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For Trump! Against the Disloyalists! By Jared E. Peterson

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

At last it’s beyond dispute: This time the Republican Party’s presidential nominee is someone chosen by full throated roar from its augmented voter base, not by the timid and failed leadership that’s gripped the Party since Reagan.

And just as importantly, despite furious howls from “We prefer Hillary” turncoats scattered among Republican elites and conservative intellectuals, it’s now also indisputable that Donald Trump is fighting for the major part of the Republican Party and American conservatism’s Reagan agenda: unapologetic patriotism and belief in American exceptionalism, a freer, less regulated economy, a Supreme Court that respects the Constitution, unrestricted freedom of expression, unambiguous condemnation of all domestic violence, especially against the police, and a muscular defense of America, its people and allies against increasingly murderous enemies.

Not good enough, say the allegedly Republican and conservative turncoats … we prefer Hillary Clinton and all that comes with her.

An important aside: In law as in logic, the absolutely certain consequences of actions that are known to the actor beforehand … are consequences that he intends. If he fires an automatic weapon into a crowd, he will not be heard to say he did not intend to kill or seriously wound.

Those members of the Republican elite now denouncing Donald Trump and proclaiming he will not get their votes, or failing to endorse and campaign for him when by resume they would be expected to, are actions they know — to an absolute certainty — will help elect Hillary Clinton.

Thus, the entire gaggle of Republican and conservative disloyalists — from former presidents and failed presidential candidates all the way down to obscure scribblers — are intentionally working for the election of Hillary Clinton and the now radical Left Democratic Party.

If Hillary Clinton is elected, especially if by a narrow vote, the turncoat disloyalists will forever own all of the utterly predictable consequences of her Leftist presidency (see below for a partial list).

The reasons for this astonishing betrayal of their own voter base? A mixture of motives is on display. Much social and intellectual snobbery, selfish wound licking, and sinecure protecting are all unsuccessfully seeking cover behind alleged issue or character criticisms.

The soreheads’ issue gripes with Trump focus on those positions that indisputably have expanded the potential voter base of the Republican Party: In addition to embracing much of core conservatism and Republicanism, Trump has responded favorably to two pleas from huge and long-standing majorities of Republican and conservative voters — and from large numbers of working and middle class Americans who are neither:

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AMERICA’S ECONOMY IS CARTELIZED, CORRUPT, AND ANTI-COMPETITIVE BY DAVID GOLDMAN

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

Under the title “Rotting-Flesh Reaganism,” R. R. Reno argues that Reagan’s campaign for economic freedom “made sense in 1980, a great deal of sense. But we’re in 2016 now, and we’re no longer suffering under suffocating collectivism and clotted, complacent capitalism. . . . The politics of freedom is losing its salience.”

It surely is the case that the old Reagan message has less purchase now than it did a quarter-century ago. The word “entrepreneurship” hardly was spoken during the recent Republican primaries. That is disturbing, because the empirical evidence argues strongly that today’s capitalism is more “clotted” and more “complacent” than at any time for which we have data.

Here are some parameters that show just how cartelized the American economy has become:

First, and most alarming, startup businesses contributed virtually zero new jobs during the post-2009 employment recovery. Nearly all the employment growth since the depth of the Great Depression came among the 1,500 largest American public companies by market capitalization. In a February study for Asia Times, I showed that the reported employment growth of the S&P 1,500 companies was nearly identical to the total increase in payroll employment reported by the Bureau of Labor statistics during the past seven years.

That is a drastic and unprecedented reversal of historic patterns. As I observed in the Asia Timesstudy, “Economists from the US Census Bureau and the University of Maryland showed in a 2014 study that startup firms created an average of 2.9 million jobs a year between 1980 and 2010—twice the 1.4 million average increase in employment. In other words, startups created 2.9 million jobs a year while established firms lost 1.5 million jobs a year.”

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Bolívar Hats Were All the Rage European powers lost their hold on the New World during the Napoleonic wars. As colonies suddenly broke away, Americans were thrilled. By Fergus M. Bordewich

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

The presidency of James Monroe is often recalled as a period of political quiescence between the heroic age of the Founders and the era of muscular national expansion that followed him. Of course, his presidency is mostly remembered for the Monroe Doctrine. Proclaimed in 1823, it declared that the United States would consider any European action against the newly independent states of the Americas as an affront to itself.

Beneath the surface, the Monroe years and the decade that preceded them—roughly, 1810 to 1825—were anything but placid, at least with respect to Americans’ political discovery of Latin America. The turbulent visions and new ideological affinities of this period are the focus of Caitlin Fitz’s superb “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions.” Ms. Fitz, a history professor at Northwestern University, argues that the Monroe era not only laid the foundation for U.S. policy toward Latin America but shaped North Americans’ ideas about the place of the United States in the world. It is a fascinating and often surprising story.

“Our Sister Republics” is not a history of Latin America’s revolutions, although Ms. Fitz tells us enough to enable us to distinguish the fleeting Republic of Pernambuco from the new regimes in Buenos Aires or Caracas. Rather, she focuses on North Americans’ passionate, if short-lived, identification with the aspirations of their South American neighbors.As instructive as Ms. Fitz’s narrative is, it is also a pleasure to read. She has a gift for the sparkling phrase that both enchants and illuminates. North American newspapers were “foreign agents’ strongest weapons, their pages scraping away at Portuguese authority with the accumulated force of a thousand paper cuts.” News of revolutions was carried by “merchants, sea captains, and other international men of motion.” Monroe, in the weeks before proclaiming his doctrine, sat “in Washington’s crisp autumn, holding foreign policy in his thoughts like a jeweler appraising a diamond, turning it around, inspecting it from all sides.” It is a rare historian who can bring politics alive with such verve.

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Priest Dead, Two Attackers Killed After Assault on Church in Normandy, France Investigators are treating the assault as a terror attack, Interior Ministry spokesman saysBy Noemie Bisserbe and Inti Landauro

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

A priest was killed and another person was seriously wounded in an attack on a church in a northern French town, police said Tuesday.

Two men entered the church in Saint Etienne du Rouvray in Normandy and took five hostages, including the priest, who was found with his throat cut, police said.

Police surrounded the church and shot the two men as they exited the building, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry said.

The assault is being treated as a terror attack by investigators, said Paris prosecutors in a statement.

France’s President Francois Hollande and Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve are on their way to the small town where the attack took place, government officials said.

The attack comes less than two weeks after the killing of 84 people assembled on France’s Bastille day in Nice on the French Riviera.

This is a developing story and will be updated shortly.

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ISIS Suicide Bombing Sets Germany on Edge Series of attacks over past week add new fuel to debate over migrants and security By Anton Troianovski and Ruth Bender And Todd Buell

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

Terror militia Islamic State on Monday claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in southern Germany—the latest in a string of attacks that have shattered the country’s sense of calm and stoked tensions over accepting migrants.

The Sunday night blast that injured 15 people outside a concert venue in the Bavarian town of Ansbach was the second attack to be claimed by Islamic State here in a week and the first jihadist suicide bombing in the country.

The bomber was a 27-year-old Syrian asylum applicant identified by authorities as Mohammad D., who had been in Germany for about two years but was facing deportation. Authorities said he had pledged allegiance to Islamic State’s leader in a video found on his smartphone.
ENLARGE

The revelations focused more attention on the security implications of the more than a million refugees and migrants who arrived in the last year-and-a-half, and raised pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel to ramp up domestic security.

“It is clear that with these attacks in quick succession, the worries and fears in our population will grow,” said Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Herrmann, whose conservative Christian Social Union is allied with Ms. Merkel but has called on her to limit the number of asylum applicants.

The run of violence began July 18 when a teenager who had registered as an Afghan refugee injured five people with an ax in Würzburg, an attack also claimed by Islamic State.

On Friday, an 18-year-old Iranian-German who officials say was obsessed with mass shootings went on a shooting spree in Munich, killing nine. And on Sunday, a 21-year-old Syrian asylum applicant killed a 45-year-old Polish woman with a large knife after what police suspected was a personal dispute.

Investigators said the Ansbach attacker, whose surname was withheld under German privacy law, came from Aleppo in Syria and appeared to have war wounds, suggesting he had military experience.

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Japan Knife Attack at Facility for Disabled Kills at Least 19 The attack is one of the worst mass murders in Japan in recent decades By Eleanor Warnock and Mitsuru Obe

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

SAGAMIHARA, Japan—A man broke into a residence for disabled adults outside Tokyo early Tuesday morning and stabbed to death 19 people, authorities said, one of the worst mass murders in recent decades in a country known for its low crime rate.Officials at the facility described the 26-year-old suspect, Satoshi Uematsu, as a troubled former employee who quit in February of this year after being warned to stop making abusive comments about the severely disabled people living thereThey said Mr. Uematsu broke a window in the middle of the night to gain entrance to the home, then tied up some of the caregivers before attacking dozens of residents with a knife.

Top government spokesman Yoshihide Suga said Mr. Uematsu surrendered himself to police shortly afterward and was arrested. Footage from a security camera aired on local television showed a person who appeared to be Mr. Uematsu returning to his car parked outside the home at about 2:50 a.m. and driving off. Public broadcaster NHK said Mr. Uematsu drove to a nearby police station to turn himself in.

Mr. Uematsu appears to have given a warning that he planned to kill disabled people.

A Japanese parliament official said a man believed to be Mr. Uematsu visited Parliament on Feb. 15 and hand-delivered a letter addressed to the lower-house speaker. The official declined to reveal its contents, but Kyodo News quoted Mr. Uematsu as writing in the letter that he wanted to carry out “euthanasia” on severely disabled people “to revitalize the global economy and prevent World War III.”

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The Democrats’ Second Email Problem Hacked messages showing the party connived against Sanders have sent his fans in Philly into a tizzy.By Allysia Finley

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

Donald Trump got a post-convention gift Friday when WikiLeaks released a trove of hacked emails that showed Democratic National Committee leaders conniving against Bernie Sanders.Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz disparaged Mr. Sanders’s party loyalty in one email and called his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, a “damn liar.” The party’s CFO, Brad Marshall, suggested trying to make an issue of the Vermonter’s religion: “Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist.” Amy Dacey, the party’s CEO, replied: “AMEN.”

It’s hardly news that the Democratic machine assisted Hillary Clinton throughout the primary. The party scheduled debates at times likely to draw few viewers—for instance, Sunday night at 9 p.m. Still, it’s bracing to see the political cynicism lain out in black and white.

The uproar cost Ms. Wasserman Schultz her job, as the chairwoman announced she will step down at the end of the convention. She leaves after having accomplished her mission of nominating Mrs. Clinton, for which she is being rewarded with a titular position as head of the Clinton campaign’s “50-state program” to elect Democrats nationwide.

At first the party establishment expressed remorse only that the improper collusion was exposed. Mr. Marshall, the CFO, apologized Saturday. “I deeply regret,” he wrote in a post on Facebook, “that my insensitive, emotional emails would cause embarrassment to the DNC.” The following day, after Ms. Wasserman Schultz announced her resignation, President Obama lauded her service, saying that “her fundraising and organizing skills were matched only by her passion, her commitment and her warmth.” Mrs. Clinton thanked her “longtime friend” for “getting the Democratic Party to this year’s historic convention.”

Meantime, Team Clinton is using Russian hackers as a diversion. “Sources are saying the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually helping Donald Trump,” campaign manager Robby Mook said. Campaign Chairman John Podesta sensed “a kind of bromance going on between Putin and Trump, which is distinct from this leak.”

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Putin and Those Democratic Emails Clinton blames Russia for the DNC leak. Pre-emptive inoculation?

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

Here’s the last word Democrats wanted to hear at their Philadelphia convention this week: emails. But there it was after WikiLeaks released 20,000 internal emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee revealing, among other things, that party officials had favored Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.

That wasn’t news, but it gave the Sanders legions a new opening to vent their frustration with the establishment. Their fury brought down Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the party chair, who on Sunday announced her resignation at the end of the convention but by Monday had been strong-armed by the Clinton campaign to abandon any convention role.

Remember those Casualties of Bill (Clinton) from the 1990s? Ms. Wasserman Schultz is the first Casualty of Hillary in this Clinton comeback. She had to go for the sake of party unity but also because the DNC emails remind Americans of another batch of emails, those belonging to the former Secretary of State.

On that score, it was startling to hear the Clinton campaign respond to the email leak by blaming Russia. Campaign manager Robby Mook accused Russian “state actors” of divulging the emails for “the purpose of helping Donald Trump,” and even suggested several pro-Russian provisions in the recent GOP platform were behind the leak. The media is now noting that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort once worked for a Vladimir Putin crony.

Nothing is beyond Mr. Putin, especially since he is already trying to influence European elections. His allies are bankrolling France’s National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, they supported Britain’s exit from the European Union and fabricated stories this spring to undercut Chancellor Angela Merkel in regional elections. Vlad the Election Impaler might well prefer Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, even if Mrs. Clinton was an architect of President Obama’s 2009 “reset” with Russia.

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Is Europe Helpless? A civilization that believes in nothing will ultimately submit to anything. Bret Stephens

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

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?

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.

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Germany: Christian Names for Muslim Migrants? by Soeren Kern

Posted By on July 26th, 2016

“The United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. … I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.” — Ruprecht Polenz, former secretary general of Germany’s ruling Christian Democratic Union.

Non-Muslim immigrants generally choose traditional German names for their children to facilitate their integration into German society. By contrast, Muslim immigrants almost invariably choose traditional Arabic or Turkish names, presumably to prevent their integration into German society. A 2006 study found that more than 90% of Turkish parents give their German-born children Turkish first names.

A 2016 study found that 32% of ethnic Turks in Germany agree that “Muslims should strive to return to a societal order such as that in the time of Mohammed.” More than one-third believe that “only Islam is able to solve the problems of our times.” One-fifth agree that “the threat which the West poses to Islam justifies violence.” One-quarter believe that “Muslims should not shake the hand of a member of the opposite sex.”

Muslim migrants in Germany who feel discriminated against should be given the right to change their legal names to Christian-sounding ones, according to a senior German politician.

The latest innovation in German multiculturalism is being championed by Ruprecht Polenz, a former secretary general of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He believes the German law which regulates name changes (Namensrecht) should be amended to make it easier for men named Mohammed to become Martin and women named Aisha to become Andrea.

German law generally does not allow foreigners to change their names to German ones, and German courts rarely approve such petitions. By custom and practice, German names are only for Germans.

According to Polenz, who served as a member of parliament for nearly two decades, the law in its current form is “ignorant” and should be changed:

“An ignorant law: the United States is full of anglicized German names, from Smith to Steinway, from Miller to Schwartz. The reason: integration was made easier. It no longer appeared as though a family was not from the USA. I think that German citizens of foreign origin should also have this possibility.”