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Trumped in Iowa Cruz and Rubio are the big GOP winners, while Hillary shows weakness.

Posted By on February 2nd, 2016

The American political revolution appears to be exaggerated. Iowa Republicans played to their social conservative form Monday by vaulting Ted Cruz to victory over Donald Trump in their first-in-the-nation caucuses, while as we went to press Democrats were narrowly turning back Bernie Sanders’s populist challenge in favor of Hillary Clinton’s interest-group machine.

The night’s biggest loser, to borrow a word, was Mr. Trump, who in the end couldn’t turn his large crowds and polling leads into enough caucus voters. There’s no doubt the New York businessman helped to generate higher turnout, which broke recent caucus records for Republicans. But perhaps he should have attended that debate last week after all, or maybe there are limits to his unconventional media-dominated, celebrity politics.

Mr. Trump still leads in the New Hampshire polls, but one question is how he will respond to the uncomfortable reality of second place. His speech on Monday night was, to borrow another phrase, low-energy.

Instead Mr. Cruz prevailed like Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) by mobilizing the state’s cultural conservatives into a 28% plurality. The first-term Texas Senator had the support of Iowa’s conservative pastors network, he spent months organizing across the state, and his campaign invested heavily in voter analytics. The Texan also passed the first test of his theory that he can win the GOP nomination, and then the Presidency, with a hard-edged conservative message.

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Front-Runners Give Ground as Rivals Make Mark in Iowa Donald Trump fell short, Hillary Clinton flirted with disaster, and their main rivals had strong nights By Gerald F. Seib

Posted By on February 2nd, 2016

Ted Cruz did what he had to do. Donald Trump fell well short of the shock-and-awe moment he hoped would set up a blitz through the rest of the country. Marco Rubio bought himself a seat at the big table. And Hillary Clinton flirted all night with disaster.

Those were the big story lines that emerged from Iowa’s caucuses Monday night. It’s early—ridiculously early, actually—to draw too many conclusions. But the results suggested that a fight still lies ahead on the Democratic side, and a potentially much bigger and longer battle is ahead on the Republican one.

Perhaps most important, the Iowa results suggest that those fights will take place in two parties deeply divided between insiders and outsiders, between young and old, and between the most and least wealthy. The situation is volatile, and, as a consequence, unpredictable.

By late last night, it was clear that Mr. Cruz rode his strong support among evangelical conservatives to a victory. He had to do that to be a viable long-term candidate; if he couldn’t charge ahead in a state where evangelical voters traditionally have an outsize influence, his candidacy would have been seriously compromised.

Mr. Trump calculated that he could make a late surge in Iowa, put away Mr. Cruz and pave the way for a big win in New Hampshire to start putting away the competition. That didn’t happen. His brand has been that he is a winner; it remains to be seen what the Iowa outcome does to that brand.

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Ted Cruz Beats Donald Trump in Iowa’s GOP Race By Patrick O’Connor and Janet Hook

Posted By on February 2nd, 2016

DES MOINES, Iowa—Texas Sen. Ted Cruz outmuscled Donald Trump to win the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses on Monday, delivering a stinging rebuke to the celebrity businessman and establishing himself as a leading contender for the GOP nomination.

The results Monday set the stage for a series of high-stakes showdowns in the weeks ahead between the top two finishers and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, whose appeal as a general-election candidate was good enough for a late surge that nearly overtook Mr. Trump.

“Tonight is a victory for the grass roots,” said Mr. Cruz to a raucous victory party in Des Moines. “Tonight is a victory for millions of Americans who have shouldered the burden of seven years of Washington deals run amok.”

Mr. Trump kept his post-caucus remarks brief, thanking his family and the state of Iowa before turning his attention to contests that follow. “We love New Hampshire, we love South Carolina,” he said.

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Defining Presidential Down If this election is so crucial, why have the front-runners been so awful? By Bret Stephens

Posted By on February 2nd, 2016

In 2014 I wrote a book that made the case that the United States, for all of its problems, was not in decline. Now and again I have my doubts.

The results of Monday’s Iowa caucus won’t be known until after this column goes to print. But here’s what we know already about the four top contenders. No prizes for matching names to descriptions:

1) A compulsive liar with a persecution complex, a mania for secrecy, and a bald disdain for rules as they apply to lesser people.

2) A bigoted braggart with a laughable grasp of public policy and leering manners of the kind you would expect from a barroom drunk.

3) A glib moralizer who is personally detested by every single senator in his own party, never mind the other one.

4) A Sixties radical preaching warmed-over socialism to people too young to know what it was or too stupid to understand what it does.
Such are the character traits of the candidates now vying to possess the nation’s nuclear launch codes. This being a free country, they are entitled to their ambitions. This also being a democracy, we are responsible for our political choices. So how is it that we have come to choose this?

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ISIS beheads boy; parents watch : Martin Barillas

Posted By on February 2nd, 2016

Islamic State terrorists beheaded a 14-year-old boy in front of his parents, according to ARA News. The murder took place on January 30 in Jarablus – a city in northern Syria. The report said that the boy had missed Friday prayers at the mosque.

At the worship space in central Jarablus, extremist preachers who call for an Islamic Caliphate regularly call down death sentences for alleged sinners.

Human rights campaigner Nasser Taljbini reported that the Islamic sharia court had ordered the execution of sentence to take place in public. “Dozens of people attended the brutal execution, including the victim’s parents who were forced to witness the beheading of their own son,” Taljbini said.

ISIS forces boys and adolescents to fight alongside adult terrorists and sometimes forces them to participate in beheadings of captives.

Earlier this week ISIS reportedly arrested dozens of women in Jarablus for violating the Sharia dress code. According to their interpretation of Islam, women must be fully covered from head to foot. Infractions are dealt with harshly.

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MY SAY: REWARDING TERRORISM

Posted By on February 1st, 2016

Everyone is running to the fainting couch- shocked, shocked that Iran has given medals to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards who recently captured and humiliated American sailors.

The act is heinous and they’ll probably get more millions from Obamakerry, but where is the outrage or at least some empathy when Palarabs enabled and encouraged by Abbas name streets in honor of terrorists who kill Israeli civilians including women, and children and infants swaddled in their cribs?

And these are the terrorists with whom Israel is asked to negotiate and treat as partners for peace by the Eurotrash and our media and State Department…..rsk

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The Month That Was January 2016 Sydney Williams

Posted By on February 1st, 2016

Despite rallying the last couple days of the month, world stock markets lost about $7.5 trillion in January, amid fears of global recession. According to analysts, China’s economic growth has slowed to the range of six percent. Keep in mind, however, statistics from authoritarian regimes are suspect. What we do know is that the Shanghai Index is down 22.6% year-to-date. Emerging markets have been battered by falling commodity prices. The MSCI Index is, so far, down 14.9 percent. Brazil and Russia are in recession, if not depression. Europe’s economy is flat-lining, which comes as no surprise given the role of the state in the economy. Economic growth in the U.S. has been anemic – growing at two percent – since the end the “Great Recession” in early 2009. In fact, U.S. GDP growth has not exceeded 2.7% for ten years. Last Friday’s preliminary report on fourth quarter GDP showed growth at 0.7 percent. Free markets have been hamstrung by state intervention (i.e., healthcare, higher taxes, extraordinary low interest rates and increased EPA regulations). It has led to a loss of confidence, and a reduction in forward visibility.

Not even the 2800 delegates to the World Economic Forum in Davos (who, incidentally, flew in on 850 private jets) could lift expectations. Curiously, the theme of this year’s conference, which went from January 19th to the 23rd, was that the world is on the cusp of a fourth industrial revolution. It is generally acknowledged that the first industrial revolution began in England in the late 18th Century and extended into the second half of the 19th. The second, most would agree, began with Henry Ford’s development of the assembly line in early 1920s America. The third, according to The Economist in an April 2012 cover story, is the one we are currently in – artificial intelligence, genetics, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, robotics, etc., the same drivers mentioned two weeks ago in Davos as the fourth. It was not made clear if the business, banking, government and media elites who descended on Davos pulled a Rip Van Winkle, but world economic conditions suggest they haven’t been paying attention. Something is wrong.

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Why the Left Can’t Understand Islam Learning the truth about Islam would destroy the Left. Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on February 1st, 2016

The left’s greatest intellectual error is its conviction that the world can be divided into a binary power struggle in which both sides agree on the nature of the struggle, but disagree on the outcome.

For leftists of a certain generation, it was class. Marx began the Communist Manifesto by laying out a primal class struggle throughout human history. For Marxists, everything in the world could be broken down to a class struggle with the wealthy oppressors on one side and the oppressed on the other.

It didn’t matter that this model didn’t fit a reality in which Communists leaders came from wealthy backgrounds and their opponents were just as likely to be poor peasants. To the left, everything is defined by the model. Reality is an inconvenience that is suppressed with gulags and firing squads.

Today the variable is identity politics. Everything must be intersectional. There are those who stand on the right side of history, in favor of abortion, gay marriage and illegal immigration. Everyone who isn’t on board is a racist, even if they’re black or Latino, a sexist, even if they’re female, or a homophobe, even if they’re gay. Once again, reality doesn’t matter. The binary struggle is the model for everything.

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Manhattan Blues (The Cyrus Skeen Mysteries) (Volume 14) Paperback – by Edward Cline

Posted By on February 1st, 2016

It is March, 1929. Cyrus Skeen is called to New York by his father, Garnett Skeen, to attend to some trust fund affairs. Skeen’s detective agency is subsidized by a trust fund his father set up years before, but his mother, Eleanor “Nellie” Skeen, wishes to set up her own trust fund for her son. A daughter of an Oklahoma oil magnate, she is “very well situated” in terms of wealth. Skeen’s parents, however, are driving to Nags Head in the Outer Banks of North Carolina to spend the rest of the winter. The elder Skeen tells his son that he must prove his existence for a new bank officer who will be administrating the new trust fund; therefore, Skeen must travel to New York City. In New York, he meets an alluring and tempestuous opera singer, Brianna “Ginger” O’Quill. During one of her performances at the Metropolitan Opera, he goes backstage and kisses the diva’s hand. She interprets the gesture as an invitation to pursue him, which she does even though she knows he is married and in love with his wife, Dilys. But a rival for her attentions is jealous and attempts to murder Skeen – or O’Quill…or anyone.

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Hope is not a strategy Since Israel is going to be attacked no matter what it does, we might as well do things that advance our interests. Caroline Glick

Posted By on February 1st, 2016

Our government is playing games with itself. And losing.

On Wednesday Chaim Levinson reported in Haaretz that for the first time in nearly two years, last week the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria approved new building plans for a small number of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria.

Levinson also reported that last month Jerusalem’s municipal planning and building commission gave final approval to plans to build nearly 900 housing units in the southern neighborhood of Gilo. Initial approval was granted back in 2012.

But in the intervening three years, the commission refused to allow them to go forward.

From the report, we learn that the government’s critics in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria who claimed that it was barring Jewish building were right all along. Despite the government’s denials, the fact is that for at least the last year and a half, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers maintained an undeclared freeze on construction for Israeli Jews in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.

During this period, Jews have only been permitted to build in these areas either on the basis of plans that had received final approval before the unofficial freeze took effect, or in cases where refusal to approve building would have involved admitting that a freeze was in effect. So, for instance, in areas where the rights of Jews to their property in Judea and Samaria have been challenged before the Supreme Court by EU-financed Israeli NGOs like Yesh Din, the government has defended those rights and so given permission for Jews to exercise their property rights.

The government opted to enact this unofficial building freeze, and so trample the civil rights of hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens, in the hopes of convincing the Obama administration to protect Israel from Palestinian efforts to pass anti-Israel resolutions at the UN Security Council.