the president think clearly about the nature of the Islamic State?":

Great essays tell big truths. A deeply reported piece in next month’s Atlantic magazine does precisely that, and in a way devastating to the Obama administration’s thinking on ISIS.

“What ISIS Really Wants,” by contributing editor Graeme Wood, is going to change the debate. (It ought to become a book.)

Mr. Wood describes a dynamic, savage and so far successful organization whose members mean business. Their mettle should not be doubted. ISIS controls an area larger than the United Kingdom and intends to restore, and expand, the caliphate. Mr. Wood interviewed Anjem Choudary of the banned London-based Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, who characterized ISIS’ laws of war as policies of mercy, not brutality. “He told me the state has an obligation to terrorize its enemies,” Mr. Wood writes, “because doing so hastens victory and avoids prolonged conflict.”

ISIS has allure: Tens of thousands of foreign Muslims are believed to have joined. The organization is clear in its objectives: “We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change . . . that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. . . . The Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people.”

The scale of the savagery is difficult to comprehend and not precisely known. Regional social media posts “suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.” Most, not all, of the victims are Muslims.

The West, Mr. Wood argues, has been misled “by a well-intentioned but dishonest campaign to deny the Islamic State’s medieval religious nature. . . . The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers,” drawn largely from the disaffected. “But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” Its actions reflect “a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bring about the apocalypse.”

Mr. Wood acknowledges that ISIS reflects only one, minority strain within Islam. “Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.”

Keep reading.

Wood's thesis is simple and devastating: Most of the world's Muslims neither follow nor endorse Islamic State's extreme theology and violence, but the group is nevertheless genuinely Islamic through-and-through. And this fact has the radical left's Islamo-enablers --- from the president on down to his far-left fever swamp minions --- scurrying for arguments or evidence to debunk the Atlantic's cover story. Sadly (for them), it's much too late. The damage has been done and the White House is now taking withering fire for Barack Barry Hussein Soetoro Obama's anti-Americanism.

The 2016 election is already shaping up to be a referendum on American foreign policy, although it might as well be a campaign to put a non-traitor in the White House.

Major League Baseball Adopts New Rules to Speed Up Play

Batters can't step out of the box, among other tweaks to speed things along.

At WSJ, "Baseball Adopts New Rules to Speed Up Play":

Major League Baseball announced new rules Friday aimed at speeding up the plodding pace of its games. Beginning this season, hitters will be required to keep one foot in the batter’s box during at-bats and managers will no longer be required to leave the dugout to challenge calls.

The league will also introduce timers between innings and during pitching changes, requiring pitchers to complete their warm-ups 30 seconds before the end of the break in play. Hitters will be encouraged to step into the box 20 seconds before play is set to resume, coinciding with the time broadcasters return from commercials.

The rules are intended to reduce the lulls between game action, after the average length of nine-inning games reached a record-high 3 hours, 2 minutes in 2014.

“These changes represent a step forward in our efforts to streamline the pace of play,” MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement released by the league. “The most fundamental starting point for improving the pace of the average game involves getting into and out of breaks seamlessly. In addition, the batter’s box rule will help speed up a basic action of the game.”

Batters will still be allowed to step out of the box if one of several exceptions occurs, most notably if the batter swings at a pitch. And managers can hold play from the top step of the dugout by signaling to players and the home-plate umpire that he is considering a challenge. But if nothing else, the new rules should reduce the time it takes to go from the end of a commercial break to the resumption of play...

Well, during the long, hot days of summer, I personally enjoy the easy-going pace of the game. Hopefully these reforms don't kill the vibe.

Keep reading.

Eurozone Agrees on Four-Month Extension of Greece Bailout

At WSJ:

BRUSSELS—Greece struck a tenuous agreement for a four-month extension of its bailout Friday, removing immediate concerns over a potential exit from Europe’s currency union but setting the stage for more tense negotiations over the country’s financial future.

The deal, reached after weeks of often harsh exchanges between Athens and other European capitals, forced the left-wing government of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras to temper many of the anti-austerity pledges that swept it into power last month.

The tough negotiations have frayed relationships between Greece and other governments, and particularly with Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister.

“Now we hope that trust can grow again. There’s a lot of room for growth,” Mr Schäuble said afterward.

Markets rose on Friday as the agreement was reached, with the Stoxx Europe 600 edging up 0.6% to reach its highest level since November 2007. Both Germany’s DAX index and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 climbed 0.4%. The euro was up against the dollar and the yen.

U.S. stocks also rose on the news, as the Dow industrials, the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 small-company index hit record highs.

Greece’s Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis rejected claims that Friday’s deal constituted a surrender of the government’s anti-austerity promises. “Our pre-electoral program was about four years. This deal is about four months,” he said.

The agreement to extend the bailout that was due to run out Feb. 28 should fend off immediate concerns about Greece’s deteriorating finances and help stem an outflow of deposits from its banks.

However, concerns about Greece’s ability to pay its debts will linger. The deal leaves a series of hurdles that could trigger further bouts of nervousness, with the first to be encountered next week.

Under the agreement, Greece has to present by Monday a list of budget cuts and economic overhauls, which has to pass the scrutiny of the supervisors of the bailout, the so-called troika of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund. On Tuesday, finance ministers will review the proposals.

Only once these measures have been implemented will Athens received the next €7.2 billion slice of a €240 billion ($273 billion) bailout that has kept it afloat for almost five years.

Crucially, the four-month extension only takes Greece to the end of June, upping the pressure to negotiate a follow-up rescue deal in time for almost €7 billion in bond repayments to the ECB in July and August.

The Greek finance minister can take some small victories back to Athens. Greece will likely be allowed to run a smaller primary surplus—a measure of its budget balance that strips out interest payments—than the 3% of gross domestic product mandated by its bailout deal this year.

But the ministers’ statement stressed that this concession had been made only because the economy has performed worse than expected.

“Today we have found partners among those who up until very recently looked at us with suspicion,” said Mr. Varoufakis. “There are some partners who still look at us with suspicion.”

Keep reading.

'Death to America! Death to Israel!' say Houthis in Yemen

And these guys are Shiite Muslims!

Between Islamic State and the Iranian-backed rebels in Yemen, U.S. foreign policy has its hands full.

And I thought Obama was going to heal the rifts with the Muslim world. Yikes!

At LAT:

The worshipers pumped their fists to the rhythm of the chant, the younger ones among them, including children, whipping their arms high above their heads.

“God is great!” came the refrain. “Death to America! Death to Israel! A curse upon the Jews! Victory for Islam!”

The crowd shouted it twice more  in unison, before bowing their foreheads onto the thick carpet of the Bleily Mosque.

The slogan, spray-painted on walls and cinderblock throughout the Yemeni capital, has become the calling card of the Houthis, a Shiite faction that overran the Yemeni capital last year — and in recent weeks consolidated control of the central government. Critics call the move a coup.

The Houthi takeover has brought fears that Yemen — once touted by President Obama as a success of his counter-terrorism policy — could collapse, fall into civil war or disintegrate into warring regions. The country is home to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, considered among the most dangerous branches of the global terrorist network.

The Houthis are sworn enemies of Al Qaeda. But they are also implacable foes of Washington and its regional allies, especially neighboring Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. partner that views Yemen as part of its sphere of influence and has a massive embassy here.

Last week, the United States and Saudi Arabia, among other nations, withdrew their diplomatic missions from the Yemeni capital. The U.N. called on the Houthis to relinquish control of the government.

Friday’s sermon at a signature Houthi mosque provided some sense of the mood of defiance that has come to characterize the northern-based provincial power, which has vowed to destroy Al Qaeda and cut down on rampant government corruption. The fiery collective chant followed an equally blistering political broadside from the preacher, Faisal Atef, who lavished scorn upon Yemen’s recent leadership, including U.S.-backed President Abdu Rabu Mansour Hadi, now under house arrest.

“Those leaders do not care about your concerns and pains!” said Atef, his eyes scanning the crowd before him. “All they care about is seven-star service.”

The comments came only a few hours after Jamal Benomar, special United Nations envoy to Yemen, announced a “breakthrough” in U.N.-brokered negotiations while urging all parties to act “in the spirit of agreement.”

The U.N. envoy said the talks were nearing a deal that would help resolve the nation’s dire security and political crisis. He unveiled the creation of a new transitional council to run the country while negotiations on a comprehensive agreement continued.

The U.N. message hinted of reconciliation in Yemen’s fractured and volatile political landscape. The scene at the Houthi mosque didn’t suggest a mood of compromise...

Marie Harf Rule 5

Heh, I hadn't considered the State Department spokeswoman for Rule 5, but she's a surprise entry at the Evil Blogger Lady's, "Marie Harf is a Dangerous Idiot Rule 5."

Progressives' Peculiar Sense of Patriotism

From Jonah Goldberg, via Blazing Cat Fur:

Look, it was like a week ago that we were talking about Obama’s inability to criticize the Islamic State without first going out of his way to flagellate the West and America over the Crusades, the Inquisition, slavery, and Jim Crow. Is it really so crazy to think a guy who feels compelled to warn his own countrymen not to get on their “high horse” about child rapists and slavers (who are also beheading and/or immolating and/or burying alive Americans, Christians, Yazidis, and fellow Muslims) might subscribe to an, um, unconventional form of patriotism?

Give a Little Bit

The Goo Goo Dolls, with the Supertramp cover:

Henry Segerstrom Dies at 91

Henry Segerstrom, a Costa Mesa farmer, land developer, and philanthropist from a Swedish immigrant family, has passed away.

He built South Coast Plaza into one of the world's premier luxury shopping centers, and he was the principal benefactor to the development of the Orange Country Performing Arts Center, which built the O.C.'s reputation as a major regional center for the fine arts.

At the Costa Mesa Daily Pilot, "Henry Segerstrom, South Coast Plaza and arts center pioneer, dies at 91."

And at the O.C. Register, "Henry T. Segerstrom, 91, saw bean fields and grew style, creating world-class shopping, arts centers in South Coast," and the L.A. Times, "Henry Segerstrom, O.C. developer and philanthropist, dies at 91."

'Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding...'

It's been woven into Obama's founding as a traitor to America's values, but not so much America's founding.

From Kemberlee Kaye, at Legal Insurrection:

That time Obama invented a new version of early American history.

Also at the Blaze, via Memeorandum, "Historian David Barton Takes Apart Obama's Claim That ‘Islam Has Been Woven Into the Fabric of Our Country Since Its Founding’."

And from Warner Todd Huston, at Right Wing News, "Historian Destroys Obama’s Idiotic Claim That ‘Islam Has Been Woven Into the Fabric of Our Country Since Its Founding’."

Radical Leftists Pulling the Leftist Democrats Further Left -- And Further Away from Middle America

From Selena Zito, at the Pittsburgh Tribune, "Extreme-left Dems pushing Middle America away":

Tim Ryan — a once-strident champion of the Rust Belt city of Youngstown, filled with moderate Catholic Democrats whose issues are still firmly pocketbook-based — penned an op-ed saying he now supports abortion.

The Ohio congressman, who once sat on the board of the Democrats for Life in America advocacy group, made that surprising reversal as he contemplates a run for U.S. Senate.

You see, plenty of Jacksonian Democrats remain in his district — and all across the country, for that matter — but no tolerance for them exists in the Washington-based national Democratic Party.

No money exists for them from elite progressive funders, either.

Ryan's decision opens up the floodgates for campaign cash from national Democrats' purses, now that he shed that old-fashioned tie to his moral compass.

And groups such as Emily's List, Planned Parenthood and NARAL, which are funding spigots for Democrats, can deploy that cash and those all-important volunteers to help Ryan win whatever office he seeks.

It was a spigot that was never opened to him before his departure from the blue-collar ideals he brought to office in 2004.

“It always strikes me as funny that the folks on TV call Republicans ‘extreme,' and pretty much ignore that Democrats have left no room for people like me in my own party,” said Yvonne, a Youngstown native who did not want to give her last name.

To Yvonne, who has lived all of her 30-plus years in that eastern Ohio city, being a Democrat is like listing your religion, the part of town where you grew up, and the school you attended.

“It's a part of my identity,” she said, adding after a pause: “Or was.”

When Ryan made his announcement last week, the national press offered no questions or headline-grabbing adjectives — just praise.
That was an interesting departure from the media reaction when then-candidate Cory Gardner, a Colorado congressman running for U.S. Senate last year, changed from support to non-support of “personhood.”

“Bombshell,” “extremist” and “cheap election-year stunt” were the words in some of the milder headlines.

Gardner moved to the center. Ryan moved to the left wing.

Ryan was praised. Gardner was hammered.

Now think about that for a moment: One politician moved to his party's wing, not its center, and it was as if a tree fell in a forest — with no one listening. Another politician moved to his party's center, and hair collectively caught fire.

Just five years ago, 110 pro-life Democrats were in the House, around a dozen in the U.S. Senate. Today, fewer than five are in the House, and two in the Senate.

Just five years ago, coincidentally, Democrats held majorities in both chambers.

They lost those majorities because they lost touch with their districts.

Yes, gerrymandering played a part. Yet that is far from the whole story, a story no one talks about — or, if they do, they don't address the problem. The fact is, Democrats are losing or excluding evangelicals, blue-collar types, Jacksonians and moderates, not only from feeling welcome in the party but from filling the Democrat bench to run for or to hold local offices.

That is happening not just in Ohio but all across the country...

The Democrats are the party of Anti-America, from the president on down to the local level. Amazing, though, how they're backed through and through by the America-hating "mainstream" media.

Up is down these days. God help us.

Still more.