Wednesday, September 21, 2016

Donald Trump: 'It's a Movement, Not a Campaign' (VIDEO)

Via Hot Air:



CNN, Kaiser Family Foundation Poll on White Working Class Voters (VIDEO)

At CNN, "The anatomy of a white, working-class Trump voter."



Seattle to Create Government-Financed 'Heroin-Injection Clinics', 'Safe Sites' for Junkies to Shoot Up

It's a terrible idea, but then, this is Seattle, the far-left freakazoid enclave on Puget Sound.

At LAT, "Seattle's new war on drugs: Giving heroin addicts 'safe sites' to shoot up":
Seattle officials are moving forward with a controversial plan for what would be the nation’s first supervised heroin-injection clinics — government-financed shooting galleries that supporters say can save lives but that critics say will only enable drug users.

A new 99-page task force study envisions at least two safe-use facilities — one in Seattle, another in the suburbs — where heroin addicts can legally take narcotics while being monitored by medical personnel who can administer aid or call 911 if needed.

The project is modeled after North America’s first supervised heroin haven, InSite, a government-funded injection facility 140 miles north in Vancouver, B.C., which in 13 years of operation has never had an overdose fatality, officials there say.

That success has inspired other cities — including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland — to consider government-approved safe sites for addicts to inject heroin. But Seattle is moving fastest, convinced there is “urgent need for action,” as the new study puts it.

“For me personally, what has worked,” says Seattle social worker Thea Oliphant-Wells, a task force member and recovering heroin addict for 11 years, “was to have harm-reduction folks engaging me long before I was ready to change my drug-abuse behavior. I promise you, when you give people the opportunity to get better, they will.”

Jeff Duchin, head of Seattle-King County Public Health, said the safe sites — officially known as Community Health Engagement Locations — will increase the odds for drug users to return to healthy lives by reducing overdoses, preventing HIV and other infections and cutting down on other drug-related medical problems.

The proposal has the support of King County’s chief executive and the mayor of Seattle, a city once dubbed by Rolling Stone as “Junkie Town.” Heroin use here and across the U.S. dripped, then spiked in the last decade as Americans addicted to pain killers such as OxyContin and Percocet looked to the streets for cheaper alternatives.

A United Nations study released this summer found that use of heroin has soared in the last two decades. U.S. deaths related to the narcotic have increased fivefold since 2000 and the number of U.S. users has tripled to one million in that time.

In King County, with good Samaritan laws that prevent prosecution of anyone who, in good faith, aids an overdose victim, and with wider use of the recovery drug Naloxone by first responders, overdose deaths actually dropped last year — 132, compared with 156 in 2014.

But from 2010 to 2014, the number of users seeking treatment here doubled from 1,439 to 2,886, and the death toll in 2015 was a third higher than two years ago.

With no apparent end to the upward trend, local officials say safe-use sites are a worthy intervention...
Sorry. I'm not convinced giving addicts a government-sponsored heroin safe space is the path to creating drug-free lives. The article needed to cite addiction experts who provide evidence why this isn't a great idea. It's still experimental at this point. My hunch is that enabling addicts to shoot up only legitimizes hardcore drug dependency. If you want to help people, get them into treatment. Drug use will continue to spike as long as government-financed bleeding-heart leftists enable drug addicts to get high.

Threat Profiling

From Amanda Carpenter, on CNN, via Twitter:


Why FBI Suspects Keep Attacking Americans

Following-up, "Ahmad Khan Rahami Hailed Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki in 'Scrawled Journal' Seized During Arrest," and "Gee, What Could Possibly Be Causing All of These 'Lone Wolf' Terror Attacks?"

From Matthew Vadum, at FrontPage Magazine:
Why does the Obama administration keep failing to thwart Muslim terrorist attacks in the U.S. after receiving apparently good intelligence warning of those attacks?

It turns out that Americans keep turning in budding Muslim terrorists to the Obama administration and the administration keeps on doing nothing. For example, the alleged mastermind of the weekend pressure-cooker bombing in New York City was turned in by his own father but the Federal Bureau of Investigation failed to do much of anything about him.

These intelligence failures have become a recurrent theme in the Obama era, with deadly results. Excluding the events of the last few days, there have been 89 Muslim terrorist plots and attacks in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001 and 25 of those have taken place since the beginning of 2015, according to David Inserra of the Heritage Foundation.

Counterterrorism expert Sebastian Gorka, vice president at the Institute of World Politics, blamed political correctness for the FBI’s inability to do something about Rahami before he acted.

“There are certain sensitivities,” Gorka said on the “O’Reilly Factor” last night.

“A certain political matrix is being forced upon our operators and investigators,” he said. Usually this kind of political pressure originates not from the FBI, but from the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, he said.

The FBI is also hindered by inadequate human resources, Gorka said. There are reportedly 900 active terrorist investigations in all 50 states and the bureau can only do so much, he said.

The FBI has indeed been handcuffed in terrorist investigations by President Obama whose administration has worked with terrorist front groups like the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The law enforcement agency has also become increasingly politicized in the Obama era.

The pressure-cooker terrorist was apprehended after he injured a score of New Yorkers on the weekend but not through brilliant police work. He was caught during a shootout with cops.

Ahmad Khan Rahami, a.k.a. Ahmad Rahimi, was charged yesterday with use of weapons of mass destruction and bombing a place of public use. Rahami was born in Afghanistan but became a U.S. citizen.

Prosecutors say Rahami planted a pipe bomb and triggering cellphone Saturday morning in Seaside Park, N.J., before a scheduled U.S. Marine Corps charity run. Later that day he placed a pressure cooker bomb in the Chelsea neighborhood in Manhattan that the complaint states caused injuries and “multiple-million dollars of property damage across a 650-foot crime scene.” Twenty-nine people were wounded. He was previously charged with multiple counts of attempted murder of police officers and other offenses arising from a gun battle when he was captured Monday.

Police also discovered and safely detonated a pipe bomb at a train station in Elizabeth, N.J. Although it is unclear if Rahami is connected to that bomb, his family did sue the city of Elizabeth in 2011 claiming harassment and religious discrimination related to their family restaurant, First American Fried Chicken.

Rahami came to the attention of the FBI two years ago when his father suspected his son was involved in terrorism. Mohammad Rahami told reporters he contacted federal authorities after Ahmad stabbed Nasser, another one of his sons, and attacked another family member, which led to a criminal investigation.

The FBI apparently performed a superficial examination of the case at the time.

“In August 2014, the F.B.I. initiated an assessment of Ahmad Rahami based upon comments made by his father after a domestic dispute that were subsequently reported to authority,” the agency said in a press release. “The F.B.I. conducted internal database reviews, interagency checks, and multiple interviews, none of which revealed ties to terrorism.”

It would seem the fact that Rahami made a three-month trip to Quetta, Pakistan, in 2011, and visited Quetta again during an 11-month trip beginning in 2013, were ignored by the FBI. Quetta is a Taliban stronghold and a hotbed of Salafi jihadism.

About two miles from the Chelsea attack, President Obama gave a speech at the United Nations in which he said the U.S. should take more immigrants like Rahami and implicitly attacked GOP candidate Donald Trump. Obama blamed America for the world’s problems as he jabbed at Trump’s promise to secure the border, crack down on illegal aliens, and change our asylum policies.

“The world is too small for us to simply be able to build a wall,” Obama said. “We have to open our hearts and do more to help refugees who are desperate for a home,” he said. He added, “today a nation ringed by walls would only imprison itself.”

Obama also suggested that Americans and Europeans are racist for not wanting to be swamped by outsiders from hostile cultures. “And in Europe and the United States, you see people wrestle with concerns about immigration and changing demographics, and suggesting that somehow people who look different are corrupting the character of our countries,” he said...
More.

Gee, What Could Possibly Be Causing All of These 'Lone Wolf' Terror Attacks?

Occam's razor says go with the simplest explanation, and in this case it's not too complicated. Repeat after me: "It's the jihad."

At WSJ, "Experts See No Single Explanation for 'Lone Wolf' Terror Attacks."


Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Ahmad Khan Rahami Hailed Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki in 'Scrawled Journal' Seized During Arrest

This Rahami mofo was a very bad dude.

If you hear people saying they "don't know what the motive" was, just tell 'em to fuck off.

At the Los Angeles Times, "'The sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets': A scrawled journal found with New York bombing suspect":
Federal authorities on Tuesday filed charges against Ahmad Khan Rahami in a series of bombs planted over the weekend in New York and New Jersey, and said they have recovered a journal in which the 28-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan invoked instructions to attack unbelievers “in their backyard.”

“Inshallah [God willing], the sounds of the bombs will be heard in the streets. Gun shots to your police. Death To Your OPPRESSION,” were some of the words scrolled in a journal FBI agents found with Rahami when he was taken into custody Monday.

“My heart I pray to the beautiful wise ALLAH. To not take JIHAD away from [me]. I beg...for shahadat [martyrdom],” said the journal, which was damaged during the exchange of gunfire with police that preceded Rahami’s arrest.

The complaint filed in federal court in Manhattan said the bomb that exploded Saturday in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood was powerful enough to shatter windows three stories above ground and cause millions of dollars in damage.

Fragmentation from the explosive, fashioned from a pressure cooker and left in a dumpster, was blasted up to 650 feet away, according to an affidavit from Special Agent Peter Frederick Licata of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Rahami faces federal charges of using a weapon of mass destruction, bombing a public place, destruction of property by fire or explosive and using a destructive device in the commission of a crime of violence.

In their charging document, federal authorities said they have recovered a cellphone video, shot two days before the Chelsea bombing, that appears to show Rahami blowing up a cylindrical container at or near his home in Elizabeth, N.J.

The video, recovered from a phone believed to belong to a family member of the suspect, shows a fuse being lighted, then an explosion.

“The video depicts the lighting of the fuse, a loud noise and flames, followed by billowing smoke and laughter,” according to Licata’s affidavit. “Rahami then enters the frame and is seen picking up the cylindrical container.”

The 31 people injured in the attack suffered lacerations from flying glass, shrapnel and fragmentation as well as “various head injuries,” according to the criminal complaint. At least one victim was hospitalized.
More.

Ten Times in Past Two Years Terrorists Slipped Through Immigration Process into U.S.

From Matthew Boyle, at Breitbart (via Jihad Watch):
NEW YORK CITY, New York — In the wake of the terrorist attacks in New York City and Minnesota during the weekend, the focus of the national debate has again shifted back to America’s enemies exploiting weaknesses in U.S. immigration screening processes to get into the country to attack the United States.

While President Barack Obama’s administration, and his would-be successor, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton, have promised to increase the amount of people they bring into the United States through immigration, refugee, and asylum programs, the Republican nominee for president, Donald J. Trump, has promised to put the brakes on allowing potential terrorists into the United States.

Below is a by-no-means comprehensive list of at least ten times in the last couple years—there are certainly many more instances—that terrorists have exploited the Obama-Clinton immigration weaknesses to get into the United States. This is the first in a series of stories that will examine specific examples on this front...
Keep reading.

Angelina Jolie Files for Divorce from Brad Pitt

Well, I'm not all sad about it or anything, although these two are probably my favorite people in Hollywood.

I hope he didn't abuse her, above all.

At LAT, "Angelina Jolie files for divorce from Brad Pitt, seeks full physical custody of their kids":
Angelina Jolie has filed for divorce from Brad Pitt after two years of marriage.

In her Monday filing under the legal name Angelina Jolie Pitt, the actress-director cited irreconcilable differences but didn’t elaborate on what those differences are.

She’s requesting sole physical custody and joint legal custody of their six children but indicated she is willing to give her husband visitation rights.

The separation date is listed as Sept. 15; Jolie Pitt and Pitt were legally married Aug. 14, 2014, and followed that up on Aug. 23 with a nondenominational ceremony held at their chateau in Provence, France, after a two-year engagement.

The couple, who met while working on the movie “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” got together in August 2005. They have six children together: Maddox, Pax, Zahara, Shiloh, and twins Knox and Vivienne.

"I am very saddened by this, but what matters most now is the well-being of our kids," Pitt said in a statement to People magazine. A source close to the couple told the magazine the divorce was "a complete shock."

The decision to divorce was made “for the health of the family,” attorney Robert Offer, who represents Jolie Pitt, told the Associated Press on Tuesday...

Steve Emerson, American Jihad

Emerson got a bad rap in 1994 when he made comments about the Oklahoma City bombing having "traits" common to Middle Eastern terrorism, which once Timothy McVeigh was named as the suspect, essentially destroyed his reputation as a terrorism analyst.

But he's looking more prescient all the time. I read his book years ago, but I think I'll pull it off the shelf for some review.

At Amazon, Steve Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us.

Re-Upping David Solway, 'How to Defeat Terrorism'

I posted Solway in July. But since we're going through another round of deadly political correctness following the Chelsea bombing, I thought I'd re-up. This is key, and exactly the opposite of what leftists propose:
The measures and policies that would need to be put in place [to stop terrorism] are so obvious that the failure to implement them is nothing but a sign of lethal complacency and moral cowardice. What are these measures? The list is not unduly long and, as I say, entirely obvious.
* Islamic immigration must be drastically curtailed if not completely stopped. As Donald Trump has cogently warned, “We are allowing people into our country who we have no idea where they are, where they're from, who they are, they have no paperwork, they have no documentation, in many cases.” This, as the proverb goes, is like closing the barn door after the horse has escaped. But there are many more horses in the barn to be confined to their stalls. It’s a start.

* Since large Muslim populations are already settled within our borders, surveillance must be intensive, methodical and ongoing. No-Go Zones must be pacified by whatever means, and must be made Go Zones. Self-regulated ghettoes have to be opened up and rigorously policed. Islamic law must be ruled in contravention of common law and legally prohibited. Vigorous action is required. As Andrew Bieszad, one of Walid Shoebat’s co-bloggers, reported at com, the mayor of Calais has now decided to act, to dismantle the so-called refugee “jungle” that has disfigured the town and to displace or deport thousands of its characteristically violent denizens. As Bieszad says, “It has taken a long time, but the French are finally pushing back against the Muslims in Calais.” But nowhere else, it appears.

*All mosques, which are effectively command centers, must be stringently investigated and many must be closed down.

*Every imam in the country should be thoroughly vetted and many should be de-licensed and restricted from preaching.

*Jihadi suspects clearly and unequivocally known to law enforcement agencies should not be so readily allowed, as is far too often the case, to mix freely among the people. As has often been said, lone wolves are usually known wolves. Moreover, it is a mistake to consider them as “lone”; they are really part of a vast ideological pack. Of course, we would need to protect ourselves against abuse of authority where anyone in disfavor with policing agencies or political administrations can be randomly detained. Wolves may be responsibly “tagged,” so to speak, and monitored, whether digitally or in propia persona, by the intelligence community, with a reasonable prospect of interception before yet another outrage is committed—those like the Nice jihadist Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, who, as The Washington Post reports, “had been connected to assault and theft since 2010” and sentenced to a six month prison term (though “[i]t was not clear whether Bouhlel served any of that sentence”). Admittedly, there is a fine line between liberty and security, the issue will always remain moot, and safeguards will have to be agreed upon even if we lose some battles along the way.

*Muslims and non-Muslims who leave the country to fight alongside terrorist entities must not be repatriated, even if they are passport-holding citizens. They are accessories to those who would destroy us and are therefore enemy combatants.

*Muslim organizations with ties to terror-sponsoring organizations or that lobby for Sharia or for cultural and political influence must be disbanded and outlawed, no matter how powerful and widespread.

No less important, indeed, perhaps the most crucial of the measures I am proposing, has to do with terminology and the concepts it signifies. We keep hearing that the enemy we are facing is “Islamic extremism” or “radical Islam.” Nothing can be further from the truth. This is the most serious in its consequences of the evasions we practice and one that ensures our eventual destruction. The enemy is not radical Islam but Islam pure and simple. The terrorists, their enablers and the “entry” cohort take their warrant from their holy scriptures—the Koran, the Hadith, the Sira, the schools of jurisprudence, and centuries of political and religious commentary.
Read the whole thing.


Taleeb Starkes: Black Lies Matter

Here's the dude's book, at Amazon, Black Lies Matter: Why Lies Matter to the Race Grievance Industry.

And watch, via Prager University:



Max Boot Advising Hillary Clinton?

Max Boot jumped the shark earlier this year with his op-ed at the Los Angeles Times attacking the nomination of Donald Trump, "The Republican Party is dead."

I don't care about the GOP, but I do care about Donald Trump, who was the real target of Boot's wrath.

I'm reminded of Boot's tantrum with his new piece at Foreign Policy, "Why Trump Is the Islamic State’s Dream Candidate."

I probably wouldn't even be blogging this, but a passage from Boot's essay is virtually verbatim from Hillary Clinton's comments yesterday on the New York bombing. Here's Boot:


The core of his [Trump's] approach [to global jihad] is to keep saying the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism,” something that he (wrongly) claims Clinton never does. “To defeat Islamic terrorism,” he said in Ohio, “we must also speak out forcefully against a hateful ideology that provides the breeding ground for violence and terrorism to grow.” But there’s a good reason why both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama have been reluctant to speak of “Islamic terrorism,” and it’s not because Obama is a closet Muslim, as Trump has insinuated in the past. It’s because they realize that in the battle against terrorism, the United States cannot win unless it can get the support of most of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims. By seeming to insult Islam and Muslims as Trump does, he plays into Islamic State and al Qaeda propaganda, which posits that there is a battle between Islam and the West.
I've highlighted the key portion, the part about "Islam and the West," which is almost exactly what Hillary Clinton said yesterday when she claimed ISIS wanted to pull the U.S. into a "religious conflict," a "war against Islam," which is why they prefer Donald Trump.

I'm sick of people like Max Boot, to say nothing of Haggard Hillary. See my post from yesterday for more, "Democrat 'Our Values' Talking Point: It's Not 'Annoying' — It's Evil."

If Boot's not advising Clinton, then the Democrat Party and Clinton's campaign have been working extremely hard at unified messaging for their army of surrogates. It's impressive messaging, but wrong for America. Unfortunately for them, they're going to find that out too late when Donald Trump wins on November 8th, which is becoming a distinct possibility the ways things have been going this last couple of weeks.

Donald Trump's Winning the Narrative

The terrorism narrative, which is to say, he talking plainly about terrorism, the way regular people talk about terrorism, especially New Yorkers (who should know a thing or two about terrorism).

From James Robbins, at USA Today, "Trump's winning terrorist narrative":
For more than a year, Donald Trump has been raising an alarm about the upswing of terrorism in the United States, promising to address it head-on without any of Washington’s usual political pieties. Jargon-laden responses to terror attacks from the White House and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign only tend to confirm Trump voters' worst fears about the Washington establishment, rather than build support for the Obama-Clinton approach to fighting the Islamic State terrorist group.

On Saturday a pressure cooker bomb detonated in a Manhattan dumpster, wounding 29. A second device was found blocks away and disarmed. This followed a pipe bombing that morning in Seaside Park, N.J., targeting the Marine Semper Fi 5K fundraising race. Fortunately, only one bomb detonated and no one was harmed.

On Sunday, five bombs were found in a backpack near a train station in Elizabeth, N.J. On Monday one suspected terrorist, Afghan immigrant Ahmad Rahami, was arrested after a shootout with police in Linden.

While all this was playing out on the East Coast, on Saturday a man went on a stabbing rampage at a mall in St. Cloud, Minn., wounding nine people before being gunned down by an off-duty police officer. The assailant, Somali immigrant Dahir Adan, whom ISIL claimed as a “soldier,” asked one of his victims whether he was a Muslim before stabbing him.

Monday morning, White House spokesman Josh Earnest attempted to calm rattled public nerves, saying that “when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle.” He assured us we are winning it. Democratic presidential candidate Clinton quickly echoed this line, and accused Trump of giving “aid and comfort” to the terrorists by counseling a get-tough approach against radical Islam that strays from the administration’s more restrained rhetoric.

The White House response that America is successfully challenging ISIL’s "narrative" is cold comfort when improvised explosive devices (IEDs) are blowing up on American streets...
Keep reading.

Mark Steyn on 'The O'Reilly Factor' (VIDEO)

At great segment.

I miss Mark Steyn:



Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton Calls for 'Tolerance' After Crossroads Mall Jihad Attack

"Tolerance."

I think Americans are just about out of "tolerance" at this point. We've been so "tolerant" we're about to die from it.

At Blazing Cat Fur, "Tone-Deaf Governor Calls for ‘Tolerance’ After ISIS Stabbing."

Samantha Hoopes Visits Coney Island (VIDEO)

At Sports Illustrated:



Obama Won't Acknowledge Terrorism

From the impeccable Michael Goodwin, at the New York Post, "Obama won’t acknowledge terrorism — and it’s great news for Trump":
Poor President Obama. He had a perfect plan — to use his final UN speech Tuesday to secure his reputation for putting Globalism First. He would preen to the assembled autocrats and bureaucrats about forcing America to take in a record number of refugees, and blast Donald Trump for putting America First.

Hillary Clinton also had a perfect plan. She would keep attacking Trump and his supporters as dangerous and deplorable in hopes that she could scare her way into the White House. With Obama playing the race card to help her with black voters, Clinton would wrap her arms ever more tightly around the president and his policies between now and November.

But terrorist bombings and stabbings are great disrupters, especially when they involve both New York and the heartland in a single weekend. The disruption becomes unbearable when the attacks allegedly are carried out by foreign-born Muslims who were welcomed here with open arms, then turned on their generous American hosts.

Events have a voice and a vote, and the terrorism in Minnesota, New Jersey and New York is scrambling the presidential campaign. It also revealed Mayor Putz to be a horse’s ass as he twisted himself into a pretzel to deny calling the Manhattan bomb a bomb and terrorism terrorism. New Yorkers know that when a bomb goes off on a public street and another one is disarmed nearby, it’s terrorism, stupid.

While the scramble for political safe spaces is still under way, the advantage so far clearly belongs to Trump. His gut instinct to call the Saturday bombings what they were, combined with his demand that refugees and immigrants from countries with a history of terrorism be given tougher scrutiny, fit the nation’s mood and the facts.

Is there any doubt he’s right when he says political correctness has handcuffed law enforcement and that more attacks are coming? Or that his backing by numerous law-enforcement groups reciprocates his support for them? It is a potent message when Americans believe they are less safe than they were eight years ago.

The result of the mayhem and Trump’s boldness is that Obama and Clinton are playing defense. The president hoped to avoid saying anything Monday, no doubt viewing the attacks as a distraction from the lofty thoughts he wants to express at the UN, but events forced him out of his hidey hole...
More.

Americans' Trust in the Media Sinks to Record Low

Well, I'm glad.

I'm not glad trust is sinking. I'm just glad that folks are reporting the survey findings. The media's been a total disgrace lately. It's definitely worse than ever.

At Gallup, "Americans' Trust in Mass Media Sinks to New Low":
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- Americans' trust and confidence in the mass media "to report the news fully, accurately and fairly" has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history, with 32% saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media. This is down eight percentage points from last year...
Keep reading.

Monday, September 19, 2016