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Chicago, Trump’s Incitements, and Cruz’s Response By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 17th, 2016

It is ludicrous to argue that, because the hard Left is primarily responsible for the outbreak of chaos and violence that caused Donald Trump’s Chicago rally to be canceled last night, it is wrong to condemn the thuggery Trump often encourages at his appearances.

Trump has encouraged physical battery at his campaign events, even telling supporters he’d pay their legal fees if they get arrested for assaulting dissenters. (See, e.g., Iowa event: ”So if you see somebody getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of ‘em, would you? Seriously. Okay? Just knock the hell — I promise you, I will pay for the legal fees. I promise. I promise”; see also Las Vegas event: regarding an unruly protester removed by security, Trump tells crowd, “I’d like to punch him in the face. He’s smiling, having a good time.”) Trump has continued to fan these flames even after it has become obvious that some of his supporters are acting on the invitation to resort to violence. Incitement to violence is a crime; incitement to violence at a large rally is incitement to riot — a crime that can get people badly injured or even killed.

And it’s about more than incitement. As David has been chronicling, Trump’s top campaign guy, Corey Lewandowski, has been credibly accused of manhandling Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields. In case you haven’t noticed, one of the main tactics that has transformed Turkey, before our very eyes, from a reasonably democratic society into an authoritarian Islamist state is Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s green-light to his underlings to intimidate, assault, shut down, imprison, and trump up prosecutions against members of the press. Trump is not a conservative, so it is perhaps unknown to him that media hostility is something conservatives in a free society learn to deal with — even to become more effective communicators because of. What should really frighten people is that Breitbart is Trump-friendly media. It is unlikely that, at the time of the alleged assault, Mr. Lewandowski even knew for whom Ms. Fields worked … but it is highly likely that he knew she was a reporter. (And even if he didn’t, campaign officials don’t get to rough up non-media rally attendees, either.)

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Why I Don’t Watch Holocaust Movies John Podhoretz

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

The very act of converting the Shoah into a story on film is a violation of its meaning, its force, and its evil.http://mosaicmagazine.com/response/2016/03/why-i-dont-watch-holocaust-movies/

I have not seen Son of Saul, and I will not see it. As a general rule I do not see Holocaust movies, even though I have been a working film critic for 37 years. It is not because they do not affect me but because they do—and I do not trust the way they affect me. I did see Schindler’s List, and I wept at its conclusion, when Steven Spielberg has the Schindler survivors walk toward the camera as the film’s black- and-white blooms suddenly into color. But what was I weeping at?

The director Stanley Kubrick spent years trying to figure out how to make a movie about the Holocaust and never succeeded. When the writer Frederic Raphael talked to Kubrick about Schindler’s List, the universally praised work of Kubrick’s acolyte Spielberg, Kubrick issued an off-the-cuff criticism as great as any considered analysis by Erich Auerbach or Lionel Trilling: “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.” I was weeping because Schindler’s List is the Holocaust with a happy ending. The Shoah did not have a happy ending. It ended. And the tragedy of it will be with us until the end of time. It’s no wonder people seek to mitigate the horror by turning it into fable, but it is an impulse that should be resisted.

In his brilliant and scorchingessay on Son of Saul, Dan Kagan-Kans quietly and systematically exposes the contrivances of this self-consciously “new” kind of film about the Holocaust. The very fact that I just used the words “contrivance” and Holocaust in the same sentence is an example of the insurmountable aesthetic and moral problems faced by this and every other movie about the Shoah.

Now, all films are contrivances, whether they are about Auschwitz or about a couple meeting cute in a department store in Philadelphia. What we are seeing is not happening. The people we are watching are not the characters they are playing. The characters they are playing do not exist and never have existed. The words they are speaking were put into their mouths by someone else, which is not how actual people converse. As these simulacra move and speak those words, dozens of real people are a few feet away watching them, recording them, moving pieces of furniture in and out of their way, sending other people and cars and even rolling debris through the viewer’s line of sight to mimic the passing flow of life.

The problem is that, more than any other art form before it, the cinema is designed to trick you into forgetting that what you are seeing isn’t real. It’s the ultimate in stylization—it hides its stylization behind a veneer of reality. For what you are seeing looks real. Maybe even more real than reality itself. Bodies are walking back and forth before you. People are speaking words. Cars are moving in the background. It’s just that what they are actually doing and what you are seeing are two different things. They are making a movie. You are watching a story.

And the act of converting the Shoah into a story is itself a violation of its meaning, its force, and its evil. The imposition of a plot makes the inexplicably and unimaginably awful falsely explicable and, since it is at the same time literally being made imaginable, not quite so awful.

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How ‘Michael Jordan’ Missed His Shot: The Story of Marco Rubio’s Epic Underachievement By Tim Alberta

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

Miami — “I loved watching Michael Jordan play basketball, because he could do things with the basketball that were not teachable,” Whit Ayres, a highly regarded Republican pollster, said in between sips of coffee in a downtown D.C. hotel conference room. “Marco Rubio is the Michael Jordan of American politics.”

It was March 31, 2015, just 13 days before Rubio, long considered the GOP’s brightest star, would launch his campaign at the Freedom Tower here in his hometown. Ayres, Rubio’s polling guru, had written a book with detailed, data-driven prescriptions for Republicans to take back the White House in 2016. He met on that March morning with a few dozen reporters to make his case — not just for the book and its blueprint, but for Rubio, whom he did not hesitate to hail as the party’s messiah.

Ayres was not alone in his assessment of Rubio’s unique talents. The 44-year-old son of Cuban immigrants became a celebrity in 2010, when he toppled Florida’s popular governor, Charlie Crist, en route to winning a seat in the U.S. Senate. His victory epitomized everything the then-ascendant Tea Party stood for — disrupting the established order, cleansing the landscape of Republicans perceived as too moderate — and he became a refutation, in the flesh, of charges that the party was a home only for old, wealthy, white men.

Though he ran as an outsider, the young senator wasted no time forging connections with Washington heavyweights and surrounding himself with skilled campaign operatives to help plot a path to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. After wisely sitting out the 2012 race, in which Mitt Romney won just 27 percent of Latino voters after a primary filled with harsh rhetoric about illegal immigration, Rubio and his team were convinced that spearheading a comprehensive, bipartisan immigration-reform effort would earn him the party’s goodwill and position him as a 2016 front-runner. They were wrong. The conservative grassroots revolted at Rubio’s co-authorship of a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants, the Senate “Gang of Eight” bill collapsed, and by the summer of 2013 Rubio had become persona non grata to the same Tea Party movement that had carried him into office just three years earlier.

His star was dimmed — but hardly diminished. In a tribute to both his resilience and the stubbornness of elite impressions of his aptitude, the Florida senator found himself a top-tier contender at the outset of the 2016 race. There were reasons it should not have been so: his misreading of the base on immigration; his standing with conservatives, who had defected in droves to Ted Cruz, another charismatic Cuban-American senator with designs on the presidency; and the looming presence of friend and former mentor Jeb Bush, who was the first Republican to announce his intention to enter the race. Yet Rubio and his team began the campaign in April 2015 convinced of his unmatched talent, and bullish — bordering on cocky — about his prospects of winning the nomination and the White House.

Those dreams came crashing down Tuesday night when Rubio lost the Florida primary in a landslide to Donald Trump. The bombastic real-estate mogul, whom Rubio spent most of the campaign ignoring in hopes that he would implode, took 46 percent of the vote to Rubio’s 27 percent. After an atrocious 3-for-26 start to the primary season — the wins coming in Minnesota, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C. — Rubio’s campaign had hoped his home state and its 99 delegates could save him. Instead, his defeat here dealt a death blow to what will likely be remembered as one of the most underachieving campaigns in modern Republican history.

“It is clear that while we’re on the right side, this year we will not be on the winning side,” Rubio told a crowd of several hundred supporters at Florida International University. Having foregone reelection to the Senate to focus on his presidential bid, he now faces an uncertain political future. With an eye on 2020, convinced that Trump will be devastated in a general election, Rubio used his closing remarks Tuesday night to condemn the GOP front-runner in harsh terms — though not by name — for using “fear” to “prey upon” the insecurities of voters.

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Raymond Ibrahim: ISIS and the Hydra of Jihad Why U.S. strategies against the jihad always fail and worse.

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/262169/raymond-ibrahim-isis-and-hydra-jihad-frontpagemagcom

Raymond Ibrahim was recently interviewed by the Hoover Institution’s Strategika Podcast. Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the Center, discussed his article “ISIS: The Latest Phase of the Jihad,” and explained how his original analysis concerning the resilient nature of the jihad from over a decade ago has proven equally resilient, especially in the context of the Hydra of Jihad. The 15-minute interview follows:

CLICK HERE.https://soundcloud.com/hoover-institution/isis-and-islam-with-raymond

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Ides of March: 4 Candidates Stabbed Rubio in the Back By Tyler O’Neil see note please

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

RUBIO WAS THE BEST GOP CANDIDATE AND MOST LIKELY TO TROUNCE HILLARY….HE ASKED HIS SUPPORTERS TO VOTE FOR KASICH IN OHIO, BUT CRUZ WOULD NOT DO THE SAME IN FLORIDA….SHAME ON ALL OF THEM…..RSK
Marco Rubio was the Julius Caesar of the 2016 campaign. For months, other candidates saw him as the most effective debater, one of the strongest candidates for November, and a benchmark by which to judge their own success. When the candidate of hope and “a new American century” finally succumbed, it wasn’t just due to Donald Trump — it was a whole host of candidates who did him in.

Rubio targeted too wide an audience, earning him too many foes who each considered him competition for their “lane” of the Republican primary. Rubio was seen as establishment, Tea Party, social conservative, and even slightly libertarian. That made him the perfect punching bag for every other candidate.

Furthermore, as he picked up endorsements from leading Republicans in the last months of his campaign, Rubio seemed all but coronated as the “establishment” nominee — something as toxic to the Republican party this cycle as being presented a crown by the Roman people was to the senators who decided to murder Julius Caesar.

Here is PJ Media’s list of Republican candidates who attacked Rubio, stabbing him in the back before he finally suspended his campaign on March 15, the same day Julius Caesar collapsed under the knives of his fellow Romans.
1. Jeb Bush
Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush was the first to attack Rubio. George W. Bush’s brother saw Rubio as a threat early on, and spent heavily to derail his campaign. On Sunday, the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol estimated that Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise, spent $25 million in attack ads against Rubio, while it only spent about $5 million attacking Trump. Kristol said that “if Rubio is going to lose on Tuesday,…part of it is because the Bush campaign dropped $20 million of negative ads on him in Florida.”

As Slate’s Jim Newell put it, “Jeb Bush’s super PAC, Right to Rise–after burning through $40 million already–has made a $1.4 million buy in…Iowa? To go after Sen. Marco Rubio? Yes, the same Rubio who currently polls at a distant third in the first caucus state, one that no one (including Rubio) expects him to win.” Bush attacked Rubio for being too inexperienced, for his use of a charge card for personal expenses, and for switching his position on immigration.

Attacking Rubio only made sense because every campaign — besides Trumps, of course — bought into the false idea of “lanes.” Instead of focusing fire on the front-runner, Bush and his unconnected PAC directed their ammunition on Rubio, the greatest threat in the “establishment” lane. There may be some truth to the idea that their bases overlapped, but it was a huge mistake to overlook the polls, despite the unreliability of polling. Had Bush’s campaign thrown its weight against The Donald, how different would 2016 have looked?
2. Chris Christie
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie also threw punches at the Florida senator, and his blows hit home. Christie attacked Rubio and Cruz as inexperienced time and time again, touting his experience as governor.

Most famously, Christie hit Rubio hard in one of the debates, saying that Washington elites attack using a “15-second speech” to demonize opponents and come out on top. Rubio played right into Christie’s attack, repeating himself three times with a stock quote: “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

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In Europe, the Defeat of Angela Merkel… By Michael Walsh

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

Eminently predictably, Angela Merkel just got the first taste of her well-deserved comeuppance at the polls over the weekend. There will be more to come:

The ripple effects of the German voter rebellion against Merkel’s open-door immigration policy will rapidly be felt across the continent. It will not matter much that the Chancellor has tried to modify it after the fact, reaching out to Turkey and seeking ways to slow down the migration inflow, with NATO and the EU looking for joint solutions to strengthen the borders. If anything, the public rejection of Merkel’s policy has reinforced the sense that her leadership has failed to grasp fully the complexity of the nearly thirty-year-old European Union—especially the enduring strength of the national identity politics of its newer members and the ultimate insularity of state interests in the United Kingdom, France, and Spain. Today, regardless of how Germany ultimately adjusts its immigration policy, the amount of damage done to the EU’s cohesion by Merkel’s initial open door policy will endure. It has already reinforced an increasingly nationalized approach to managing immigration by individual member states, while feeding the European public opinion’s growing anti-Brussels sentiment.

The anti-Merkel vote in Germany also casts in a different light the early decision by Viktor Orban of Hungary to build a fence across his country’s border, and, more recently, the refusal by France to take in more migrants, the ongoing resistance in Poland to the mandatory resettlement quota system advocated by the EU Commission, and the Macedonian government’s decision to close the country’s border completely. Likewise, the creeping de facto reintroduction of national border controls across the Schengen Zone is but the latest reaffirmation of what was once derided in Berlin, Vienna, and Brussels as the “Orbanization of Europe.” This was, in hindsight, at least on the border question, a prudent if clumsily executed effort to manage the flow so as to stay attuned to the public mood in the European Union and to preserve individual states’ absorption capacity. Whatever one thinks of Orban’s questionable economic and foreign policy priorities, he correctly anticipated the public’s resistance to the current wave of MENA migrants.

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Trump Campaign Continues Heavy-Handed Approach to Critical Media By Stephen Kruiser

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

This is just getting creepy.

Donald Trump’s campaign blocked a Politico reporter from attending the candidate’s victory rally on Tuesday night, continuing a troubling trend of denying access to reporters who write critically about Trump and his campaign.

Ben Schreckinger, who has been covering Trump for more than six months, was denied access to Tuesday night’s “press conference” — Trump did not actually take any questions — despite the fact that the campaign had already given press credentials.

In blocking Schreckinger, the Trump campaign appears to have been following through on a threat it made last week to exclude Politico reporters from campaign events because it did not approve of their coverage.

Schreckinger and his colleagues also reported Tuesday morning that Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — who was recently accused of assaulting a female reporter — had a “quick temper and heavy-handed leadership,” which was becoming a source of concern among fellow Trump staffers.

In a statement to CNNMoney, Trump called Schreckinger “a dishonest, third-rate reporter with a failing outlet that will soon be out of business, hopefully.”

Of all the seemingly impossible things this mercurial Trump candidacy has accomplished, the biggest may be that he’s actually making me feel sympathy for members of the MSM.

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The Israel-Bashing Industry’s “Intellectuals” by Giulio Meotti

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

But today, these novelists hold a deep, uninformed, irrational hatred… Instead of backing the only country that gives full rights to all its citizens, they are instrumental in attacking not only Israel but the Jewish people.

What is notable is that every single time, these most illustrious writers “forget” to say why Israel built those fences, checkpoints and roadblocks in the first place.

Mr. Saramago chose not to see and talk about the Israeli restaurants, shopping malls and hotels turned into carpets of human bodies while he was visiting Ramallah. The wholesale slaughter of Jews was the only reason Israel had to send tanks and soldiers back into the Palestinian cities after the Oslo Accords. Saramago did not mention the context; he preferred to give credence to a distorted, demonizing vision.

What is the only country about which can be said:

Its very existence is disputed? (Clue: Not Zimbabwe, not Tuvalu, not even overrun Tibet.)
Its boundaries, bought with blood in wars initiated by others, is challenged by all nations, who now seem determined to destroy it through boycotts, unjust defamation and purported “laws” that are applied to no other nation?
It fully respects the rights of women and every kind of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities, notwithstanding that it is condemned at the United Nations for being “the worst violator of women’s rights.” Worse than Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan?
It provides its own enemy with water, electricity, food and medical treatment; its Defense Forces, to avoid enemy civilian casualties, warn the enemy to evacuate buildings before attacking them, and — instead of simply carpet bombing the enemy as all other nations do, including most democracies –sends its own soldiers poissibly to die on land missions?

Yet this is the only country that even famous writers, intellectuals and Nobel laureates target, demonize and criminalize.

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France: Jihad Infecting Army, Police by Yves Mamou

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.
That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.
In July 2015, four men, one of whom is a Navy veteran, were called in for questioning. They had planned to penetrate a Navy base in the south of France, seize a high-ranking officer, decapitate him, and then spread photos of the decapitation on social media networks. The Navy veteran was one of the leaders.

According to a confidential memo, dated January 2015, from the anti-terrorist unit of the interior ministry, France was already host to 8,250 radical Islamists (a 50% increase in one year).

Some of these Islamists have gone to Syria to join the Islamic State (IS); others have infiltrated all levels of society, starting with the police and the armed forces.

A confidential memo from the Department of Public Security, published by Le Parisien, not only details 17 cases of police officers radicalized between 2012 and 2015, but that this increase had accelerated during 2014. Particularly noted were the police officers who listen to and broadcast Muslim chants while on patrol.

Some of these police officers have openly refused to to protect synagogues or to observe a minute of silence to commemorate the deaths of victims of terrorist attacks.

In addition, the police were alerted to a policewoman who incited terrorism on Facebook, and called her police uniform a “filthy rag of the Republic” while wiping her hands on it. When she came out of the restroom she was wearing a hijab. In January 2015, immediately after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the Hypercacher market in Vincennes which had left 17 people dead, she wrote on her Facebook page: “Masked attack led by Zionist cowards… They need to be killed.”

That police officers are armed and have access to police databases only intensifies anxiety.

Although Police headquarters in Paris confirm that this situation is rare, they have decided to review on a weekly basis any behavior that overstep the principle of separation of church and state, such as that of Muslim officers who appear to be leaning toward radicalization. Patrice Latron, who manages the office of the Paris police prefect, told Le Parisien that these circumstances are “very marginal.”

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Open the books on federal pensions By Adam Andrzejewski

Posted By on March 16th, 2016

What has a three-quarter billion-dollar unfunded liability, is manually calculated on paper inside a Pennsylvania mountain, and costs taxpayers more money annually than the entire state budget of Florida? Answer: Federal employee pensions.

It’s national Sunshine Week across America. During this week, good-government groups advocate for open government and transparency in public spending. One area that remains hidden is federal pensions.

Imagine if you could see how much your former congressman makes in federal retirement pension? Just how many years were ‘worked?’ How much money was paid-in? How much did taxpayers finance? And, once retired, just how quickly did the congressman ‘break-even’ on their own contributions?

Even Illinois – where the state’s #1 manufactured product is corruption – has the courtesy to show taxpayers all of the gory details about pensions. The books are open on all 700,000 public retirees at every level of government.

In Illinois, this transparency has been instrumental in identifying pension abuses. For example, our organization OpenTheBooks.com found that a pair of Illinois union lobbyists who substitute taught for just one day in the public school system actually received their $1 million lifetime ‘teacher’ pensions. This happened despite a state law expressly designed to stop them. In another case, a former chief aide to previous Gov. Pat Quinn (D) was receiving an annual pension of $137,000 per year rather than the proper $20,000. A good-government pension hawk exposed the mistake and stopped the over-payments.

Many other states have public pension transparency. Citizen outrage in California drove lawmakers to pass a state law curbing a $545,000 pension to a city manager in Vernon (population 102). Now, that manager is retired on $115,000 per year – an 80 percent reduction.

Inside the cavernous, windowless, Cold War era federal complex in Pennsylvania, what mistakes has the U.S. government made while hand-calculating retirement pensions? Nobody has a clue, because the Obama administration has cited a ‘privacy’ exemption to the Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) and refused to shine a light on federal pensions.

Two years ago, we filed a FOIA request for individual federal pension data. The Office of Personnel and Management rejected our request saying it was, “… a clear unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” But, our request for the active salaries of 2.5 million federal employees was fulfilled, with seven-year histories. We post these salaries and bonuses (with names) at OpenTheBooks.com.

If active salaries/bonuses are subject to transparency, why would posting federal retiree pension amounts, service credits and contributions be an invasion of privacy? The same privacy law underlies both records. The Obama administration’s legal argument against revealing pension data is arbitrary.