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Weekly round up from the religion of horrors By Carol Brown

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

Israelis live under constant threat of attacks that can occur anywhere, anytime, any way – from suicide bombings to stabbings to being run over with cars. (And this doesn’t even address the threat of large-scale attacks that loom on the horizon.)

The West has had the relative luxury of looking at Israel from afar and feeling a sense of how different life is here, compared to there. But times are changing as evil gains ground. Westerners can no longer cast their eyes to Israel and sense a great divide between us and them anymore. The Israeli reality has become the West’s reality as we face increasing terror attacks that crop up anywhere, anytime, any way.

These events are no longer occasional (though that would be bad enough). They’re not even every month or two (though that would be bad enough). Jihad has become a daily reality. Here is a sampling from just last week of some of the horror that the religion of horrors served up.

Bavaria: A group of Nigerian “refugee” women attacked a refugee center worker, attempting to strangle him while they held their babies in front as human shields so the man would not fight back. (here)

Brussels: Muslim adolescent boys sexually assaulted a teenage girl on a train. (here)

Denmark: A 15-year-old convert to Islam was arrested for possessing explosives. (here)

Canada: Two Muslims attempted to shoot up a nightclub full of people. A Muslim serial rapist was arrested after having raped at least ten teenage girls. (here, here, and here)

Germany: Three Muslim teenagers stoned two “transgender” people. (There really is no such thing as a “transgender” person, but for the sake of this report, the term is being used.) The attackers were apprehended and told the police: “such persons must be stoned.” Teenage girls were sexually assaulted and raped by “Syrian migrants” at a swimming pool. A Muslim man kicked a woman in her face and broke her cheekbone while attempting to rape her. Christians continued to be targeted by Muslims at asylum centers. (here, here, here, and here)

France: A Muslim teenager attacked a Jewish teacher with a machete and a knife, stating that he was acting in allegiance with the Islamic State. (Life for Jews in France has become so perilous that Jewish men are being urged not to wear yarmulkes in public.) Women continued to come forward to report sexual assaults from New Year’s eve. (here, here, and here)

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Is North Korea Testing Iran’s Nuclear Device? By Amil Imani and James Hyde

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is yet another toothless U.N. body that is in for a whirlwind of frustration when it inspects Iran’s nuclear program sites. The provisions of the agreement negotiated by Secretary of State John Kerry and his team of sycophants make Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time” negotiations with Hitler look like a stroke of genius.

Iran’s Islamic regime is an incredibly dangerous foe. Like ISIS (or Daesh, a moniker that group loathes), Iran has an apocalyptic view of current and near-future events. But this time around, a group of believers in Shia Iran, with tremendous resources, are intent upon forcing the issue, making the conditions so dire that they leave the reluctant Saheb-ul-Zaman, the Lord of the Age, the Mahdi, their messianic myth, no choice but to appear and assume his universal reign.

Devotees drive both, the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Islamic State, to quicken the End Times apocalypse. Iranian leaders hold to a Shia brand. ISIS leaders hold to a Sunni brand. But both are obsessed by a belief that their messiah is coming. The Iran Shiites believe they must lay the groundwork for the messiah (Mahdi) to come and build their Kingdom or Imamate. ISIS isn’t really waiting. They have propelled a jihadist storm to build the Caliphate now, so that the Mahdi will come soon.

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Ten Reasons to Vote for Rubio By James Arlandson ****

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

It’s about time to vote. It’s now time to get serious about who can win in the general.

It is true that we have a slate of better than average candidates, but Rubio comes across as better than the others for ten reasons.

Since this is turning into a three-way race, I have to contrast Rubio mainly with Cruz and Trump (but some others, too). Here’s why you should vote for Sen. Marco Rubio and not throw away your vote on the other candidates.

1. Rubio has the best chance to deliver Florida.

This reason comes first because we need that state to win electorally. In 2010, he won 48.49% in a three-way race; former Republican turned independent Crist got 29.71, and Democrat Meeks got 20.20%. We already have states like Texas, so we don’t need Cruz. We need Ohio, but I doubt Kasich would run as the V.P. Maybe he would campaign for Rubio. If Rubio’s opponents claim he can’t deliver Florida, then how could Cruz (see the other points below)? And certainly Trump can’t. It’s doubtful he could get even 30% of the N.Y. voters.

2. He speaks Spanish fluently.

At my large, mostly white church in the greater L.A. area, we sometimes sing in Spanish. The lyrics are put up on the screen. This is happening in historically white churches across the Southwest. We like Hispanics in our congregations.

TBN, the world’s largest family of Christian networks, has opened a new network called “Salsa.” Here are the cities into which they broadcast across the nation.

“True” conservatives have a knack for misreading their own country. Will they get caught flat-footed by this inexorable trend line and continue to be shrill and hysterical about Hispanics and their immigrant relatives?

Like it or not, we need someone at this time in our nation’s history to persuade them in Spanish to come over to our side. We don’t need one hundred percent of them – just enough to tip the scales our way.

Rubio can go into the Southwest and Colorado and other markets and give speeches and TV interviews in Spanish, explaining why conservative politics is what the nation needs now. He won’t scare them off.

From my own experience, I know they are persuadable.

In contrast, Cruz barely speaks “Spanglish” and can’t debate or interview on Spanish TV.

Rubio can reassure concerned Hispanic voters in Spanish that Trump’s harsh rhetoric and Cruz’s politically convenient “never” even to legalization don’t represent the best kind of conservatism.

3. His faith seems genuine.

Whichever church he has eventually chosen, his journey seems sincere. He gave a talk before a conference of Iowa ministers, and he spoke as an insider, not an outsider whose religion is politically motivated and convenient (Trump).

Also, he doesn’t get into needless controversies, like tracing the current Middle East conflict all the way back to Jacob and Esau in Genesis (Carson). Surely there are more proximate causes than that. But even if, hypothetically, those two characters were the main cause, this knowledge about them doesn’t lead to solutions today.

4. He outpolls Hillary in a head-to-head matchup.

I don’t trust campaign polls nowadays because the news media gleefully obsesses over Trump, so he gets the most attention, but that linked one at least offers a little perspective.

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13 Hours and Counting to the end of Hillary’s Candidacy By Daniel John Sobieski

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

Patricia Smith and Charles Woods, parents of two of the Benghazi dead, Sean Smith and Tyrone Woods, would disagree with the notion that history is a lie agreed upon. They do not agree with and do not consent to Hillary Clinton’s attempted rewriting of history and the attempted hiding of what is arguably her criminal negligence in what she calls the “fog of war.”

Family members of the Benghazi dead talked to Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly Wednesday night after viewing the world premier of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi. Charles Woods and Jeremiah Woods, father and brother of Ty Woods, and Patricia Smith. mother of Sean, repeated their consistent statements that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, President Obama, and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice all told them in front of their son’s caskets that Benghazi was the fault of a video and they would get, not the terrorist’s that killed their sons, but the filmmaker. As Matthew K. Burke notes on the Politistick blog:

The most powerful moment of the interviews — setting aside Charles Woods, whose son Ty Woods was killed in the Islamic attacks, who showed notes he took at the funerals of the victims which collaborate [sic] that Hillary Clinton told the families the known lie that the YouTube video was responsible, was a crying Pat Smith, who sadly declared the one thing she would like to say.

The poor lady couldn’t even make it through the whole movie, having to leave immediately upon seeing the actor portraying her son.

Almost like Bill Clinton’s multiple victims of his sexual assault victims who were labeled as liars, Hillary Clinton claimed to not have told the families that the YouTube video was responsible — in essence calling the families liars.

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Why the Media Don’t Want You to See the Must-See ’13 Hours’ By Jack Cashill

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

The more naïve members of the Hillary Clinton campaign have long dreaded the release of Michael Bay’s factual account of the Benghazi attack, 13 Hours. The more sophisticated members of that campaign were less worried. They were confident their friends in the media would scare off all but the most deluded “tea-baggers.”

Yes, the media will try. They are trying. I am not sure, however, that they will succeed. In the age of social media, word of mouth is much more significant a force than it ever was before. And the word of mouth on 13 Hours will be justifiably powerful. The movie is riveting from beginning to end.

I saw the movie without benefit of having read a review. I was further burdened by the fact that I know the story well; I have written extensively about Benghazi. When the movie begins with the words on screen, “This is a true story,” and not the usual “This is based on a true story,” I was prepared to hold the filmmakers to account. They were as good as their word.

In reading the reviews afterward, I sensed some relief among the critics that the movie was not overtly political. The names of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, for instance, go unmentioned. In a feint at sophistication, some critics held this against director Bay.

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Trump Dotes on Despots and Fiscal Fiasco At best, he disregards prudence, decency and facts. He’s altering conservatism itself. By William Galston

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

I swore that I wouldn’t write another column on Donald Trump this month, but the mouthy New York billionaire has forced my hand.

Over the weekend a New York Post headline smacked me in the face: “Trump praises Kim Jong-un’s murderous ascent to power.” I double-checked to make sure it wasn’t the Onion instead. It wasn’t. So I read on.

Here’s part of what Mr. Trump had to say about the North Korean dictator in Iowa on Saturday: “You’ve got to give him credit. He goes in, he takes over, he’s the boss. It’s incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one.”

Machiavelli, who admired Hannibal for his “inhuman cruelty,” would have said it more elegantly, but the sentiment is the same.

This is not the first time Mr. Trump has praised an autocrat, and it probably won’t be the last. In December Vladimir Putin called him a “very bright and talented man.” Informed of this news, Mr. Trump said it was “a great honor to be so nicely complimented by a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond.”

When a stunned Joe Scarborough, the co-host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” pressed him about Mr. Putin’s thuggish rule, Mr. Trump shot back, saying: “He’s running his country, and at least he’s a leader, you know, unlike what we have in this country.” Mr. Scarborough pressed on: What about the murder of Russian journalists? Mr. Trump: “Well, I think our country does plenty of killing also, Joe.”

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Taiwan’s Shy Tsai Thrust Into Spotlight as First Female President The 59-year-old former law professor is known to shun confrontation but is a tough negotiator By Jeremy Page and Jenny W. Hsu

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

TAIPEI — Taiwan’s first female president, Tsai Ing-wen, takes a novel approach to politics on an island renowned for its legislative brawls and fiery standoffs with Beijing.

The 59-year-old former law professor, who won a landslide election victory on Saturday, shuns confrontation, listens rather than lectures, and is happiest poring over policy details, say people who know her.

Even so, in over two decades in politics and government, they say she has proven to be a tough negotiator, having shepherded Taiwan’s entry to the World Trade Organization, and she’s a passionate believer in Taiwan’s democracy as its defining feature — rather than its divisive relations with China, which sees the island as its territory.

Her quiet pragmatism struck a chord with voters, winning the presidency and helping secure a legislative majority for her Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, which espouses independence from the mainland.

The presidential nominee for Taiwan’s pro-independence opposition defeated rival Eric Chu, of the ruling Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, in Saturday’s election. The KMT also lost control of the legislature for the first time.

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Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy 2.0 The Kochs host public-policy seminars, fund political groups and back candidates. Are they really such a danger to the republic?By George Melloan see note please

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

Jane Mayer’s bias has long been on display….she is co-author of a hagiography of Anita Hill and a book bashing Clarence Thomas… “Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas”by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson 1994….rsk
Jane Mayer, a New Yorker magazine staff writer and former Washington reporter for this newspaper, introduces “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” by comparing current-day America to the Gilded Age of the 1890s and bemoaning the ways in which rich people today are trying to “remake America” to advance their interests. Inevitably, she quotes New York Times columnist Paul Krugman: “We are on the road not to just a highly unequal society but a society of an oligarchy. A society of inherited wealth.”

That claim may have a familiar ring. Populists have been deploring the power of the rich since the birth of the republic. In 1907, Teddy Roosevelt railed at “malefactors of great wealth.” His fifth cousin, Franklin, laced his 1933 inaugural speech with a promise to drive the “money changers” out of whatever temples they occupied. The formula works well.

Dark Money

By Jane Mayer

(Doubleday, 449 pages, $29.95)

Ms. Mayer is highly selective about which super-wealthy dabblers in politics she wants to expel. Warren Buffett, whose $62 billion fortune ranks second only to that of Bill Gates ($76 billion), is not one of her targets. Rather she quotes him in support of her thesis, to the effect that the rich are winning the class war. Tom Steyer, the West Coast hedge-fund billionaire environmentalist, gets a bye as well. So does former Google CEO Eric Schmidt ($11 billion), a big campaign contributor to Barack Obama, and Steven Spielberg, who has generously shared from his $3 billion nest egg to aid the goals of Bill and Hillary Clinton. A host of think tanks and political websites depend on liberal deep pockets, but their donors do not figure in “Dark Money.” Politically active, left-of-center oligarchs are apparently wonderful people, not dangerous ones.

Ms. Mayer mainly dislikes foes of big government. Her list of the rich and dangerous begins with figures whose heyday has passed, such as Richard Mellon Scaife and John M. Olin. For decades, their philanthropies supported conservative journals, scholars and think tanks, much as the Bradley Foundation does today, another organization that earns her contempt. But most of “Dark Money” is aimed at just two people, Charles and David Koch

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Taiwan’s New Direction However Beijing reacts to its new leaders, Taipei needs to build links with others.

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

Tsai Ing-wen easily won Taiwan’s presidential election on Saturday, as expected, and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took its first-ever majority in the legislature. The party platform stressed Taiwan’s right to democratic self-government, and the victory margins received a last-minute boost from an unexpected source: the political bullying of a teen pop star.

Hours before voting began, Taiwanese social media exploded with anger over a video in which Chou Tzu-yu, a 16-year-old Taiwanese member of a South Korean “K-pop” group, was forced by her management to apologize for waving Taiwan’s flag on a TV show. “There is only one China and the two sides of the Strait are one,” she read from a script, promising to “seriously reflect” on her behavior. The glum scene resembled a hostage video.

It would have been hard to concoct a display more likely to reinforce Taiwanese fears that China’s economic and military power threatens their democratic way of life. Candidates across the political spectrum defended Ms. Chou, but the episode was bad news for the ruling Nationalist Party (KMT), which since 2008 has prioritized closer ties with China. Several tight legislative races may have tipped for the DPP as a result.

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Iranians Freed by U.S. Are Shippers, Traders, Sanctions Violators U.S. rejected freedom for Iranians involved with violence, weapons By Damian Paletta and Jay Solomon

Posted By on January 18th, 2016

WASHINGTON—Two months ago, Houston lawyer Joel Androphy got a call from an Iranian official in Washington requesting a meeting. They met a few days later at a federal detention center in Houston with Mr. Androphy’s client, Bahram Mechanic, a 69-year-old Iranian-American facing charges for shipping electronics equipment to Iran.

The Iranian official asked if Mr. Mechanic would be interested in being part of a clemency exchange between the two countries, a sentiment U.S. officials soon echoed. It remained unclear if the deal would come together until about a week ago.

“Everybody told me to keep my mouth shut, both the U.S. and the Iranians,” Mr. Androphy said in a phone interview from the detention center on Saturday as he waited for Mr. Mechanic to be released.

The U.S. and Iran consummated a historic—though controversial—legal deal Saturday that freed several Iranian-Americans facing charges in Iran and offered clemency to six Iranian-Americans and one Iranian either facing charges or convicted of charges in the U.S.