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February 2020

The ISIS Plot in Kansas City You Heard Nothing About By Robert Spencer

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-isis-plot-in-kansas-city-you-heard-nothing-about/

A few years ago, Robert Lorenzo Hester, Jr. of Columbia, Missouri met “several young men who suggested that Islam was a religion that valued men like him.” That was when his troubles began: prosecutors announced Wednesday that they want Hester to serve twenty years in prison and be under supervision for the rest of his life for plotted a jihad massacre in Kansas City. His case shows yet again how politically correct willful ignorance regarding the motivating ideology and magnitude of the jihad threat renders us all vulnerable.

True to form, federal prosecutors are already busily ignoring the possibility that Hester was inspired to try to kill non-Muslims by Qur’anic exhortations such as “kill them wherever you find them” (2:191, 4:89; cf. 9:5). According to the Columbia Tribune, they claim that “mental health issues combined with a mockery of his race and intellect by fellow soldiers led him to extremists ideologies.” Federal public defender Troy Stabenow also notes that Hester suffered from an “abusive childhood” and engaged in “drug use at an early age.” He “wanted to feel accepted and do something to make others proud, so he joined the Armed Forces,” but he didn’t stick.

Canada: A Dead Country Walking By David Solway

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/canada-a-dead-country-walking/

Canada is presently in the throes of social and political disintegration. A left-leaning electorate has once again empowered a socialist government promoting all the lunatic ideological shibboleths of the day: global warming or “climate change,” radical feminism, indigenous sovereignty, expansionary government, environmental strangulation of energy production, and the presumed efficiency of totalitarian legislation. Industry and manufacturing are abandoning the country in droves and heading south.

Canada is now reaping the whirlwind. The Red-Green Axis consisting of social justice warriors, hereditary band chiefs, renewable energy cronies, cultural Marxists, and their political and media enablers have effectively shut down the country. The economy is at a standstill, legislatures and City Halls have been barricaded, blockades dot the landscape, roads and bridges have been sabotaged, trains have been derailed (three crude-by-rail spillages in the last two months), goods are rotting in warehouses, heating supplies remain undelivered, violent protests and demonstrations continue to wreak havoc—and the hapless Prime Minister, who spent a weak swanning around Africa as the crisis unfolded, is clearly out of his depth and has no idea how to control the mayhem. No surprise here. A wock pupper politico in thrall to the Marxist project and corporate financial interests, Justin Trudeau is generally baffed out when it comes to any serious or demanding concerns involving the welfare of the people and the economic vitality of the nation. Little is to be expected of him in the current emergency apart from boilerplate clichés and vague exhalations of roseate sentiment.

Still, Trudeau may have been right about one thing when he told The New York Times that Canada had no core identity—although this is not what a Prime Minister should say in public. Canada was always two “nations,” based on two founding peoples, the French and the English, which novelist Hugh MacLennan famously described as “two solitudes” in his book of that title. But it may be closer to the truth to portray Canada as an imaginary nation which comprises three territories and ten provinces, two of which, Quebec and Newfoundland, cherish a near-majoritarian conception of themselves as independent countries in their own right. Newfoundland narrowly joined Confederation only in 1949 and Quebec held two successive sovereignty referenda that came a hair’s breadth from breaking up the country.

Worst Side Story Anyone expecting a standard revival of ‘West Side Story’ is in for a surprise. By Terry Teachout

https://www.wsj.com/articles/worst-side-story-11582246801?mod=opinion_reviews_pos1

My sentiments exactly. If the P.C. crowd wants a P.C. musical, let them compose their own music and lyrics and not defile a classic….rsk

Pop quiz, boomers: What’s your favorite musical? If I had to guess, I’d go for “West Side Story.” Not only did the original 1957 production light up the hit parade four times in a row, with “Maria,” “One Hand, One Heart,” “Somewhere” and “Tonight,” but the 1961 film version was a box-office smash that won 10 Oscars and remains to this day a small-screen staple, while regional theater companies all over America continue to stage the show with remunerative regularity. As for Broadway, this fourth revival of “West Side Story” had been in previews since December and is selling out nightly. Nor is anyone buying tickets to see the big names in the cast, because there aren’t any: This is a starless production. No, they’re going to see “West Side Story” because it’s “West Side Story.”

Unfortunately, a suburban mom who goes to Ivo van Hove’s new Broadway revival without knowing anything about Mr. Van Hove’s work in general or this production in particular is in for a very big shock. This is not the “West Side Story” you know and love, and there are some—quite a few, actually—who’ll likely tell you that it’s not “West Side Story” at all. Jerome Robbins’s finger-popping choreography has been scrapped, and the rest of the show is heavily cut (it now runs for an intermission-free hour and 45 minutes, an hour shorter than the 2009 Broadway revival). “I Feel Pretty” and the “Somewhere” ballet are nowhere to be seen in Mr. Van Hove’s production, which takes place not on New York’s Upper West Side in the ’50s but—surprise, surprise—here and now. Oh, yes, there’s no balcony or fire escapes, just a huge empty stage. Instead, the upstage wall of the 1,761-seat Broadway Theatre has been replaced with a proscenium-size projection screen on which are alternately shown scenes of the mean streets of New York and giant live-TV images of the cast in action.

Lawyers Cast a Stone at William Barr Former officials urge current officials to defy their supervisors. That’s an affront to the rule of law. By Edwin Meese III and Michael B. Mukasey

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lawyers-cast-a-stone-at-william-barr-11582477289?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Whatever the outcome of a case, then-Attorney General Robert H. Jackson observed in 1940, “the government . . . has really won if justice has been done.” It’s worth keeping that truth in mind as we consider the dispute over Attorney General William Barr and Roger Stone.

Judge Amy Berman Jackson last week sentenced Mr. Stone to 40 months in prison—a term within the range Mr. Barr had suggested when he overruled prosecutors who recommended a term of seven to nine years. The attorney general’s move generated accusations that he was doing President Trump’s bidding by showing leniency to Mr. Trump’s friend and former political adviser. It even prompted a petition, signed by more than 2,000 former Justice Department employees, demanding Mr. Barr’s resignation.

Before we address these attacks directly, we think it useful to consider a few data points in Mr. Barr’s recent tenure. Notwithstanding his own skepticism about aspects of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, he allowed that probe to run its course. Mr. Barr supported the decision not to prosecute Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and frequent critic of Mr. Trump, despite overwhelming evidence that Mr. McCabe not only lied when he denied leaking information about an investigation but also berated others for the leak to deflect suspicion from himself.

Mr. Barr has said publicly that he believes Mr. Stone’s prosecution was warranted, and that, given his conviction, so is a prison sentence. And the attorney general has pointedly criticized the president—rightly, in our view—for commenting publicly about cases pending in court and before the Justice Department. That is not the behavior of someone doing the president’s bidding.