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When To Whip A Virgin: Danish Imam tells (video)

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

No, it’s not one of those kinky sex videos.

It’s an imam, and a prominent one at that (apparently), in one of those former Viking lands that seem set on committing cultural suicide and taking the rest of Europe down with them.

He’s explaining to the female of the species the mandatory punishments the Religion of Peace metes out to married women on the one hand and virgins on the other if they should have the temerity to leave said creed.

Remember, this is not a lecture in some Middle Eastern hellhole.

It is a lecture in one of the nation states of northern Europe.

This is Danelaw, but not as King Knut knew it.

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Osama bin Laden, Lefty Friend of the Planet By Michael Walsh

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

As if we needed another reason to despise the Saudi Arabian terrorist, Osama bin Laden:

Osama bin Laden wrote a letter calling on the American people to help President Barack Obama fight “catastrophic” climate change and “save humanity,” in the latest evidence of his worries about environmental issues, newly released documents show.

The letter was among materials that were seized in the May 2, 2011, US raid on bin Laden’s hideout in Pakistan that killed the al Qaeda chief and which were released on Tuesday by the Obama administration. The undated, unsigned letter “to the American people,” which US intelligence officials attributed to bin Laden, appeared to have been written shortly after Obama began his first term in 2009, based on the letter’s references to events.

Bin Laden’s preoccupation with climate change also emerged as a theme in the first tranche of documents from the raid that was declassified in May 2015, as well as in an audio recording released via the al Jazeera network in January 2010.

You can’t make this stuff up. But wait — there’s more!

In the rambling letter made public Tuesday, bin Laden blamed the 2007-8 US financial crisis on corporate control of capital and corporate lobbyists, and the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He called on Americans to launch “a great revolution for freedom” to liberate the US president from those influences. That would enable Obama to make “a rational decision to save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its destiny,” bin Laden continued.

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UN Security Council Passes U.S.-China Resolution on North Korea By Bridget Johnson (That’ll learn em!)

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

The UN Security Council today unanimously passed a resolution penned by the United States and China to expand sanctions on North Korea.

In addition to broadening the list of people and entities subject to sanctions, the resolution stipulates that countries accepting cargo from North Korea or heading to the reclusive country will have to inspect all shipments. New banned items include luxury swag that Kim Jong-un enjoys.

Under the resolution, North Korea is not supposed to use any revenue from energy sales to fund its nuclear program. This would be nearly impossible to enforce, and Pyongyang is notorious for thumbing its nose at UNSC resolutions.

The Security Council began negotiations a few weeks ago on “measures in response to these dangerous and serious violations” of North Korea’s latest missile launch.

President Obama said in a statement that the resolution “imposes significant costs on the DPRK in response to its January 6 nuclear test and February 7 missile launch.”

“This resolution levies strong new sanctions aimed at halting Pyongyang’s efforts to advance its weapons of mass destruction programs,” Obama said. “I have consistently said that the DPRK would face consequences for its actions, and I welcome this resolution as a firm, united, and appropriate response by the international community to the DPRK’s recent provocations that flagrantly violated multiple Security Council resolutions.”

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What’s a Conservative to Do? By Andrew Klavan

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

“More thoughtful G.O.P. voices argue that risking a bad Supreme Court nominee from Trump is better than guaranteeing a bad one from Hillary. And also: a Trump beholden to conservative voters is better than a Hillary at odds with them. But it won’t wash. American politics is a binary game, I know. Normally, I’m for the Buckley rule: go for the most conservative candidate you can get elected. But a dishonest big-government bully with a tendency to urge his crowds to violence exists nowhere on the spectrum of conservatism as I understand it.”

“As Donald Trump Rolls Up Victories, the G.O.P. Split Widens to a Chasm,” read the headline on the post-Super Tuesday analysis in the New York Times, a former newspaper. The article was typical of the Times’ modern work: a house of facts with a family of lies living inside. The gloating lede — “Democrats are falling in line. Republicans are falling apart” — was fair enough. It was even hard to argue with the accompanying front-page photo. It nastily captured Trump wearing a particularly supercilious smirk — and okay, fine; though I doubt any equally representative photos of a cackling, screeching Hillary Clinton have made the paper on any page.

But throughout the rest of the piece was scattered the usual Timestuff: dishonest leftist assertions casually tossed off as fact. The Republicans’ unwillingness to hold hearings on a replacement for Justice Scalia is a tactical error because it has energized the leftist base. (Ha.) The Obama economy is improving and unemployment is low. (That’s not what the Democrat candidates say.) Obama has a “nearly 50 percent” approval rating. (It’s closer to 46 percent, but more importantly he has plunged the nation into divisive rancor and racial violence we haven’t seen in years.)

But the worst was this:

Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College professor and the author of a new history of the Republican Party, predicts a violent rupture that cleaves the party in two: a hard-line conservatism, as embodied by Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Mr. Trump, and an old-fashioned strain of moderate Republicanism that recalls Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower and Nelson Rockefeller.

If Professor Richardson thinks Donald Trump is a hard-line conservative, she should no more be writing about Republicans than I should be writing about quantum mechanics. Because she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

What is splitting the Republican Party in two is the very fact that Trump is not a conservative. He favors government health care. He favors disastrous protectionism. He favors less freedom of speech in the form of new libel laws making it easier for him to sue those who criticize him. He sends friendly signals to the haters of blacks and Jews. Plus he’s a foul-mouthed thug who treats women like dirt — which may be fine for the Clintons, but is unacceptable behavior in any conservative circle I’ve ever been in.

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Cruz, not Rubio, is the alternative to Trump By Robert A. J. Gagnon see note please

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

I still like Rubio but this is a persuasive column…..because I still loathe Trump….more than ever….rsk

“Trump will destroy first the Republican Party and then, with a likely Democratic victory, the nation. It’s now or never. Let all who recognize the train wreck that is Donald Trump unite. Cruz is not perfect. He’s not the Messiah (that role is already taken). But he has the brains, the conviction, and the guts to lead our nation in the direction that we want it to go and that the country needs it to go.”

With almost all the votes counted on Super Tuesday, Cruz finished with 2.5 million votes, compared to Rubio’s 1.9 million and Trump’s 2.9 million. Cruz bettered Rubio by 600,000 votes, which makes him the candidate around which other Republicans opposed to Trump need to coalesce. The latest polls before Super Tuesday indicated that Texas would be a close race between Cruz and Trump, yet Cruz ended up crushing Trump by 17 percentage points and nearly half a million votes. Trump was expected to beat Cruz in Oklahoma – so the latest polls told us. Yet Cruz defeated Trump decisively there. He also won the small-population state of Alaska.

What of Rubio? He did better in Virginia than polls predicted but still finished second to Trump. He won one primary, Minnesota, beating Cruz by only 8,000 votes. He did overtake Cruz for second place in Georgia, but only by less than one percent. He finished a distant third to Trump and Kasich in tiny Vermont and third to the same pair in Massachusetts. Cruz finished ahead of Rubio everywhere else, with second-place finishes in Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, in addition to his three victories.

In the latest Florida poll (Feb. 26), Trump was leading Rubio in his home state of Florida by 20 percentage points. If Rubio cannot carry even his own home state, and that by a wide margin (as Cruz crushed Trump in his own home state), he stands no chance of beating Trump. It is time to face the math. It is time for Rubio supporters to come around to Ted Cruz as the only candidate left who both respects our values and can beat Trump. Let’s put our differences aside and make this a two-person race, before it is too late.

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French Diplomacy on ‘Palestine’ Will Run Aground By Shoshana Bryen

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

France is proposing to lead the Middle East Quartet on a new foray into Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy. This is understandable as a part of French politics. The Palestinians, however, are setting up to be at least as difficult a client for France as they have ever been for the U.S.

Of the members of the P5+1 negotiating the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran last summer, France was least happy with the result and said so publicly. Since President Obama needed all five other nations to sign onto the deal, he bowed to a previously expressed French interest in midwifing a Palestinian state in exchange for French acquiescence on Iran.

Aside from its traditional delusions of influence in the Middle East, France wanted to appease its large, unassimilated, unhappy, and increasingly violent Muslim population, which is predominantly Sunni with no love for Iran – and not much love for the French State. France is also part of the anti-Sunni ISIS coalition, which angers parts of the French Muslim population as well. President François Hollande perhaps thought he could buy time or space by inserting himself in the issue of Palestinian statehood – not resolving the problems that bedevil Israelis and Palestinians, but just producing a Palestinian state.

Hollande & Co. will run afoul of two trends: one French, one Palestinian. First, France’s Muslim population, while increasingly anti-Jewish, is not particularly interested in a Palestinian state. Watching Israel sold down the river by a Western country may have some visceral appeal, but it will not let Hollande off the hook for France’s perceived sins against its Muslim population or the Sunni Muslim cause. Second, France is offering the Palestinian Authority nothing the Palestinians have not previously rejected – and will reject this time as well for the same reasons.

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Trump Already Is a Third Party Candidate By G. Murphy Donovan

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

Questions have dogged the Donald Trump campaign from the start. Who is this guy? What does he believe? What are his party loyalties? And finally, will Trump run as a third party candidate if Republicans try to torpedo his quest for the White House?

Third Party?

Let’s start with the easiest question first. Donald Trump has already staged a coup. He is the third party candidate, albeit campaigning under a Republican guidon. Given his success up to this point, Trump seems to have outmaneuvered his critics on all sides. Indeed, he has hijacked a major political party and is now reshaping it to his purposes. Trump believes that he has the answer to national malaise and he is willing to pay his own way to the levers of power.

Self-funding alone makes Trump revolutionary. He’s “all in” to resuscitate his vision of the American dream.

Say what you will about Trump, but the phenomenon is vintage Americana. He has reinvented himself, reinvented political campaigns, reinvented American politics, and may be on the way to reinventing the country too. Trump is a third party, a party of one until done.

Now, to those other questions.

Who is Trump?

Defining Donald Trump is best done by saying what he is not. He is not a Republican, nor a Democrat. He is not a liberal, nor a conservative. And surely, he is not a lawyer. Not that any of the usual branding means much these days.

Most traditional labels are now captured in a few words: call them elites, establishment, or the usual suspects. Personalize the left as Chris Matthews or the right as George Will; it really doesn’t much matter. Both represent varieties of tired platitudes.

Trump isn’t running against, or for, any labels or specific ideology. He’s running against “business as usual,” or for an opportunity to make things work again. Trump wants to win first and sift the details later. Whether or not he is the guy to fix Washington is arguable, but none of the traditional pigeonholes apply in his case.

For the moment, you could call Trump a pragmatic populist. If business models are relevant, he probably thinks that he can build a better mousetrap. If his career and campaign to date is evidence, the Donald is pretty good at building, period.

Lawyers have dominated American politics now for generations. The time may be right to give a cocky guy who has had a real job, and concrete accomplishments, a shot at fixing decades of domestic and foreign policy folly. The Beltway status quo is Trump’s real target in 2016.

What does He Believe?

At heart, Donald Trump probably believes in three things: God, country, and Donald Trump. Surely God and America have been good to him and his family. Why should he not believe in himself?

Trump had the opportunity the other day to shame a pandering prelate in Mexico, a papal hypocrite — and he didn’t. Such restraint might be the fear of God — or intimations of a lighter touch once the electoral battles are done.

If Trump picks a fight with a church, it will not be Christians or Jews in any case. Francis and Bibi, like Trump, are both fond of walls too. And bye-the-by, Trump could pay for his southern wall with tariffs, applying a tax on the $20-some billion in annual remittances to Mexico, or withholding foreign aid from Mexico.

Vicente Fox and other scions of dystopic narco-states south of the border should be careful about “f—king walls” and related obscenities. If Trump becomes president, Vicente may have an open-ended opportunity to “foxtrot” himself and Mexico on a grand scale.

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New Migrant Crisis Flares in Greece Thirty thousand stranded in Greece as EU tries to halt inflow from Middle East, South Asia and Africa By Nektaria Stamouli

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

IDOMENI, Greece—A clampdown along Balkan borders has left 30,000 migrants trapped in Greece, marking a new stage in the humanitarian crisis swamping Europe.

Countries farther up the migration trail, from Macedonia to Austria, are now letting in only a few hundred a day, and sometimes no one.

Allowing migrants to be stranded in Greece is considered the EU’s last option to halt the relentless inflow of people from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. More and more EU governments have lost faith in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s policy of stopping irregular migrants at Turkey, spreading bona fide refugees around the EU, and keeping Europe’s internal borders open.

Ms. Merkel warned this week of “chaos” in Greece, but other European Union leaders say there is no alternative to shutting down the Balkan migration route.

“The first priority is to rapidly stem the flows,” European Council President Donald Tusk said on Wednesday while visiting Croatia, a country on the now-constricted Balkan trail. Europe’s monthslong furor over migration “is testing our Union to the limit,” Mr. Tusk said.

Senior EU officials argue that a humanitarian crisis in Greece, ameliorated with EU money, would help deter further migrants from traveling to Europe. On Wednesday, the EU executive in Brussels said it could send Greece €300 million ($326 million) quickly, from a new €700 million emergency fund for the bloc.
Greece is rapidly becoming a pressure cooker. Refugees and other migrants are growing frustrated and angry. Hundreds tried to storm the border with Macedonia on Monday, only to be driven back with tear gas. The presence of riot police and military vehicles is growing daily. Authorities are hastily building a network of camps around the country, hoping to spread the trapped migrants and avoid major unrest. CONTINUE TO SITE

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Trump’s Pottery Barn GOP Even as he wins, GOP resistance to his nomination builds.

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/trumps-pottery-barn-gop-1456965435

Donald Trump claims to have opposed the Iraq war before opposition was fashionable. So perhaps he won’t mind if we apply Colin Powell’s adaptation of the Pottery Barn rule to Mr. Trump’s attempted takeover of the Republican Party: If you break it, you bought it.

The rule comes to mind after examining the paradox of Super Tuesday’s primary results: Mr. Trump was the clear winner and his support is solidifying, but Republican resistance to his candidacy is mounting at the same time. A front-runner at this stage of the primaries would normally be expanding and consolidating his party support, as Hillary Clinton is among Democrats. This is what happened in every other recent GOP presidential race.

Mr. Trump is winning, but his Super Tuesday performance was less than commanding. He generally underperformed his percentages in the pre-election polls, and he cracked the 40% mark in only two states—Massachusetts and Alabama. Overall he averaged about 35% of the vote, lower than his totals in Nevada and about what he received in New Hampshire. Yet the same media sages who said he could never win now say the race is over.
One possible explanation is that the attacks on Mr. Trump that began in earnest only late last week have begun to break through to voters. In two of Mr. Trump’s weakest states, Oklahoma (28% and second place) and Arkansas (33% and a narrow first), the Club for Growth ran ads against him.CONTINUE AT SITE

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Helplessly watching Trump’s rise, world reacts with dread, confusion.

Posted By on March 3rd, 2016

From Mexico to India to Israel, pundits, papers and people on the street unite in astonishment that GOP juggernaut could become world leader By John-Thor Dahlburg
BRUSSELS (AP) — Following Donald Trump’s breathtaking string of Super Tuesday victories, politicians, editorial writers and ordinary people worldwide were coming to grips Wednesday with the growing possibility the brash New York billionaire might become America’s next president –a thought that aroused widespread befuddlement and a good deal of horror.

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“The Trump candidacy has opened the door to madness: for the unthinkable to happen, a bad joke to become reality,” German business daily Handelsblatt wrote in a commentary for its Thursday edition. “What looked grotesque must now be discussed seriously.”

There was also glee from some Russian commentators at how American politics is being turned topsy-turvy in 2016. And in Latin America, Ecuador’s president predicted a Trump win could boomerang and become a blessing to the continent’s left.

However, the dominant reaction overseas to the effective collapse of the Republican Party establishment in the face of the Trump Train appeared to be jaw-dropping astonishment, mixed with dread at what may lie ahead.

“The meteoric rise of the New York magnate has left half the planet dumbfounded,” wrote columnist Andrea Rizzi in Spain’s leading newspaper, El Pais.

“To consider Donald Trump a political clown would be a severe misconception,” said another European daily, Salzburger Nachrichten. If Trump is elected to the White House, the Austrian paper predicted, his ideas “would bring major dangers for the USA and the world … basically a nationalist-chauvinist policy that would make America not great but ugly, and risk the stability of the international order.”

Eytan Gilboa, an expert on US-Israeli relations at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, said the best word to describe Israeli feelings about Trump is “confusion.”

There are certain parts of him that Israelis can relate to, such as his aversion to political correctness, his tough stance on Islamic terrorism and his call for a wall with Mexico to provide security, Gilboa said.

But others have been particularly jarring to Israelis, such as comments about Jews that many consider insensitive and his derision of US Sen. John McCain’s captivity in Vietnam.

“This is something that every Israeli would reject. It’s a highly sensitive issue in a country where prisoners of war are heroes and people go out of their way to release them,” he said.

‘We pray to God that a racist, politically incorrect personality does not win the election’
Thuraya Ebrahim al Arrayed, a member of Saudi Arabia’s top advisory body, the Shura Council, said a Trump presidency would be “catastrophic” and set the world back “not just generations, but centuries.”