CNN’s view: “Everything sucks and it’s all your fault, America!”
“45 minutes on why Trump is bad, and 15 minutes on why Oprah should be President.”
CNN’s view: “Everything sucks and it’s all your fault, America!”
“45 minutes on why Trump is bad, and 15 minutes on why Oprah should be President.”
Austria has finally had enough of catering to jihad and giving lip-service to the idea that there are no problems integrating Muslims into their culture:
Austria’s right-wing government plans to shut seven mosques and could expel dozens of imams in what it said was “just the beginning” of a push against radical Islam and foreign funding of religious groups that Turkey condemned as racist.
The coalition government, an alliance of conservatives and the far right, came to power soon after Europe’s migration crisis on promises to prevent another influx and restrict benefits for new immigrants and refugees.
The moves follow a “law on Islam”, passed in 2015, which banned foreign funding of religious groups and created a duty for Muslim organizations to have “a positive fundamental view towards (Austria’s) state and society”.
“Political Islam’s parallel societies and radicalizing tendencies have no place in our country,” said Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, who, in a previous job as minister in charge of integration, steered the Islam bill into law.
Standing next to him and two other cabinet members on Friday, far-right Vice Chancellor Heinz-Christian Strache told a news conference: “This is just the beginning.”
Austria, a country of 8.8 million people, has roughly 600,000 Muslim inhabitants, most of whom are Turkish or have families of Turkish origin.
Snip.
The ministers at the news conference said up to 60 imams belonging to the Turkish-Islamic Union for Cultural and Social Cooperation in Austria (ATIB), a Muslim group close to the Turkish government, could be expelled from the country or have visas denied on the grounds of receiving foreign funding.
A government handout put the number at 40, of whom 11 were under review and two had already received a negative ruling.
ATIB spokesman Yasar Ersoy acknowledged that its imams were paid by Diyanet, the Turkish state religious authority, but it was trying to change that.
Expect howls of outrage from the European elite, as well as numerous comparisons to You-Know-Who from the media thanks to the Austrian angle. How dare those silly Austrians think they’re a sovereign nation and defy the will of their EU betters by questioning the unquestionable?
Vienna, of course, was the site of the Ottoman Empire’s defeat in 1683, which ended Muslim attempts to conquer Europe (at least until the recent unpleasantness).
See also Thursday’s post.
“A soldier stole an armored personnel carrier from a National Guard base in Virginia on Tuesday and took the vehicle on a two-hour drive that ended in a police chase through downtown Richmond, the state capital, state police said.”
Some video:
That’s an M577, manufactured by BAE Systems, which is a variant of the M113 APC. The M577 is the command variant and generally unarmed. (News reports referring to this as a “tank” are from lazy, shiftless journalists who don’t care and should be shunned by polite society.)
As for the SUPERgenius who decided it was a swell idea to take it for a joy ride:
Update:
“Police have identified the soldier accused of stealing an armored vehicle from a military base and leading police on a wild chase through Central Virginia Tuesday night.
Police say 29-year-old Joshua Philip Yabut of Richmond took the M577 armored personnel carrier an from Fort Pickett in Nottoway County, near Blackstone, and led police on a pursuit up I-95 before surrendering in downtown Richmond.”
In a release, the Virginia National Guard said Yabut is a first lieutenant assigned as the commander of the Petersburg-based Headquarters Company, 276th Engineer Battalion, with more than 11 years of service. He deployed to Afghanistan from 2008 to 2009 with the Illinois National Guard.
Snip.
“State police say Yabut has been charged with Driving Under the Influence of Drugs, one felony count of eluding police and one felony count of unauthorized use of a vehicle.”
And there’s your motive. Drugs are bad, mmmkay? I think Mr. Yabut’s military career just came to an end.
(Hat tip: J. R. Salzman.)
Update 2: This is supposedly his Twitter feed. With retweets of Bernie Sanders, President Donald Trump and Popehat.
Including what appears to be a few seconds footage from inside the YPC:
— Joshua [BCH] (@movrcx) June 6, 2018
Add “movie-making” to the long list of things that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has brought his magic touch to:
A $15 million state-built film studio outside Syracuse, which promised to produce hundreds of jobs and bring Hollywood’s glitter to Central New York, hit an inglorious milestone on Friday with its sale to a new corporation set up by Onondaga County to manage it.
The price? $1.
The flop of the Central New York Film Hub, built by frequent and generous donors to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo who are facing federal corruption charges, had been presaged almost since its announcement in 2014, when the governor wondered aloud the miracle of the concept.
“Who would have ever figured: Hollywood comes to Onondaga, right?” Mr. Cuomo said. “You would have never guessed. But it has.”
It actually never did.
Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat facing re-election in the fall, had promised that the project would create “at least 350 new high-tech jobs” and would be “a hot spot” for cutting-edge filmmaking techniques. But beyond temporary construction jobs, sporadic shoots and a lucrative contract for its builder, COR Development, the film hub has been anything but a success. It sat rarely used and became the subject of lawsuits by COR, which said the state owed it back rent.
The lawsuits were not the film hub’s only brush with scandal: In 2016, two executives with COR, Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, were charged in a federal bid-rigging case along with Alain E. Kaloyeros, the former president of the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute.
All three men have pleaded not guilty, as has a fourth co-defendant, Louis Ciminelli, another developer who has given money to Mr. Cuomo.
Mr. Aiello was found guilty of conspiracy in March during a separate corruption trial that also saw the conviction of Joseph Percoco, once one of the governor’s closest aides and friends. Mr. Percoco was found guilty of three corruption-related counts, including conspiracy and solicitation of bribes.
Mr. Cuomo, 60, has not been accused of any wrongdoing, but the taint of corrupt associates has become an issue in his re-election campaign, used by both his Democratic challenger, the actress Cynthia Nixon, and his Republican opponent, Marcus Molinaro.
A 2016 investigation of the film hub by The New York Times found that the producers chosen to anchor the project by the Cuomo administration were entangled an array of lawsuits, tax liens and legal judgments. Their company, FilmHouseNY, used a misleading website to suggest it had offices in Albany and the Los Angeles area; it had neither. (The website listed its New York headquarters as “Suite 263,” the number of the company’s mailbox at a U.P.S. Store in a suburb outside Albany.) And despite the governor’s promises of jobs, the film hub had only two employees.
Spending $15 million and getting $1 in return is emblematic of not only Cuomo’s own corrupt regime, but of New York Democrats in general, from Eric Schneiderman to former New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Democrat-run New York is a cesspit of corruption and failure.
(Hat tip: Charlie Martin.)
Here’s Greg Gutfeld on the current state of the Not So Golden State:
“A new study ranks California dead last of all the states for quality of life, making it toxic.”
Back in the 1980s, when the Soviet Union was still a going concern, communism held sway over a significant fraction of the globe. In addition to those countries forcibly incorporated into the USSR itself, and its vassal Warsaw Pact states in eastern Europe, communism also had many “franchises for totalitarianism” scattered throughout the world, with client states in Vietnam, Mozambique, etc. One of the closest to America was in Nicaragua, where the Sandinistas went about rapidly communizing the country, killing thousands, censoring the press, suppressing the Catholic Church, ushering in hyperinflation (P.J. O’Rourke: “We exchanged $480 for 4,080,000 Cordobas, which filled an Adidas gym bag…You probably have to take economics at Moscow U. two or three times to make cash worth this little.”), and committing ethnic cleansing against the Miskito, Suma and Rama indians. Running the entire show was Comandante Daniel Ortega, until pressure from the Reagan-doctrine backed “Contras” and the Organization of American States, forced the Sandinistas into holding a fair election in which they were promptly kicked out of power.
Out of office for 17 years, Ortega’s Sandinistas managed to regain power in 2007, and since then they’re gotten up to their old tricks, albeit in a lower-key, “we’re no longer backed by Soviet money” way.
Lately, however, the mask has slipped, and the Sandinistas are killing protesters against their regime:
The protest on Wednesday capped six weeks of what has been described as a national rebellion against the government of President Daniel Ortega. The government has denied responsibility for any of the deaths and insists that it is the victim of a vast conspiracy….
“The demonstration was peaceful,” said Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a negotiator on the national dialogue committee. “There were children there. It was a peaceful manifestation that ended up with people shot in the head and killed deliberately by snipers.”
Guillermina Zapata, 63, said protesters had told her that the bullet that hit her son, Francisco Javier Reyes Zapata, 34, came from a sharpshooter perched on the top of the national baseball stadium. Mr. Reyes was struck in the eye and died, she said.
“They have to go,” Ms. Zapata said of the president [Ortega] and his wife, Rosario Murillo, who is also the vice president. “He is a murderer, and a murderer cannot continue to govern Nicaragua. They have to leave. I believe that dialogue is no longer an option. That’s sitting down to talk with the devil, who is killing the people.”
And, of course, the classic socialist mismanagement of the economy. “David Zywieck, the Bishop of Siuna, a mining town in northeast Nicaragua, said pharmacies are short on medicine, building materials like tools and cement are in short supply and people are running out of sugar, flour, milk and cooking oil. Gasoline has also become scarce and more expensive.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
A half-million protestors showed up in the streets of Managua to protest the Sandinista regime, a staggering amount for a country of six million people.
Here’s a brief video recap of the situation:
All that time out of office evidently didn’t quench Ortega’s thirst for absolute power. Once a brutal communist scumbag, always a brutal communist scumbag…