“Hillary Clinton took me through Hell.”Keep reading.
Those were the words of a woman who was raped and beaten into a coma when she was twelve years old. Instead of helping that twelve year old girl, Hillary Clinton aided her rapist. She falsely accused the abused child who would never be able to have a family of her own after the assault of “a tendency to seek out older men”. Then Hillary Clinton was recorded on tape laughing at how her client had failed a lie detector test while relishing describing how she had gotten him off.
Tonight’s Democratic National Convention theme was "A Lifetime of Fighting for Children and Families". But this was how Hillary Clinton’s “fight” for children and families really began. And Tuesday’s highlight was an address by a career sexual predator whom she covered up for and whose victims she smeared.
That sexual predator was her husband, Bill Clinton.
Bill Clinton put even more women through hell than Hillary did. And he isn’t done just yet. Amid the freakshow of the Carter mummy phoning in, the mothers of criminals, random mildly famous celebrities, the Sandernista walkout and Howard Dean doing the scream that ended his career one more time, the other Clinton took the stage.
In an evening featuring discussions about sex trafficking, the highlight was a sexual predator. In an evening that featured 9/11 victims, the highlight was the man who left America vulnerable to 9/11 and refused to take out Osama bin Laden.
And Bill being Bill, the lying didn’t take too long to get started.
Bill Clinton told the hooting and yapping DNC audience that Hillary Clinton wanted to help child abuse victims. But a child rape victim back home knows the truth and we know the truth. He got up on stage and lied again about the Children’s Health Insurance Program, one of those things which, like bringing peace to Northern Ireland and landing under fire in Bosnia, Hillary Clinton can’t stop lying about.
In Bill Clinton’s new version, Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch didn’t exist and Hillary Clinton got it all done.
But the Clintons always have a thousand new versions of every lie that they tell. And Bill’s entire speech was one big lie. The version of Hillary Clinton that he describes, an obsessive crusader for children who is also a devoted wife and mother has only one tiny problem with it. It’s an expert work of fiction.
The real Hillary Clinton hit up the Boys and Girls Club for $200K to speak for them. The real Hillary saw every non-profit organization working for education, children and any combination of the two as a piggy bank to loot for her greedy husband and herself. The real Hillary, the one revealed by the emails, is incapable of doing basic tasks and requires a horde of assistants to do anything for her.
The image of Hillary Clinton on her “hands and knees” putting liner paper in Chelsea’s dorm drawers is as real as Bill Clinton’s family values. The real Hillary Clinton requires people to pose before she steps into the picture so they don’t waste her time. The real Hillary Clinton laughed at the thought of a rapist beating a child into a coma and then getting off. The real Hillary Clinton has never met a charity she didn’t steal from. The real Hillary Clinton dislikes people and has her assistant elbow them out of the way.
Bill Clinton claimed that they never intended for Hillary to run for office in New York until New York Democrats “urged Hillary to run”. Then they offered to sell her the Brooklyn Bridge at a discount.
The Clintons didn’t move to New York for their health. They did it as part of a long term plan to get back into the White House. Tonight was a major step in the fulfillment of that plan...
Ansbach, Munich, Würzburg, Nice, Brussels -- in light of the many horrific news stories, many are asking: What's the matter with 2016?Still more.
Has the world gone mad? This question is occupying the minds of many people these days. It feels like the world is out of step, that multiple crises are encroaching upon us and that the distant world of international politics is about to get dangerously personal. How are we supposed to deal with the feeling of living in an era that we no longer seem to understand?
"I'm tired of living in interesting times," a Twitter user wrote several days ago. His words were retweeted more than 1,000 times. Everyday, people on social media ask: What is wrong with 2016? When will it be over? What more does it have in store for us?
This year, international political events have overlapped in an unsettling way. Something seems to be coalescing and brewing, though it's not yet clear what. Each new development seems to come a bit faster than the last. It may have begun with the Arab Spring in 2011, but it also continued with the wars in Libya and Syria and was further exacerbated by the conflict between Ukraine and Russia and the latest terrorist attacks. We are witnessing the destabilization of the world as we've known it since 1989.
When our phones began vibrating a week ago Friday with breaking news alerts about the military coup in Turkey, we were still processing our shock over the terrorist attack in Nice, France. Each shock fades quickly in light of the next one. On Sunday, a Syrian refugee detonated a bomb outside an outdoor concert in Ansbach, Germany. Last Friday, an 18-year-old student shot and killed nine people in Munich, most of them teenagers. And only days before that, a 17-year-old asylum-seeker in Würzburg attacked a group of Chinese tourists with an ax.
It was only a month ago that a majority of British voters decided to leave the European Union. The United States is shaken by racial unrest, the massacre in Orlando -- and the rise of the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
With that, 2016 was really only the worst year since 2015, the year of the great refugee crisis. And 2015 was only the worst year since 2014, the year of the war in Ukraine.
We are living in an age of shocks and crises that could well be traumatizing in their rapid succession and concentration, since it's not yet clear whether they're only a temporary jolt or the beginning of a trend with no end in sight. Of course, the sheer number of conflicts has remained constant in recent years. But there is much indication that we find ourselves in a new era of global instability. The biggest geopolitical stories of our time are the destabilization in the Middle East, the European security order and the European Union. In addition, there has been a societal shift in many Western countries: Many citizens are angry at the elites, because they see themselves as victims of globalization, free trade and migration. This anger has enabled the rise of political movements from the fringe to the mainstream in only a few years: Donald Trump, the Brexit movement, Front National and the Alternative for Germany, or AfD. The classic political camps are dissolving as the battle between the political left and the right is replaced by one between Isolationists and Internationalists.
Every now and then, there are phases in international politics during which more happens in the span of a few weeks than would otherwise happen in decades...
I've gotten to the point where I mute the TV every time Obama speaks. I will listen to his speech tonight though. #DemsInPhilly
— Aleister (@AmericanGlob) July 28, 2016
I'm not watching any of these tonight. The #Democrats make me sick. I'll see the clips and commentary later. https://t.co/8aYTVDYjyl
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 28, 2016
This weeks' cover: Summer of terror. Europe's leaders can't handle the crisis they created, says @DouglasKMurray pic.twitter.com/Rc2B1AiR9O
— The Spectator (@spectator) July 27, 2016
How is your Merkelsommer going? For now, Britain seems to be missing the worst. True, a couple of men of Middle Eastern appearance tried to abduct a soldier near his base in Norfolk for what was unlikely to have been an interfaith dialogue session. But Britain’s geographical good fortune, relative success in limiting weapons and our justified scepticism of the undiscriminating ‘open borders’ brigade mean that we have so far been spared the delights of what Angela Merkel’s growing army of critics refer to as her summer of terror.Still more.
It is now a fortnight since Mohammed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and ploughed a truck along the Nice seafront, killing 84 people. The following Monday Mohammed Riyad, who said he was from Afghanistan but almost certainly came from Pakistan, screamed ‘Allahu Akbar’ while hacking with an axe at his fellow passengers on a Bavarian train. The next day another Mohammed, this time Mohamed Boufarkouch, shouted ‘Allahu Akbar’ and stabbed a Frenchwoman and her three daughters (aged eight, 12 and 14) near Montpelier. Mixing things up a little, that Friday’s shooter in Munich was a child of Iranians called Ali David Sonboly. Skip forward a couple of days and a ‘-Syrian asylum seeker’ with a machete was hacking a pregnant woman to death in Stuttgart. The next day another ‘Syrian asylum seeker’, Mohammad Daleel, carried out a suicide bombing outside a bar in Ansbach, Bavaria. And a little over 24 hours later two men shouting the name of Isis entered a church in Rouen during Mass, took the nuns and congregation hostage and slaughtered the priest with a knife.
Although the public know what is going on, the media seems loath to find any connection between these events. Indeed, the same papers that blame an exaggerated spike in ‘hate crime’ on everyone who voted for Brexit seem unwilling to put the blame for these real and violent attacks on the individuals carrying them out. ‘Syrian man denied asylum killed in German blast’ was the Reuters headline on the Ansbach story, neatly turning the suicide bomber into the victim and the German asylum system into the perpetrator. As Reuters went on: ‘A 27-year-old Syrian man who had been denied asylum in Germany a year ago died on Sunday when a bomb he was carrying exploded outside a music festival.’ How terrible for him to lose his bomb in such a way.
The more complex story of the Munich shooter allowed everyone to double-down on their favourite explanations for violence. Inadequate welfare provisions, unsuitable town-planning and bullying were all wheeled out to explain why Ali David Sonboly started shooting in a McDonalds. Others were a little too keen to claim him as an Isis warrior, when it seems he wasn’t. The BBC got around the problem by excising the ‘Ali’ and all reports of his religion. Instead, speculation about the shooting happening on the fifth anniversary of Anders Breivik’s terrorist assault in Norway meant that every-one could ignore the Muslim eyewitness who heard Sonboly shout ‘Allahu Akbar’ and headline on Breivik instead. Meaning that in Europe in 2016 a child of Iranian parents can be portrayed as a white supremacist, while no amount of Mohameds shouting ‘Allahu Akbar’ can be said to have any connection to Islam.
Sections of the media and political class seem determined to stop the public coming to any conclusions. But most of us probably did that a long time ago, and these conclusions are being reinforced on a daily basis.
For the time being, the acceptable thing is to blame Isis. There is sense in that. The German train attacker had an Isis flag at his home, the Ansbach bomber left a video pledging allegiance to the group, and at least one of the Rouen church attackers had tried to travel to Syria to join them. The extent to which the group is involved varies, and they undoubtedly talk up their capabilities, but their ability to inspire as well as direct will be a problem as long as they exist.
However, opinion polls show that the European public know that the problem is bigger than that. Before Isis there was al-Qaeda. After Isis there will be something else. A poll carried out two years before the Charlie Hebdo attacks showed that 74 per cent of the French public believe Islam to be an intolerant religion incompatible with the values of the French state. The reaction of most politicians to findings such as this is that the public don’t know enough about Islam or haven’t experienced enough Islam. On the contrary many French people — like the Christians of the Middle East — have experienced quite enough, and do not like it. Mainstream politicians cannot agree with this, not least because they (and Merkel in particular) are responsible for the massive upsurge of Muslim migration into Europe that is fundamentally changing its future. But this is a gap which they must at some point bridge...
Tomorrow's @independent front page #tomorrowspaperstoday To subscribe to the daily edition: https://t.co/XF8VnDpHYF pic.twitter.com/YpFT8Jj29S— The Independent (@Independent) July 26, 2016
saw this picture earlier and thought it was a parody. May God have mercy on your souls. https://t.co/ySL5vYJK5Z— #JeSuisJuive (@lamblock) July 26, 2016
'An abomination against Christianity and Islam' says Independent front-page about the beheading of a priest in a church during mass.— Douglas Murray (@DouglasKMurray) July 26, 2016
Donald Trump dared a foreign government to commit espionage on the U.S. to hurt his rival on Wednesday, smashing yet another taboo in American political discourse and behavior.More.
“Russia, if you're listening, I hope you’ll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing,” he said, referring to deleted emails from the private account Hillary Clinton used as secretary of State. “I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”
Trump made the taunt during a lengthy and unusual news conference in Doral, Fla., in which he also suggested the Geneva Convention treaties protecting prisoners of war are outdated, told a reporter asking a question to “be quiet” and said the fact that the Democratic National Committee may have been hacked was because foreign leaders lack respect for the U.S. government...
I won’t pretend to know the ins and outs of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act but I will point out to you that Trump didn’t use the word “hack” this morning. He asked Russia to “find” her missing e-mails, which may sound like splitting hairs but would doubtless be flagged by his lawyers in court as proof that he wasn’t necessarily encouraging criminal activity. By “find” he could have meant obtaining them from a third-party who already has them. And he wasn’t talking about a prospective hack; he was assuming that they’d already harvested the contents of her private server years ago. He was encouraging a leak. The hack has, presumably, already happened...More at that link.
1) Outrage over Trump's comments re: Russia is laughable. Hillary had an unsecure, private server to store top secret info for "convenience"— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) July 27, 2016
2) The reality: Russians have already hacked everything on Hillary's private, unsecure server and they're already using it against us— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) July 27, 2016
3) If anyone "encouraged espionage," it was Hillary Clinton— Katie Pavlich (@KatiePavlich) July 27, 2016
RELATED: At the Mirror U.K, "Marine Le Pen's niece enrols in the ARMY as she calls on France to 'kill Islamism'," and Breitbart London, "Marion Le Pen: Christians Must Stand Up to Islam; Young Patriots Should Join the Military Like Me."Père Jacques Hamel - 1930-2016 - Martyr du terrorisme islamique. pic.twitter.com/W53aOitK4r— Marion Le Pen (@Marion_M_Le_Pen) July 27, 2016
Two prominent liberal groups withdrew their endorsements of Rep. Alan Grayson in the Democratic primary for a U.S. Senate seat in Florida after his ex-wife disclosed police reports containing allegations of domestic abuse on Tuesday.He's a bully and a blowhard. I hope he chokes on his own tears.
Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee said in a joint statement that they were withdrawing their support for Mr. Grayson, the first rescission of an endorsement in the history of either group, after Mr. Grayson’s ex-wife released police reports to Politico alleging the lawmaker had abused her in a series of incidents from 1994 to 2014.
Copies of the police reports couldn’t immediately be independently obtained. A lawyer for Mr. Grayson said the reports were authentic, but didn’t accurately reflect what had occurred.
“This is more of the same nonsense and untrue allegations that we’ve heard for years,” Mark NeJame, an attorney representing Mr. Grayson, said Tuesday.
Mrs. Grayson wasn’t available for comment...
PHILADELPHIA — Democrats opened their convention with an emphasis on inclusion and public service, and little mention of law and order or the rise of the Islamic State — a stark contrast to the Republicans’ focus on homeland security at their convention in Cleveland last week.More.
Hillary Clinton has made a strategic calculation to present an optimistic view of America and its place in the world as she is formally nominated this week. It’s a bet that voters will reject what her campaign calls the inaccurate fear-mongering of Republican nominee Donald Trump.
But some Democrats worry that the contrast could help Trump make up in rhetoric for a lack of traditional national security credentials.
“My hope is that people will see through this,” said Michèle Flournoy, a former senior Pentagon official under President Obama and a Clinton supporter. “It’s policy by bumper sticker. There will be some people who will find the strength of his rhetoric very appealing.”
None of the prime-time speakers on the Democrats’ opening night, Monday, dwelled on security in the traditional sense — either U.S. military readiness or safety on the streets. On Tuesday, many Republicans jumped to say that the threat from the Islamic State went unmentioned.
Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort sent this Twitter message Tuesday morning, using another name for the Islamic State:
“Clinton Mentions at DNC Last Night: 208. Trump Mentions at DNC Last Night: 96. ISIS Mentions at DNC Last Night: 0 (!!!)”
Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta was pressed Tuesday about the silence from Monday night’s lineup of speakers on a major issue in the minds of voters — terrorism.
“This is not a problem that is going away. It needs an intelligent and resourced and fulsome strategy, but the wrong strategy is to split away our alliances and to divide our country,” Podesta said at a Wall Street Journal luncheon here. “We need everyone in this fight together.”
Several Democrats said the structure of the convention is deliberate, with an initial focus on bringing the divisive primary contest to a respectful close, as well as on Clinton’s biography as an advocate for children and families.
Her national security bona fides and an examination of where the country stands after nearly eight years of the Obama presidency are subjects for later in the week, several Democrats said, although there is an effort to avoid much mention of Clinton’s onetime support for the Iraq War.
Clinton’s attempt to offer a sunnier vision of American leadership comes along with a concerted strategy to make the case that she is more knowledgeable and experienced on national security issues...
Heh. Now that's classic a Democrat Party operative!INCREDIBLE video interaction: delegate caught on tape, starts crying , @tombrokaw reacts #ToCatchADelegate #DNCinPHL pic.twitter.com/SqKOYFQFNM— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) July 25, 2016
In Germany, the government’s failure to grasp the public’s mounting resentment towards Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open door policy in handling the migrant crisis has caused the remarkable rise of the Alternative for Germany party, which won almost 25 per cent of the vote in a state election in Saxony-Anhalt in March, almost beating Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democrats.Um, I think there's enough "political chaos" in Europe right now without worrying about being pushed by Islamic State. Growing "secularist pretensions" aren't the problem. Appeasement is. If it takes a nationalist party to beat back that syndrome, the Europeans will thank their lucky stars they found a recipe for survival.
In France, meanwhile, Front National leader Marine Le Pen has been quick to exploit the wave of anger directed towards President Francois Hollande over his handling of the terror threat. On Tuesday, commenting on the attack at Saint-Etienne-du Rouvray, she accused the entire French establishment, both Left and Right, of sharing “immense responsibility” for creating the circumstances in which Islamist terrorists can operate in France.
The prospect of Right-wing nationalists exercising real political power in France and Germany is one that even the most ardent Brexiteer will view with dismay.
But the longer Isil is able to maintain its terrorist offensive against Europe, then the more likely this becomes, especially if the fanatics continue to attack soft targets like the church selected in Tuesday’s attack.
For all the Republic’s secularist pretensions, Catholicism remains part of France’s national identity, and the murder of an elderly priest is just the kind of attack that could provoke sectarian tensions of the sort we are more used to seeing in the Middle East, as opposed to the heart of Europe.
This is just the kind of political chaos Isil wants to create in Europe, which is why its political leaders must steer clear of this simple but deadly trap.
What will Obama do after the presidency? Hopefully go away. Far away. https://t.co/HPFvnuj4iw #DemsInPhilly
— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 27, 2016
The main thing last night — other than the ritual of the roll call (the cut-short ritual) — was a speech from Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton was allowed to do his thing and talk and talk and talk. He went last and so: let Bill be Bill. Some people find him charming. But even those of us who do drift into when-will-it-end mode eventually or we've fallen asleep. Bill's idea for the speech was just to tell the story of his half century of life alongside of Hillary — tell it as if it's the most charming, beautiful tale of a guy from Arkansas who somehow got to weave his story together with the most hard-working do-gooder who ever appeared on Earth.Oh, he was attracted to her, it's just that Hillary alone wasn't enough to satiate his desires. Bill Clinton's a man of insatiable desires, heh.
At Meadhouse, the feed got paused a few times to make comments about his failure to mention how he cheated on her time and again over the decades and how (we think) he's still doing it now. Was he never sexually attracted to her? Did they have an agreement about it and, if so, was it just don't let the public see what you are doing? These were topics of conversation during one of our many pauses.
The proper response to Islamic State is to go on swift and decisive offense, beginning with the eradication of its strongholds in Syria, Iraq and Libya. Mr. Hollande may have declared war on Islamic State, but so far the fight has been more symbolic than strategic. Unless that changes, Tuesday’s attack in Normandy will merely be one more of many horrors to come.Read the whole thing.
WASHINGTON — Six weeks before the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks published an archive of hacked Democratic National Committee emails ahead of the Democratic convention, the organization's founder, Julian Assange, foreshadowed the release — and made it clear that he hoped to harm Hillary Clinton's chances of winning the presidency.More.
Assange's remarks in a June 12 interview underscored that for all the drama of the discord that the disclosures have sown among supporters of Bernie Sanders — and of the unproven speculation that the Russian government provided the hacked data to WikiLeaks in order to help Donald Trump — the disclosures are also the latest chapter in the long-running tale of Assange's battles with the Obama administration.
In the interview, Assange told a British television host, Robert Peston of the ITV network, that his organization had obtained "emails related to Hillary Clinton which are pending publication," which he pronounced "great." He also suggested that he not only opposed her candidacy on policy grounds but also saw her as a personal foe.
At one point, Peston said: "Plainly, what you are saying, what you are publishing, hurts Hillary Clinton. Would you prefer Trump to be president?"
Assange replied that what Trump would do as president was "completely unpredictable." By contrast, he thought it was predictable that Clinton would wield power in two ways he found problematic.
First, citing his "personal perspective," Assange accused Clinton of having been among those pushing to indict him after WikiLeaks disseminated a quarter of a million diplomatic cables during her tenure as secretary of state.
"We do see her as a bit of a problem for freedom of the press more generally," Assange said.
(The cables, along with archives of military documents, were leaked by Pvt. Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, who is serving a 35-year prison sentence. WikiLeaks also provided the documents to news outlets, including The New York Times. Despite a criminal investigation into Assange, he has not been charged; the status of that investigation is murky.)
In addition, Assange criticized Clinton for pushing to intervene in Libya in 2011 when Moammar Gadhafi was cracking down on Arab Spring protesters; he said that the result of the NATO air war was Libya's collapse into anarchy, enabling the Islamic State to flourish.
"She has a long history of being a liberal war hawk, and we presume she is going to proceed" with that approach if elected president, he said.
In February, Assange said in an essay that a vote for Clinton to become president amounted to "a vote for endless, stupid war."
Efforts to reach Assange for comment were unsuccessful, and a Clinton campaign spokesman did not respond to an inquiry. In November 2010, when WikiLeaks and its media partners began publishing the cables, Clinton strongly condemned it...
There hung the sun, brazenly aglow in red. The sky around it, tinted a dusty rose. In the stifling air, ashes fluttered like snowflakes.More.
The effects of the Sand fire over the last few days have cast an ominous yet picturesque pall across the Los Angeles Basin, the sun and the moon eliciting comparisons to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Eye of Sauron” and apocalyptic films.
But up in the Santa Clarita Valley, the largest blaze in Los Angeles County this year was no photo op. Raging in the steep, rugged mountains and charring more than 35,000 acres, the Sand fire plowed through homes and sent thousands fleeing as it swept through a landscape of desiccated fuel. Explosive and swift, it melted cars, downed power lines and left the air thick with smoke.
“This is a big animal,” said Mike Wakoski, a spokesman for the multi-agency wildfire effort made up of nearly 3,000 firefighters. Wakoski warned that the fire was scorching an average of 10,000 football fields a day and that containment would be slow...
If nothing else, the opening day of the Democratic National Convention showed that family feuds are not solely the province of the Republican Party.More.
Party stalwarts arrived onstage only to be treated dismissively — loudly so — by many of the delegates. That followed a second day of protests by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders, the second-place finisher, who was booed by many of his own backers for suggesting they should cast their November ballots for the winner, Hillary Clinton.
That followed Florida delegates yelling at the party’s chairwoman, Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, on Monday morning, contributing to her decision to cancel her convention appearances.
“Brothers and sisters, this is the real world that we live in,” Sanders had implored his supporters as they booed.
Real world or not, it should come as no shock after the campaign season America has witnessed that chaos has been visited upon both political parties as they seek to put their best faces forward in four-day television extravaganzas.
But the lines of division are not the same in each party.
Republicans saw last week that their party has been taken over by Donald Trump, the real estate impresario whose improbable campaign defeated more than a dozen candidates who, in more normal times, could have found success.
Trump channeled the economic and cultural concerns of Americans who felt spurned by more traditional Republicans, attracting them with bombastic words and spraying insults across many voter groups.
He succeeded to the point that delegates to his Cleveland convention roundly booed when his second-place finisher, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, failed to endorse Trump, saying that people should vote their consciences.
The Democratic problem is the opposite in many ways: Rather than taking over the party, many supporters of Sanders here remain on the outside, protesting. They do so despite his dramatic successes in winning votes, raising money, successfully liberalizing the party platform and contributing to the deposing of Wasserman Schultz, who will leave her post at the conclusion of the convention, months before her term ended.
Both feuds also look very different outside the convention halls...
The two attackers were killed by police upon exiting the church. Prosecutors said one of them was Adel Kermiche, a young man who was under court order to wear an electronic bracelet after trying to travel to Syria.My prediction is that things do not get better. We will see more jihad terror in France.
Kermiche, a 19-year-old who was born and raised in France, was detained in Turkey in 2015 while trying to reach Islamic State’s stronghold in northern Syria, French authorities said. He was ordered to wear the bracelet in March after French prosecutors placed him under investigation on preliminary terrorism charges.
Henria Bayouki, 19, a friend who attended summer camp with Kermiche, said she spoke to his family, who confirmed he was one of the attackers.
The knife-wielding men, one of whom was carrying fake explosives, entered the 16th-century stone church in this Normandy town and took five hostages, including Rev. Jacques Hamel, the parish’s 85-year-old auxiliary priest.
A nun who fled the scene told French TV she saw the attackers force Father Hamel to kneel before cutting his throat. The attackers recorded the attack and “did a sort of sermon around the altar in Arabic,” she said.
Another person knifed in the church was in stable condition, a prosecutor said.
Police surrounded the church and shot and killed the two men as they exited the building, the spokesman said.
Islamic State said via its media arm, the Amaq news agency, that the attack was carried out by two of its “soldiers” without providing evidence of any direct links to the attackers.
French President François Hollande said the attackers had sworn allegiance to the extremist group.
“We are faced with a group that has declared war on us,” Mr. Hollande said after rushing to the scene.
The gruesome nature of the attack—and the fact that it was carried out in a Catholic church in a predominantly Catholic country—provoked outrage across France, fueling calls for a broader crackdown on Muslim radicals.
“A new low has been reached,” said Marine Le Pen, leader of the anti-immigration National Front party. “The heart of our nation’s cultural identity has been intentionally struck.”
Authorities were also grappling with the possibility of another breakdown in France’s security apparatus as they investigated Kermiche’s involvement in this latest attack...
Vox Popoli: Conservatism in ruins:Still more.
It very much looks to me right now as if Trump is going to lose this election on pure incompetence and mean spirit. That might actually make it easier for conservatives to regroup in the ruins of the Republican Party. If he wins, we may need a new party of our own. But whichever way things go, I think we need to open a discussion about how conservatives can not only remain conservative but also win elections in modern America.I have never been a conservative. I will never be a conservative. I am delighted to see the conservative movement crumbling into dust. Conservatives conserve nothing, accomplish nothing, and stand for nothing. They will not defend the Church, they will not defend America, and they will not defend the West.
Is he even watching the political conventions? This sort of wishful thinking is why no one should bother paying any attention to a cuckservative like Klavan now or in the future. Conservatism is dying. Its diseased remnants are flocking to the progressives, as we always knew they would. And we watch them go with dry eyes and a grim smile, because we don’t need a bunch of useless cucks and moderates who were always happier shooting at their own side than the enemy.
The Alt Right will. Join us, if you have the steel.
I gave up on the formal “conservative” movement a while back, when I realized that Hot Air was an apt name for what almost all of them were spouting, and than almost none of those politicians they supported ever had any intention of winning the war for America that the Leftists and other Democrats were waging on them...
STANDING w FRANCE on Ramirez website: #tcothttps://t.co/gytrW4qbRh
— Michael Ramirez (@Ramireztoons) July 15, 2016
Facebook:https://t.co/WeX1G9jwDl pic.twitter.com/2rMeS5XMP7
Once again, the vile and wretched refuse of mankind have attacked the innocent.More.
Our prayers go out for the families of Father Jacques Hamel, and the nun who is fighting for her life. We pray. Our prayers go out for the people of France and for people everywhere who have fallen victim to these heinous acts of terror.
The terrorists who continue to commit these brutal acts, attacking an 84 year old priest and a nun, demonstrate what they truly are, cowards, who prey on the weak, helpless and defenseless.
As I have written before, these tragedies expose "those who subvert religion to justify brutal acts of barbarity. Only when the world can see these animals for what they truly are will the world unite against these emissaries of death and destruction."
But before you can go after evil, you must define it. It goes by many names; ISIS, ISIL, lone wolf, DAESH... but they all share one thing in common, the celebration of death in the name of radical Islam.
We pray for those who have been touched by terror.
At last count, members of the European Union spent more than $200 billion a year on defense, fielded more than 2,000 jet fighters and 500 naval ships, and employed some 1.4 million military personnel. More than a million police officers also walk Europe’s streets. Yet in the face of an Islamist menace the Continent seems helpless. Is it?Keep reading.
Was France helpless in May 1940?
Let’s stipulate that a van barreling down a seaside promenade isn’t a Panzer division, and that a few thousand ISIS fighters scattered from Mosul to Marseilles aren’t another Wehrmacht. But as in France in 1940, Europe today displays the same combination of doctrinal rigidity and loss of will that allowed an Allied army of 144 divisions to be routed by the Germans in six weeks. The Maginot Line of “European values” won’t prevail over people who recognize none of those values.
So much was made clear by French Prime Minister Manuel Valls, who remarked after the Nice attack that “France is going to have to live with terrorism.” This may have been intended as a statement of fact but it came across as an admission that his government isn’t about to rally the public to a campaign of blood, toil, tears and sweat against ISIS—another premature capitulation in a country that has known them before.
Mr. Valls was later booed at a memorial service for the Nice victims. It would be heartening to think this was because he and his boss, President François Hollande, have failed to forge a strategy to destroy ISIS. But the public’s objection was that there hadn’t been enough cops along the Promenade des Anglais to stop the attack. In soccer terms, it’s a complaint about the failure of defense, not the lack of a proper offense.
Then there is Germany, site of three terror attacks in a week. It seems almost like a past epoch that Germans welcomed a million Middle Eastern migrants in an ecstasy of moral self-congratulation, led by Angela Merkel’s chant of “We can do it!” Last summer’s slogan now sounds as dated and hollow as Barack Obama’s “Yes we can!”
Now Germany will have to confront a terror threat that will make the Baader-Meinhof gang of the 1970s seem trivial. The German state is stronger and smarter than the French one, but it also surrenders more easily to moral intimidation. The idea of national self-preservation at all costs will always be debatable in a country seeking to expiate an inexpiatable sin.
Thus the question of whether Europe is helpless...
“Allahu akbar” is such a constant of jihad attacks that every time it is shouted, it is bearing witness not only to the fact that the murder in question is being committed in the name of Islam and in accord with its teachings, but also to the fact that Western authorities are resolute in their refusal to acknowledge the motivating ideology of the enemy, and thus are abjectly ill-equipped to deal with it adequately.Well, as I asked above, what will it take? I suspect it'll take Marine Le Pen's accession to the Élysée Palace in Paris. I have no worry that she'd fail to protect the French national interest.
And as for Hollande saying that France is at war with the Islamic State, we have heard French and other Western officials say that before. But they don’t act as if they mean it...
* Atlas Shrugs, "Muslims SHOUTED ALLAHU AKBAR as they BEHEADED PRIEST in Normandy CHURCH, Nun fighting for her life, STORMED Morning MASS."Expect updates.
*Bare Naked Islam, "FRANCE: Islamic terrorists shouting “Allahu Akbar” slits throat of 84-year-old priest."
* Blazing Cat Fur, "Islamist Knifemen Forced Priest, 84, To Kneel Before They Slit His Throat On Camera: Jihadists Carry Out Slaughter In Church Then Give ‘Arabic Sermon’… And Now Hollande Says ‘We’re At War With ISIS’."
* iOWNTHEWORLD, "Priest murdered during Mass in terror attack on Catholic church in France."
* Legal Insurrection, "Priest in France murdered by ISIS terrorists."
EXCLUSIVE: Inside the Kremlin's covert operation via Wikileaks to destroy Hillary + the DNC & elect Donald Trump.https://t.co/ezoTER1v3D
— John Schindler (@20committee) July 25, 2016
The recent Wikileaks dump of 20,000 emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee has caused political sensation and scandal on a grand scale. These internal communications reveal nothing flattering about the DNC or Hillary Clinton, who is set to be anointed as the Democrats’ presidential nominee at their party convention in Philadelphia that gets underway with fanfare today.I'm getting a little more sold on the idea that Russia's behind the hack, although not so much that Trump's a Putin plant.
Wikileaks has thrown an ugly wrench into Hillary’s coronation. DNC emails reveal a Clinton campaign that’s shady and dishonest, not to mention corrupt. Its secret dealings with Hillary’s opponents—whether Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump—have been distasteful and possibly illegal. To say this is an unflattering portrayal of Team Clinton is like saying the Titanic had issues with ice.
The ramifications of this massive leak are already serious. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the embattled DNC chair, has been forced to tender her resignation in advance of the party conclave in Philadelphia, while Senator Sanders, who’s been revealed as the target of much aggressive DNC attention during the Democratic primary campaign, stated he was “not shocked but I’m disappointed” by the Wikileaks revelations. The Democrats are anything but united now as they prepare to take on Donald Trump and the Republicans.
On the eve of the four-day Democratic convention extravaganza, this data-dump could not have been timed better to damage Hillary and her efforts to move back into the White House this November. Although it’s doubtful that leaked RNC internal emails would make any more pleasant a read for the public, Clinton will emerge from this tarred with the indelible brush of corruption and collusion with her party’s leadership to fix the Democratic presidential nomination.
Wikileaks has delivered as promised on its public threats of damaging Team Clinton with hacked emails. Although the DNC can’t deny that many of the leaked messages appear authentic—they wouldn’t have forced the chair’s resignation if they were fake, obviously—there remains the important question of how the vaunted “privacy organization” got its hands on them.
It turns out there’s hardly any mystery there. It’s no secret that the DNC was recently subject to a major hack, one which independent cybersecurity experts easily assessed as being the work of Russian intelligence through previously known cut-outs. One of them, called COZY BEAR or APT 29, has used spear-phishing to gain illegal access to many private networks in the West, as well as the White House, the State Department, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff last year. Another hacking group involved in the attack on the DNC, called FANCY BEAR or APT 28, is a well-known Russian front, as I’ve previously profiled.
These bears didn’t make much efforts to hide their DNC hack—in one case leaving behind a Russian name in Cyrillic as a signature—and Kremlin attribution has been confirmed by independent analysis by a second cybersecurity firm.
The answer then is simple: Russian hackers working for the Kremlin cyber-pilfered the DNC then passed the purloined data, including thousands of unflattering emails, to Wikileaks, which has shown them to the world...
Florida man accused of beating wife for two decades: https://t.co/gc1nEjKWpx cc @AlanGrayson
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) July 26, 2016
If the election were today, Trump would likely win. But Clinton's still favored long-term: https://t.co/2uB2oqpXy4 pic.twitter.com/HUTQMaVrBx
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) July 25, 2016
Finally catching up to the old crook... #CrookedHillary pic.twitter.com/WF3TLMY0hc
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) July 25, 2016
Why the North Korean flag at a Bernie rally? pic.twitter.com/U4qZUl9340— Tania Gail (@TaniaGailPhotos) July 26, 2016
Leftists love Stalinists. https://t.co/UJccMzLPS0— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) July 26, 2016
The terror attacks in Nice and Wurzburg are the latest manifestations of what should now be seen as a still fairly low-level Islamist insurgency taking place in a number of west European countries. The fact that this insurgency has been allowed to kindle itself and slowly emerge before now bursting forth represents a profound failure of Western European political culture and of the continent’s elites.
This is not merely a matter of poor police or intelligence work. Rather, it is the culmination of a long process of enfeeblement. The Islamist insurgency is a disease attacking an already weakened body which lacks the means to defend itself...
Establishment Trumps People every time; Trump Stumps Establishment, everytime. #DEMSINPHILLY RETWEET #RETWEET pic.twitter.com/iIve2QbBBT
— ⚓ I'm With You ™ (@ImWithYou010) July 25, 2016
Crying Peter Pan Guy is about to become an Internet Thing.#feelthebern#DemsInPhilly pic.twitter.com/kLxSIHaZuY
— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) July 26, 2016
Outside the convention, protestors are flying a Bernie Sanders flag and chanting "Off with her head"https://t.co/au9SdOWveR
— VICE News (@vicenews) July 26, 2016
DNC disarray is the foreshadowing of a Clinton administration https://t.co/Lrrd2XX5VH pic.twitter.com/U3Q8VxYQV2
— New York Post (@nypost) July 26, 2016
Jessica Alba shows off her perfect figure in a pineapple bikini on her family vacation https://t.co/QvdE8W6ReE pic.twitter.com/n3GCSVJjLE
— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) July 21, 2016
— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) July 25, 2016
That blinding flash of light you saw this weekend? That was the byproduct of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the American media’s two greatest obsessions, fusing into a single intoxicating storyline after the Democratic National Committee’s internal emails were hacked and made public with the apparent assistance of Russian hackers, and to the apparent glee of the Republican nominee. The conventional wisdom, after sifting through all the evidence, has reached a verdict, and it’s that Trump is Putin’s stooge, a veritable plant through which Putin plans to take over the United States.RTWT.
Okay, I exaggerate. But not by much...
Germany’s Terror Wave - by @noahcrothman https://t.co/3AVz0BmqGN pic.twitter.com/0xghjwl7k6
— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) July 25, 2016
All young men; all of Middle Eastern or South Central Asian descent, with varying but generally modest levels of assimilation into Western society. Each was attracted to death cultism—be it of an Islamist or secular variety. Three of these four attackers were known to members of the psychological community and had at one point sought or received help for mental imbalances. None of it was apparently sufficient to prevent the worst.
What the effects of this new wave of terror will be on German and European political culture are not yet clear, but it is a safe bet that the kind of nationalist political backlash gathering support in France will soon materialize in Germany. And without a will to defeat the forces of radicalization abroad, Europeans will have little recourse but to bar the door and keep a watchful eye on their neighbors through lace curtains. Ultimately, that will only intensify the sense of paranoia that Europeans are already justifiably feeling today. The continent is under attack, and it’s only a matter of time before passivity is no longer an option.
When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday, she will take command of a party that has little in common with the one she and her husband rode to the White House a quarter-century ago.Still more.
The party she will inherit is less white and more liberal. It is better educated and not as willing to compromise with Republicans. Many Democrats today aren’t convinced capitalism is the best economic model or that socialism is taboo.
Nor is the party entirely sold on its new leader. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this month showed 45% of registered Democrats and those who lean in that direction would have preferred a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.
“I’m in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton camp,” said Jason Frerichs, a Democratic Party county chairman in southwestern Iowa.
Behind the party’s evolution are seismic shifts that have threatened to sweep aside the pro-business, centrist brand of politics the Clintons long embodied. Those same forces could make it tougher for Mrs. Clinton to govern from the center should she win in November.
Working-class white voters once loyal to the Democratic Party have gravitated to the Republicans over the past two decades, drawn by the GOP’s stance on guns, immigration and other social issues.
Amid the exodus, Democrats have moved left.
Only 30% of Democrats considered themselves liberal in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That figure had nearly doubled by 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
With minorities, 20-somethings and college-educated voters making up a bigger chunk of the party, some Democrats are questioning tenets that once seemed inviolate. Take capitalism. An Iowa poll early this year showed more than four-in-10 likely Democratic caucus-goers in a state with an outsize influence on the nomination battle described themselves as socialist.
Watching these trends, some Democrats are uneasy. They fear the party will continue to lose state and local contests unless it makes an ideological course correction. For all of President Barack Obama’s electoral success, the party lost more than 80 House and Senate seats under his watch.
“The party has moved steadily left because of the surge of liberal populism, and that has caused the party to be in complete free fall at the subpresidential level,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank, Third Way.
“The party is going to have to realize that to get and hold a sustained majority and enact solutions that are even remotely politically feasible, it’s going to have to move toward the center,” he said.
The draft party platform that Democrats approved at a two-day meeting in Orlando, Fla., highlights the sharp left turn the party has taken since Mr. Clinton held the White House 20 years ago.
The 1996 Democratic platform celebrated free-trade deals; the proposed new platform says they don’t “live up to the hype.” Bill Clinton’s platform embraced the death penalty; the new one would do away with it. The old platform boasted of building new prison cells; the 2016 version calls for “ending the era of mass incarceration.”
Eyeing the changes over the last generation, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said: “These are two radically different parties.”
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.
She has signaled she isn’t about to govern in accordance with her party’s liberal faction. In naming a running mate, she passed over both Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the more moderate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
Speaking to Charlie Rose of CBS News recently, she said: “We are the center-left party.”
Yet, pressed by Mr. Sanders during the presidential primaries, Mrs. Clinton reversed course and came out against a 12-nation Pacific trade deal she promoted back when she was secretary of state. Hoping to win over his young supporters, she recently rolled out new plans to wipe out public-college tuition for millions of families.
When Hillary Clinton accepts the Democratic nomination on Thursday, she will take command of a party that has little in common with the one she and her husband rode to the White House a quarter-century ago.
The party she will inherit is less white and more liberal. It is better educated and not as willing to compromise with Republicans. Many Democrats today aren’t convinced capitalism is the best economic model or that socialism is taboo.
Nor is the party entirely sold on its new leader. A Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll this month showed 45% of registered Democrats and those who lean in that direction would have preferred a nominee not named Hillary Clinton.
“I’m in the hold-your-nose-and-vote-for-Hillary-Clinton camp,” said Jason Frerichs, a Democratic Party county chairman in southwestern Iowa.
Behind the party’s evolution are seismic shifts that have threatened to sweep aside the pro-business, centrist brand of politics the Clintons long embodied. Those same forces could make it tougher for Mrs. Clinton to govern from the center should she win in November.
Working-class white voters once loyal to the Democratic Party have gravitated to the Republicans over the past two decades, drawn by the GOP’s stance on guns, immigration and other social issues.
Amid the exodus, Democrats have moved left.
Only 30% of Democrats considered themselves liberal in 1994, the second year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. That figure had nearly doubled by 2014, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.
With minorities, 20-somethings and college-educated voters making up a bigger chunk of the party, some Democrats are questioning tenets that once seemed inviolate. Take capitalism. An Iowa poll early this year showed more than four-in-10 likely Democratic caucus-goers in a state with an outsize influence on the nomination battle described themselves as socialist.
Watching these trends, some Democrats are uneasy. They fear the party will continue to lose state and local contests unless it makes an ideological course correction. For all of President Barack Obama’s electoral success, the party lost more than 80 House and Senate seats under his watch.
“The party has moved steadily left because of the surge of liberal populism, and that has caused the party to be in complete free fall at the subpresidential level,” said Jonathan Cowan, president of the centrist Democratic think tank, Third Way.
“The party is going to have to realize that to get and hold a sustained majority and enact solutions that are even remotely politically feasible, it’s going to have to move toward the center,” he said.
The draft party platform that Democrats approved at a two-day meeting in Orlando, Fla., highlights the sharp left turn the party has taken since Mr. Clinton held the White House 20 years ago.
The 1996 Democratic platform celebrated free-trade deals; the proposed new platform says they don’t “live up to the hype.” Bill Clinton’s platform embraced the death penalty; the new one would do away with it. The old platform boasted of building new prison cells; the 2016 version calls for “ending the era of mass incarceration.”
Eyeing the changes over the last generation, Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducts the Journal survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said: “These are two radically different parties.”
Mrs. Clinton’s campaign declined to comment.
She has signaled she isn’t about to govern in accordance with her party’s liberal faction. In naming a running mate, she passed over both Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the more moderate Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
Speaking to Charlie Rose of CBS News recently, she said: “We are the center-left party.”
Yet, pressed by Mr. Sanders during the presidential primaries, Mrs. Clinton reversed course and came out against a 12-nation Pacific trade deal she promoted back when she was secretary of state. Hoping to win over his young supporters, she recently rolled out new plans to wipe out public-college tuition for millions of families...
Blake Lively wears plunging leather wrap dress in stunning shoot for Elle magazine https://t.co/6thnZsWuK0 pic.twitter.com/DuevNBQXrQ— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) July 25, 2016
