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March 2016

MY SAY: SILVIO CANTO JR. GETS IT RIGHT “ONLY TRUMP CAN ELECT HILLARY”

Back in 1992, I was having lunch with a bunch of disenchanted GOP friends. We were looking at October 1992 polls and desperately seeking something to get excited about. One guy said: “[Expletive deleted] Ross Perot.” He spoke for all of us!

I hope I’m not looking at October 2016 polls and saying, “[Expletive deleted] Trump!”

Go ahead and tell me that March polls are meaningless. Or that Megyn Kelly of Fox News hates Trump. Or whatever other excuse is going around these days.

The GOP will be running against the weakest candidate on the other side.

Let’s look at Clinton, according to Doug Schoen:
Mrs. Clinton appears to have a virtual lock on the Democratic nomination. She leads Bernie Sanders with 1,561 pledged and superdelegates to his 800 (though superdelegates can defect, as Mrs. Clinton found out in 2008). In the latest WSJ/NBC News poll she beats the GOP front-runner, Donald Trump, by 13 points. But dampening this good news for the Clinton campaign is a sobering reality: The candidate’s base of support is shrinking, and it may not be broad enough for her to win a national election. Mrs. Clinton retains the core of her husband’s presidential constituency, doing best among moderates—but in 2016 these are a diminishing portion of a Democratic base increasingly dominated by more-liberal voters. Bill Clinton drew support in large numbers from white men, independents and young people. Mrs. Clinton struggles with those groups.

Even among the ultimate Democratic Party voting bloc—blacks—she is showing signs of erosion both in support and enthusiasm for her candidacy. Since her 80% take of African-American voters in South Carolina and Mississippi in recent weeks, Mrs. Clinton has seen her black support in other states drop by about 10 percentage points. In Michigan, Mr. Sanders pulled in 30% of the African-American vote and broke even with Mrs. Clinton among black voters under age 45.
This trend continued on Tuesday: Mr. Sanders took 32% of black support in Missouri, 30% in Ohio and 29% in Illinois, highlighting a significant gap in Southern and Northern black support for the former first lady.
Mrs. Clinton is the weakest Democrat candidate since Governor Dukakis had the misfortune of running against V.P. Bush in 1988, or President Reagan’s third term.
Mrs. Clinton creates zero excitement, turnout is down, and supporters are scared that she will start coughing at a moment’s notice.
So why is she leading Trump by 13 points? Why is Trump down 6 in the RCP average?

The German Jew Who Became an Ottoman Pasha Mehmed Emin Pasha was born a Jew in Germany, converted to Christianity and then Islam on his way to being named a ruler of an Ottoman province. Gil Troy

The story of Mehmed Emin Pasha, born a Jew as Isaak Eduard Schnitzer and baptized as Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer, is a multiculturalist’s delight. This Jewish doctor who turned Christian, then Muslim, could be the cosmopolitan poster child, proof that we are all one and that distinctions don’t matter. But universalists beware; this pasha was no Zelig, fitting in chameleon-like at colorful historical moments. This shapeshifter adapted smoothly but stood out boldly, proving that the best way to contribute to the world is to root identities in particular cultures and act on core ideals.

Schnitzer was born in Oppeln, Silesia on March 28, 1840, into a German Jewish family that had already broken from the ghetto’s provinciality. Schnitzer’s father was a merchant, a proper German burgher wannabe. He embodied the Enlightenment delusion that we could, as John Lennon would sing, “all live together as one.” But Schnitzer’s father had made the classic Enlightenment deal with the devil. To become emancipated, to prosper, most Jews felt compelled to abandon much of Judaism—even though they would only be accepted marginally as Europeans.

When Isaak was 5, his father died and his mother ditched her people and purchased acceptance by marrying a Christian. Now baptized as a Lutheran, Eduard Carl Oscar Theodor Schnitzer grew up championing German nationalism as embodying Western humanism at its best. After studying at the universities of Breslau, Konigsberg, and Berlin, he became a physician, to use modern science to save lives.

Schnitzer was derailed temporarily when he failed to file his licensing paperwork on time and could not practice medicine. Ever-resilient, he left for Istanbul.

Arriving in Antivari in Montenegro along the way, he resumed his medical practice far away from German supervision. One of those annoying Europeans with a genius for language, he mastered Turkish, Albanian, and Greek, along with many of the standard Romance languages. This poly-lingual environment so suited him, he became the port’s quarantine officer, processing immigrants.
Always climbing, Schnitzer charmed his way into working for northern Albania’s governor, Ismail Hakki Pasha. In perhaps his creepiest move, Schnitzer returned to Germany in 1873, after his boss died, claiming the widow and children as his wife and kids. That arrangement ended abruptly, mysteriously, in 1875, leading to Schnitzer’s plunge into the Muslim world.

Germany’s Merkel to Voters: “No Change to Migration Policy” “Tectonic shift in political landscape of Germany” by Soeren Kern

Merkel’s migration policy is causing security mayhem in Germany, where mostly Muslim migrants are raping and assaulting women and children with virtual impunity.

The AfD was founded as a Eurosceptic party in 2013 by German economists advocating the abolition of the European single currency, the euro, and opposing financial bailouts of profligate eurozone countries such as Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. Since then, the leader of the AfD, Frauke Petry, has broadened the party’s initial focus on economics to immigration.

Other political and media elites are ramping up a months-long campaign to delegitimize AfD voters as: agitators, arsonists, far-right extremists, fascists, Nazis, populists and xenophobes.

Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel has called on German intelligence to begin monitoring the AfD, presumably in an effort to silence critics of the government’s migration policy. Gabriel has called for Germany to take in even more migrants by airlifting them into the country directly from the Middle East.

“It cannot be that after such an election result, the answer to the electorate is: everything will go on as before.” – Horst Seehofer, the head of the Christian Socialist Union (CSU), the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria.

“I expect the chancellor clearly to admit: ‘Yes, we have understood. We are going to return to the voters. Politics must move toward the voter, not the other way around. This is called democracy.'” – CSU politician Hans-Peter Uhl

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has vowed to continue her open-door migration policy — despite heavy losses in regional elections that were widely regarded as a referendum on that very policy.

Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) was defeated in two out of the three federal states voting on March 13. By contrast, the Alternative for Germany (AfD) — an upstart anti-establishment party campaigning against Merkel’s liberal migration policy — surged to double-digit results in all three states: Baden-Württemberg, Rhineland-Palatinate and Saxony-Anhalt.

The End of GOP Optimism By Rich Lowry

Marco Rubio’s speech suspending his campaign after his crushing loss in the Florida primary was a requiem for an entire style of Republican politics.

Rubio represented an upbeat, opportunity-oriented vein in the GOP that ran through George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism back to the late supply-sider Jack Kemp, who practically made a civic religion out of optimism and inclusivity.

Donald Trump has grabbed this Kempian tradition by the collar and frog-marched it from the room with all the delicacy of one of his security guards ejecting a troublesome protester from a rally.

Kemp, a former pro quarterback who was a congressman from Buffalo for years, was the chief proponent of the Reagan tax cuts. To read the recent biography of him by journalists Fred Barnes and Morton Kondracke, Jack Kemp: The Bleeding-Heart Conservative Who Changed America, is to be struck by Kemp’s touching naiveté by the standards of the 2016 GOP race.

Kemp eschewed personal attacks and opposed negative campaigning. He believed “the purpose of politics is not to defeat your opponent as much as it is to provide superior leadership and better ideas.” And the central idea was, always and everywhere, tax cuts.

Kemp wanted the GOP to be a “natural home of African-Americans.” He favored openhandedness on immigration. He cared deeply about the plight of the urban poor, and about what he called — long before Jeb Bush — “the right to rise.”

In foreign policy, he was a friend of freedom and stalwart advocate of human rights.

Kemp influenced the debate and a generation of conservatives, but his own flaws as a highly undisciplined candidate and the monomania with which he hewed to his ideas limited him as a candidate at the national level.

But Kempism lived on in George W. Bush, whose compassionate conservatism was latitudinarian on immigration and sought to win over minorities by softening conservatism’s edges.

Bush’s foremost domestic achievement was an enormous tax cut, and his Freedom Agenda was a Kemp-like advocacy of human rights on steroids.

Hillary’s E-Mailgate Woes Immune to Primary Wins By Deroy Murdock

Like the eye of a hurricane, Donald J. Trump almost magically keeps himself at the very center of attention, no matter what chaos surrounds him. This phenomenon and the relentless and exhausting drama of the Democratic and GOP presidential primaries largely have kept the eyes of the world off Hillary Clinton and the increasingly ominous developments in the E-mailgate scandal. Despite the former secretary of state’s impressive ballot-box victories, her ethical woes multiply.

The number of classified e-mails on Clinton’s private computer server totals 2,115. At her initial March 10, 2015, news conference on this fiasco, Clinton claimed that “I did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.” Actually, “no” such e-mails actually exceed by 99 the number of years since the birth of Christ.

If the first reports on this intelligence catastrophe indicated that Clinton’s server contained two thousand one hundred and fifteen classified e-mails, the Duchess of Chappaqua would have left her press conference in the back of a squad car.

Clinton’s server held at least 22 e-mails that are too Top Secret to be made public, even if redacted. Moreover, the Washington Post reports that Clinton’s server contained 104 dispatches in which “officials have determined that material Clinton herself wrote in the body of email messages is classified.”

The Post quoted a former senior functionary who is angered by today’s public display of e-mails that were sent securely and expected to remain quiet.

“I resent the fact that we’re in this situation,” the official said, “and we’re in this situation because of Hillary Clinton’s decision to use a private server.”

What John Adams Knew By Kevin D. Williamson —

There is a line from John Adams of which conservatives, particularly those of a moralistic bent, are fond: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.” The surrounding prose is quoted much less frequently, and it is stern stuff dealing with one of Adams’s great fears — one that is particularly relevant to this moment in our history.

John Adams hated democracy and he feared what was known in the language of the time as “passion.” Adams’s famous assessment: “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy; but while it lasts, it is more bloody than either.” Democracy, he wrote, “never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

If you are wondering why that pedantic conservative friend of yours corrects you every time you describe our form of government as democracy — “It’s a republic!” he will insist — that is why. Your pedantic conservative friend probably is supporting Ted Cruz. The democratic passions that so terrified Adams have filled the sails of Donald Trump.

At some point within the past few decades (it is difficult to identify the exact genesis) the rhetorical affectation of politicians’ presuming to speak for “We the People” became fashionable. Three words from the preamble to the Constitution came to stand in for a particular point of view and a particular set of assumptions present in both of our major national political tendencies. Molly Ivins, the shallow progressive polemicist, liked to thunder that “We the People don’t have a lobbyist!” She liked to call lobbyists “lobsters,” too, a half-joke that she, at least, never tired of. Dr. Ben Carson likes to draft “We the People” into his service. Sean Hannity is very fond of the phrase, and so-called conservative talk radio currently relies heavily on the assumption that the phrase is intended to communicate: that there exists on one side of a line a group of people called “Americans” and on the other side a group called “the Establishment,” and that “We the People” are getting screwed by “Them.”

A Hate That Has (Officially) No Name As expected, media and politicians play down latest Islamic terrorist attack in Canada. Stephen Brown

Last Monday, a man walked into a Canadian Armed Forces recruiting office in Toronto and began to attack the military personnel working there. After first assaulting the soldier stationed at the reception desk, he pulled out a knife and, while yelling “Allah told me to do this,” slashed two military workers who had come to their comrade’s assistance. Other center personnel then joined in the melee and subdued the attacker, Ayanle Hassan Ali, 27, a Montreal-born man of Somali descent, holding him for police.

The surprising thing about this attack is not that it took place. Islamic terrorist attacks are now so common worldwide that they are almost routine. And this one also did not garner much media attention internationally, probably because no one was killed.

But what was noteworthy about Monday’s attack is the growing, and annoying, tendency to downplay such crimes, omit the word terror in describing them as well as any connection the attacks may have to Islam.

The most conspicuous example of this was provided by Toronto’s police chief, Mark Saunders. At a news conference on the day of the attack, he refused to say what Ali was yelling while trying to murder Canadian military personnel.

The Mullahs’ Executions Reach Highest Level Since 1989 Killing in the name of Islam. Dr. Majid Rafizadeh

The Left made the argument that if international sanctions were lifted against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the country would open up politically and respect fundamental rights, international law and standards.

Nevertheless, the reality indicates that the ruling clerics are heading toward more radicalism, extremism, fundamentalism, and forceful implementation of Sharia and Shiite laws. The ruling mullahs seem to be proud that their country has hit the highest rate of execution since 1989. The official number shows that Iran perforned nearly two times more executions in 2015 in comparison to 2010 when the hardline president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was in office, as well as roughly 10 times more than the number of executions in 2005.

Approximately 1000 people were executed in 2015, according to the latest report from the United Nations investigator, Ahmed Shaheed, the special rapporteur for human rights in Iran. The unofficial number is definitely much higher.

The peak of the executions in 2015 was between April and June in which nearly 4 people were executed every day on average. Most of the executions were carried out in prisons located in urban areas, such as Ghezel Hesar and Rajai Shahr in Karaj, and Adel Abad in Shiraz, through various traditional methods.

Iran has surpassed China in the number of executions being carried out per capita. Most of the executions in Iran are being done by hanging. In addition to the alarming increase in executions, fundamental rights, including those for ethnic and religious minorities, appear to have regressed in 2015 as well.

Michael Cutler:Are DHS Leaders Seeking an MVP Award From ISIS? The day after the San Bernardino terror attack, why exactly did USCIS managers block a team of ICE agents from entering their facility?

I am certain that the headline for my article has you wondering if I may have lost my mind or am so determined to attract attention that I went “over the top.”

I can assure you that I am neither insane nor am I attempting to sensationalize my description of the events surrounding the alleged interaction between ICE agents and managers at USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) in which the ICE agents were blocked from entering the USCIS facilities and denied access to the relevant immigration files.

USCIS is charged with providing a wide array of immigration benefits through the adjudications process, to aliens present in the United States. This includes providing aliens with political asylum, conferring lawful immigrant status upon aliens, and providing aliens with United States citizenship through the naturalization process.

In a manner of speaking, USCIS is the locksmith to America’s front door. An alien who has been granted lawful immigrant status and issued an Alien Registration Receipt Card (Green Card) or has become a United States citizen, may travel in and out of the United States at will.

Before we go any further, I want you to make an indelible note in your mind: USCIS currently adjudicates more than 6 million applications each and every year and would be charged with providing unknown millions of illegal aliens with lawful status should any sort of “immigration reform” program be enacted.

The 9/11 Commission made it clear that immigration benefits were the key to the 9/11 terrorist attack and, indeed, as I have noted in previous articles, terrorists such as Faisal Shahzad, the “Times Square Bomber,” was naturalized roughly a year before he attempted to detonate a bomb concealed in an SUV parked at Times Square. The terrorist Tsarnaev brothers, who carried out the murderous rampage at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, had been granted political asylum along with other family member and become lawful immigrants. In fact, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who, having been found guilty of committing numerous terror-related crimes and now sits on death row, became a naturalized America shortly before he participated in that savage attack.

The Left’s Plan to Cut Loose a Million Prisoners The radicals’ assault on the rule of law — and on the institutions that keep Americans safe. Matthew Vadum

Radical left-wingers want to free half the nation’s prisoners –including many violent offenders– a move that would cause an upsurge in crime rates for decades to come.

To many of today’s leftists criminality itself is an illegitimate concept. The mindless chanting of the slogan “no one is illegal” at open-borders rallies is part of the same school of thought.

Spearheaded by the American Civil Liberties Union and bankrolled by radical speculator George Soros, the “end mass incarceration” movement wants to reduce the U.S. prison population by 50 percent within the next 10 to 15 years.

This specific push is called the “Cut50” project.

“We have the largest incarcerated population in the world despite the fact that we’re a democracy and that we value individual freedoms,” Alison Holcomb, national director of the ACLU Campaign to End Mass Incarceration told public radio station KUOW in Puget Sound, Wash.

“The overuse of our criminal justice system has resulted in expanding a caste, a second class of citizens that lose their right to vote, that won’t be able to get loans to go to school, that will probably have difficulty renting an apartment and that is not healthy for our society and it’s actually compromising our safety.”

Like Black Lives Matter supporter and Baltimore riot organizer DeRay Mckesson, Holcomb doesn’t care about property rights.

She doesn’t want thieves and robbers jailed even briefly. If someone steals property, “why is the response to put that person in a cage?” she said.

Holcomb’s comrades want to unleash more than a million inmates –including violent offenders– on American society.