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University Policy: ‘Slight’ Neck-Touching Can Be ‘Sexual Battery’ By Katherine Timpf

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

East Carolina University’s new sexual harassment policy declares that even “slight” neck-touching can be considered a form of “sexual battery” and deserving of punishment.

According to the school’s new “Regulation on Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment and Other Forms of Interpersonal Violence” rules, which went into effect on Jan. 1, “sexual battery includes the intentional or attempted sexual touching of another person’s clothed or unclothed body, including but not limited to the mouth, neck, buttocks, anus, genitalia, or breast, by another with any part of the body or any object in a sexual manner without their consent,” “however slight” that touching may be.

Of course, no one wants to deal with some creep coming up to her and rubbing on her neck and making grunting sounds and smacking his lips or something. But where is the line drawn? What if someone picks a piece of fuzz off of my turtleneck and I decide that they seemed sexually aroused by it? Does how I say I felt about it determine whether or not it was sexual battery?

Or is it about whether or not the person with the neck looked uncomfortable with it being touched? If so, would what Joe Biden did to Ash Carter’s wife be considered sexual battery? What about when George W. Bush touched Angela Merkel at that G8 summit? Was that really just a funny little awkward moment, or was it in fact a violent, disturbing incident of battery that was caught on tape and should have led to him being punished if not impeached?

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The Showdown in the South China Sea A plan to keep Beijing from ruling the the Spratly Islands. By Arthur L. Herman

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

On January 3, a Chinese plane touched down on a remote island airfield where, two years ago, there was no island, let alone any airfield — only a lonely stretch of reef in the South China Sea. That reef in the Spratly Islands, known as Yongshu Jiao to China and Fiery Cross Reef to everyone else, has become the eye of an international diplomatic storm.

At issue is who owns the Spratlys, a collection of reefs, rocks, and tiny islets; no fewer than six governments (China, Taiwan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and the Sultanate of Brunei) claim sovereignty over part or — in China’s case — all of them.

Fiery Cross, for example, is partly claimed by Vietnam, which has dubbed the Chinese-built airfield “illegal” and the plane landing as “a serious infringement of the sovereignty of Vietnam on the Spratly archipelago.”

A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman shot back, “China has indisputable sovereignty” over the Spratlys, which Beijing calls the Nansha Islands, as well as “their adjacent waters,” and that “China will not accept the unfounded accusation from the Vietnamese side.”

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Preventing the Seriously Mentally Ill from Owning Guns Is Not Enough By D. J. Jaffe

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

As part of his effort to reduce gun violence, President Obama issued an executive order today that makes it easier to prohibit a small group of the most seriously mentally ill from owning firearms and provides $500 million in additional mental-health funding. The order’s mental-illness–focused gun-control provisions are smart and narrowly tailored to affect only the most seriously ill individuals. But its additional funding won’t go where it could make a difference.

The mental-health industry teaches the public­ that, as President Obama put it, ‘the mentally ill are not more violent than others.’ But that platitude does not apply to the most seriously ill when they are allowed to go untreated. Eighteen percent of the population has some form of “mental-health issue” and is not violent. But 4 percent of the population has serious mental illness, which, left untreated, causes them to be more violent than others. While gun violence is rare, and mass violence by the seriously ill is even rarer, no one outside the NRA and the politically correct mental-health industry believes the seriously mentally ill should have access to weapons.

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If Marco Rubio Is ‘Establishment’ Then ‘Establishment’ Has Lost Its Meaning By David French

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

I must confess that I’m confused. I still have vivid memories of the tea-party revolution of 2010, when insurgent conservative candidates toppled incumbents and establishment favorites from coast to coast. This was the year of Rand Paul in Kentucky, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, and Nikki Haley in South Carolina.

Perhaps most momentous of all, it was the year of Marco Rubio, who overcame long odds to beat Charlie Crist, a man who’s since proven himself to be exactly the kind of soulless politician the tea party exists to oppose. Since his election, Rubio has delivered, becoming one of the most consistent and eloquent conservatives in the Senate. My colleague, Jim Geraghty, has outlined his stratospheric ratings from the American Conservative Union, National Rifle Association, National Right to Life, and the Family Research Council.

In fact, Rubio is largely responsible for the single most effective legislative attack on Obamacare, a move that the New York Times bemoaned in a piece last month:

A little-noticed health care provision that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida slipped into a giant spending law last year has tangled up the Obama administration, sent tremors through health insurance markets and rattled confidence in the durability of President Obama’s signature health law.

So for all the Republican talk about dismantling the Affordable Care Act, one Republican presidential hopeful has actually done something toward achieving that goal.

By blocking bailouts of insurance companies, he’s preventing the White House from passing even more of the costs of Obamacare to taxpayers and forcing insurers to live with the true price of the law.

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The Term ‘Neocon’ Has Run Its Course By Jonah Goldberg

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

In interviews and on the stump, Senator Ted Cruz likes to attack President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and “some of the more aggressive Washington neocons” for their support of regime change in the Middle East.

Every time we topple a dictator, Cruz argues, we end up helping terrorists or extremists.

He has a point. But what interests me is his use of the word “neocon.” What does he really mean?

Some see dark intentions. “He knows that the term in the usual far-left and far-right parlance means warmonger, if not warmongering Jewish advisers, so it is not something he should’ve done,” former George W. Bush advisor Elliott Abrams told National Review. Another former Bush adviser calls the term “a dog whistle.”

I think that’s all a bit overblown. Cruz is just trying to criticize his opponent Marco Rubio, who supported regime change in Libya. There’s little daylight between the two presidential contenders on foreign policy, and this gives Cruz an opening for attack.

But Abrams is right — and Cruz surely knows — that for many people “neocon” has become code for suspiciously Hebraic super-hawk. It’s an absurd distortion.

At first, neocons weren’t particularly associated with foreign policy. They were intellectuals disillusioned by the folly of the Great Society. As Irving Kristol famously put it, a “neoconservative is a liberal who was mugged by reality and wants to press charges.” The Public Interest, the first neoconservative publication, co-edited by Kristol, was a wonkish domestic-policy journal.

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Desperate, Dishonest Donald Trump Goes Birther on Ted Cruz By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

You knew it was coming!

Donald Trump said in an interview that rival Ted Cruz’s Canadian birthplace was a “very precarious” issue that could make the Texas senator vulnerable if he became the Republican presidential nominee.

“Republicans are going to have to ask themselves the question: ‘Do we want a candidate who could be tied up in court for two years?’ That’d be a big problem,” Trump said when asked about the topic.

This is how Donald Trump operates: whenever he’s threatened by someone in the polls, he tries to smear his opponents. He did so with Dr. Ben Carson, calling him pathological, and he now does the same with Ted Cruz by trying to convince voters he isn’t eligible to become president because he wasn’t born in the United States.

Sadly for the billionaire businessman, however, there is one minor problem: in September of last year he admitted that Cruz is eligible:

From what I understand everything is fine. I hear that it [Cruz’s eligibility] was checked out by every attorney, in every which way, and I understand that Ted is in fine shape.

As Mark Levin says: “Oh my.”

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Ted Cruz’s Surge is Real: Now Leads in California By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz not only leads in Iowa, but also in California:

A new Field Poll in California finds Ted Cruz has surged ahead of his GOP presidential rivals with 25%, followed by Donald Trump at 23%, Marco Rubio at 13%, Ben Carson at 9%, Rand Paul at 6%, and Jeb Bush at 4%.

And that isn’t the only good news in this poll for Cruz. It also shows that he’s now twice as likely to be GOP voters’ second choice. This means that he will continue to surge if (or when) some of his rivals get out of the race, which they’ll undoubtedly do once they lose (big-time) in Iowa.

Cruz’s surge comes despite relentless attacks from his rivals for the Republican nomination and establishment-friendly columnists like the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin.

And that proves that 2016 will be different from other years. Until this election season, negative attacks from establishmentarians against real conservatives were always successful, which is how moderates like John McCain and Mitt Romney ended up being the Republican nominee. Not anymore. The establishment tried to take out Donald Trump, which only resulted in him rising in the polls. Now they’re going after Cruz, and the results are the same. He’s stronger than ever before and actually seems to be relishing the attacks.

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New ‘Jihadi John’ Threatened to ‘Spill Blood,’ ‘Convert Your Children’ in Washington By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

The new English-speaking face of ISIS threatening Britain in the group’s latest execution video also threatened Washington in a guide this past spring aimed at luring westerners to join the Islamic State.

British sources reportedly have Siddhartha Dhar, aka Abu Rumaysah, atop their list of suspects in identifying the masked spokeskiller who shot an orange-jumpsuited man in the head in the video, accusing him of being a British spy. Four other ISIS members also shot one alleged spy apiece.

And yesterday Raqqa Is Being Slaughtered Silently, the underground group of citizen journalists and activists risking and sometimes losing their lives to report from within the ISIS capital, tweeted that they believe the executioner is Abu Rumaysah.

And in 2014, he was in British custody.

Dhar, who’s close to radical cleric Anjem Choudary and marched in his pro-sharia events, was arrested in Britain in September 2014 — his sixth time — on suspicion of encouraging terrorism. He jumped bail and fled to the Islamic State with his pregnant wife, who later gave birth to a boy. British politicians were calling for an inquiry today on how he slipped through the cracks.

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Islamic School Projects By David Solway

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

The Islamization of America is proceeding at speed as the political and educational elites are desperately playing catch-up with Europe’s looming immigration and refugee disaster. We have just learned that Paul Ryan’s “House-passed omnibus [bill] will bring in nearly 300,000 Muslim migrants in the next 12 months alone, including roughly 170,000 who will be permanently resettled…” The political nomenklatura on both sides of the aisle are hastening the ruination of the country. As Roger Simon remarks, “Europe is in a double-bind situation that we are not. As their domestic populations decline, they have to admit a substantial amount of Muslims to support their welfare states. We do not need this.” However, there are no doubt electoral and fiscal considerations that would profit, on the one hand, the political fortunes of the Democrats (as well as “fundamentally transforming” America according to Obama’s sinister intentions), and on the other, the financial prospects of those involved in migrant resettlement programs and of employers seeking a low wage labor force.

The education establishment is no less complicit. Common Core, which has been enthusiastically embraced by both Brahmin and shudra, effectively mandates the study of Islam, which often takes precedence over the traditional focus on American and Western history. As columnist and author Edward Davenport reports for Freedom Outpost, “An astounding 32 pages of the World history textbook are devoted to Muslim cavitation. Students in two Texas schools–Cross Timbers intermediate and Kenneth Davis–will be required to learn Arabic…thanks to a 1.3 million grant from the Department of Education’s Foreign Language Assistantship program.” Much of American political and military history has been airbrushed out of the materials students are expected to master. Qatar has also been lavish in promoting Islamic propaganda at the expense of objective scholarship; indeed, Qatar Foundation International, directed by Islamic apologist Tariq Ramadan, funded the “One World Education” concept from which Common Core originated.

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Uwe Siemon-Netto: Where Muslim Dreams May Lead

Posted By on January 6th, 2016

Uwe Siemon-Netto has been an international journalist for almost sixty years. In 2015 his memoir Triumph of the Absurd: A Reporter’s Love for the Abandoned People of Vietnam appeared in four languages. He and his wife share their time between their homes in southern California and the Charente region of France.

Shortly before ISIS struck Paris in November killing 130 people, I committed what must have been utter idolatry in the eyes of its iconoclastic Muslim exterminators. I drove to Bourges, a medieval city in the centre of France, and spent a few hours in St Etienne’s Cathedral to let its twenty-two thirteenth-century stained-glass windows tell me the story of my Christian faith in a mighty burst of colours.

At first I stood alone that sunny morning in the ambulatory at the east end of this magnificent Gothic sanctuary, but quickly I found myself engaged in a long and daunting dialogue with a cultured Frenchwoman about the looming demise of our common civilisation to which these windows testified. It was a conversation so troubling that I will remember it for the rest of my life.

She seemed to have appeared from nowhere. “How long, monsieur, before this becomes the next Palmyra?” she asked me softly, referring to ISIS’s recent destruction of the Temple of Baal in that ancient Semitic city in Syria, a Unesco World Heritage site just like this church. She went on:

“When will these barbarians be here to raze Chartres cathedral, level our vineyards and smash the vats of Burgundy and Bordeaux? How soon will red wine flow down the street as it did in America during Prohibition, but this time mixed with blood? Will Christians in Europe be enslaved, beheaded or crucified like the Chaldeans in Iraq at this very moment?”

“I was born in Leipzig in Germany, madame,” I answered. “My home church was the Thomaskirche where Johann Sebastian Bach is buried. A few years ago, I sat there in the chancel with my feet resting on Bach’s tomb. The Thomaner, the boys’ choir he headed almost three centuries ago, had just begun the opening chorus of his Christmas Oratorio when I was overcome by a premonition similar to yours. Will the day come when the Muslims will forbid these children to sing, I wondered? Will they rip out the church’s two mighty organs? Will they smelt its bells and replace them with a muezzin? Will they outlaw concerts and art shows? Will they butcher educated women?”