WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Paris Terrorists Introduced, Warn West in New ISIS Beheading Video By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

ISIS released a new video today with statements from the Paris attackers, vowing to kill westerners in their homes and chiding Muslims to join jihad now.

The 17-minute film, “Kill Them Wherever You Find Them,” was released in English, Arabic and French by Al-Hayat Media Center, the ISIS media arm that recently produced a new issue of Dabiq magazine. ISIS hinted at more on the Paris attacks in last week’s issue with a page featuring the faces of the terrorists over a backdrop of the French capital and the words “Just Terror.”

“Let Paris be a lesson for those nations that wish to take heed,” the page noted.

The highly stylized video begins with news footage and the voices of CNN and Fox News anchors narrating the Paris attacks as they unfolded on Nov. 13. Red crosshairs are superimposed on victims and police in the news footage.

Brahim Abdeslam, aka Abul Qa’Qa al-Baljiki, a French ISIS member who was living in Belgium and was one of the shooters at bars and restaurants the night of the attack, is shown firing a gun at targets painted on a wall.

Belgian restaurant attacker Chakib Akrouh, aka Abu Mujaed al-Baljiki, is shown viciously beheading a man in a desert setting, as are Frenchmen and Bataclan gunmen Foued Mohamed-Aggad (aka Abu Fu’ad al-Faransi) and Ismaël Omar Mostefai (aka Abu Rayyn al-Faransi).

Belgian restaurant gunman Abdelhamid Abaaoud, aka Abu Umar al-Baljaki, speaks in what looks like a home video shot with an ISIS flag and two guns for a backdrop. Samy Amimour, aka Abu Qital al-Faransi, the third Bataclan gunman, gives a wicked smile for the camera.

POLITICS Comments turned off

You Know You’re in the Trump Cult When… By Paula Bolyard….The Cur in his own Words

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

At a campaign rally in Iowa on Saturday GOP frontrunner Donald Trump bragged about how loyal his followers are.

“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump boasted, as he formed his fingers into the shape of a gun and pointed at the crowd:

I’m beginning to believe that Trump could do about anything at this point and his most loyal followers would find a way to justify it. He makes disgusting, sexist comments about women and his supporters think it’s hilarious —Megyn Kelly had it coming, they say. Trump makes fun of a reporter’s disability and his loyalists laugh right along with him—because they love his ability to crush people under the awesome weight of his 3rd grade insults. He tells students at Liberty University that he’s a good person and has no need for God’s forgiveness and the crowd—including the school’s president, Jerry Falwell, Jr.—goes wild. The guy is bigger than God now, I guess.

Matt Walsh wrote at the Blaze this week:

I watch it unfold feeling like a guy whose best friend just started dating the town floozy. I try to tell him that she’s sleeping around, she’s betraying him, she’ll break his heart, but he’s too smitten to hear me.

That’s exactly what it feels like when you try to have a conversation with Trump’s ardent followers. They are card-carrying members of Trump’s cult of personality now, and I fear they’re not coming back. You can’t reason people out of something they haven’t been reasoned into. Many of these people are caught up in the emotion of this moment and it doesn’t bother them one bit that a man who could quite possibly become president of the United States in a few months is openly bragging that his sycophants will blindly follow him, no matter what he does. But don’t worry. It’s all a show! He’s just entertaining the crowds and schlepping for votes. He doesn’t really mean any of this crazy stuff. Except for the stuff we like, and then we’re sure that he really, truly (pinky promise!) means all of that. Because he fights!

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Prosecutions of Immigration Crimes Down by 36% in Last 5 Years By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

The Center for Immigration Studies has determined that the federal government has becoming more and more lax in prosecuting immigration offenses over the last 5 years. Statistics compiled by the group show a 36% decline in prosecutions in that period.

Washington Examiner:

Justice Department statistics show that criminal prosecutions for crimes such as unlawful re-entry by an illegal in November totalled 4,861, down 13.2 percent over the previous month. Over the past year, that number is down 22.3 percent.

According to the Center for Immigration Studies, which analyzed the data, that is a five year decline of criminal prosecutions of 36 percent.

CIS analyzed data produced by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which publishes Justice and Homeland Security Department data on immigration. TRAC said that the top criminal prosecution charge was “reentry by a deported alien.”

TRAC also produced the “detainer” report based on Homeland Security data that showed a huge drop in the administration’s effort to grab illegals in jail. It said that there were over 25,000 detainers issued in October 2015. That dropped to 7,117 in October 2015.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Either Carry a Big Stick—Or Shut Up! By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Western culture is deservedly exceptional. No other tradition has given the individual such security, freedom, and prosperity.

The Athens-Jerusalem mixture of Christian humility (and guilt) and the classical Socratic introspection combined in the West to make it a particularly self-reflective and self-critical society, in a way completely untrue of other traditions.

Unprecedented Western leisure and affluence also have given Europeans and Americans a margin of error, in the sense of the material ability to indulge in ethical critique of themselves without existential danger.

But self-proclaimed moralists also developed habits of ethical nitpicking. Here I do not just mean the more recognizable jingoism so common in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Instead, today progressive global strutting showcases how magnanimous Westerners are and how they can afford to remain disengaged and nonjudgmental.

If in the 1880s Victorians could dress up conquered and dethroned Zulu King Cetshwayo in British tweed and parade him around the liberal parlors of London, today we can psychoanalyze why thugs and murderers abroad are mostly misguided, and thus without Western guidance and empathy understandably become nihilist.

Such liberal self-moralizing is never termed chauvinistic or culturally arrogant, because its practitioners are so often liberals who want all others to become as liberal as themselves. Nonetheless, many of our current tensions in the world result from our enemies’ dislike of our smug sense of moral superiority.

Lecturing Egypt to respect a “largely secular” Muslim Brotherhood’s electoral win means that the U.S. is safely distant when one-election/one-time Islamists dismantle the process that brought them to power and seek an Islamic state.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, as a champion of Western rationalism and British fair play, was convinced that he could persuade Adolf Hitler to play by Europe’s post-Versailles Marquess of Queensberry Rules. The more Hitler violated the Versailles accords, rearmed, militarized the Rhineland, gobbled up Austria and dismembered Czechoslovakia, the more Chamberlain redoubled his efforts to convince Hitler of Europe’s shared interest in peace and friendly relations instead of a Neanderthal return to Verdun and the Somme.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Why Hillary is Far Worse than Petraeus By Tom Trinko see note please

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Perhaps on the issue of e-mails Hillary is worse, but frankly I shed no tears for the troubles of David of Surgeistan whose rules of engagement were more sensitive to the religious mores of barbarians than to the safety of our troops surrounded by terrorists hidden among “civilians.” rsk

Liberals are saying that since Hillary didn’t actually hand over secret data to someone she’s not guilty of anything. They also use that “reasoning” to say that her case is nothing like that of General David Petraeus who was found guilty of mishandling classified information.

The liberal position essentially holds that if General Petraeus had brought home top-secret SAP documents and left them on his dining room table in a neighborhood with a large number of recent robberies and then gone on vacation for a few years, he would have done nothing wrong.

Liberal reasoning also says that if General Petraeus had just removed the classification markings from the data he shared then he would have done no wrong.

Yet it’s hard to imagine anyone in the national security community or the military, or even the FBI or your local police department, thinking that if General Petraeus had done either of those things he’d be legally free and clear.

Essentially Hillary is guilty for two reasons:

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Real Ted Cruz By Theodore A. Gebhard

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Contrary to some who have expressed concerns about Ted Cruz’s temperament and qualifications to be an effective president, my experience in working with the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate during the early 2000s convinces me that he is the right person at the right time for the job.

Although not a close friend of Senator Cruz, I got to know him reasonably well as a colleague at the Federal Trade Commission from mid-2001 until he left the commission to return to Texas in 2003. During that time, we worked together on a number of projects, including efforts to curtail anticompetitive legislation pending in several states to protect incumbent businesses such as gasoline retailers and automobile dealerships, and a task force established by the FTC’s Chairman charged with looking into litigants’ abuses of legal immunities to the antitrust laws. The Chairman appointed Cruz to lead that task force, and I was one of several members.

In this capacity, I was able to observe Ted’s professional skills, his personal characteristics, and, significantly, his commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and free-market economics. These personal observations impel me to conclude not only that Ted possesses the qualifications to be president in terms of intellect, temperament, and knowledge of the issues facing the country; but even more importantly, that he is uniquely the right person to lead America at this time in its history.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Bloomberg View Why the former New York mayor may think he can win as a third-party presidential candidate. See note please

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

As a resident of New York I resent a billionaire who literally bought a third term despite term limits. After 9/11 when Giuliani suggested remaining on the job for a few months to complete the cleanup after the downing of the World Trade Center-Bloomberg ungraciously reminded Rudy that New York City had term limits ….What a hypocrite….rsk
You read it here last week. As the odds rise of extreme outcomes in the presidential election, so do the chances of a serious third-party candidate getting into the race, especially Michael Bloomberg. Now word has leaked that the former three-term mayor of New York is actively exploring the possibility.

Mr. Bloomberg considered a run in 2008 and 2012, only to conclude he couldn’t win, and that may be what happens this year too. The U.S. political system is tilted against third-party candidates, which is why the last one to take the White House was Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as the nominee of the antislavery Republicans.

Third-party candidates have made other notable runs but their influence has mainly been as spoilers or to force the major-party candidates to confront issues they’d ignored. Teddy Roosevelt ruined William Howard Taft’s chances for re-election in 1912, and Ross Perot contributed to George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 though he won no electoral votes. He split the Reagan coalition by winning 19% of the vote and helped Bill Clinton win with only 43%.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Where Does All That Aid for Palestinians Go? An outsize share of per capita international aid, even as the Palestinian Authority funds terrorists. By Tzipi Hotovely

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Ms. Hotovely is the deputy foreign minister of Israel.

One often-cited key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is economic development. To that end, there seems to be broad agreement about the importance of extending development aid to help the Palestinians build the physical and social infrastructure that will enable the emergence of a sustainable, prosperous society. But few have seriously questioned how much money is sent and how it is used.

Such assistance will only promote peace if it is spent to foster tolerance and coexistence. If it is used to strengthen intransigence it does more harm than good—and the more aid that comes in, the worse the outcome. This is exactly what has been transpiring over the past few decades. Large amounts of foreign aid to the Palestinians are spent to support terrorists and deepen hostility.

For years the most senior figures in the Palestinian Authority have supported, condoned and glorified terror. “Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem,” President Mahmoud Abbas said last September on Palestinian television, “is holy blood as long as it was for Allah.” Countless Palestinian officials and state-run television have repeatedly hailed the murder of Jews.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How the Feds Use Title IX to Bully Universities Lowering the burden of proof for sex-assault cases isn’t required—but schools don’t dare challenge it. By Jacob E. Gersen

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Mr. Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School.

In the past several years politicians have lined up to condemn an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. But there is a genuine question of whether the Education Department has exceeded its legal authority in the way it has used Title IX to dictate colleges’ response to the serious problem of sexual assault.

When an administrative agency makes rules and regulations—which are a form of law every bit as binding as those passed by Congress—it must follow the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, the bible of the bureaucracy. The process most often used involves “notice and comment”: The agency must publish the proposed regulation and respond to comments before issuing the final rule. This can take months or years, and at the end of the process parties affected by the new rule can challenge it in court.

There’s a point to making the government jump through these hoops: By demanding transparency and facilitating public participation and judicial review, we can be more confident that the bureaucracy is up to good rather than ill.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton’s Tactic of Emphasizing Experience Is Questioned Focus on credentials as secretary of state and senator gives Sanders an edge with his message of change, some say By Peter Nicholas

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

CLINTON, Iowa—In her closing pitch to Iowa voters, Hillary Clinton is casting herself as the one Democrat who has the experience to make the life-or-death choices that come with the presidency.

It echoes the argument she made in 2008, when she ran an ad saying a president must be ready for a “3 a.m. phone call” warning of imminent peril. It didn’t work then and some people close to the Clintons worry it won’t succeed now.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has narrowed Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Iowa ahead of the state’s Feb. 1 caucuses. He could scramble the race should he notch a victory there and in New Hampshire. His theme is direct: He is the champion of voters who are disillusioned with Washington politics and impatient with an economy that lavishes rewards on a tiny fraction of families.

“I am angry…and the American people are angry,” Mr. Sanders said Sunday on CBS.

He is promising a political “revolution.” Even if his ideas may be difficult to achieve in a polarized, Republican-controlled Congress—a point Mrs. Clinton often makes—his message is overshadowing Mrs. Clinton’s focus on experience, some Clinton allies said. They want to see her return to an argument more central to her campaign when she entered the race nine months ago: that she will shake up the system.