BRUSSELS—Belgian police carried out multiple raids and shot two people who resisted arrest on Friday as they broadened their investigations into the Islamic State terror network linked to the Brussels attacks and a plot foiled Thursday in France.More.
The Belgium prosecutor identified the second suicide bomber at the Brussels airport as Najim Laachraoui, a 24-year-old Belgian national of Moroccan descent who is believed to have been the bomb maker of both the Paris and Brussels attacks. His DNA traces were found on one of the suicide vests and one of the detonators used in Paris, as well as in the hideouts used by the Paris attackers before the assault.
Mr. Laachraoui traveled to Syria in 2013 and was charged in absentia in February for being a recruiter for Islamic State. U.S. officials said they were surprised that Mr. Laachraoui, one of the Islamic State’s most well known bomb makers, blew himself up in the Belgian attack. Some of these officials said they think he had little choice, and was clearly worried that authorities were moving in on him.
Officials said Islamic State has many experts in explosives and it isn’t clear how quickly another of their operatives will step into Mr. Laachraoui’s role.
The raids in Belgium on Friday followed the arrest of a man in France who had been convicted for terrorism and was said to be “in an advance stage” of planning an attack, in the latest example of the potential danger posed by the Brussels-based network responsible for the Brussels and Paris terror attacks.
French President François Hollande told reporters Friday that the network of terrorists that carried out the attacks in Paris and Brussels was “on the way to being destroyed” but there were “other networks” that constituted a threat.
“We have had results in tracking down the terrorists and, in Brussels as well as Paris, there have been a number of arrests made,” Mr. Hollande said.
On Thursday, French authorities arrested Reda Kriket, a 34-year-old Frenchman who was convicted of terrorism in absentia in Belgium last year, along with the suspected ringleader of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud. French police found explosives and weapons in his apartment.
Belgian police detained two people on Friday in connection to the suspected French plot. One of the men, identified by the Belgian prosecutors, as Tawfik A., was also shot in the leg at the time of his arrest during a house raid. A second suspect, Salah A., was arrested without injuries on Friday.
In another operation, in the Schaerbeek neighborhood of Brussels, police ended up shooting and arresting a man near a tram stop with a backpack that authorities thought was suspicious. The Belgian prosecutor’s office didn’t identify the man, who was injured in the leg.
A Belgian government official described the captured man as a “big fish” and Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel canceled a planned event with Secretary of State John Kerry just as the Schaerbeek operation began, officials said...
RALEIGH, N. C.—A broad new law here requires transgender people to use the public bathroom corresponding to the gender on their birth certificate, a rebuke of a move by the state’s largest city and the latest skirmish in the “bathroom battles” popping up in statehouses and city halls.More.
North Carolina on Wednesday became the first state to enact legislation restricting access to sex-segregated facilities on the basis of sex assigned at birth, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At least 13 other states are considering similar bills, according to the nonpartisan group.
Several big cities have moved in the opposite direction. Earlier this month, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio signed an executive order requiring city agencies to allow people to use the city’s 2,200 public restrooms based on their self-declared gender identity. Philadelphia recently required private businesses to use gender-neutral signs on single-occupancy bathrooms.
But Houston voters overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure last year to extend nondiscrimination protections to gay and transgender people.
Ten states are considering “religious-freedom” laws, according to NCSL, which could allow businesses to refuse to work with gay couples on religious grounds. North Carolina approved a law last year allowing magistrates to opt out of performing same-sex marriages.
The flurry of proposals on LGBT issues could be a backlash to changes playing out in federal court, particularly the recent legalization of gay marriage, said Maxine Eichner, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Law. But, she added, “The story with LGBT rights has been surprising—not in that there’s backlash given how quickly views on this issue have changed, but that there hasn’t been more backlash.”
The Republican National Committee, the Washington, D.C.-based group that sets the national Republican platform, is encouraging state legislatures to push back against what it describes as the Obama administration’s federal overreach on “gender identity politics,” particularly in schools.
The RNC adopted a resolution in February encouraging legislatures “to enact laws that protect student privacy and limit the use of restrooms, locker rooms and similar facilities to members of the sex to whom the facility is designated.”
The Republican-led North Carolina General Assembly passed the bathroom bill in an emergency session Wednesday night. The move came in response to an ordinance passed last month by the predominantly Democratic Charlotte City Council. State lawmakers debated, approved and had the signature of Republican Gov. Pat McCrory within 12 hours.
Civil-rights advocates say the fast track left no room for public debate and resulted in a mishmash that repeals local protections against discrimination based on race, national origin, sex and sexual orientation. These advocates say that means it puts at risk billions of dollars in federal Title IX funding, which goes to an array of public programs, including education, and prohibits discrimination...
Monday night in Spokane, Wash., former President Bill Clinton praised his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, by contrasting her to what he called "the awful legacy of the last eight years” under President Obama.Big mistake.
Although a Clinton spokesperson has since walked back Bill's apparent gaffe, that couldn’t have gone over well at the White House — or, at any rate, at the mansion in Cuba where President Obama was staying just then — but Clinton was right. Barack Obama has left an awful legacy, and the next president, whoever it is, will have a lot to deal with. Fortunately, the next president — whether it’s Hillary, Donald Trump or Ted Cruz, or even Bernie Sanders — will probably be a better president.
For one example of Obama’s “awful legacy,” we need look no further than the terror attacks this week in Brussels. These attacks, which killed dozens and injured close to 200, were perpetrated by the Islamic State, the group that Obama once disparagingly called a “jayvee team.”
Well, for a jayvee team, they’ve done a lot of damage, in the Middle East and beyond, and it’s in large part because of Obama’s premature withdrawal from Iraq, which fulfilled a political promise, but which had the effect of squandering a decade of blood and treasure, and costing many thousands of lives.
As late as 2010, things were going sufficiently well in Iraq that the Obama Administration was bragging about what a huge success they had going there. But in his 2008 campaign, Obama had promised to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq, and so it was essential that he do so before 2012, or his antiwar supporters would complain. So Obama pulled out. And that was a mistake...
When a bomb goes off in Europe, Americans shudder as if rocked by the blast. Whatever the geographical reality, post-industrial Old Europe—in Donald Rumsfeld’s deathless phrase—is, emotionally speaking, our nearest neighbor and closest peer. So if an explosion propels shattered glass and broken bodies in a Brussels airport, we instinctively expect it to happen here next.Meh.
We shouldn’t. While the jihadist threat is genuinely global, it is by no means equally distributed. There is, of course, no such thing as perfect security, and as we saw as recently as the San Bernardino shootings in December of last year, there are individuals in the United States who are prepared to commit violence against other Americans. But the European context underlying the attacks at Brussels Airport and the downtown Maelbeek subway station—one of alienated, underemployed and ghettoized Muslims as well as subpar security—differs dramatically from anything found in the United States...
LONDON — It did not take long. Almost as soon as the bombs went off in Brussels on Tuesday morning, the new act of terrorism in the heart of Europe was employed in the bitter debate about the influx of migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.More.
Even before the identities and nationalities of the attackers were known, there was an immediate association in popular discourse between the attacks on the airport and subway station in Brussels and the migrant crisis. Right-wing politicians and average citizens alike raised concerns that groups like the Islamic State, which claimed responsibility for the attacks, are slipping radicalized recruits, including European jihadists, through the vast migrant stream and into an unprepared Europe.
The murderous attacks in another European capital — just days after the Belgians finally tracked down the sole surviving suspect in a series of similarly coordinated attacks that killed 130 people in and around Paris in November — prompted new questions about European solidarity and security. And they came during a period of severe self-doubt about the European Union, with low growth, high unemployment, and the threat of a British exit from the bloc, to be decided in a June referendum.
“There is a growing perception among European public opinion that E.U. leaders are not in control of the Continent’s terrorist threat,” said Mujtaba Rahman of the Eurasia Group, a political risk and consulting company. “Combined, these attacks will increase xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiment across the E.U., which has already been rising in light of the E.U.’s ongoing refugee crisis.”
Right-wing parties all over Europe, and especially the Alternative for Germany party, “have and will continue to conflate refugees with terrorism,” Mr. Rahman said. “This will in turn put more pressure on incumbent governments and limit their space for policy action to address Europe’s multiple crises.”
Nigel Farage, a leader of the populist, conservative U.K. Independence Party, said: “I think we’ve reached a point where we have to admit to ourselves, in Britain and France and much of the rest of Europe, that mass immigration and multicultural division has for now been a failure.”
The attacks will also put more strain on the deal brokered last week by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany with the Turkish government to restrict the migrant flow into Europe, in return for more liberal visa arrangements for travel into Europe by Turkish nationals. That deal was already being criticized as a security threat to Europe and had been questioned on humanitarian and legal grounds...
On Feb. 15, Rob Calabrese, a Canadian radio disc jockey, launched a website inviting Americans to take refuge on a Nova Scotia island. The site, Cape Breton if Donald Trump Wins, has received 977,000 visits and so many inquiries about emigrating that it now offers a link to the Canadian government’s application. (President Obama even mentioned it during last week’s state dinner with Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister.) The site was, of course, a response to a familiar refrain, the threat to move abroad if politics doesn’t go your way. In the wake of primary victories by Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump on Super Tuesday, people took to Twitter to vow to move to Canada, and the use of the search phrase “move to Canada” surged on Google.Keep reading.
The Association of Americans Resident Overseas estimates that eight million nonmilitary Americans currently live abroad, in more than 160 countries. While there are no reliable statistics about motives, few of the expatriates are believed to have left out of disgust with their politicians. Much more likely, they made a job-related move. Or retired to a warmer climate and friendlier economy. Or simply took a vacation and never came home.
Nan McElroy, for instance, had been working as a film and video editor in Atlanta when she visited Italy for the first time at the age of 40. She fell in love with the country, and ultimately moved to Venice 11 years ago. Now 60, she works as a sommelier and oarswoman, teaching people to row boats standing up in the Venetian style. “Even when it’s simple, it’s really complicated,” she said about emigrating. “You have to really want to do it.”
I asked Ms. McElroy and others familiar with expat life about the things Americans traveling abroad should do if they’re visiting a place with an eye to settling down. Here are several suggestions...
PIC: Obama Stands In Front of Che Mural in Cuba https://t.co/wuIF8OBQCC pic.twitter.com/Fh2hdzcuVB— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) March 21, 2016
.@BarackObama trip to Cuba is a giant exercise in self-regard that will legitimize and perpetuate the Castro dictatorship @rhodes44
— Jamie Kirchick (@jkirchick) March 20, 2016
Political establishment denounced bourgeois Tea Party. Now, they must face raucous working-class Trumpsters.Keep reading.
Last week, in assessing the rise of Donald Trump, New York Times columnist David Brooks engaged in an uncharacteristic bit of self-reflection:
“Trump voters,” he wrote, “are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else. Moreover, many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.” (Emphasis added.)
Well, it’s a lesson for a lot of people in the punditocracy, of whom Brooks — who famously endorsed Barack Obama after viewing his sharply creased pants — is just one. And if Brooks et al. had paid attention, the roots of the Trump phenomenon wouldn’t have been so difficult to fathom.
Brooks is, of course, horrified at Trump and his supporters, whom he finds childish, thuggish and contemptuous of the things that David Brooks likes about today’s America. It’s clear that he’d like a social/political revolution that was more refined, better-mannered, more focused on the Constitution and, well, more bourgeois as opposed to in-your-face and working class.
The thing is, we had that movement. It was the Tea Party movement. Unlike Brooks, I actually ventured out to “intermingle” with Tea Partiers at various events that I covered for PJTV.com, contributing commentary to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Examiner. As I reported from one event in Nashville, “Pundits claim the tea partiers are angry — and they are — but the most striking thing about the atmosphere in Nashville was how cheerful everyone seemed to be. I spoke with dozens of people, and the responses were surprisingly similar. Hardly any had ever been involved in politics before. Having gotten started, they were finding it to be not just worthwhile, but actually fun. Laughter rang out frequently, and when new-media mogul Andrew Breitbart held forth on a TV interview, a crowd gathered and broke into spontaneous applause. A year ago, many told me, they were depressed about the future of America. Watching television pundits talk about President Obama's transformative plans for big government, they felt alone, isolated and helpless. That changed when protests, organized by bloggers, met Mr. Obama a year ago in Denver, Colo., Mesa, Ariz., and Seattle, Wash. Then came CNBC talker Rick Santelli's famous on-air rant on Feb. 19, 2009, which gave the tea-party movement its name. Tea partiers are still angry at federal deficits, at Washington's habit of rewarding failure with handouts and punishing success with taxes and regulation, and the general incompetence that has marked the first year of the Obama presidency. But they're no longer depressed.”
Here’s a headline:Keep reading for "‘Kazika the Mad Jap’."
What Happens to Journalists When No One Wants to Print Their Words Anymore? As newsrooms disappear, veteran older reporters are being forced from the profession. That’s bad for journalism — and democracy.Please shut up. Nobody feels sorry for you, and probably nobody should. The idea that people are entitled to be employed in whatever field they choose to pursue, and that once they get hired, they then have a “right” to keep that job — that is what’s bad for democracy.
Newspapers were my life for more than 20 years. Deadline after deadline after deadline — from 1986 to 2008, that’s what it was about. From the day I talked myself into a job as a $4.50-an-hour staff writer at a tiny weekly in Austell, Georgia, until the day I quit the Washington Times after a decade as assistant national editor and Culture page editor, my life was all about deadlines. It was a job I loved except for when I hated it, but one scam I never bought into was the lofty illusion cherished by the Professional Journalism types who insisted that the rotten pay and miserable working conditions of the typical newspaper reporter were justified because we were doing What’s Good For Democracy.
Bovine excrement.
We were doing what was good for the advertisers and the publisher, and any benefit to Democracy was strictly incidental. Long before the Internet made it possible to have “metrics,” as they say, of reader interest, I realized that there was a disconnect between (a) the average journalist’s conception of his job, and (b) what most readers actually wanted to read. Two or three decades ago, there was a lot of puffy nonsense — the kind of stuff you’d read in Columbia Journalism Review or the monthly American Society of News Editors (ASNE) bulletin — about “community service” and “investigative journalism” and so forth, all of which amounted to your mother telling you to eat your broccoli.
Every major metro daily in the country was piling manpower into the kind of five-part “investigative” series (or “enterprise journalism”) cynics used to call “Pulitzer bait.” This always seemed to involve a pet liberal crusade — racism, environmentalism, homelessness, etc. — that would appeal to the sensibilities of the Professional Journalism types who think of their jobs as What’s Good For Democracy: “Eat your broccoli.”
Joel Pavelski, 27, isn’t the first person who has lied to his boss to scam some time off work.He should have fired him on the spot. He lied. And blogged about lying. How much more insubordinate can you be?
But inventing a friend’s funeral, when in fact he was building a treehouse — then blogging and tweeting about it to be sure everyone at the office noticed? That feels new.
Such was a recent management challenge at Mic, a five-year-old website in New York that is vying to become a leading news source created by and for millennials. Recent headlines include “Don’t Ban Muslims, Ban Hoverboards” and “When Men Draw Vaginas.”
“There’s 80 million millennials; we focus on the 40 that went to college,” said Chris Altchek, Mic’s 28-year-old chief executive.
But he is still working out how to manage many of the traits associated with his fellow millennials: a sense of entitlement, a tendency to overshare on social media, and frankness verging on insubordination.
Mic’s staff of 106 looks a lot like its target demographic: trim 20-somethings, with beards on the men and cute outfits on the women, who end every sentence with an exclamation point and use the word “literally” a lot.
Their crowded newsroom on Hudson Street has an aggressively playful vibe, like a middle-school fraternity house. Some ride hoverboards into the kitchen for the free snacks. Others wield Nerf dart guns or use a megaphone for ad hoc announcements. Dino, a white Maltese terrier owned by the lead designer, snuffles between desks.
Mr. Altchek is proud of the freewheeling office culture. “It helps us to have everyone speak out and best ideas rise to the top,” he said. “What that can feel like or sound like is rudeness. But I’d rather have a lot of people speaking their minds than a very controlled environment.”
But running an office made up exclusively of millennials, it turns out, is not without its snags. His philosophy was tested when Mr. Pavelski, Mic’s director of programming, requested a week off, ostensibly to attend a wake back home in Wisconsin. “I went to talk to Joel and said, ‘So sorry about your loss, take as much time as you need,’” Mr. Altchek said.
Then, several days later, he noticed Mr. Pavelski tweet a link to Medium, a popular blog for cathartic, personal essays. In a post titled, “How to Lose Your Mind and Build a Treehouse,” Mr. Pavelski wrote about feeling burned out at work and wanting to rebuild a childhood treehouse as therapy. The first line read, “I said that I was leaving town for a funeral, but I lied.”
“I was sort of taken aback,” Mr. Altchek said. “It’s not acceptable to be lied to.”
In a disciplinary meeting the next day, Mr. Pavelski’s supervisor acknowledged that he had been working grueling hours, so he was given another chance. Still, Mr. Altchek wanted to send a message. “Our feedback to him was, ‘This is not a three-strike policy, it’s a two-strike policy,’” he said...
Counter-jihadis are frustrated people. We see truths that others ignore. Jihad's death toll increases daily. We hope for a turning point, perhaps a charismatic public champion or a social media icon to propagate our movement.Keep reading.
The perfect public relations gimmick can change the landscape overnight. Relatively few people were thinking about, or donating money for research to cure amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in spring of 2014. By summer of 2014, a social media fund-raising gimmick called "the ice bucket challenge" inspired millions to participate in raising $115 million for ALS -- five times more than had been raised the year before. Counter-jihad needs that moment: when the landscape changes, and millions join the cause.
One might think that high-profile jihad attacks, such as 9-11, or ISIS' sexual enslavement of girls, might create a public relations tsunami, bringing leaders into the counter-jihad camp. Alas, the opposite has occurred. "Islam is peace," President George W. Bush said six days after 9-11, speaking in a mosque, accompanied by CAIR. "ISIL is not Islamic," said Barack Obama on September 10, 2014.
In 2010, a New Jersey Muslim man who had raped and tortured his arranged, teenage wife was exonerated by a New Jersey judge, on the grounds that the husband's behavior was consistent with Islamic belief and practice. Also in 2010, Derek Fenton was fired from New Jersey Transit for burning three pages from a Koran. In both cases, Americans applied sharia's standards. In spite of these events in his own state, Governor Chris Christie insisted that any question of sharia in the U.S. is nonsense. "This sharia law business is crap. It's just crazy. And I'm tired of dealing with the crazies."
Americans, beneficiaries of the freedom of speech as granted in the first amendment, inheritors of Western Civilization and its emphasis on truth as the highest value, now engage in the same process of decoding of news items that slaves of the Soviet system used to resort to. We hear of an explosion, a stabbing, a plot or a decapitation – the 2009 Fort Hood shooting, the 2014 decapitation in Moore, Oklahoma, the July, 2015 shootings in Chattanooga, Tennessee, the November 2015 UC Merced stabbing – and we all wonder when and if we will learn the suspect's name. The name is not released for hours or days. Officials rush to insist that the incident was not terrorism, but, rather, workplace violence.
Tremendous resentment, confusion and frustration are building up. People are angry. People are afraid. People don't know whom to trust.
But wait! There's good news. Very good news. The rhetorical landscape has slowly changed since 9/11.
Fifteen years ago, there were far more people who were eager to play the cultural relativism card and excuse away jihad and gender apartheid. As time has gone on, more and more people, in spite of the PC indoctrination that permeates schools, churches, politics and media, have concluded that there is something about Islam that poses a challenge. People are eager to learn more. When I give talks about Islam, audiences grant me a uniquely intense level of focus and concern. Audiences are much more likely now than in the past to have self-educated, and to know the differences between Islam and other world faiths, and to be able to refute standard-issue apologias for jihad.
The gap still exists, though, between average people's openness and awareness and the elite. Political correctness demonizes and punishes people who speak the truth about Islam. Heroes like Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders must wear Kevlar and be surrounded by armed guards. Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller are targeted and slandered by the incorrectly named Southern Poverty Law Center...
Commentators on MSNBC and CNN have been shedding crocodile tears over Donald Trump’s “divisive rhetoric” and lamenting his failure to unify the country. This sudden concern for national unity is rather hard to take from the same worthies who have incessantly glorified the Black Lives Matter movement over the last year and a half.Keep reading.
Let’s dip into the rhetoric of a garden-variety Black Lives Matter march that I observed last October on Fifth Avenue in New York City. It featured “F**k the Police,” “Murderer Cops,” and “Racism Is the Disease, Revolution Is the Cure” T-shirts, “Stop Police Terror” signs, and “Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Racist Cops Have Got to Go” chants.
What about the rhetoric of Black Lives Matter leaders? Last October, DeRay Mckesson, one of the self-appointed spokesmen for Black Lives Matter, led a seminar at the Yale Divinity School, while his BLM ally, Johnetta Elzie (ShordeeDooWhop), tweeted about the proceedings. Mckesson (now running for mayor of Baltimore) had assigned an essay, “In Defense of Looting,” which justified the August 2014 Ferguson riots as “getting straight to the heart of the problem of the police, property, and white supremacy.” Elzie’s tweeted reporting on the class included “If you put me in a cage you’re damn right I’m going to break some glass” and “Looting for me isn’t violent, it’s an expression of anger.” (Let’s hope Baltimore residents do their homework before voting.)
President Obama routinely claims that the police and the criminal-justice system treat blacks differently than whites — an allegation without any empirical support. Last October, he defended the Black Lives Matter movement on the ground that “there is a specific problem that is happening in the African-American community that is not happening in other communities.” And might that “specific problem” be drive-by shootings, which happen virtually exclusively in black communities, mowing down innocent children and drawing disproportionate police presence? Of course not. Obama was referring to the alleged problem of racist cops’ mowing down black men. In fact, a police officer is two and a half times more likely to be killed by a black man than a black man is to be killed by a police officer. Blacks make up a lower percentage of victims of police shootings — 26 percent — than their astronomical violent-crime rates would predict. And the percentage of white and Hispanic homicide deaths from police shootings (12 percent) is much higher than the percentage of black homicide deaths from cop gunfire (4 percent).
The rhetoric of Democratic presidential contenders is just as incendiary. Hillary Clinton says it’s a “reality” that cops see black lives as “cheap.” Bernie Sanders says the killing of unarmed black people by police officers has been going on “decade after decade after decade.” In fact, among the 36 “unarmed” black men killed by the police last year (compared with 31 unarmed white men), a large percentage had been trying to grab the officer’s gun, were pummeling the officer with his own equipment, or were otherwise so viciously fighting with the arresting officer as to legitimately put him in fear for his life.
Black Lives Matter ideology, eagerly embraced by media and political elites, has created a volatile, dangerous atmosphere in urban areas when officers make an arrest...
I am almost in complete agreement with David Brooks regarding his assessment of Donald Trump in his latest New York Times column:Keep reading.
He is a childish man running for a job that requires maturity. He is an insecure boasting little boy whose desires were somehow arrested at age 12. He surrounds himself with sycophants. “You can always tell when the king is here,” Trump’s butler told Jason Horowitz in a recent Times profile. He brags incessantly about his alleged prowess, like how far he can hit a golf ball. “Do I hit it long? Is Trump strong?” he asks.So why am I almost in agreement with Brooks?
Well, to put it very simply, what Brooks has written about Trump could just as easily be said of Obama.
Remember when Michael Jordan dissed Obama's golf game shortly before the 2014 mid-term elections? While Obama acknowledged Jordan was a better golfer he added, "Of course if I was playing twice a day for the last 15 years, then that might not be the case." I realize Obama has played golf 270 times since taking office, but the idea he could compete with one of the greatest athletes in American history is delusional. But, of course, Obama would think like that. This is, after all, a man who has said with complete conviction, "I'm LeBron, baby. I can play on this level. I've got some game."
It takes a certain amount of hubris to think an iPod full of one's speeches is a fitting gift for anyone much less a Queen. Speaking of the Brits, it doesn't say a lot for Obama's maturity that he saw fit to blame British PM David Cameron for the debacle in Libya. To Obama, leading from behind means attacking one's friends from behind...
Here is the list of current federal and state GOP officials, former Republican officials, and private citizens who have formally endorsed Trump if anyone else is interested in joining me. Each and every one of his endorsers should be held accountable in their future elections or political ventures.Jan Brewer and Sarah Palin are on the list, two of my favorite conservatives, heh.
“If his poll numbers hold, Trump will be there six months from now when the Sweet 16 is cut to the Final Four, and he will likely be in the finals.”More.
My prediction, in July of 2015, looks pretty good right now.
Herewith, a second prediction. Republican wailing over his prospective nomination aside, Donald Trump could beat Hillary Clinton like a drum in November.
Indeed, only the fear that Trump can win explains the hysteria in this city. Here is The Washington Post of March 18: “As a moral question it is straightforward. The mission of any responsible Republican should be to block a Trump nomination and election.”
The Orwellian headline over that editorial: “To defend our democracy, the GOP must aim for a brokered convention.”
Beautiful. Defending democracy requires Republicans to cancel the democratic decision of the largest voter turnout of any primaries in American history. And this is now a moral imperative for Republicans.
Like the Third World leaders it lectures, the Post celebrates democracy—so long as the voters get it right.
Whatever one may think of the Donald, he has exposed not only how far out of touch our political elites are, but how insular is the audience that listens to our media elite.
Understandably, Trump’s rivals were hesitant to take him on, seeing the number he did on “little Marco,” “low energy” Jeb and “Lyin’ Ted.”
But the Big Media—the Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times—have been relentless and ruthless.
Yet Trump’s strength with voters seemed to grow, pari passu, with the savagery of their attacks. As for National Review, The Weekly Standard and the accredited conservative columnists of the big op-ed pages, their hostility to Trump seems to rise, commensurate with Trump’s rising polls.
As the Wizard of Oz was exposed as a little man behind a curtain with a big megaphone, our media establishment is unlikely ever again to be seen as formidable as it once was.
And the GOP?
Those Republicans who assert that a Trump nomination would be a moral stain, a scarlet letter, the death of the party, they are most likely describing what a Trump nomination would mean to their own ideologies and interests...
Most excellent.
From Professor Mark Perry, at AEI:
In 2009, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick was asked by a journalist for his thoughts on the importance of the annual one-hour event in energy self-flagellation and green nitwitery known as Earth Hour, which takes place today, March 28, at 8:30 p.m. Here is his excellent response (my emphasis)...Keep reading.
The Leftist effort to sever objective immutable sex differences from both meaning and cultural recognition and to promote the fiction that one’s sex can change marches on. Within hours of the filing of the Pupil Physical Privacy Act (HB 4474) in Springfield, which would prohibit students in public schools from using restrooms and locker rooms designated for the opposite sex, Equality Illinois, an organization dedicated to the normalization of sexual perversion and confusion, flew into a paroxysm of deceit:Keep reading.
HB4474…would stigmatize transgender and gender non-conforming youth by requiring them to use separate restrooms and locker rooms.Despite the demagogic rhetoric of Equality Illinois, policies and practices that acknowledge and respect objective, immutable, and important sex differences do not “stigmatize” or “attack the well-being” or “dignity” of gender-dysphoric students. Respect and valuation of humans does not require affirmation of all their feelings, beliefs, desires, or actions. In fact, sometimes respect and valuation of humans includes not affirming some of their feelings, beliefs, desires, or actions. Many would argue that allowing a boy or girl to deny the meaning and import of their sex through cross-dressing, rendering themselves sterile through the use of cross-sex hormones, and mutilating their healthy bodies is profoundly disrespectful—an egregious denial of their dignity.
This bill is an attack on the well-being and dignity of transgender and gender non-conforming students. It says to them that they are not respected and valued in the very spaces where they should be safe and affirmed.
The only fair option is to ensure transgender students have access to the facilities that correspond to their gender identity.
The Left believes—sort of—that all reality is determined by the subjective feelings and desires of each individual. So a person’s maleness or femaleness is determined by their feelings not by their, well, maleness or femaleness.
But, it’s a horse of a different color, when other people “feel” that maleness and femaleness is inextricably linked to objective, immutable sex, or when they believe that it’s wrong to pretend people are the sex they are not, or that treating others with dignity requires affirming their wholeness. In such cases Leftists, who with alacrity and regularity violate the law of non-contradiction, claim their subjective feelings (and assumptions) should be considered immutable, absolute, objective truth—you know, unlike each person’s sex...
There is so much anger out there in America: “Anger at Wall Street. Anger at Muslims. Anger at trade deals. Anger at Washington. Anger at police shootings of young black men. Anger at President Obama. Anger at Republican obstructionists. Anger about political correctness. Anger about the role of big money in campaigns. Anger about the poisoned water of Flint. Anger about deportations. Anger about undocumented immigrants. Anger about a career that didn't go as expected. Anger about a lost way of life. Mob anger at groups of protesters in their midst. Specific anger and undefined anger and even anger about anger.”Hat Tip: Instapundit, "ARE YOU FEELING THE LIGHTWORKER’S HOPE-AND-CHANGE YET?"
This anger is the culmination of long-emerging trends in American life: “The decomposition of traditional institutions. The descent of politics into reality-TV entertainment. Demographic and economic shifts quickening the impulses of inclusion and exclusion and us vs. them. All of it leading to this moment of great unsettling, with the Republican Party unraveling, the Democrats barely keeping it together, and both moving farther away from each other by the week, reflecting the splintering not only of the body politic but of the national ideal.”
The largest manhunt in Europe came to a dramatic end Friday when police in Belgium arrested a fugitive linked to the Paris terrorist attacks that killed 130 people in November.More at that top link.
Salah Abdeslam, a 26-year-old French national who grew up in Brussels, was captured in a raid that sent loud bursts of gunfire reverberating through the city's Molenbeek neighborhood.
“We got him,” tweeted Belgium's secretary of state for asylum and migration, Theo Francken.
Abdeslam was injured in the leg during the raid and police were preparing to question him late Friday, hopeful that he will reveal crucial information about a Europe-wide network of Islamic extremists.
Images from French TV showed a man with a seemingly injured leg, wearing an off-white hooded top, being bundled into a police car by several armed officers in combat gear. The identity of the man in the footage was not immediately known...
“The city has a fetish for banning things (among many other weird fetishes, some of which are OK I guess). Things that are currently unwelcome in San Francisco: McDonalds Happy Meals, Segways, plastic bags, soda vending machines, and gay people with opinions…It’s little wonder that companies like Twitter and Facebook, based in San Francisco, are so rapidly descending into the wacky politics of social justice, censorship, and blatant anti-conservatism.”
After Bernie Sanders' wife took a tour of Maricopa County's Tent City Jail with Sheriff Joe Arpaio, critics today accused her of acting as a "prop" in the spread of racist propaganda.More.
Among the naysayers was Democratic U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego, who, in a Facebook post, advised Jane Sanders "to take a less naive approach" to promoting her husband's policies if she "is serious about winning over Latino voters in Arizona."
Gallego is an announced Hillary Clinton supporter.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) walked away during an interview with a local NBC channel in Phoenix, Arizona.Watch the video at the link.
The footage was released by KPNX, NBC 12 ahead of Arizona’s primaries on Tuesday, March 22 and widely reported by The Hill.
Sanders appeared irked at first by a question from Brahm Resnik about Sanders’ stance on the Minuteman, a group who would voluntarily patrol the Southern border. After Sanders commented on it, Resnik asked Sanders about his wife, Jane Sanders’ recent trip to ‘Tent City,’ an outdoor prison in Maricopa County, Arizona. The prison is run by the famous Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who endorsed Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump for Trump’s strong stance on illegal immigration.
Jane Sanders went on a tour around the perimeter of the prison with Carlos Garcia, an immigrant rights activist. Arpaio approached her and invited her inside the prison for an up-close tour, which she accepted.
Sanders appears to be unhappy however with Arpaio’s invite. As Resnik attempted to ask Sanders about the visit, Sanders interrupted and gave his take.
“You know, let me just tell you something, you know, what Joe Arpaio is doing is an outrage. My wife went to look at the so-called ‘Tent City,’ which is something that should not exist. The fact that he crashed her meeting is to me, very, very wrong. Not something that he should have done.”
After Sanders was done, he got up, took off his microphone and walked off the set...
Still more.
Today, the daughter of a Southern preacher has shifted her energy and passion into electing Donald Trump as the latest Washington outsider to shake up the status quo.
No matter that many of Trump’s policies stray from the tea party’s original small-government ideals. The tough-talking billionaire ignites that same anti-establishment fervor that fired up many tea party foot soldiers like Dooley.
In the process, Trump has recast their earlier champions — namely tea party darling Sen. Ted Cruz — as disappointing outsiders-turned-insiders who cater to corporate donors and fail to deliver on big promises.
“The support for Trump is not only a screw-you to the Republican establishment, it’s a screw-you to the conservative establishment,” said Dooley, 57, an energy consultant. “[People] are sick and tired of the same old, same old — just money corrupting the political process. They work hard, they vote for elected officials and they expect them to keep their promises.”
Trump’s candidacy has not only fractured the Republican Party, it’s threatening to break apart the tea party movement and erode a once-powerful voting block that has driven conservative politics and elections for the past seven years.
In addition to grass-root defections by activists like Dooley, tea party leadership has split over Trump’s presidential bid. Some conservative activists met this week to try to stop him, while others have joined his campaign.
Meanwhile, major financial backers, including groups funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, have been sidelined from publicly backing GOP primary candidates, partly out of fear they might alienate their divided base.
The soured relationship should come as no surprise. The tea party was always somewhat of a marriage of convenience between Washington’s free-market powerhouses and frustrated ordinary Americans who showed up at rallies with their tri-cornered hats and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags.
Fighting President Obama provided an easy alliance that Republicans at first leveraged to their advantage. But it also was a relationship built on what now looks like a rickety foundation — less about think-tank-driven policies and more about voter outrage against perceived elitism.
From an ideological standpoint, the tea party’s natural candidate should be Cruz, the Texas senator who was swept into office in the tea party revolt and wears his unpopularity in Washington as an “outsider” badge of honor.
But in Trump’s long shadow, Cruz and rival Sen. Marco Rubio, before he left the campaign, suddenly looked to many rank-and-file activists as part of the problem.
“I don’t see Ted Cruz being a job creator,” Dooley said...
The stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize violators of the Party Line.A great essay.
Donald Trump’s success in the primaries and his rhetoric have sparked troubled meditations about an awakening of fascist impulses among his supporters. Bret Stephens has drawn an analogy with the Thirties, “the last dark age of Western politics,” and compared Trump to Benito Mussolini. On the left, Dana Milbank, in a column titled “Trump Flirts with Fascism,” wrote about a campaign rally at which Trump was “leading supporters in what looked very much like a fascist salute,” a scene New York Times house-conservative David Brooks linked to the Nuremberg party rallies.
Much of the rhetoric that links Trump to fascism or Nazism is merely the stale ad Hitlerum fallacy used by progressives to demonize the candidate. They did the same thing when they called George W. Bush “Bushitler.” This slur reflects the hoary leftist dogma that conservatives at heart are repressed xenophobes and knuckle-dragging racists lusting for a messianic leader to restore their lost “white privilege” and punish their minority, immigrant, and feminist enemies. As such, the attack on Trump is nothing new or unexpected from a progressive ideology whose totalitarian inclinations have always had much more in common with fascism than conservatism does.
What Auden called the “low dishonest decade” of the Thirties, however, is indeed instructive for our predicament today, but not because of any danger of a fascist party taking root in modern America. Communism was (and in some ways still is) vastly more successful at infiltrating and shaping American political, cultural, and educational institutions than fascism ever was. But the same cultural pathologies that enabled both fascist and Nazi aggression still afflict us today. These pathologies and their malign effects are more important than the reasons for Trump’s popularity–– anger at elites, economic stagnation, and anti-immigrant passions–– that supposedly echo the “waves of fear and anger” of Auden’s Thirties.
The most important delusion of the Thirties still active today is the idealistic internationalism that had developed over the previous century. A world shrunk by new communication and transportation technologies and linked by global trade, internationalists argued, meant nations and peoples were becoming more alike. Thus they desired the same prosperity, political freedom, human rights, and peace that the West enjoyed. Interstate relations now should be based on this “harmony of interests,” and managed by non-lethal transnational organizations rather than by force. Covenants and treaties like the Hague and Geneva Conventions, and institutions like the League of Nations and the International Court of Arbitration, could peacefully resolve conflicts among nations through diplomatic engagement, negotiation, and appeasement.
The Preamble to the First Hague Convention (1899) captures the idealism that would compromise foreign policy in the Thirties. The Convention’s aims were “the maintenance of the general peace” and “the friendly settlement of international disputes.” This goal was based on the “solidarity which unites the member of the society of civilized nations” and their shared desire for “extending the empire of law and of strengthening the appreciation of international justice.” Two decades later, the monstrous death and destruction of World War I should have shattered the delusion of such “solidarity” existing even among the “civilized nations.” Despite that gruesome lesson, Europe doubled down and created the League of Nations, which failed to stop the serial aggression that culminated in World War II.
But the League wasn’t the only manifestation of naïve internationalism. The Locarno Treaty of 1925 welcomed Germany back into the community of nations with a seat on the League of Nations council. Nobel Peace prizes, and wish-fulfilling headlines like the New York Times’ “France and Germany Bar War Forever,” were all that resulted. The Kellogg-Briand pact of 1928 “condemn[ed] recourse to war for the solution of international controversies, and renounce[d] it as an instrument of national policy” in interstate relations. The signing powers asserted that “the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts . . . shall never be sought except by pacific means.”
All the future Axis Powers signed the treaty, and they all soon shredded these “parchment barriers.” In the next few years, Japan invaded Manchuria, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in gross violation of the Versailles Treaty, and Italy invaded Ethiopia. By the time Germany annexed Austria, and Neville Chamberlain’s faith in negotiation and appeasement handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler, all these treaties and conventions and conferences were dead letters, and the League of Nations was exposed as a “cockpit in the tower of Babel,” as Churchill suggested after the First World War.
However, such graphic and costly evidence showing the folly of “covenants without the sword,” as Hobbes put it, did not discredit this dangerous idealism over the following decades. Indeed, it lies behind the disasters of Obama’s foreign policy. Just consider his “outreach” to our enemies, his acknowledgement of our own “imperfections,” his reliance on toothless U.N. Security Council Resolutions, his preference for non-lethal economic sanctions to pressure adversaries, and his belief that negotiated settlements and agreements can achieve peace and good relations even with our fiercest enemies. All reflect the same failure to recognize that our adversaries in fact do not sincerely want to reach an agreement, for the simple reason they are not in fact “just like us,” and so they do not want peace and prosperity and good relations with their neighbors and the “world community.”
The catalogue of Obama’s failures is long and depressing...
