Marco Rubio
“I do not believe that we have to destroy our economy in order to protect our environment. And especially what these programs are asking us to pass that will do nothing to help the environment, but will be devastating for our economy.”
Will he go as far as Rick Perry did and suggest we shut down the job killing, data falsifying, purveyor of junk science EPA?
One of the great scandals in the world of philanthropy is the fact that Mohandas K. Gandhi, the great apostle of nonviolence, was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which instead has gone to such figures as the murdering jihadist maniac Yasser Arafat and Barack Obama, who has spent part of his subsequent time in the White House conducting an illegal war in Libya, reinvading Iraq, and assassinating the occasional U.S. citizen.
Timing is everything, of course. The unhappy fact is that Mr. Gandhi was not an especially effective advocate of nonviolence, at home or abroad, and he reached the height of his celebrity at a time when the world was nose-deep in blood from the carnage of the Second World War. During much of that time (1939–43) the Nobel committee had the good taste to forgo offering peace prizes. Mr. Gandhi outlived the peace-price moratorium, but not by much, and a young Hindu radical who didn’t get the nonviolence message assassinated him in 1948 (no peace prize that year, either) in revenge for the violence-plagued partition of India, in which at least a half a million people died.
Sometimes, it just isn’t your year.
The diversity racket — and it is a racket — depends entirely upon keeping prestigious, powerful, and, above all, wealthy institutions in a state of political agitation and moral panic. It’s Hollywood’s turn this time around, and the manufactured controversy is the lack of black nominees for the top honors at the Academy Awards.
Several high-profile black actors, including Will Smith and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, announced that they would not attend this year’s Academy Awards, absenting themselves in protest. The black host of the ceremony, Chris Rock, will attend, as will the black president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Cheryl Boone Isaacs. Ice Cube, a black rapper and actor who is in the interesting position of having this year produced a well-regarded film about his own career starring his son as himself, scoffed at the controversy, with some appreciation for the fact that being a movie star is a pretty good life, regardless of whether one is celebrated at the very pinnacle of celebrity culture: “It’s like crying about not having enough icing on your cake,” Mr. Cube said. “It’s just ridiculous.”
Imagine that you own a large department store called Foggy Bottom. Your most frequent customer is a superbly connected globetrotter with some one million miles on her passport. She never uses a standard shopping basket like everyone else. Instead, she strolls in with her own gigantic, custom-made, black-leather handbag.
Quite often when this 68-year-old grandmother visits Foggy Bottom, you catch her shoplifting. Indeed, you have pried 1,340 pilfered items that magically tumbled into her black bag.
How does she get away with it? Whenever you call the police, she gives them the same excuse:
“I did not take anything marked with a price tag.”
You keep wondering, “Why don’t the cops arrest her already?”
The authorities seem to accept her unprecedented justification. But everyone believes she knows better: Just because a sweater lacks a price tag doesn’t make it free of charge.
Eventually, you learn that those price tags didn’t vanish by accident. While you tended to other patrons at Foggy Bottom, you missed members of this crafty lady’s entourage deliberately snipping price tags off the merchandise. That way, when she says, “I never walked off with anything that carried a price tag,” her flimsy rationale somehow seems marginally plausible — at least to those who want to accept it. Now, it slowly emerges, the whole thing was not a parade of pratfalls, but a conspiracy since her four-year-long crime spree began.
Having solved this mystery, at last, you call 911. You hope that law enforcement finally will haul this supercilious woman and her entire posse to jail. And yet you wonder: Will someone this powerful ever receive the equal justice she deserves?
“Then there’s the fact that D.C. handles snow about as well as Bernie Sanders handles questions about the Wu Tang Clan (“Mr. Sanders, how would you describe the totality of Ghostface Killah’s oeuvre?”).
Speaking of Sanders, some wag on Twitter noted that the best thing about the run on the grocery stores in blizzard-besieged D.C. is that it gave the Beltway crowd a sense of what it will be like under a Sanders administration. I don’t want to live under a socialist president, but a silver lining would be seeing all those MSNBC hosts waiting in line for toilet paper.
D.C.’s Collective-Action Problem
Part of the problem is that there’s a tragedy of the commons endemic to D.C. during its snow freak-outs. I’m not worried that we will starve to death in our home, our corpses eventually consumed by the cats (and the cats by the dogs). My wife is Alaskan. She can make six kinds of soup from snow.
But that is precisely the way many other Washingtonians think. And so they run to the supermarkets like the kids in Red Dawn and grab enough provisions to last them until spring. That leaves sane people with a dilemma: Do you run to the store, too, not out of fear of the snow, but out of concern that the deranged masses will clear the shelves?
Irritable Trump Syndrome
And then, of course, there’s Trump.
But before I get to him, I wonder if you caught what I did above. I said I didn’t want to indulge in Acela-corridor navel-gazing, and then I proceeded to spelunk into the very kind of Beltway omphaloskepsis I condemned.
I was, loosely speaking, flirting with apophasis there. Apophasis is a rhetorical device where you bring up something while denying or condemning it. (It shouldn’t be confused with aposiopesis, which is when you . . .)
For instance, you might say, “I do not think the fact that Hillary Clinton put our national security at risk just so she could hide her illegal communications from congressional oversight, journalists, and FOIA requests should be held against her.” Or you might say, “I have no doubt that Bill Clinton is telling the truth. Though I cannot for the life of me figure out why he was pantsless at 3:00 in the morning, trying to push that goat over the fence.”
Apophasis came up on Twitter the other day because Donald Trump tweeted: “I refuse to call Megyn Kelly a bimbo, because that would not be politically correct. Instead I will only call her a lightweight reporter!”
What Rich Lowry tartly labeled “the Trumpless Debate” exposed the fracture of the Republican party’s base with a clarity that the Donald’s presence would not have allowed.
For those of us in the commentariat, the evening was a joy. It was an exhibition of substance and seriousness, a night of lively exchanges where quality candidates took shots at each other that were hard but fair. The Fox News moderators were no wallflowers, but they were clearly determined to make the night about the contestants: Questions were succinct; interruptions were reserved for moments when candidates were unresponsive or in denial over inconvenient, incontestable facts. It was a glimpse, as David French put it, at “what might have been” — without the blaring Trumpet of snark and bully bravado, it was as if Henry Gondorff had never crashed the old boys’ poker game.
But the thing is: Most people who have a stake in the Republican race are not in the commentariat. They are the people who have been ill-served by the old boys. They are no longer impressed by slick-sounding policy wonkery because they are finally on to the charade: The candidates say one thing to get elected and then do very different things once they’ve been elected.
They like Trump precisely because of the wrench he has thrown in the works. He makes the pols and the press feel as powerless as the pols and the press have made them feel. He doesn’t care about the Beltway’s rules; Trump plays by his own and invites them, vicariously, to play along.
The U.S. Has No Global Strategy…The former defense secretary on U.S. gains forfeited in Iraq, America’s rudderless foreign policy and the ‘completely unrealistic’ Donald Trump.
Many Americans probably had misgivings when U.S. troops were withdrawn from Iraq in 2011, but even the most pessimistic must be surprised at how quickly things went south.
Turn on the TV news: Western Iraq, including the Sunni triangle that the U.S. once worked so hard to pacify, is in the hands of a terrorist group, Islamic State, radiating attacks as far as Paris, Jakarta and San Bernardino, Calif.
The battlefield where the U.S. spent most of its blood has become swept up into the chaos of next-door Syria. Refugees from the region are destabilizing Europe. Proxy forces, shadowy groups and national armies representing half a dozen countries are fighting on the ground and in the air. The world seems one incident away from World War III in the vacuum U.S. troops left behind—as when NATO member Turkey recently shot down a Russian jet.
Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates occasionally meets veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars in his travels. What their effort bought seldom comes up. “We don’t really talk about where we are today,” he says. “You have to assume it’s very painful for a Marine who lost a buddy in Fallujah to see an outfit like ISIS in charge of Fallujah again. Was the sacrifice worth it?”
Mr. Gates, along with President George W. Bush and Gen. David Petraeus, was a prosecutor of the troop surge, a decision unpopular even in the Pentagon to double down on the Iraq war in 2006. His 2014 memoir, “Duty,” which a New York Times reviewer called “one of the best Washington memoirs ever,” makes clear that the suffering of U.S. troops weighed more and more heavily on him as he served under President Bush and then re-upped under President Obama.
Today, if the mess in Iraq comes up, he tells those who served there, “You accomplished your mission. It was the Iraqis that squandered our victory.”
But Mr. Gates also believes the outcome could have been different if the U.S. had kept troops in place. Islamic State wouldn’t have spread its influence across the border from Syria. More important than firepower, he says, was having a four-star representative of the U.S. military present who could “bring Sunni and Kurdish and Shia leaders together, make them talk to each other. When that process disappeared, all the external brakes on Maliki”—Iraq’s then-Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, whom Mr. Gates blames for the unraveling—“disappeared.”
A U.K. court on Friday convicted the first British woman of joining Islamic State, 26-year-old Tareena Shakil, who traveled to Syria with her infant son and spent three months living with the militant group.
A jury, who heard that Ms. Shakil had once declared her wish “to be a martyr,” found her guilty of belonging to a terrorist organization and encouraging support for a proscribed group.
Ms. Shakil will be sentenced on Monday.
The case provides a rare account of how a Western woman came to be involved in Islamic State amid what authorities have said is a concerning surge in the number of females traveling from Europe to Syria and Iraq. It also sheds a light on the dilemma for authorities on how to treat such women when they return home: as victim or terrorist.
Ms. Shakil, of Burton-upon-Trent, a town in the English Midlands, was arrested by counterterrorist police shortly after her plane touched down at Heathrow airport last February. She told officers
But investigators weren’t convinced. Prosecutors told the court how a raft of evidence showed Ms. Shakil had self-radicalized even before leaving the country, and that her trip to Syria was the final stage in her plan to become a jihadist bride. In the weeks leading up to her departure, Ms. Shakil had become an ever more vocal online supporter of Islamic State online, said prosecutors. Farewell notes left for her family showed she had no intention of returning home, prosecutors said.
The State Department said it would launch its own investigation into whether top-secret information on Hillary Clinton’s personal email server was classified at the time it was sent or received—a dramatic reversal that comes just days before the Democratic presidential front-runner faces the first nominating contest in Iowa.
Department spokesman John Kirby said 22 documents containing highly classified information will be excluded entirely from the release of Mrs. Clinton’s archive. So far, more than 1,300 of Mrs. Clinton’s emails have been redacted, with portions blocked out, due to the presence of classified information, but this is the first example of emails being entirely withheld from public release.
Friday’s announcement is the first time State Department officials have said they have concerns about the classification level of some of the information contained on Mrs. Clinton’s server. Officials have previously said the redactions in the roughly 43,000 pages of her emails so far released were made for information that was classified only after the fact.
The Clinton campaign said the emails in question probably originated on the department’s unclassified system before they were ever shared with Mrs. Clinton.
Locked in a tight primary battle with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Mrs. Clinton now faces the possibility of another investigation, led by the department she ran, into whether she compromised sensitive or classified national-security information.
“We are importing Islamic extremism, Arab anti-Semitism, national and ethnic conflicts of other peoples, as well as a different understanding of society and law.” — From a leaked German intelligence document.
The mayor of Molenbeek, Belgium ignored a list she received, one month prior to the Paris attacks, “with the names and addresses of more than 80 people suspected as Islamic militants living in her area,” according to the New York Times. “What was I supposed to do about them? It is not my job to track possible terrorists,” Mayor Schepmans said.
In October 2015, Andrew Parker, director general of Britain’s Security Service, said that the “scale and tempo” of the danger to the UK is now at a level he has not seen in his 32-year career. British police are monitoring over 3,000 homegrown Islamist extremists willing to carry out attacks on the UK.
The head of the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST), Benedicte Bjørnland, was recently a participating guest at a security conference in Sweden, where she warned against further Muslim immigration.
One cannot,” she said, “assume that new arrivals will automatically adapt to the norms and rules of Norwegian society. Furthermore, new arrivals are not homogenous and can bring ethnic and religious strife with them… If parallel societies, radicalization and extremist environments emerge in the long run,” she added, “We will have challenges as a security service.”
Delta Flight Attendants Brawl at 37,000 Feet J. Christian Adams
A Delta Air Lines flight from Los Angeles to Minneapolis had to make an unscheduled landing in Utah because two flight female flight attendants got into a fistfight at 37,000 feet.
The Boeing 757 was south of Salt Lake City when the fist fight broke out between Delta employees servicing the flight. The pilot asked air traffic control for a diversion to Salt Lake City because he “wanted to hear from his flight attendants,” according to the Aviation Herald. Delta Air Lines Flight 2598 then diverted to Salt Lake City and safely landed.
