Posts Tagged ‘Marine Le Pen’
Friday, January 20th, 2017
Welcome to Inauguration Day, when Donald J. Trump is sworn in as the Forty-Fifth President of the United States of America! Celebrate the momentous day with a Friday LinkSwarm.
Trump plans to hit the ground running with a number of executive actions his very first day on the job. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Trump started planning his presidential run right after Romney lost. In fact, Trump registered his “Make America Great Again” slogan six days after Romney’s defeat. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Clinton Family Friend: “Yes, I will be at the review stand at the inauguration and I am going to kill President-elect Trump… what are you gonna do about it Secret Service?” Secret Service: “Enjoy these complimentary handcuffs.”
Much of the hatred against Trump is pure class bigotry:
I don’t think reasonable differences of opinion on the one hand, and the ordinary hypocrisy of partisan politics on the other, explain the extraordinarily stridency, the venom, and the hatred being flung at the incoming administration by its enemies. There may be many factors involved, to be sure, but I’d like to suggest that one factor in particular plays a massive role here.
To be precise, I think a lot of what we’re seeing is the product of class bigotry.
Snip.
Until last year, if you wanted to experience the class bigotry that’s so common among the affluent classes in today’s America, you pretty much had to be a member of those affluent classes, or at least good enough at passing to be present at the social events where their bigotry saw free play. Since Donald Trump broke out of the Republican pack early last year, though, that hindrance has gone by the boards. Those who want to observe American class bigotry at its choicest need only listen to what a great many of the public voices of the well-to-do are saying about the people who votes and enthusiasm have sent Trump to the White House.
You see, that’s a massive part of the reason a Trump presidency is so unacceptable to so many affluent Americans: his candidacy, unlike those of all his rivals, was primarily backed by “those people.”
Snip.
This isn’t just because so large a fraction of working class voters generally backed Trump; it’s also because Trump saw this from the beginning, and aimed his campaign squarely at the working class vote. His signature red ball cap was part of that—can you imagine Hillary Clinton wearing so proletarian a garment without absurdity?—but, as I pointed out a year ago, so was his deliberate strategy of saying (and tweeting) things that would get the liberal punditocracy to denounce him. The tones of sneering contempt and condescension they directed at him were all too familiar to his working class audiences, who have been treated to the same tones unceasingly by their soi-disant betters for decades now.
Much of the pushback against Trump’s impending presidency, in turn, is heavily larded with that same sneering contempt and condescension—the unending claims, for example, that the only reason people could possibly have chosen to vote for Trump was because they were racist misogynistic morons, and the like. (These days, terms such as “racist” and “misogynistic,” in the mouths of the affluent, are as often as not class-based insults rather than objective descriptions of attitudes.) The question I’d like to raise at this point, though, is why the affluent don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to come right out and denounce Trump as the candidate of the filthy rabble. Why must they borrow the rhetoric of identity politics and twist it (and themselves) into pretzel shapes instead?
Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
“In donated shoes and suit, a Trump supporter comes to Washington.”
Follow-up:
How ObamaCare helped destroy Medicare.
Physicians across the country have been firing Medicare patients; and according to a late 2015 study from the Kaiser Family Foundation, 21% of physicians are not taking new Medicare patients.
Much of this trend is based on stiff penalties and financial disincentives from the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and 2015’s Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization (MACRA) Act.
MACRA in particular is completely mystifying.
The law created a whopping 2,400 pages of regulations that Medicare physicians are expected to know and follow.
Many of the rules are debilitating.
For instance, MACRA changed how physicians can be reimbursed for their Medicare patients by establishing a bizarre set of standards to determine if a physician is providing “value”.
As an example, if a patient ends up in the emergency room, his or her physician can incur a steep penalty.
This explains why my step-dad was dropped by his doctor.
The healthcare system has been broken to the point that physicians now have a greater incentive to fire their Medicare patients than to treat them.
City journal has an extensive profile of George Soros.
Soros’s global reach and influence far outstrip those of the Koch brothers or other liberal bogeymen—and that underlying it all is a vision both dystopian and opportunistic. “The main obstacle to a stable and just world order,” Soros has declared, “is the United States.” Ergo, that constitutional republic must be weakened and its allies degraded. The Sorosian world order—one of open borders and global governance, antithetical to the ideals and experience of the West—could then assume command.
Snip.
n the United States, Soros bankrolls a broad range of political and cultural causes. One is to destabilize the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. In 2015, he dedicated $650,000 for the purpose of shaping Pope Francis’s U.S. visit, using left-leaning Catholic groups to promote gay marriage, abortion, and physician-assisted suicide. Leading the effort was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta, a self-professed Catholic. Bill Donohue, outspoken president of the Catholic League, vainly called for Podesta’s dismissal. “He is fomenting revolution in the Catholic Church, creating mutiny and is totally unethical,” Donohue said. “He is the front man for George Soros to create a host of phony anti-Catholic groups. These are not just bad comments, as some have suggested. These words are orchestrated, calculated and designed to create fissures in the Catholic Church.”
Another Soros favorite is Black Lives Matter, the radical protest group dedicated to the proposition that police are inherently racist. Working the streets with incendiary rhetoric, at odds with the truth about black-on-black crime, BLM has helped foster “depolicing,” as Heather Mac Donald describes it, in high-crime urban areas. In 2015, after days of rioting in Baltimore in response to the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, an Open Society Foundations memo excitedly commented that “recent events offer a unique opportunity to accelerate the dismantling of structural inequality generated and maintained by local law enforcement and to engage residents who have historically been disenfranchised in Baltimore City in shaping and monitoring reform.” Three straight acquittals of police officers involved in the matter left the prosecution’s case in shreds but made no difference to the Open Society Foundations. It has donated at least $650,000 to Black Lives Matter and pledged more assistance to antipolice factions across the country. These activities prompted the father of one of the Dallas police officers killed during a Black Lives Matter protest to sue Soros (along with other individuals and groups) for inspiring a “war on police.”
(Hat tip: John Tierney at Instapundit.)
I always thought George Soros was running Black Lives Matter, and now here’s some proof: “BLM leader lives in home owned by Soros’ Open Society board member.”
Don’t look now, but the Clinton/Sanders rift is still roiling the Democratic Party. Sadly, neither side seems to be willing to give up on Social Justice Warrior victimhood identity politics. (Hat tip: Hot Air, which notes “Democrats have to come to grips with the fact that they stopped speaking for most Americans over the past eight years, and started lecturing at Americans instead. The party got wrapped up in the progressive-academic social-justice agenda to the point that the party made diversity into an obsession at the expense of the real economic issues facing voters outside of the coastal enclaves and college campuses.”)
One college Democrat has had enough:
A National Councilman for the College Democrats of America is jumping ship and considering joining the Republican Party just before President-elect Trump takes the oath of office.
Michael J. Hout, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, told Campus Reform that he believes the contemporary Democratic Party is no longer the best place for an ideological moderate like himself, saying the Party is pivoting towards more extremist rhetoric and appealing more to those who often do not even consider themselves Democrats, such as socialists and independents.
Snip.
“This strategy of catering to the whims of those for whom identity politics matters more than anything else, and of allowing for even anti-white, anti-male rhetoric to find a home within the party, is a large part of its untenable strategy moving forward,” Hout explained, predicting that “it will continue to cause Democrats to lose, time and time again.”
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Former California Democratic Party chair argues that Democrats should move their headquarters to Detroit to reconnect with middle class voters. I agree, but for a different reason: So they can be forced to see the results of their handiwork firsthand every day.
A glimmering of a clue: “U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy III, breaking ranks with other Democrats who are trashing President-elect Donald Trump and boycotting his inaugural, is imploring his party’s rank and file to figure out why middle American voters went Republican in November….’Folks, we lost their trust and being mortified and mystified about their vote doesn’t bring it back.'” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Tolerant left gets another Milo speech cancelled.
Ignore the shame mob and they’ve got nothing else to throw at you:
While [Steve] Harvey tries to use his celebrity for something selfless and useful and while the Talladega College marching band gets the world stage to show off the results of its hard work and school spirit, think of their detractors as the latter sit behind their cell phones and sling names like “coon” and “Uncle Tom”[i] in between posting their twerking and ghetto fight videos.
Ouch! (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Joe Bob Briggs takes aim at the “angry white male” concept.
Numero Three-o: Why is anger as a voting incentive limited to white males? Don’t black men get angry? When Louis Farrakhan holds a rally, why doesn’t Yahoo News say “Angry Black Men Gather in Chicago”? Why aren’t there any Angry Latino Men or Angry Chinese Men?
Numero Four-o: More specifically, how do you explain the fact that the Angry White Men who voted for Trump in 2016 are the same white men who voted for Obama in 2008? When they vote for Obama they’re not angry, but when they vote for Trump it can only be because they’re enraged hicks? Gogebic County in Michigan is 92 percent white and hadn’t voted for a Republican since 1972—until this election. The counties in southwestern Wisconsin, all heavily Democratic, went for Trump after a strong Obama vote in 2008 and 2012. Eastern Iowa, Democratic since 1988, went for Trump. Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, which is frequently used as the very definition of “working-class,” went for Republicans for the first time since 1988. Why are all these people classified as “angry” now, but in 2008, when they were angry at George Bush, they were just “voting for change”? Could it be, just perhaps, maybe, they feel betrayed by the Democratic Party? If we’re gonna call them angry, let’s define what they’re angry about.
Then again, fake outrage over non-issues is the stock in trade of the center-left.
Four reasons why nobody trusts the media. Including that nothingburger of a New York Times hit piece on Rick Perry that relied on no facts whatsoever.
For all that CNN flack global warming, they certainly don’t act like they believe it. In addition from moving CNN headquarters from Atlanta to New York City, “Time Warner, the company that owns CNN, just invested in SEVEN new buildings located in Hudson Yards, a part of Manhattan just a block or two away from the water. An area that, according to its own CNN, will soon be underwater, and therefore utterly and completely worthless.”
Speaking of CNN, they just hired Valerie Jarrett’s daughter to report on Trump’s Justice Department. “Valerie Jarrett’s daughter quietly joined CNN in September as a reporter in the network’s Washington bureau. She came to CNN with no experience in journalism.” Evidence suggests CNN has naked contempt for both objectivity and those not in the anointed liberal overclass. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“The primary aim of official propaganda is to generate an “official narrative” that can be mindlessly repeated by the ruling classes and those who support and identify with them. This official narrative does not have to make sense, or to stand up to any sort of serious scrutiny. Its factualness is not the point. The point is to draw a Maginot line, a defensive ideological boundary, between “the truth” as defined by the ruling classes and any other “truth” that contradicts their narrative.”
Post-Brexit, an economic boom in the UK. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
UK PM Theresa May aims at a “hard Brexit.” Andrew Stuttaford (and I) wonder why she isn’t going for the ‘Norway option’ of leaving the EU but staying in the European Economic Area.
Marine Le Pen cues up Frexit. “The euro has not been used as a currency, but as a weapon—a knife stuck in the ribs of a country to force it to go where the people don’t want to go.” I disagree with Walter Russel Mead: The EU, as currently constituted, is incapable of being reformed. Reform is impossible without scraping the European Commission, which is impossible without scraping Maastricht, which would scrap the EU. Better to start again from scratch or go back to just the common market.
Jihadwatch’s Robert Spencer had a minor piece at The Hill on why Lindsay Lohan’s (rumored) conversion to Islam was a bad idea. I wasn’t even going to link it. The The Hill took it down due to political pressure. Now I have to.
As one of his last acts, Obama commutes the sentence of convicted Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera.
And it’s not just terrorists: Obama commutes the sentences of four South Texas druglords:
Four family members who ran one of the largest cartel smuggling operations in south Texas had their life in prison sentences commuted and will likely be returning to this border city from where they ran their criminal empire. One of the main destinations that the criminal organizations delivered drugs to was Chicago, Illinois.
This week, outgoing President Barack Obama commuted the sentences of 209 convicted criminals and pardoned 64 others. The majority of the convictions were from drug trafficking or production offenses.
Four of those convicted criminals who had been sentenced to life in prison will be released by May 17. They ran a criminal organization made up of close to 80 men and women who worked with Mexico’s Gulf Cartel to move between 100,000 to almost 750,000 pounds of marijuana into the U.S. during a 10-year period. The drugs were moved into Houston and then distributed to Atlanta, Chicago, and other major metropolitan areas.
According to court records obtained by Breitbart Texas, brothers Cesar Moreno Sr., Eduardo Moreno, Lazaro Moreno, and Luis Moreno along with other relatives and friends had been at the helm of a large-scale drug distribution operation based out of the border city of Roma, Texas.
(Hat tip: Director Blue.)
A tweet:
Brian Krebs deduces the author of the Mirai worm.
Seattle kills bikeshare program. If it can’t make it in Seattle…
3D TV is dead again. Good. 3D always struck me as an annoying gimmick, even in IMAX.
“Woman stabbed man 9 times after he wouldn’t commit to relationship.” I’m pretty sure the guy made the right call there… (Hat tip: Bill Crider.)
Man gets head start on the epic douchebag Olympics. “28-year-old James Allen is facing a charge of driving while intoxicated. [He] drove a $385,000 Ferrari off a bridge in Westlake, went airborne for 40 feet and crashed into the woods while speeding on Friday night.” (Hat tip: Iowahawk’s Twitter feed.)
Oakland Raiders file papers to move to Las Vegas.
“It’s come to my attention that some of you Hollywood types are calling yourselves ‘the Resistance’. Stop. Now.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Graduate student sues after being kicked out of school for not supporting left-wing causes.
Scott Adams being unable to comment on his own blog due to a software bug has to be the most Dilbert thing ever…
Tags:2016 Presidential Race, Andrew Stuttaford, Austin, Brexit, Brian Krebs, California, CNN, Crime, Democrats, DeRay Mckesson, Detroit, Donald Trump, EU, European Economic Area, Foreign Policy, George Soros, Hollywood, Internet, Iowa, James Allen (Austin), Jihad, Joe Bob Briggs, Joseph P. Kennedy III, Las Vegas, Laura Jarrett, Lindsay Lohan, LinkSwarm, Marine Le Pen, Media Watch, Medicare, Michigan, Milo Yiannopoulos, Mirai worm, New York Times, Oakland, Oakland Raiders, Obama Scandals, ObamaCare, Oscar Lopez Rivera, Pennsylvania, Rick Perry, Rio Grande Valley, Robert Spencer, Roma (Texas), Scott Adams, Seattle, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Theresa May, Trump Cabinet, TV, Valerie Jarrett, Wisconsin
Posted in Austin, Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, ObamaCare, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | 1 Comment »
Friday, December 2nd, 2016
Welcome to the last month of the year! (Insert standard “where has the time gone” lament here.)
Enjoy the traditional Friday LinkSwarm:
Kevin D. Williamson brings the wood:
The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union. They are more likely to be cutting the grass in front of Elizabeth Warren’s multi-million-dollar mansion than moving into one of their own. They roll their eyes at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s risible “abuela” act, having actual abuelas of their own.
As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation. The Democratic base is not made up of little old liberal white ladies with seven-, eight-, and nine-figure bank balances, but the party’s leadership is.
Alan Derschowitz is not a fan of Rep. Keith Ellison’s DNC Chairman bid:
What should a political party that has just lost its white working-class, blue-collar base to a “make America great again” nationalist do to try to regain these voters? Why not appoint as the new head of the party a radical left-wing ideologue who has a long history of supporting an anti-American, anti-white, anti-Semitic Nation of Islam racist? Such an appointment will surely bring back rust-belt voters who have lost their jobs to globalization and free trade! Is this really the thinking of those Democratic leaders who are pushing for Keith Ellison to head the Democratic National Committee?
Keith Ellison is, by all accounts, a decent guy, who is well liked by his congressional colleagues. But it is hard to imagine a worse candidate to take over the DNC at this time. Ellison represents the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party, just when the party — if it is to win again — must move to the center in order to bring back the voters it lost to Trump. The Democrats didn’t lose because their candidates weren’t left enough. They won the votes of liberals. The radical voters they lost to Jill Stein were small in number and are not likely to be influenced by the appointment of Ellison. The centrist voters they lost to Trump will only be further alienated by the appointment of a left-wing ideologue, who seems to care more about global issues than jobs in Indiana, Wisconsin and Michigan. Ellison’s selection certainly wouldn’t help among Jewish voters in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania or pro-Israel Christian voters around the country.
Also, Derschowitz is not buying the “friend of Israel” blather put forth by Ellison defenders:
Ellison’s voting record also does not support his claim that he has become a “friend” of Israel. He was one of only 8 Congressmen who voted against funding the Iron Dome program, developed jointly by the U.S. and Israel, which helps protect Israeli civilians from Hamas rockets. In 2009, Ellison was one of only two dozen Congressmen to vote “present” rather than vote for a non-binding resolution “recognizing Israel’s right to defend itself against attacks from, reaffirming the United States’ strong support for Israel, and supporting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.” And in 2010, Ellison co‐authored a letter to President Obama, calling on him to pressure Israel into opening the border with Gaza. The letter describes the blockade of the Hamas-controlled Gaza strip as “de facto collective punishment of the Palestinian residents.”
Five Thirty Eight asserts that education levels one of the primary determinants of which counties voted for Trump.
More electorate analysis: “This is a case where the simplest explanation is the correct one: Donald Trump won because he did exceptionally (indeed, historically) well with the white working class, a bloc that until 2016 was resistant north of the Mason-Dixon line to voting Republican en masse.”
Fidel Castro’s murders by the numbers. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Could Marine Le Pen be the leftmost candidate in France’s presidential election?
Your government in action: health inspectors deny the homeless a free BBQ meal.
Rotherham, post-truth and the “alt-right”:
Some on the left in the West see certain ideas and even some easily verifiable truths, as plain dangerous, much like the totalitarian communists of yesteryear. Dangerous to public order. Dangerous to the ‘common good’.
Whilst this section of the left has always existed, it now seems to have become more ‘mainstream’. It seethes and obsesses within carefully-policed ideological echo-chambers. It dominates in universities, trade unions and the public sector. And whereas it was once mainly prevalent in fringe far-left outfits, it has now effectively co-opted the Labour party through its membership and leadership.
Anyone who has ever tried to engage with this section of the left will know that it doesn’t ‘do debate’ with conservatives on issues like immigration, multiculturalism and identity politics. For it, “the debate is settled”. Opposing views are intrinsically wicked. Such ideas are to be ignored. Muted. Blocked. Banned. Disrupted. Drowned out with fog-horns.
It does not feel it needs to win the argument nor does it see any reason to engage in one. Where it can apply ‘No Platform’ or ‘Safe Space’ schemes to stymie debate, it will do so assiduously. Where it can’t, it’s adept at innovating campaigns such as #StopFundingHate to help promote the censorship it craves.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Still more on How Trump got elected:
The privileged worked hard for Trump. Every time they described his people as uneducated white males, implicit dregs, they drove votes to Donald. And they so described the working class unceasingly.
It made him President. Good, bad, or indifferent, it is how he got in.
The privileged denigrated all whites unlike themselves. Then Hillary made her “deplorables” speech, confirming her contempt for half of America–those uneducated, shapeless, dull-witted proles in Flyover Land, obese, farting and belching, swilling Bud, watching NASCAR for god’s sake in awful trailers. And why not not sneer at them? Why did Hillary need their votes? Did not Rachel Maddow love her?
For Trump it was gold, pure gold. If he had written her speech, he could not have come up with a better line to destroy her. It was the purest product of the establishment’s hubris. She did it to herself. Sweet.
It made him President.
Black Lives Matter also did yeoman work for the Donald. As they and snowflake Brown Shirts and excited millennials blocked highways and beat Trump’s supporters and shut down rallies, and vandalized cars, and of course looted, they presumably thought they were working against the Trump Monster. Not a chance. Out there in the uncharted barbarian lands between Manhattan and Hollywood, in dark primeval forests where Cro-Magnons are still a rarity, people were sick of lawlessness, and of an establishment that tolerated it. It produced more votes, perhaps not for Trump or even against Hillary but against the class that she represented.
Immigration. Here Hillary and Obama did great work for Donald. As Obama frantically brought in as many “refugees” as possible from everywhere, anywhere that might not be compatible with the people upon whom he would force them, Hillary promised to import huge numbers of Muslims. It was luminously stupid politics, but politically she was luminously stupid, so it fit.
It is why she is not President.
She knew that the backward peoples of Flyover Land ought to want hundreds of thousands of Somalis and Pakistanis and who-knew-what to live with, and if they didn’t, she would force them and it didn’t matter because she had big donors and everybody in the media loved her.
However incoherent and ignorant Trump was, the Establishment was determined to elect him. Elect him it did.
(Hat tip: Borepatch.)
The end of identity politics? (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
You know those sacred medicare funds? Obama has raided them to help take care of illegal aliens.
Germany’s security agency infiltrated by a jihadist. (Hat tip: Ace.)
The pension fund for Dallas policeman and firefighters is teetering on insolvency thanks to risky investments.
Don’t agree with everything in this John Gray essay on the closing of the liberal mind, published right before Trump’s election, but there’s a lot to chew over concerning the post-liberal world order, and especially the Labour Party’s relation to it. “Labour has become unelectable in any foreseeable future.”
Banks in India run out of money thanks to the idiot currency ban:
Many in north India who slept outside banks in freezing conditions woke up in the morning to be told only that no cash had arrived.
“I have been doing the rounds of banks for the past 20 days and have been unable to withdraw my own money,” said Balbir Singh, a junior executive in a private firm in New Delhi. “Even on payday the story was the same: the bank said it simply had no money to disburse, even though I have ample credit in my account.”
Turkish Lira collapses.
Global warming: “Since 1940 the sea level off of northern Washington has dropped about 15 cm. (6 inches).”
How Gary Taubes overcame the severe backlash over his famous expose of how low fat diets fail compared to low carb diets like Atkins.
Chicago’s real estate market expect to rank dead last. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Will Wallace Hall have the last laugh on his UT records request? (Hat tip: Cahman’s Musings.)
Smoking marijuana inhibits blood flow to the brain.
The science of the Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
Nothing says “class” like wearing an ascot, sipping a glass of wine, and spray-painting “Fuck Trump” on a supermarket wall.
The wit and wisdom of Robert Stacy McCain.
A startling factoid:
Less startling, still interesting:
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
A concise definition of the issue:
Tags:Alan Dershowitz, Atkins, Boston, Chicago, Christmas, Dallas, Donald Trump, Elaine Chao, Elizabeth Warren, Fidel Castro, France, Gary Taubes, Germany, Global Warming, India, Israel, Jihad, Jill Stein, Keith Ellison, marijuana, Marine Le Pen, Randi Weingarten, Robert Stacy McCain, Rotherham, Social Justice Warriors, Texas, Trump Cabinet, University of Texas, Wallace Hall
Posted in Border Control, Communism, Democrats, Elections, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Republicans, Social Justice Warriors, Texas | No Comments »
Friday, December 18th, 2015
It’s a week before Christmas, and I hope everyone is having a better week than I am (I’m sick and my dog’s sick).
Former FBI counterterrorism agent says that we haven’t gotten squat in terrorism leads from “moderate Muslims,” and we probably won’t as long as we keep using Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood front groups like CAIR as our only go-to groups for them. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Swedes are stocking up on guns.
Given that the French political establishment continues to ignore widespread French desire to stem Islamic immigration, is it any wonder Marine Le Pen’s National Front did so well in early voting?
DNC cuts off voter info access to Bernie Sanders campaign over data breach?
“Environmentalists are a much more serious threat to human well being than climate change—even catastrophic climate change.”
The Fall of Rahm Emmanual.
Media Matters mouthpiece David Brock says that Ted Cruz is the biggest threat to a Hillary coronation.
“FitzGibbon Media, a prominent progressive public relations firm, abruptly shut down on Thursday amid allegations of sexual harassment and assault by the company’s president. Trevor FitzGibbon and his team worked with some of the biggest progressive organizations, including NARAL, MoveOn, the Center for American Progress and the AFL-CIO, as well as Wikileaks, Chelsea [i.e., Bradley] Manning and The Intercept.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
How The New York Times continually revised a story to help Obama look better.
Remember that ACLU board member that called for murdering Trump supporters? Turns out that calling for the assassination of political opponents is just a tad too extreme for the ACLU.
So we saved Kuwait’s bacon, and they can’t even be arsed to pretend they don’t hate Jews?
How Obama celebrated a deserter in the Rose Garden.
The cocked fist culture.
Nothing says “rational” and “reasonable” quite like calling Ted Cruz Satan incarnate. Thanks for proving that Hollywood celebrities aren’t overwrought drama queens, Cher…
The 25 most Florida things that happened in 2015.
Tags:ACLU, Bowe Bergdahl, CAIR, Cher, David Brock, FBI, Florida, Global Warming, Jews, Jihad, Kuwait, LinkSwarm, Marine Le Pen, Mark Steyn, Media Matters, Media Watch, Military, Rahm Emanuel, Ted Cruz
Posted in Democrats, Foreign Policy, Global Warming, Jihad, Media Watch, Military | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 28th, 2014
It’s hard to know just how much weight to put in widespread gains by Eurosceptic parties in EU elections, mainly because the EU decision-making process seems so opaque to outsiders. Even if Eurosceptic Parties had won significant majorities, you get the impression that they would be like Patrick McGoohan’s character on The Prisoner after he got elected #2, issuing orders and flipping switches to no effect whatsoever:
Even were the Eurosceptics to form a coalition, power would still lie in the Council, or, some feel, in the permanent unelected EU bureaucracy. The entire apparatus seems designed specifically to thwart popular will and keep all power in the hands of the continental elite.
More reactions to the election:
Roger Kimball:
The architects of the EU envision a European superstate in which national identity is subordinated to the abstraction of “Europe.” The regime would be internationalist but only titularly democratic: the real power (as has been traditional on the continent) would reside in a technocratic elite, not the people. But the people, it seems, have just awakened to this reality and it turns out they don’t like it.
One take-away from yesterday’s election is this: when conservative parties cease providing a natural home for the community-binding sentiments of patriotism and national identity—when, that is to say, conservative parties cease being conservative—those parts of the population not indentured to the apparatus of dependency look elsewhere.
John O’Sullivan in National Review:
These results are merely the latest evolution of a very ominous long-term trend for the Tories. As Anthony Scholefield and Gerald Frost pointed out in their 2011 study Too Nice to Be Tories, the Conservative Party has been steadily losing one region of the United Kingdom after another in the last 40 years. It used to be able to depend on nine to twelve Unionist votes from Northern Ireland for its parliamentary majority; it gets none now. It won half the Scottish seats in 1955; the last three general elections each returned one Scottish Tory to Parliament. It wins eight seats out of 40 in Wales. And from the 158 MPs elected from the North of England, the Tories got 53.
This is a dreadful record, but it could get worse. UKIP is now starting to replace the Tories as the main challenger to Labour in northern working-class constituencies. The new party takes votes in particular from culturally conservative and patriotic working-class men whom both major parties have abandoned in their pursuit of urban middle-class progressives. UKIP may therefore be a threat to both parties, but the local elections suggest that it is a bigger threat to the Conservative party.
All this leaves Cameron with difficult choices:
Either he does the electoral deal with UKIP that he now says he won’t do, in which the Tories agree to support UKIP candidates in a given number of seats in return for UKIP’s not fielding candidates elsewhere. In London, for instance, that would give UKIP an electoral base of something just above 40 percent — in Britain as a whole an even larger one.
Or he contrives to lose the Scottish referendum on independence, which would remove only one Tory from the House of Commons but 41 Labourites and 11 Lib-Dems.
France’s ruling class are in a panic following the strong showing of Le Pen’s National Front.
Here’s a piece from the Jewish magazine Tablet in 2011 suggesting that Marine Le Pen has worked to purge the party of the antisemitism her father exhibited. Maybe.
Could UKIP and Eurosceptic parties even form a majority coalition in the European parliament? Possible but doubtful.
Then there’s the question of who would lead such a coalition, Nigel Farage or Marine Le Pen. Anglo-French rivalry is not exactly unknown…
Tags:Elections, EU, Europe, European Debt Crisis, Eurosceptics, Marine Le Pen, Nigel Farage, UKIP, video, Welfare State
Posted in Elections, Foreign Policy, video, Welfare State | No Comments »
Friday, October 11th, 2013
A LinkSwarm heavy on shutdown-related news:
For epitomizing what Democrats have done to Detroit, Kwame Kirkpatrick gets 28 years.
Hey Venezuela, how’s that Socialism working out for you? Inflation hits 49.4%. (Hat tip: Prairie Pundit.)
Victor Davis Hanson thinks Republicans are winning.
ObamaCare, or food?
Steyn on the shutdown. “The conventional wisdom of the U.S. media is that Republicans are being grossly irresponsible not just to wave through another couple trillion or so on Washington’s overdraft facility.”
Catholic priests prohibited from giving Mass.
The revolving door between the Democratic Party and the IRS.
How the GOP establishment tried to seize control of Freedomworks.
The Magic of Obama: White House gift shop goes bankrupt.
Department of Fish & Wildlife lift ban minutes before North Dakota files lawsuit.
Le Pen poised to win European Parliament elections? That’s Marine Le Pen, or Le Pen: The Next Generation.
Five years after the meltdown, families still hoarding cash.
Kent Hance to retire as Texas Tech Chancellor. Hance’s political career is in many ways emblematic of the evolution of Texas politics, starting out as a conservative Democrat, elected to the state Senate in 1974, defeating George W. Bush for a U.S. congressional seat in 1978, played key roll in backing the Kemp-Roth tax cuts in 1981, narrowly losing the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate to Lloyd Doggett (who would then get stomped by Phil Gramm in the general election) in 1984, followed Gramm by switching to the Republican Party in 1985, losing the GOP Gubernatorial nomination to an un-retired Bill Clements in 1986, getting appointed to the Railroad Commission in 1987, winning re-election to it in 1988, and losing to Clayton Williams in the 1990 Republican Gubernatorial primary. He had a long, long career as a bridesmaid…
Raising the debt limit means bankrupting your children.
“This 20 year old has discovered Sex Is Awesome!!! and just wants us all to know that. Yeah Sugar-Tits we sort of know. We’ve been enjoying it for years, but without quite as much Noob Squeeing about it.”
Tags:Bill Clements, Catholics, Crime, Democrats, France, George W. Bush, IRS, Kent Hance, Kwame Kilpatrick, Lloyd Doggett, Marine Le Pen, Mark Steyn, North Dakota, Obama, ObamaCare, Phil Gramm, Republicans, shutdown, socialism, Venuzuala, Victor Davis Hanson, War on Catholics
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