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Fred Siegel : Divided, They’ll Fall The Democrats could be coming apart.

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

After nearly seven years in power under the leadership of President Barack Obama, legatee of both the old and new Left, the Democratic Party has managed to hold on to its base. Despite Democrats’ loss of both houses of Congress, Obama has been successful in using executive, judicial, and regulatory power to deliver subsidies and administrative rewards to liberal interest groups including trial lawyers, feminists, and the Hispanic lobby. Unlike George W. Bush, under whom the first inklings of a Tea Party rebellion first formed, Obama has kept core Democratic voters inside the tent—if not always happily so.

The Democrats have ongoing strengths. The party has shown considerable unity even in the face of landslide losses in the 2014 midterms. On a wide variety of issues, however, the Democratic base finds itself at odds with the country’s so-called “swing” voters. This poses a problem for Democrats in 2016. On issues as varied as crime, environmentalism, late-term abortion, illegal immigration, free trade, and the Iran nuclear deal, serious splits exist among self-identified Democrats. The base’s leftward shift on these issues has party moderates shaking their heads.

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Hillary & Co. Fight a Phony War on Gun Violence By Charles Cooke

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Assault Weapons, Aschmault Weapons By Charles C. W. Cooke

With the notable exception of Jim Webb, whose many talents seem better suited to another time and place, every single one of the Democratic party’s presidential candidates is in favor of banning at least some of America’s “in common use” firearms. In her recent gun-control missive, Hillary Clinton contended that “military-style assault weapons” are “a danger to law enforcement and to our communities,” and therefore “do not belong on our streets.” On his campaign website, Martin O’Malley boasts that, while he was governor there, “Maryland prohibited the sale of assault weapons and limited the size of magazines,” and proposes that the federal government, should “adopt similar, commonsense reforms.” In 2012, CBS reports, then–Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee “backed a state measure to ban semi-automatic assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.” And, although he has stayed pretty quiet on the question this time around, Bernie Sanders voted to ban “assault weapons” during the failed Senate push of 2013, and would, he confirmed last week, happily do so again.

All in all, this focus is a little strange, for, as Lois Beckett explained extremely clearly last year in the pages of the New York Times, there is in fact no such thing as an “assault weapon.” Functionally speaking, the term is entirely meaningless. It does not mean “machine gun”; it does not mean “especially powerful rifle”; it does not mean “child killer” or “cop murderer” or “armor-piercer.” Except insofar as it nods to an aesthetic style that is popular among people who have watched a lot of 24, it means nothing much at all. To draw an analogy, it’s the “organic food” of the self-defense world.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Marshal Putin and His ‘Anti-Hitler Coalition’ By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Contrary to the principles of American foreign policy of the last 70 years, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry tacitly invited Russia to “help” monitor things in the Middle East. Now they are learning that there are lots of Middle East scenarios far worse than the relatively quiet Iraq that the Obama administration inherited in January 2009 — and soon abandoned.

Russian president Vladimir Putin liked the American invitation so much that he now has decided to move in permanently. Marshal Putin now wants the West to join his new Syria-Iran-Hezbollah-Iraq axis against the Islamic State — or to at least sit back and allow Russia to straighten out the Middle East as it sees fit.

To fight the Islamic State, Putin has called for something similar to the “anti-Hitler coalition” of World War II that saw the Soviet Union and the West unite to defeat Nazi Germany.

Certainly, the Islamic State, like Nazi Germany, is a savage regime. So far, it has grown unchecked at the very center of the Middle East. Yet under the cloak of fighting the Islamic State, Putin has two greater visions.

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The Tyranny of Idealism: Daniel Greenfield

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Of all the Alinsky rules, the most relevant one is, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” But he simply codified and made pragmatic the most destructive of the left’s rules which is, “Make the enemy live up to his ideals.” Even if those ideals are often the invention of the left.

Ideals are by definition impossible to live up to. Human societies aren’t ideal, they’re real. Ideals are absolutes and an unfliching attempt to live up to them destroys individuals and societies. More subtly, the failure to live up to them justifies hatred and self-hatred toward nations and peoples.

People naturally want to think the best of their creeds and cultures, their societies and their states. This is both the best weapon and the best breeding ground of the left. There is nothing that creates leftists and draws them like the accusation that a nation is failing to live up to its ideals.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

‘Pravda’ on Russia in Syria The facts are that Putin means to dominate the Middle East By Jed Babbin –

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Pravda is the most abused word in the Russian language. Though it means “truth,” we learned it as the name of a Soviet-era, government-controlled newspaper that printed everything except the truth. That same newspaper has returned to its old habits, telling the world that President Vladimir Putin is taking over the war against terrorism that President Obama has abandoned.

It doesn’t take much to parse this one out. Mr. Putin’s direct military intervention in the Syrian conflict is: (a) undertaken to defend the Bashar Assad regime, which we have declared a state sponsor of terrorism since 1979 when Bashar’s daddy ran the show; (b) in partnership with Iran’s kakistocracy, which is the most powerful and dedicated sponsor of terrorism on earth; and (c) isn’t aimed at defeating the nominal terrorist enemy, the Islamic State, or ISIS, but rather is designed to consolidate and grow Russia’s influence in the Middle East at America’s expense.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

DOJ: Better Late Than Never? Edward Cline

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Or, as Rahm Emanuel famously or notoriously said when he was in the Obama administration: “Never let a crisis go to waste.” (Winston Churchill is alleged to have said it first, however, when discussing how modern governments create their own crises to expand power, and also about how one can personally face a crisis and be strengthened by the experience – quite the opposite of what Emanuel meant.)

Now, I wouldn’t know an Assyrian if I stood next to him in a supermarket checkout line. If he were speaking a foreign tongue with his companion, I wouldn’t necessarily know that it was in Farsi or Iraqi or ancient Assyrian or Catalon. Frankly, I know little or nothing about Ancient Assyria or Assyrian culture. I know that Obama’s grand plan for populating the U.S. with “refugees” basically hostile to individual rights and the U.S. Constitution does not include admitting swarms of individuals who are true refugees from tyranny and poverty who seek the security of a civilized country governed by the rule of law and not of men. He prefers to bring in Muslims who come here as part of a “Grand Jihad” to conquer the country by settling in it. It’s a strategy discussed in at least two of my recent Rule of Reason columns, “Just Do It, Parts One and Two.” See Europe for the dire and wholly predictable consequences of the Muslim invasion of a Western country.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Methodist Church Hosts Palestinian Propagandist by Andrew Harrod

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Against Israel “most of Palestinian resistance is basically nonviolent,” stated Kairos Palestine Secretary General Hind Khoury on September 21 at Washington, DC’s Dumbarton United Methodist Church (DUMC). Such alternative reality statements from Khoury raised no visible concern from a small evening audience of over 20 mostly white and older listeners, for whom she preached progressive Palestinian gospel truth.

Various indications even before Khoury spoke confirmed that DUMC in tony Georgetown is firmly part of the religious left, such as the entrance sign proclaiming a pro-LGBT a Reconciling Congregation. Chett Pritchett, executive director of event host Methodist Federation for Social Action and a homosexual “advocate for LGBTQ equality in the Church,” introduced Khoury in his home congregation. A yellow “Black Lives Matter” banner in front of the organ in the second-story sanctuary and several accompanying photographs of African-Americans throughout the church showed DUMC’s emphasis on racism.

Despite Pritchett’s introduction of Khoury with an “amazing list of superlatives to her name,” such as a Palestinian Authority (PA) ambassadorship to France, her presentation offered no insight.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Ruthie Blum :American-Israeli Journalist Recounts Near-Lynching by Palestinian Mob En Route to Jerusalem (Interview)

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

“Today was my turn,” said a resident of Elazar in Gush Etzion in the West Bank, referring to his brush with Palestinian terrorism on Wednesday morning.

Driving on the Tekoa road to Jerusalem — which he took because his Waze satellite warned of traffic on his regular route — freelance journalist Josh Hasten (a show host at the now-defunct Voice of Israel online radio station) found himself prey to a mob of Arabs in balaclavas preparing to pummel him with rocks and concrete blocks.

“And it happened a mere 500 meters away from a checkpoint manned with IDF soldiers,” Hasten told The Algemeiner.

The checkpoint in question is the roadblock between the east Jerusalem Arab village of Sur Baher and the Israeli neighborhood, Har Homa. It was here, shortly before Hasten was confronted with dozens of young men on the rampage against passing Jews, that 38-year-old Rivi Lev Ohayon was nearly lynched.

Lev Ohayon was on her way to work in Jerusalem from her home in Tekoa, when she was ambushed by a group of rock-wielding Palestinians, who shattered her car’s windows. One of them began to beat her, while trying to pull her out of the vehicle.

“I saw my death,” she told a Channel 2 news team from her Jerusalem hospital bed, where she is being treated for light wounds – which could have been far greater had Lev Ohayon not managed to accelerate and tear away from her attackers. Rather than wait for an ambulance to arrive at the nearby checkpoint, as she was instructed to do when she phoned for help, she drove home, where paramedics whisked her off to the hospital.

BOOKS Comments turned off

First Step to Resolve the Palestinian Problem: Eliminate UNRWA Part One by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

Adnan Abu Hasna, UNRWA spokesman, suggested that donor countries, instead of contributions, should be charged a compulsory annual fee.

The Palestinians’ desire appears to be to preserve the refugee problem at all costs, and not to resolve it in any just way — not in the Arab states and not in the Palestinian state that will be established next to Israel.

It is therefore clear that the Palestinians refuse to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel and are not willing to agree to the return of the refugees to the Palestinian state; their only objective is to destroy and displace Israel.

If Israel is genuinely an “apartheid state,” why do its people accept Arabs as citizens, while our racist brother Arabs refuse to?

Does anyone really think the Jews so stupid as to believe that we Arabs, who slaughter one another without giving it a second thought, will be particularly generous towards them if we succeed in realizing the right of return to Palestine?

BOOKS Comments turned off

The Palestinians’ New Intifada by Barry Shaw

Posted By on October 8th, 2015

“I saw a mob of 40 to 50 masked Palestinians on the side of the road. They were holding rocks and cinder blocks. … I have no doubt that I would be dead now if I hadn’t used my gun. They were going to kill me.” – Josh Hasten, Oct. 7, 2015.

Arab children watch other Arab children on television throw rocks and firebombs, and speaking of knifing and shooting Jews, and they want a part of the action.

When Arabs hear from their leaders that Jews are “desecrating” Islamic holy places with their “filthy feet” and plotting to destroy them, it is a code, telling them to go out and attack Jews.

Yesterday, a friend, Josh Hasten, was set upon by a crowd of rock-wielding Palestinians, while he was driving to Jerusalem. “I saw a mob of 40 to 50 masked Palestinians on the side of the road. They were holding rocks and cinder blocks,” Hasten said. “As they approached my car, I took out my gun and fired one round in the air. The shot obviously scared them and they ran up the hill away from the road. I have no doubt that I would be dead now if I hadn’t used my gun. They were going to kill me.”