Displaying posts published in

July 2018

HEADLINES FROM MERKELAND

FUNNY HOW THE GERMANS SEE IT:http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/
Alliance of the LikemindedGermany’s Anti-Trump Strategy Begins to Take Shape
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/germany-government-begins-unveiling-its-anti-trump-coalition-a-1220471.html
Jean-Claude Juncker’s Unexpected DealHow the European Commission President Won Over Trump

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-the-jean-claude-juncker-won-over-donald-trump-a-1220466.htm

This week, Washington and Brussels struck an unexpected agreement to lift levies in the tariff conflict between the U.S. and the EU. The move represents a victory for all sides, but especially beleaguered European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
HibernationHow Europe Can Survive the Trump Era
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/how-europe-can-survive-the-donald-trump-era-a-1219447.html
Explosive narcissism and vulgar capitalism: It is impossible to engage in politics with this U.S. president. Europe should resist the temptation to fixate on Donald Trump and instead pursue its own goals. That’s the lesson of a deeply disorienting week.

Press credits Juncker for trade deal but should credit Trump By Jack Hellner

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/press_credits_juncker_for_trade_deal_but_should_credit_trump.html

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal headline, blared loudly, was: “How Juncker Sold Trump on Trade Deal.” They’ve since changed it, but here we are.

Juncker is Jean-Claude Juncker, the arrogant, sniveling Luxembourgish President of the European Commission so well regarded by anyone who’s in love with the European Union.

Maybe they changed it because enough readers protested. Because why wasn’t the headline: “How Trump Sold the EU and Juncker the Value of Lowering Trade Barriers to the U.S.”?

That was what really happened.

It is truly sad how one-sided the WSJ has gone on trade. No matter what Trump has done on trade, it is bad.

If something comes out good on trade, like the EU deal, it is the EU that gets the credit. Not Trump. Essentially the WSJ is no different from CNN, MSNBC, the Huffington Post, the New York Times or the Washington Post on trade. They are all worthless.

My guess is that Canada, Mexico and China will all come to the table now, having seen what just happened with Europe, because they realize we finally have a president who is actually serious about opening up trade, instead of just another presidents who gives in. They’ve seen a lot of those. The lack of vision by the WSJ (and others), is astonishing.

When Trump gets done, we will be much closer to zero tariffs and taxes across the board than before he took office. Trump is the one for open and free trade, not a guy like Juncker.

The Journal is little better on immigration, or rather, free borders. They seem to have little or no regard for actually enforcing the laws Congress passes.

Maybe the WSJ should just can all their journalists and replace them with fax machines and robots. When everyone repeats the same talking points, is it any wonder that readership goes down?

Free flights for illegals on United, while the rest of us pay full fare? By Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/07/free_flights_for_illegals_on_united_while_the_rest_of_us_pay_full_fare.html

United Airlines, the airline that famously dragged a paying passenger off a flight, stuffed a dog into an overhead compartment and killed it, and junked a priceless guitar in their baggage handlers’ tender care, has come up with a new one for us: Free flights for unscreened illegals, sitting right there next to the paying passengers in those newly shrunken seats. In the name virtue-signalling, of course.

Here’s the news item:

United Airlines is donating flights to help reunited immigrant families that were separated at the U.S.’s southern border.

The San Francisco Business Times reported Thursday that the pro-immigration lobbying group FWD.us announced United’s donation in a Facebook post, calling it “needed, timely, and critical.”

“A growing community of support is coming together to reunite families who were separated at the border,” the group posted Wednesday. “We are so thankful and happy to announce that United Airlines is jumping in and helping. Thanks to this partnership with United, we are able to provide travel to the recently reunited immigrant families to get to their next destination with dignity.”

Now, I’m all for an airline showing compassion. Kids separated from their parents due to their parents’ prison problems, and kids separated from their parents due to divorce ought to get free flights, too. But this, from the airline that just a few days ago refused to refund the ticket of a woman who got stuck sitting next to a masturbater, and then got the treat of hearing United’s flight attendants joking about it. Here’s the ‘customer service’ she got from United, as she posted it on Instagram:

Follow the Money in Florida: 34,873 Public Employees with $100,000+ Salaries Cost Taxpayers $5.5B Adam Andrzejewski

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2018/07/27/follow-the-money
Our team of auditors at OpenTheBooks.com found nearly 35,000 state and local government employees in Florida brought home six and seven-figure salaries, costing taxpayers $5.5 billion annually.
Since last year, the headcount of these high-compensated Florida government workers jumped by nearly 4,000 employees.
Here are a few examples of what we uncovered:

717 small-town, city, and village employees – including 26 local administrators out-earning every U.S. governor at $180,000.
2,484 State of Florida employees – including $276,000 for Commissioner of Education Pamela Stewart; $218,925 each for Department of Children and Families Medical Executive Directors Josefina Baluga and Steve Brasington.
3,195 teachers and school administrators – including chief academic officer Daniel Gohl ($196,001) in Broward County School District; minority achievement officer James Lawson ($181,120) in Orange County School District; and English and Journalism teacher James Johnson ($121,493) in St. Johns County School District.
13,305 college and university employees – including Vice President of Health Affairs David Guzick ($1.2 million) and Director of the Graduate Tax Program Martin McMahon ($780,392) at the University of Florida.

Not even resignations and retirements can stop some public employees from receiving huge payouts. Bruce Pelly, Palm Beach County’s airport director, pulled in $236,768 in 2017 on top of the $70,968 in annual retirement checks. Pelly worked for more than 20 years before “retiring” in 2010 to collect a $304,000 lump sum payout. Just 30 days later, he was rehired in the exact same position.

ENGLAND AND BREXIT: DR. ALAN MENDOZA

Dr Alan Mendoza is Executive Director of The Henry Jackson Society
It always amazes me how quickly after the UK Parliament shuts down for the summer recess – as it did this week – both the pace of work in politics and the news headlines change.

After weeks of knife-edge Conservative Brexit drama, Trump visitations and Labour anti-Semitism crises, today’s BBC homepage offered comment on “blood moon” sightings and the longest heatwave in Britain’s history since the infamous summer of 1976. Given the weather, perhaps it is indeed a good thing that the hot air from Westminster is being vented elsewhere for a change. But rather than using the summer as a time of malaise, perhaps our politicians should consider it an opportunity to do something different and more worthwhile.

There are few other periods in our 24/7 society when our leaders get a chance to take a break from the frenetic pace of political life today. They should use it to recharge, but also to think. For there is currently a policy vacuum in the heart of British politics that requires filling urgently.

Ever since the EU referendum of 2016, the political agenda has been filled with but one issue: Brexit. The one attempt our political parties had to refocus attention – the General Election of 2017 – turned out disastrously when the British public returned an unimpressed verdict on their efforts through a hung Parliament. Since then, neither major party – nor any of the minor ones – have come up with a political idea that has really caught the imagination.

The Mysterious Mr Khan: Douglas Murray

http://henryjacksonsociety.org/

Of all the world’s unstable countries perhaps the most concerning is Pakistan. Not just because of the extent of the religious zealotries that exist there, the power of the clerics or the unstable nature of successive governments. But primarily of course because on top of all this the country is a nuclear power, armed with munitions which many extremist groups in the country would be very glad to have in their immediate control.

It is for this reason more than any other that political events in Pakistan deserve considerable attention from the wider world—and the reason why anybody seeking the highest offices there should be subjected to an unusual degree of inspection.

As of today Imran Khan has claimed victory in this week’s election in the country. Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has said that his own party will not contest the results, despite the usual claims and evidence of corruption at the polls. If Imran Khan is to now take control of the country the wider world will have to spend far more attention on him than it has to date.

To date most of the international coverage has focused on Mr Khan’s celebrity and his former fame as a cricketer. Certainly this all helped him to get a platform in his home country—a country where, like most others, celebrity is an enormous advantage in any election. But it is the layers beneath the famous skin that need to be probed deeper.

Throughout his career in recent years Mr Khan has proven himself adept at manoeuvring around the perilous tracks of Pakistan’s domestic politics. But such navigation is hugely compromising. It has included him having meetings with—and appearing on stage with—extremists who should not be on anybody’s invite list. And of course all of this has presented challenges of its own. To what extent have some of Khan’s public appearances and statements been a necessary evil and to what extent are they the product of sincere and indeed fundamental belief? This is not an easy question to answer. But perhaps over the coming years, once he has been in power, we will be able to see the answer for ourselves. It is much to be hoped that Khan has been engaging in necessary politics in recent years. If not, then Pakistan and the wider world are in for a period which will be perilous even by their standards.

Why Israel’s Nation-State Law Matters BY: David Isaac

https://freebeacon.com/blog/israels-nation-state-law-matters/

On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared that the “spirit of Hitler has been revived, Israel is the most fascist and racist state.” He then called on—well, everybody—”to work against Israel.” What sent Erdogan into orbit was Israel’s newly minted Nation-State Law, which passed last week by a vote of 62 to 55 after a boisterous Knesset debate lasting over eight hours.

The law declares the Land of Israel is the Jewish people’s historic homeland. It identifies symbols of the state—the flag with its Star of David, the menorah, the national anthem Hatikvah (“the Hope”). It codifies certain official holidays like the Sabbath, recognizes Hebrew as the official language and proclaims encouragement for Jewish immigration and Jewish settlement.

Much of this sounds ho-hum. The law in good part is a reprise of Israel’s Declaration of Independence, which proclaims that it is the “natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State.”

Nevertheless, the Nation-State Law is significant:

1) It gives the 1948 declaration the force of law. As the first president of Israel’s Supreme Court said: “The Declaration expresses the vision and credo of the people; but it is not a constitutional law making a practical ruling on the upholding or nullification of various ordinances and statutes.”

For many years, Israeli legal scholars have called for turning the Declaration into a Basic law—Basic Laws in Israel have greater force than other laws as they cannot be easily overturned. Israel has about a dozen such laws. They are akin to a Bill of Rights in a country that has yet to pass a constitution.

My Collusion Confusion By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/andrew-mccarthy-collusion-comments-fox-news-clarification/

In response to Paging Andy McCarthy

It’s bad enough that I botched what I intended to say on Laura Ingraham’s show last night (and what I think I was pretty clear about if you actually watched the interview). But mea maxima culpaif I’ve confused Jonah by the rest of what I said. And if there’s a three-strikes-and-you’re-out law, I’m going down in flames on that, too: This morning, when I found out to my surprise and annoyance that I’d misspoken, I considered posting another tweet to make it crystal clear that I have never changed my position on the Trump Tower meeting. Specifically, I was going to tweet out this column again . . . but I got distracted by a phone call and never got around to it.

Too bad, because maybe I could have saved Jonah some time.

I won’t belabor what I’ve already corrected on Twitter (a correction I am grateful to Jonah for including). I have a bad habit of interrupting myself, particularly at the start of a sentence when I change my mind about how best to say something. When I did that last night, the garble resulted in what appears (if a dash is not inserted where I interrupted myself) to be a sentence that stands for the opposite of what I was arguing. Enough said.

Now, on to my confusion of collusion.

It is a challenge in a time-crunched television interview, with people occasionally talking over one another, to explain complex issues and distinctions adequately. I offer this in mitigation, not as an excuse. I’ve been harping on the distinction between “collusion” and “conspiracy” from the beginning. Since I criticize others for conflating the two, I have an added obligation to avoid that error myself, even when pressed for time. I didn’t do that well enough last night. When I said that turning to a foreign government for campaign dirt was not “collusion,” I meant it was not the collusion that is the rationale for the Trump-Russia investigation — specifically, the cyber-espionage conspiracy to influence the 2016 campaign.

Kim Brooks:Motherhood in the Age of Fear Women are being harassed and even arrested for making perfectly rational parenting decisions. See note please

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/27/opinion/sunday/motherhood-in-

Teachers and parents who subject their children to gender confusion including hormone treatments, or those who subject infant girls to barbaric genital mutilation are not arrested….rsk

CHICAGO — I was on my way home from dropping my kids off at preschool when a police officer called to ask if I was aware there was an outstanding warrant for my arrest.

“No, no,” I told him. “I didn’t know that.”

I needed to call my husband, but my fingers were shaking. I don’t remember if I was crying when he answered, only that he was saying he couldn’t understand me, that I needed to calm down, to tell him what had happened.

What happened began over a year before on a cool March day in 2011, at the end of a visit with my parents in Virginia. I needed to run an errand before our flight home to Chicago, and my son, then 4, didn’t want to get out of the car.

“Come on,” I said.

“No, no, no! I wait here.”

I took a deep breath. I knew what I was supposed to do. But I was tired. I was late. I didn’t want, at that moment, to deal with a meltdown. And there was something else: a small, quiet voice I’d been hearing more and more lately. “Why?” the voice asked.

Why did I have to fight this battle? He wasn’t asking to Rollerblade in traffic. He just wanted to sit in the car. Why couldn’t I leave him, just this once?

If it had been warm out, I would have said no. I knew about how quickly a closed car can overheat, even on a 60-degree day. But it was cool and cloudy. I’d grown up in that same town in the 1980s and had spent hours waiting in the back seat of my parents’ station wagon, windows open, reading or daydreaming, while they ran errands. Had so much really changed since then?

So I told him I’d be right back. I cracked the windows and child-locked the doors and set the alarm. When I got back five minutes later, he was still playing his game, smiling. We picked up his sister and our suitcases back at my parents’ house and caught our flight home.

It took me a while to figure out what had taken place in the parking lot — that a stranger had watched me go into the store, recorded my son, recorded the license plate on my mother’s car and called 911. CONTINUE AT SITE

Thousands of Christians march to Union Buildings singing ‘Viva Israel!’By Nicola Miltz

http://gatewaynews.co.za/thousands-of-christians-march-to-union-buildings-singing-viva-israel/

Thousands of Christians took to the streets in Pretoria on Wednesday in a solidarity prayer rally for the State of Israel.

Their message to the government was loud and clear: No Israel, no vote.

“Enough is enough. The government has pushed us too far.” These are the words of Masindi Mmbengwa, leader of the Unity Fellowship Church, who expressed his Christian movement’s support for Israel. He said millions of South African Christians were opposed to the government’s continued plans to sever ties with Israel, adding that it was time the government “took notice”.

“We are going to retaliate… this march is the beginning of the real war and we are going to say NO!” he said.

A petition with over 40 500 signatures was handed to a government official at the Union Buildings, calling for the government to cease efforts to sever ties with the State of Israel and to reinstate South Africa’s ambassador to Israel.

Signatories to the petition included members of civil society, political parties, religious institutions, schools and student groups from across South Africa, who declared their support for continued relations between Israel and South Africa.

The event was almost called off following the late-notice and unexpected cancellation of the venue hire by Freedom Park, where the rally was scheduled to take place.

The singing, chanting and toyi-toying crowds made their way slowly to the Union Buildings carrying placards with slogans saying: “No Cutting Ties”, “Send back the SA Ambassador to Israel”, “No to Downgrade” and ”I will bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you.”

Reverend Kenneth Meshoe, leader of the African Christian Democratic Party, roused the crowds with messages to the ANC, Hamas, the Palestinian Authority (PA), Iran, the people of Israel and fellow South Africans.

He said the ANC had allowed Hamas to inform them and influence them. “This was a mistake. Instead of listening to Hamas, listen to us Christians. We are here representing millions of South Africans and we want the relationship with Israel to be strengthened.”