By accepting the use of preelection statements to impeach and limit executive policy, the 9th Circuit is taking a dangerous step. The states’ argument is in essence that Trump is a bigot, and thus his winning presidential campaign in fact impeaches him from exercising key constitutional and statutory powers, such as administering the immigration laws.
This would mean that Trump is automatically disbarred, from the moment of his inauguration, of exercising certain presidential powers, not because of his actions as president, but because of who he is — that is, how he won the presidency.
When Judge James Robart stated that “no” terrorists had attacked America from the countries on President Trump’s travel ban, he was engaged in the rhetorical device known as lying his ass off. “At least 60 people born in the seven countries had been convicted — not just arrested, but convicted — of terror-related offenses in the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Trump’s sanctuary city and terrorist-supporting state travel bans are his most popular executive orders. To quote Mark Steyn yet again, “‘divisive’ appears to be elite-speak for ‘remarkably popular.'” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Here we go; this is what I’ve handled from Monday-Friday this week: rape, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, rape-assault and rape, extortion, blackmail, assault, violence against police, threats to police, drug crime, drugs, crime, felony, attempted murder, rape again, extortion again and ill-treatment.
Suspected perpetrators; Ali Mohammed, Mahmod, Mohammed, Mohammed Ali, again, again, again. Christopher… what, is it true? Yes, a Swedish name snuck in on the edges of a drug crime. Mohammed, Mahmod Ali, again and again.
Countries representing all the crimes this week: Iraq, Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Somalia, Syria again, Somalia, unknown, unknown country, Sweden. Half of the suspects, we can’t be sure because they don’t have any valid papers. Which in itself usually means that they’re lying about their nationality and identity.
I’m ending my support of UC Berkeley, where I got my MBA years ago. I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today. I wish them well, but I wouldn’t feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so I’ll take his word for it.
I’ve decided to side with the Jewish gay immigrant who has an African-American boyfriend, not the hypnotized zombie-boys in black masks who were clubbing people who hold different points of view. I feel that’s reasonable, but I know many will disagree, and possibly try to club me to death if I walk on campus.
Yesterday I asked my most liberal, Trump-hating friend if he ever figured out why Republicans have most of the Governorships, a majority in Congress, the White House, and soon the Supreme Court. He said, “There are no easy answers.”
I submit that there are easy answers. But for many Americans, cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias hide those easy answers behind Hitler hallucinations.
House Democrats are going on a retreat in Baltimore where they’ll go over an autopsy of the election. Will they learn from their many mistakes? “The Baltimore retreat, which will take place at the scenic Inner Harbor, will focus on the party’s fight for all Americans and feature speeches from top Democrats and various celebrities, including Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Chelsea Handler, as the party looks to get back on track.” Signs point to “No”… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Both Steve Bannon and Reince Priebus want you to know that they are not bitter enemies fighting for influence in the Trump White House. The truth is that they are “rather chummy.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
In the end it would appear that Trump is playing the kind of game that I was taught to play by my coach. His opponents are never given time to mount an attack. Their queen – the MSM has been removed from the board and their favorite piece – the Celebrities are locked in a war of attrition while Trump gets the rest of his pieces on the board. Remember, these are all Tactics but Strategy flows from Tactics. Sooner or later the Left will find itself in some terrible position and the Strategy to drain the swamp will present itself.
“Leftists said if Trump won, that there’d be violent mobs of hate, and intolerant fascists would try to silence those with whom they disagree. And they were right. It just was by a group of people from which they didn’t expect it: themselves.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
NSA contractor allegedly stole over 500 million documents. The news came out October last year (I guess reporting yet another giant classified data breach was something the media wasn’t too wild about digging into in the election homestretch), but he was just indicted yesterday. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
“Well, with Trump, Modi, Brexit, and now France, there are some similar problems in those countries. What you are hearing is people getting fed up with the ruling class. This is not fascism. It has nothing to do with fascism. It has to do with the faux-experts problem and a world with too many experts. If we had a different elite, we may not see the same problem.”
Nikki Haley’s first speech at the UN blasts Russia over their continued occupation of Ukraine. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Gun sales finally dip. Obviously gun owners don’t feel like NRA-endorsed President Trump is a threat to take their guns, unlike “World’s Greatest Gun Salesman Obama.” It also suggests that those of us in the Vast Right Wing aren’t even remotely worried about that mythical leftwing “resistance” launching an actual civil war. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
Can an average engineer earn more in a lifetime than an average NFL player? The study says yes, but I think the engineering pay average ($125,418) is probably a bit on the high side (I suspect California companies were oversampled).
Twitter had decided, in an election year, to surrender control of its platform to a crew of feminist social justice warriors (SJWs) designated the “Trust and Safety Council.” This secretive group of Soviet-style commissars included the notorious anti-male hatemonger Anita Sarkeesian, and soon Twitter began purging conservative accounts…. Jack Dorsey had made his company part of the Democrat Party’s campaign team and four months later, when Twitter banned popular commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, the partisan nature of “Trust and Safety” became transparent. Banning conservatives from Twitter was Dorsey’s contribution-in-kind to the Democrats.
This is more like “this last two months in Jihad,” it’s been so long since I did an update. But there’s a whole host of Orlando updates, and a lot of other jihad-related news, so let’s dig in.
And of course, this is after the Obama Administration’s FBI initially tried to release a censored transcript of Omar Mateen’s 911 call removing all mention of the Islamic State.
“The Obama administration and the liberal media have decided that when a radical Islamic terrorist kills Americans, the one thing the narrative cannot be about is radical Islamic terrorism….In fact, the reason that the administration and the media are so intent on downplaying the role of Islam is because they are afraid that if they told the truth, people might vote Republican in November.”
Speech by Milo Yiannopoulos at University of Central Florida in Orlando cancelled because police couldn’t guarantee his safety. One wonders if police in Orlando are capable of protecting anyone at all…
From here on down it’s mostly old news, but maybe you didn’t read it the first time around.
Two month old Mark Steyn column on Germany’s cowardice in prosecuting that comedian who made fun of Turkey’s scumbag Islamist president? Yeah, because it’s still worth reading if you haven’t already.
“Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim.”
Omar Mateen – who as we reported earlier was licensed as a security guard and also holds a firearms license – was employed by the US subsidiary of G4S plc, a British multinational security services company, whose US-headquarters are located in Jupiter, Fla, and which also happens to be the world’s largest security company by revenue….
But where it gets more disturbing is that as Judicial Watch reported several days ago, in a post titled, “DHS Quietly Moving, Releasing Vanloads Of Illegal Aliens Away From Border”, border patrol sources said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was quietly transporting illegal immigrants from the Mexican border to Phoenix and releasing them without proper processing or issuing court appearance documents. As a reminder, the government classifies them as Other Than Mexican (OTM) and this week around 35 were transferred 116 miles north from Tucson to a Phoenix bus station where they went their separate way. Judicial Watch was present when one of the white vans carrying a group of OTMs arrived at the Phoenix Greyhound station on Buckeye Road.
And this is where the Mateen-G4S link emerges: as JW reported previously, a security company contracted by the U.S. government is driving the OTMs from the Border Patrol’s Tucson Sector where they were in custody to Phoenix, sources said. The firm is the abovementioned G4S, the world’s leading security solutions group with operations in more than 100 countries and 610,000 employees. G4S has more than 50,000 employees in the U.S. and its domestic headquarters is in Jupiter, Florida.
Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, hosted a “shoestring” talk show in which he regularly unleashed anti-U.S. tirades and once praised the Taliban.
The timeline of the shooting shows, at the very least, massive misjudgment on the part of the police. The shooting started at 2:02 AM, but police don’t call in the SWAT team until 3 AM? And it’s another two hours before they storm the club? And all this after the shooter had called 911 to pledge allegiance to the Islamic State?
Reddit’s main news group evidently decided to censor mentions of the shooting once it became known that the shooter was a radical Muslim. They even censored posts providing information on blood donations.
For years, too many Americans – including the lion’s share of our elite media and most of our politicians — have been content to deny the obvious, namely that quite a few Muslims espouse beliefs that are deeply at odds with what the vast majority of Americans believe. Some of those Muslims openly advocate violence and, if they are otherwise maladjusted, the odds they may murder in the name of Islam increase commensurately. We need to have a robust national debate on this important issue. Donald Trump has opened the door to that discussion, in his customary brusque, ham-handed way. More tact is required, but we cannot put off talking about radical Islam and jihadism any longer.
After the Bataclan massacre last autumn, the French government in effect went to war with radical Islam, pledging a “merciless” response to terrorism. This wasn’t just talk. Mass arrests of suspected radicals followed, dealing a serious blow to ISIS networks in the country. Paris meant business, finally.
In the aftermath of our own Bataclan, President Obama has offered his usual platitudes about “hate” and “guns.” This is escapism-as-counterterrorism-policy. Americans must demand better, including a reality-based assessment of our terrorism threat, from our next commander-in-chief. If we cannot name our enemy, we are already halfway to losing the war.
Milo Yiannopoulos weighs in: “The Christian Right may not be totally down with homos, and Trump may say things that hurt our delicate feelings, but they aren’t going to kill us or put us in camps. Only Islam would do that — the same Islam that, bizarrely, now stands at the top of the left’s hierarchy of victimhood.”
As today is a made-up celebration called “Earth Day,” be sure to have beef for dinner…
Reminder: “Officials at VA’s Phoenix hospital manipulated wait-time data to make it appear they were connecting doctors and veterans seeking appointments much faster than they actually were. This was done so VA managers at the Arizona facility could keep getting generous performance bonuses. They got their bonuses but dozens of waiting veterans died.” So how did the VA address the problem? They hired someone accused of doing the exact same thing at another hospital.
Following a congressional subpoena over Benghazi, Hillary’s state department staff hid requested files in another department. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
How Ted Cruz could beat Hillary Clinton. “Clinton is entering the general election with glaring vulnerabilities of her own. Her image is toxic to Republicans and independents, and her popularity among Democrats is now at an all-time low as a presidential candidate, according to Gallup’s polling. It won’t take a top-tier Republican candidate to win.” Also: “Cruz consistently runs far more competitively against Clinton than Trump does.”
“It’s not just Wall Street banks. Most companies and groups that paid Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to speak between 2013 and 2015 have lobbied federal agencies in recent years, and more than one-third are government contractors, an Associated Press review has found. Their interests are sprawling and would follow Clinton to the White House should she win election this fall.”
“Although our panel’s original estimates had Trump finishing with 1,175 pledged delegates, my revised deterministic projections have him at 1,155, and the probabilistic version has him at 1,159.”
“Walden is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn: a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.”
After pointing out that mass jihadist violence was common two days ago, Nigeria’s Boko Haram decides to underscore my point:
Boko Haram insurgents kidnapped at least 185 women and children, and killed 32 people in a raid in northeastern Nigeria this week, local officials and residents said.
Gunmen in pickup trucks attacked the village of Gumsuri, just north of Chibok, on Sunday, shooting down men before herding women and children together.
“They gathered the women and children and took them away in trucks after burning most of the village with petrol bombs,”
This actually happened a few days before the Peshawar school attack, but the village was remote enough that word is only trickling out now.
And speaking of the Peshawar massacre, a Taliban spokesman said killing women and children is just fine and dandy with Islam:
“The Mujahideen were instructed to only kill the older children. The Peshawar attack is in complete accordance with the Prophet’s teachings because when the Prophet killed the Jewish Tribe of Banu Qurayza, he put the same guideline, that only the children who have hair below their belly button (pubic hair) are allowed to be killed. Killing of women and children is also in accordance with the teachings of the Prophet.”
Got that? “Killing of women and children is also in accordance with the teachings of the Prophet.” Any questions?
And I wouldn’t be surprised if I missed a dozen or more jihad-related killings the barely made local international papers, much less the ones not reported on.
If that happened in the U.S., the freakout would go on for weeks on end. But pretty much a week doesn’t go by that Jihadists don’t carry out a school killing somewhere in Nigeria or Kenya or wherever. Indeed, attacks on schools are part of the standard Jihadest blueprint for terror.
Blow-back must be a bitch for the Pakistani Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who played a key role in creating the Taliban and supporting various jihadist activities. (Remember where Osama Bin Laden was found?)
I was queuing up a LinkSwarm for Monday when it occurred to me that I have more than enough links on the fallout from the Bergdahl swap to put up a separate post, so here it is:
The entire Obama Administration seems shocked at the fact that those bitter, gun-clinging freaks from Jesusland who make our military actually have values. “The bitter criticism of Kerry in 2004 and Bergdahl today would carry no force if it came from mere ‘right-wingers.’ It comes, instead, from servicemen and veterans who see the two men as having behaved dishonorably. Once again the left is being undone by its failure to comprehend the centrality of honor to military culture.”
“Instead of just bringing Bergdahl back, they had to do the full kissy-huggy announcement with mom and dad figuring this good news would push the VA mess off the front page.”
For many in the military, the stupidity of thinking behind the Bergdahl swap (and how it was accomplished) was the last straw. “They have lost all respect for their commander in chief.”
“Perhaps President Obama stumbled into an announcement of the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl that was ignorant and insulting to those who serve our country in uniform, but his subsequent reaction to the criticism it has provoked is a disgrace.”
For a dissenting opinion on the right, Charles Krauthammer says he would have done the Bergdahl deal. Though I doubt he would have had the Rose Garden photo op, or been as sanctimonious about his own unerring judgment.”
Sometimes different stories you’re following twine together in weird and unexpected ways. Today it’s news from MEMRI that former mujahideen commander, Islamic radical, and all-around-asshole Gulbuddin Hekmatyar is taking credit for inspiring Occupy Wall Street.
If you don’t remember Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, he first rose to prominence as commander of the Hezb-i islami faction of the mujahideen fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Fighting the Soviets was pretty much the last decent thing Hekmatyar ever did, and he wasn’t very good at it, especially compared to his chief rival, Ahmed Shah Massoud, commander of Jamiat-i Islami, who was one of the greatest guerrilla warfare commanders of the 20th century. If “Hezb-i islami” sounds an awful lot like “Hezbollah,” that’s because they’re both different branches of the same transnational affiliation of radical Shia Islamic fundamentalism. Hekmatyar the sort of guy who thought the Ayatollah Khomeini was too much of liberal softie. Hekmatyar spent almost as much time fighting Massoud as he did fighting the Soviets, and after the Soviets left he changed sides so many times in the various Afghan civil wars that followed (in the government, out of the government, with the Taliban, against the Taliban, etc.) that it’s hard to keep track. He was also one of Osama Bin Laden’s drinking buddies in the 1990s. Pretty much anytime he showed up was bad news for Afghanistan, and now he’s one of the head jerks fighting the Afghan government.
Now he’s taking credit for “inspiring” Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, right. I think you would be hard-pressed to find anyone at Occupy Wall Street that had even heard of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (or even any foreign political figure before Bush43 that isn’t featured on a t-shirt).
Alabama latest state to have law introduced banning Sharia.
Death penalty suggested for Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan. Given that the shooting happened all the way back in 2009, isn’t this a little slow even for the usual wheels of American justice? Maybe if we’re lucky, the actual trial will occur in the home stretch of the 2012 election…
Stratfor is reporting that the Taliban have launched a major attack on downtown Kabul. I’m mentioning it here because it doesn’t seem to have received a lot of media attention.
Yes, there is still a War on Terror/War on Islamofascism going on.
