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Analysis: Cruz-Rubio Race Likely By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Donald Trump is not the favorite to win the Republican primary in 2016. National polls can be misleading — there is no day or time when Republicans across the nation will pick their presidential candidate. Instead, there will be multiple elections in all 50 states, on multiple days, and some states will matter more than others. This explains why so many pundits have predicted a Cruz-Rubio race.

In order to make this contest easier to understand, RealClearPolitics authors Sean Trende and David Byler created an interactive tool called the GOP Race for Delegates (you can find it here). Any reader can enter the polling results from each state’s primary and see how these results would affect the overall outcome. For convenience, Trende and Byler integrated each state’s rules into the program, and loaded the RealClearPolitics polling averages for the early states as a guideline.

Using this tool, Trende and Byler discovered many important features of the Republican primary to come. While conservative southern states will likely winnow the field, more liberal northern states will play a huge role in actually determining who will become the nominee. Some traditional wisdom is proven false, and there is a strong likelihood of a final battle between Senators Ted Cruz (TX) and Marco Rubio (FL).
Cruz-Rubio

While Trende and Byler emphasize that “there are an almost infinite number of possibilities,” they did tend to find one much-discussed outcome kept showing up in their simulations — a struggle between Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

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Canada Awaits a Pair of Impending Catastrophes By David Solway

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

There are two countries that I once regarded as home: Canada, where I have spent most of my life, and Greece, where I lived for five years. Both are now lost to me. Governed by a leftist administration and effectively submitting to the adhan—the call of the muezzin—each is now under siege.

Greece has become a way-station for a vast press of Muslim refugees sowing disorder and mayhem in their wake. Fishermen on the island of Lesbos, which I know well, have seen their livelihoods disrupted, and are unable to navigate through the filth and garbage littering their shores. Elsewhere the migrants reward their hosts by going on rampages. A graphic video shows what lies in wait for this once anti-Islamic country, which endured over 400 years of Ottoman oppression. As one Greek respondent says, “We are under occupation.”

As for Canada, the future augurs poorly. Under the partisan and incompetent administration of Justin Trudeau—like Barack Obama the most unqualified and dangerous person ever to occupy his nation’s highest office—we are witnessing the importation of a veritable Muslim army that will ultimately change the face of the country beyond recognition. Trudeau, who has ended Canada’s military contribution to the war against ISIS and vowed to weaken anti-terrorist Bill C-51, is opening the gates with intemperate haste to 25,000 Muslim refugees, aka “Syrians,” a number proportionately equivalent, as author Howard Rotberg points out, to 225,000 Muslims flooding in short order into the U.S. CTV News reports that up to 900 Syrians a day are set to land in Montreal and Toronto, starting December 1.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Police Chief: San Bernardino Shooting Well-Planned, Wasn’t Spontaneous By Bridget Johnson

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

San Bernardino’s police chief confirmed that the mass shooting at a county Christmas banquet did not look like a spontaneous attack due to the amount of planning, devices, weapons and tactical gear involved.

Chief Jarrod Barguan told reporters in a late-night press conference the shooting suspects, both killed in a gunbattle with some 20 officers at the end of a pursuit, have been identified as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27. Farook was a U.S.-born citizen; the chief wasn’t sure of Malik’s background. He said he had no information on whether either had a criminal record.

Barguan said there was a relationship between the two; CBS News reported that the pair had been married for two years. CAIR said earlier that Farook and his wife have a 6-month-old baby.

Farook was an environmental specialist at the county health department. He had attended the Christmas party last year, and this year left the party early “angry” under circumstances that led police to the Redlands residence. The Daily Beast reported that Farook’s mother lived there.

ANTI-SEMITISM, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A “Powerful Rebuke” by Mark Steyn

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

On Wednesday, 14 Americans were shot dead and another 17 injured at a Christmas party in San Bernadino. The temptation to retreat instantly to one’s tropes is very powerful – and Sam Stein, who is “Senior Politics Editor” of The Huffington Post, surrendered in a nano-second:

Planned Parenthood is about 1.3 miles from site of shooting. CNN, however, is reporting that the shooting didn’t take place there.

In fact, the slaughter appears to be the work of one Syed Farook, a US-born county employee described by his father as a “devout Muslim”, assisted by a woman who may or may not be a wife or girlfriend. They had body armor and sophisticated weaponry. One male is dead, as is a female, Tashfeen Malik – apparently one of those harmless Muslim “women and children” the President was sneering at scaredypants Republicans for being such bedwetters about.

Responding to the carnage in Paris, Barack Obama said that the most “powerful rebuke” you could send to the terrorists was to go ahead and hold the big climate conference as scheduled and show the killers that the world would not be deflected from talking about sea levels in the Maldives in the 22nd century. The President spoke at the conference yesterday. Today can be seen as a “powerful rebuke” to the fatuities of Obama.

BOOKS Comments turned off

David Singer: Israel Ensures European Union Swallows Poison Pill

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

The European Union’s (EU) discriminatory and racist labelling requirements for Jewish goods and products originating from Judea and Samaria has now seen Israel effectively label the EU as “persona non grata” in the diplomatic process between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs under the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

The EU finds itself in this sorry position following Israel’s decision to reassess the involvement of EU bodies in that diplomatic process and to suspend contacts with the EU and its representatives until that reassessment is completed.

The labelling requirements reflect the EU’s political position that settlement by Jews in Judea and Samaria is illegal in international law. This claim has never been the subject of any binding authoritative legal decision.

The International Court of Justice decision on 9 July 2004 was only an advisory opinion sought by United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan and not a legally binding precedent.

That opinion was itself deficient since the Court was never asked by the Secretary-General to consider the legal effect of two territory-specific pieces of international law applicable to Judea and Samaria. Those provisions – article 6 of the Mandate for Palestine and article 80 of the United Nations Charter – vested and preserved the legal right to “close settlement by Jews” in Judea and Samaria for the purposes of reconstituting the Jewish National Home

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Still Blaming Israel First Old habits die hard, even after the attacks in Paris. By Daniel Mandel

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

One hundred and thirty-two people have been slaughtered in Paris and hundreds more wounded, to say nothing of smaller incidents that followed, victims of a well-coordinated, multi-pronged massacre devised by jihadists owing allegiance to the Islamic State (IS). The French government of François Hollande has responded with air strikes and statements about a new war that has actually been in progress in Europe for quite some time.

But old habits die hard: Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström declares that it’s really about the war that entwines the Israelis and the Palestinians.

“To counteract the radicalization we must go back to the situation such as the one in the Middle East in which not at the least the Palestinians sees that there is no future; we must either accept a desperate situation or resort to violence,” Wallström said in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.

Her remarks were echoed by Dutch Socialist Party leader Jan Marijnissen, who opined that the terrorists’ behavior “eventually is connected also to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict” which he described as “the growth medium for such an attack.”

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Another White House Scandal: Dumbed Down Intelligence By Amil Imani and James Hyde

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

“Where intelligence starts and stops is at the White House,” Lt. General Michael Flynn gruffly exclaimed in response to a question posed by Megyn Kelly on The Kelly File. “The president sets the priorities, and he’s the number-one customer. So if he’s not getting the intelligence that he needs, and if he’s not paying attention to what else is going on, then something else is wrong there between them and the advisers that he has.”

With that, General Flynn, the personification of a bald eagle, is discussing an issue that’s near and dear to his heart: military intelligence and how it’s being manipulated. It’s the latest Obama administration scandal, and it’s being whisked along on an assembly line chock-full of them. The nature of this one, however, is far worse than “If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.” Dumbed down intelligence at the insistence of someone in the military or the administration is a clear and present threat to our national security.

Flynn, a no-nonsense, intensely bright, and “ground-truth” general, has been an intrepid and stormy critic of the Obama administration, its “whack a mole” air campaign against ISIS, and its mealy-mouthed narrative about terrorism in general. He is the tip of the spear of a growing vanguard of those in the intelligence sector who fiercely defend their craft and the solid information they provide. Top-notch analysts have been appalled to learn that the intel they’ve been supplying has been watered down like a glass of cheap wine in a cheesy bar.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Clowns on Parade By Charles Battig

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

It is unfortunate that Charles Mackay is no longer alive to add yet another chapter or two to his insightful book of human follies, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. First published in 1841, his book chronicles in sixteen examples of crowd psychology with some of the notable economic and social foibles of the past. The preface includes his observation that “[w]e find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds on one object, and go mad in its pursuit: that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it, til their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.”

Chapter headings include The Mississippi Scheme, The South-Sea Bubble, The Tulipomania, Fortune-Telling, The Magnetisers, The Crusades, and The Witch Mania. These and the other chapters were chosen by Mackay to illustrate recurring but transient moral and economic epidemics, and to “show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes.” The foreword by Bernard Baruch in the 1932 edition references Schiller’s dictum: “Anyone taken as an individual is tolerably sensible and reasonable – as a member of a crowd he at once becomes a blockhead.”

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Obama and Israel: Nothing Has Changed, Nothing Will Change By Abraham H. Miller

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

Amid the hoopla of the 2008 election campaign, when much of the world saw candidate Barack Obama as the very incarnation of the messiah, and some even openly proclaimed him so, the Israelis were not buying the narrative. Neither have they since.

Their skepticism was not to be disconfirmed. If Candidate Obama’s embrace of the anti-Israel narrative of Rashid Khalidi or Edward Said was insufficient, there was President Obama’s speech in Cairo, to which he insisted the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood be invited.

In this speech, Obama conveniently ignored the historic Jewish ties to the land of Israel and invoked the Holocaust as the reason for Israel’s existence. Even the left-leaning Ha’aretz newspaper found this sufficiently objectionable to call for Obama to rectify his misleading statements.

This narrative, fashionable throughout the Islamic world and one that denies there were ever Jews in the land of Judea is now orthodoxy among the mindless, atheistic Left, with whom Obama shares ideological kinship.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

More Security Lapses by Secret Service Disclosed Congressional committee says incidents show agency is ‘in crisis’ By Devlin Barrett

Posted By on December 3rd, 2015

A congressional panel said it has uncovered an array of previously unknown security lapses by the Secret Service showing the agency is “in crisis’’ and needs major changes.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform report, set to be released Wednesday, documents what it says are widespread problems at the Secret Service. The committee, led by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), has been probing the agency since a 2012 scandal over agents bringing prostitutes back to their hotel rooms in Cartagena, Colombia.

The newly revealed security breakdowns cited in the report include:

Security at Vice President Joe Biden’s home in Delaware was breached in 2013 when four young adults went fishing in his backyard. The Secret Service learned of their presence from neighbors of Mr. Biden, according to the report.

A previously disclosed incident in which a man pretended to be a lawmaker to get backstage at a Congressional Black Caucus event was worse than initially thought. The man managed to speak directly to President Barack Obama at the 2014 event before being removed, the report says.