Democrats Set the Rules on Blocking Judicial Nominations By Debra Heine

With the untimely death of Antonin Scalia Saturday, President Barack Obama has been handed the opportunity of a lifetime to tilt the Supreme Court to the left for decades to come. It’s also given Democrats an issue to demagogue from now until election day and beyond.

About an hour after Scalia’s death was confirmed, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “threw down the gauntlet,” announcing that the Senate would not be confirming a replacement for him until after the 2016 election, a move Politico called, “an historic rebuke of President Obama’s authority and an extraordinary challenge to the practice of considering each nominee on his or her individual merits.” But there is nothing “historic” or “extraordinary” about challenging “the practice of considering each nominee on his or her individual merits.” Democrats have been blocking judicial nominees based on ideological grounds rather than their “individual merits” for decades now.

Regardless, the president wasted no time in lecturing the Senate about its “responsibility” to give his nominee “a fair hearing and a timely vote.”

“These are responsibilities that I take seriously, as should everyone,” Obama intoned. “They’re bigger than any one party. They are about our democracy. They’re about the institution to which Justice Scalia dedicated his professional life, and making sure it continues to function as the beacon of justice that our Founders envisioned.”

Hillary Clinton issued her own statement in support of Obama on Saturday evening.

“Let me just make one point,” Clinton said, whipping up the crowd at the state Democratic Party event. “Barack Obama is president of the United States until Jan. 20, 2017. That is a fact, my friends, whether the Republicans like it or not.”

Uncle Bernie Sanders Is Brainwashing Our Uneducated Youth By Roger L Simon No Clue what Socialism Is

Bernie Sanders is a nice, avuncular character who seems to be harmless enough — a nostalgic throwback to another era — but his espousal of socialism, “democratic” though it may be, misleads an entire generation of American youth who have absolutely no idea of the economic or social ramifications of the senator’s ideology.

Lovable Bernie is essentially propagandizing a generation of gullible American young people who don’t have anything near the education or experience to understand what is happening to them. His task is made simpler because his Democratic Party opponent is demonstrably and obviously corrupt and in danger of prosecution. She has also been pushed so far to the left by Bernie’s success (and her own fears) that no serious questions about socialism are even asked.

Our educational system, which, even at the college level, rarely looks at socialism from a results-oriented perspective, exacerbates this situation. Yet those results sit just below our southern border in catastrophic form for all to see, though few, especially among the young, have the background or, frankly, even the interest, to look.

Malcolm Turnbulb : Roger Franklin

Perhaps because our species comes with ten fingers, ninth anniversaries are popularly viewed as dates of little significance in the grand scheme of things. There can be exceptions, however, and this coming weekend — February 20, to be precise — will be just such an occasion, the reason being not so much the circuits of the sun our planet has completed since a momentous decision was made, but the identity, acumen and credibility of the individual who made that initiative’s implementation his personal and moral crusade.

Take a bow, Malcolm Turnbull!

As of Saturday, it will be nine years since he began the process that banned old-fashioned, cheap and reliable incandescent light globes and mandated their replacement with planet-saving compact fluorescent ones (if you ignore their mercury content, health risks and landfill contamination).

Oh, but it was to have been golden era, albeit illuminated by the eye-straining white light and virtuous green penumbra of Turnbull’s great gift to Big Fluoro. What manufacturer does not dream of seeing inexpensive, off-patent technologies replaced by products, their products, costing ten times as much? That negative received little attention at the time and, when it was mentioned, carbonphobics dismissed such concerns as beneath contempt. Quibble about a few extra dollars when the fate of the Earth hangs in sweaty balance? How dare you!

The Sydney Morning Herald, to cite but one institution beset then as now by the dimmest of dim bulbs, perceived in the initiative further proof of the unique radiance that beams from every orifice of the man who would become the nation’s leader. Here is a little of that report from 2007:

Though the days of supermarket shelves full of 40-cent light bulbs may be numbered, the lighting industry predicts the price shock will not last long. In many cases, compact fluorescent lamps sell for about $10 each, but typically last six times as long as their predecessors.

Australia’s Labor Party going anti-Israel in quest for Muslim votes By Thomas Lifson

Like Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, Australia has been on the receiving end of a growing stream of Muslim immigrants, to the great advantage of the domestic political leftist parties. The Australian Labor Party, which is currently the opposition to the centrist Liberal/National coalition that has formed the government, has long favored Muslim immigration.

Now that Muslims located in Sydney’s western suburbs form a significant voting bloc, the ALP is going hard against Israel. Andrew Bolt, syndicated columnist based at the Melbourne Herald-Sun is denouncing this in no uncertain terms:

Labor, desperate for Muslim votes in Western Sydney, is openly pandering to bigots and anti Semites:

NSW Labor delegates to this weekend’s state conference have proposed … 18 policy agenda items relating to Indigenous affairs and 24 about the environment. But there are a staggering 28 motions regarding Israel, most of them critical, out of the entire 45 foreign policy items up for discussion.

Shame on them. Shame. (snip)

If Labor passes such motions, any Jew who backs the party is a collaborator to Jew-hatred.

He documents the foreign policy obsession of the party:

Israel Looks Beyond America How many allies does President Obama think the U.S. can afford to squander? By Bret Stephens

Talk to Israelis about the United States these days and you will provoke a physical reaction. Barack Obama is an eye roll. John Kerry is a grimace. The administration’s conduct of regional policy is a slow, sad shake of the head. The current state of the presidential race makes for a full-blown shudder. The Israeli rundown of the candidates goes roughly as follows: “Hillary—she doesn’t like us.” “Cruz—I don’t like him.” “Rubio—is he done for?” “Sanders—oy vey.” “Trump—omigod.”

As for Israel’s own troubles—a continuing Palestinian campaign of stabbings; evidence that Hamas is rebuilding its network of terror tunnels under the Gaza border and wants to restart the 2014 war; more than 100,000 rockets and guided missiles in the hands of Hezbollah—that’s just the Middle East being itself. It’s the U.S. not being itself that is the real novelty, and is forcing Israel to adjust.
I’ve spent the better part of a week talking to senior officials, journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across Israel’s political spectrum. None of it was on the record, but the consistent theme is that, while the Jewish state still needs the U.S., especially in the form of military aid, it also needs to diversify its strategic partnerships. This may yet turn out to be the historic achievement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long reign as prime minister.

On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly shook hands with former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal at the Munich Security Conference. In January, Israeli cabinet member Yuval Steinitz made a trip to Abu Dhabi, where Israel is opening an office at a renewable-energy association. Turkey is patching up ties with Israel. In June, Jerusalem and Riyadh went public with the strategic talks between them. In March, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi told the Washington Post that he speaks to Mr. Netanyahu “a lot.”

More Essential Than Ever: GOP Electability With the makeup of the Supreme Court at stake, viability in the general election is paramount—and only Marco Rubio seems to have it.By Allysia Finley

http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-essential-than-ever-gop-electability-1455572580

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has raised the stakes of the presidential election. If there is a silver lining, it’s that maybe conservatives will finally sober up and stop indulging their self-destructive impulse to choose the “most conservative” candidate or the one with no internal censor (or compass). They may finally realize how important electability is—and take a fresh look at Marco Rubio.

After an uninspiring performance in New Hampshire, the Florida senator used the South Carolina debate on Saturday as a mulligan to dispel criticisms that he is too callow and glib. While discussing immigration and foreign threats, Mr. Rubio came across as confident and capable without sounding robotic.

At the end of the night, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were the ones looking juvenile after they engaged in a playground game of “liar, liar.” Mr. Trump sounded as uninformed as usual, though his supporters may not care. He had no solution for out-of-control entitlement spending other than promising, as so many politicians have before him, to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. His harangue against trade deals and endorsement of an exit tax for companies that move abroad showed a shaky grasp of economics.

Unlike the front-runners, Mr. Rubio projected hope. Recalling the election of 1980, he noted that Americans “were scared about what kind of country their children were going to live in and inherit. And yet somehow Ronald Reagan was able to instill in our nation and in our people a sense of optimism. And he turned America around because of that vision and ultimately because of that leadership.”

Ronald Reagan aside, Mr. Rubio’s chiaroscuro contrasting the dark present with a bright future seems more to echo John F. Kennedy, who notably was also a youthful senator when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960. In his acceptance speech at the convention, Kennedy said: “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” There are other similarities. As with JFK, some voters don’t take Mr. Rubio seriously because of his boyish good looks. A new Cruz ad mocks him as “just a pretty face.”

READ MORE AT SITE

Why Obama’s Middle East Policy Is Failing Focusing on Islamic State alone leaves the contagion of civil wars to drag the region deeper into disaster.by Kenneth M. Pollack and Barbara F. Walter

Imagine that it is Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt goes before the Congress to request a declaration of war against . . . the Nazis’ SS.

Not the Japanese—they could never occupy the U.S. Not Hitler—we don’t much like him, but he’s not doing the killing. Not the regular Wehrmacht troops, they’re following orders. Not the Nazi Party—they aren’t a direct, physical threat to the U.S. Only the SS, because they are perpetrating the genocide that is the Third Reich’s worst crime.

Then FDR calls up Stalin and Churchill and urges them to quit worrying about German army divisions and the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s munitions factories—and focus only on the SS.

If America had taken that approach to World War II, it would have been utterly nonsensical, yet that is, in effect, how the Obama administration is dealing with the Middle East conflagration: by focusing exclusively on Islamic State.

The murderous jihadists of Islamic State, or ISIS, are only one symptom of a much larger problem in the Middle East. By fixating on this one symptom—rather than its sources—and then trying to convince everyone else in the region to do the same, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

READ MORE AT SITE

Russia’s Trap: Luring Sunnis into War by Burak Bekdil

Washington should think more than twice about allowing Turkey and Saudi Arabia, its Sunni allies, militarily to engage their Shiite enemies in Syria. Allowing Sunni supremacists into a deeper sectarian war is not a rational way to block Russian expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. And it certainly will not serve America’s interests.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are too weak militarily to damage Russia’s interests. It is a Russian trap — and precisely what the Russians are hoping their enemies will fall into.

After Russia’s increasingly bold military engagement in war-torn Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite bloc, the regional Sunni powers — Turkey and its ally, Saudi Arabia — have felt nervous and incapable of influencing the civil war in favor of the many Islamist groups fighting Assad’s forces.

Most recently, the Turks and Saudis, after weeks of negotiations, decided to flex their muscles and join forces to engage a higher-intensity war in the Syrian theater. This is dangerous for the West. It risks provoking further Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, and sparking a NATO-Russia confrontation.

After Turkey, citing violation of its airspace, shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet on Nov. 24, Russia has used the incident as a pretext to reinforce its military deployments in Syria and bomb the “moderate Islamists.” Those are the Islamists who fight Assad’s forces and are supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Russian move included installing the advanced S-400 long-range air and anti-missile defense systems.

Owner of restaurant targeted by machete-wielding terrorist: ‘I am going to get a bigger [Israeli] flag’….By David Bernstein*****

Last week, Somali immigrant Mohamed Barry attacked with a machete patrons at the Nazareth restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. While authorities initially said they believed that Barry chose the restaurant randomly for a “lone wolf” attack, it now seems likely that the restaurant was targeted because the owner, Hany Baransi, is from Israel, and proudly displayed an Israeli flag in his window. According to Baransi, Barry asked a server a half-hour before the attack where the owner was from, and she confirmed that Baransi was from Israel.

The Tower has an exclusive interview with Baransi, a Christian from Haifa.

When asked whether he would consider removing the Israeli flag seen from his restaurant’s entryway as a precaution, Baransi swiftly rejected the idea.

“Actually I have another flag, and I am going to get a bigger flag, and I am going to get a Star of David necklace and put it on my chest, and I am going to get a tattoo,” he declared. “Honest to God, I am not kidding. They don’t scare me. We are Israelis. We are Israelis. We are resilient, we fight back.”

“We are used to these bastards,” he added. “We are used to these kinds of attacks, that they hate us just for what we are. They don’t know us, they don’t know anything about us, and they do that. You know, I don’t care if I was an Arab or not, because I am an Israeli, and if you don’t like Israelis you don’t like me.”

David Bernstein is the George Mason University Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, VA. His latest book, Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law, was published in November.

Polish Democracy Is In Excellent Health: Matthew Tyrmand

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

Undeniably, this is the first government elected in the post-Communist period with a unilateral imprimatur to govern without coalition partners, but that rarely gets disclosed in recent printed “analysis” as that would undermine the “fascist coup” narrative being vociferously peddled by media, foreign and domestic, and unelected EU apparatchiks who are seeing widespread European rejection of their policies and control.