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January 2019

Stacey Abrams is an Odd Choice to Deliver the State of the Union Response Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/272722/stacey-abrams-odd-choice-deliver-state-union-daniel-greenfield

After the disastrous response to Trump’s wall speech, it’s understandable that the Dems don’t want to bring Schumer and Pelosi back to counter President Trump’s State of the Union address. And a lot of their top talent is pondering running in 2020.

So they can’t play favorites.

But Stacey Abrams has also been flirting with running, she’s a campaign loser and she’s a terrible public speaker. The Dems could have picked Hakeem Jeffries, or any one of a dozen other Dems in the national or state leadership who aren’t thinking of running.

And who would actually leave viewers with a positive impression.

Picking Abrams is meant to boost her comeback campaign, but at the cost of the Dem brand.

I know the pre-written media headlines about Abrams “destroying” Trump with lines carefully scripted for her by guys who charge you $50K just to hear them sneeze will be given added spice by the identity politics here, and the consultants have told the Dems that getting black women out to vote is the key to victory, but she’s still a terrible choice.

But at least she probably isn’t running in 2020. It’s hard to find a Dem who isn’t.

Obstructionist Democrats Vow Lawsuit if Trump Declares Wall Emergency The Left runs out of excuses for not securing the southern border. Matthew Vadum

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272712/obstructionist-democrats-vow-lawsuit-if-trump-matthew-vadum

Obstructionist open-borders Democrats will promptly file a lawsuit to halt the building of a desperately needed wall on the nation’s porous multi-state border with Mexico if President Trump declares a national emergency to move forward with construction, the new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee is threatening.

White House aides have reportedly prepared an executive declaration that gives the president the ability to redirect billions of dollars in military construction and flood-control funds.

“There would immediately be a lawsuit,” Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) told C-SPAN. “Taking billions out of the Pentagon’s military construction budget would be a big problem, and there’s bipartisan opposition to it.”

Using funds for the Army Corps of Engineers’ flood-control programs for the wall would also be “problematic,” Smith said.

“We really have no choice but to build a powerful wall or steel barrier,” Trump said Friday as he signed fiscal legislation temporarily reopening the portions of the federal government that had been shut down since before Christmas.

The Diverse Conformity of the 2020 Democrats They’re all different, in the same way. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272641/diverse-conformity-2020-democrats-daniel-greenfield

Never has the Democrat presidential field been more diverse in race, gender, religion and orientation, and less diverse intellectually. The 2020 primary field stumbled out into the streets of Iowa throwing clumsy identity politics punches at each other’s diverse faces. Soon the media was full of stories about how Bernie Sanders was a sexist pig, Kamala Harris spent all her time throwing the book at black men, and Tulsi Gabbard is a homophobe. And that’s just the warm up act. Give it a week and every candidate will be accusing his, her and its opponents of being bigger bigots than the biggest bigot in Biggotsville.

Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s entry into the 2020 race shone a light on the dismal conformity of the field, but not because she’s Hindu or part Samoan. Senator Kamala Harris was raised by her Tamil Indian mother in Canada and attended a Hindu temple as a child. But Harris has tried to mold her campaign into the generic cookie cutter African-American politician, dubiously laying claim to generations of history and struggle that her family was never heir to by announcing her run on MLK Day in Oakland.

And then rushing off to Iowa, which is about as far away as you can get from Oakland, because she wasn’t really trying to convince black people of her authenticity, but white progressives in Iowa City.

Cultural diversity is commonplace in the 2020 field. But all that diversity just makes for a poignant opening speech before politicians like Harris conform their brands to the lowest common Dem denominator. Harris falsely claimed to have attended a desegregated school and is using the civil rights struggle as the background for her presidential campaign because in a tribal party, white guilt and black bloc votes are safer bets than her actual background with her Tamil mother and Jamaican father.

Finland’s Grooming Gangs by David Brown

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13650/finland-grooming-gangs

Much of the coverage of the same problem in Great Britain said that Jay had accused the Rotherham council and police of failing to tackle sexual exploitation because of misplaced “political correctness.” Yet Jay says those are not the words she would use: “I have an aversion to phrases like that,” she said. Instead, she believes the Labour-dominated council turned a blind eye to the problem because of “their desire to accommodate a community that would be expected to vote Labour, to not rock the boat, to keep a lid on it, to hope it would go away.”

What hits hardest in the little town of Oulu in Finland is a disturbing sense that history is repeating itself here and nothing has been learned from the well-documented lessons of the past. Instead there seems to be a hope that with a few overdue statements this problem will go back underground and the noise will go away.

Despite bold assertions that action would be taken and the laws regarding asylum seekers would be tightened, in recent conversations regarding the numbers of migrants to be accepted from the EU quota system, politicians such as the interior minister were still campaigning to increase the refugee quota tenfold.

In January, the Andalus Islamic Center of Kastelholm in Helsinki’s Puolinharju area, published a message to its followers on Facebook. It featured a picture of two lollipops. One was unwrapped, dirty and covered with insects; the other was not. “This is why the Hijab plays an important role in Islam,” it said.

Finland is a curious place. Tucked up under the arm of its celebrity sister Sweden and with Russia as a neighbour, it is one of the world’s most northern and geographically remote countries. It takes a hardy kind of European to withstand the severe climate. The Finns in Oulu, the most populous city in northern Finland, go about their lives as normal in -25 degrees Fahrenheit.

With a national population of just over 5.5 million, trees easily outnumber people; two-thirds of this country is blanketed in thick woodland, making it the most densely forested country in Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights Does Not Deserve Its Name by Saied Shoaaib

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13533/european-court-human-rights

It is a shame that voices such as Bahiri’s are being drowned out in the West, not only by fundamentalist Islamists but by liberal apologists — and courts. Evidently they are more fearful of being called “Islamophobic” than they are of protecting the victims of radical Islamism.

The recent ECHR ruling against Sabaditsch-Wolff for speaking her mind about Mohammed’s marriage to a little girl is not merely a slap in the face to freedom of expression in an academic sense. It also serves to keep silent all those Muslims who are physically and mentally victimized by the practices sanctified in the Quran and by those adopting the strictest interpretation of Quranic texts.

In so doing, the court is giving its stamp of approval for criminal practices, such as paedophilia. Crimes that victimize children must not be tolerated. The European Court of Human Rights does not deserve its name.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently ruled that referring to the Islamic Prophet Mohammed’s marriage to a 9-year-old as paedophilia is “beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate.”

As Judith Bergman explained in the wake of the October 25, 2018 judgement, which was handed down seven years after “free speech and anti-jihad activist, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, was convicted by an Austrian court of ‘denigrating religious symbols of a recognized religious group'”:

“Sabaditsch-Wolff was ordered to pay a fine of 480 euros and the costs of the proceedings. The Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision… Sabaditsch-Wolff then appealed… to the European Court of Human Rights. She stated that her right to freedom of expression, safeguarded in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights, had been violated.”

According to the recent ECHR ruling, Article 10 had not been violated. Furthermore, it stated that the Austrian court that convicted Sabaditsch-Wolff had “served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”

Even more shocking than ignoring the whole point of freedom of expression by talking about “preserving religious peace” was the ECHR’s defense of the Austrian court for stating that that “child marriages were not the same as pedophilia, and were not only a phenomenon of Islam, but also used to be widespread among the European ruling dynasties.”

World’s Dumbest Energy Policy After giving up nuclear power, Germany now wants to abandon coal.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/worlds-dumbest-energy-policy-11548807424

Dumb environmental policies are routine across Europe—see Emmanuel Macron’s riot-inducing fuel tax in France—but even by that standard Germany’s new plan to abandon coal is notable. Having wasted uncountable billions of euros on renewables and inflicted some of Europe’s highest energy prices on German households and businesses, now Berlin is promising to kill the one reliable power source Germany has left.

That plan comes via a blue-ribbon commission that recommended over the weekend that Germany phase out coal-fired power generation by 2038. Coal currently accounts for 40% of Germany’s electricity, by far the highest proportion in northern Europe. To the extent this is creating an environmental crisis, it’s a result of more than a decade of bad green policy choices.

The energiewende, or energy transformation, championed by Chancellor Angela Merkel heavily subsidizes unreliable wind and solar power, making it uneconomical for utilities to invest in cleaner natural gas. Meanwhile, Mrs. Merkel pledged to shutter German nuclear plants in the wake of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima disaster. Utilities have fallen back on cheaper but dirtier coal to fill the supply gaps when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun isn’t shining.

EDWARD CLINE: ISLAM IN CONGRESS

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/islam-in-congress.html

One grows jaded from reading — indeed, weary of – all the bad news one finds on the Internet or which cascades into one’s email. More knife attacks in the U.K., more rapes in Swedenand Germany, Islamic butchery in Morocco and Pakistan and Nigeria, of Islamic slaughters everywhere. And news of Western countries folding, ever so slightly, to the invasion and inroads of Islam.

Except for a few reality- centered souls – Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, Amil Imani, Katie Hopkins, and a scant paucity of other individuals – with access to the reading public , few other writers and thinkers and prominent persons will risk a blanket, public condemnation of Islam. This is especially true of members of Congress. To stand up and point fingers at Islam would invite charges of racism and attempts at suppressing freedom of speech, oppression of a “minority,” even though Islam is gaining the status of a “protected” minority here (creeping Sharia), as it enjoys in the U.K. and on Continental Europe. I can’t think of any politician with the moral or mental backbone to unapologetically cite Islam’s totalitarian, fascist nature and its 14 centuries of bloodshed, conquest, and destruction.

Congress has been Islamisized. No one there dares stand up and say, “Islam is evil and is not ‘peaceful.” Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, is friendly to the Muslimis, and has appointed them to powerful, influential committees, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib to the Financial Services Committee, and Omar to the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Voters (or illegal voters) elected them to office as representatives of their districts in the House of Representatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14th district), Ilhan Omar (Minnesota-5thdistrict), and Rashida Harbi Tlaib (Michigan – 13th district). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is not a Muslim, but she is the newspaperman’s photogenic dream. She an agenda pal with Tliab and Omar. They all oppose, in varying degrees of vehemence, President Donald Trump, with the rest of the House.

Female terrorist killed during stabbing attack near Jerusalem

https://worldisraelnews.com/female-terrorist-killed-during-stabbing-attack-near-jerusalem/

Police are investigating where the suspect came from. Security has been beefed up in the area.

An Arab female terrorist attempted to stab Israeli security personnel at the A-Zaim checkpoint in Judea on Wednesday. The checkpoint is located at the southern entrance to Jerusalem.

Security forces responded quickly, shooting and killing the terrorist.

No Israelis were wounded in the attack.Jerusalem’s District Police Commander Yoram Halevi arrived at the scene of the attack and was briefed on the details.

The terrorist has not yet been identified. A police spokesman said they are investigating where the suspect came from and security will remain heightened in the area.

Senate panel postpones William Barr’s confirmation vote amid Democrats’ concerns By Karoun Demirjian

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/senate-panel-postpones-william-barr%E2%80%99s-confirmation-vote-amid-democrats%E2%80%99-concerns/ar-BBSTWla?OCID=ansmsnnews11

A planned Senate Judiciary Committee vote on William P. Barr’s nomination to serve as attorney general has been delayed for a week, as Democrats continue to raise concerns about whether he will allow special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to finish his probe and publicize the results unimpeded.

The delay, which is customary for high-profile nominations, is not expected to impede Barr’s eventual chances of being confirmed by the full Senate. But it is the latest reflection of the deep partisan tension surrounding Barr’s nomination, most of which centers on Democrats’ desire to protect Mueller’s probe from being unduly constrained.

The committee postponed its vote on Barr as one of 46 nominations the panel was scheduled to vote on Tuesday but decided to delay until its next meeting.

In both his public testimony and his written answers to senators’ questions, Barr has repeatedly refused to give senators any firm guarantee that he will release Mueller’s report to Congress and the public free of redactions. In similar fashion, he has only promised to ask for, but not necessarily heed, the advice of the Justice Department’s ethics counsel on the matter of whether he should recuse himself from oversight of the probe.

County lines gangs make £500m profit as they exploit 10,000 children to sell drugs, say police

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/01/29/county-lines-gangs-make-500m-profit-exploit-10000-children-sell/

Criminal gangs are making £500m profit a year from “county lines” networks with 10,000 children as young as 11 being exploited to sell drugs, police have revealed.

There are now 2,000 county lines through which gangs run their drug dealing networks, almost treble the 720 of just a year ago, according to analysis by the National Crime Agency (NCA) and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC).

Each line generates more than £800,000 profit and turns over some £5,000 a day, equivalent to £3.6bn a year if scaled up.

The gangs exploit children whom they recruit to sell heroin, cocaine and crack in areas outside their normal territories, directing them via mobile phone “lines.”

Duncan Ball, NPCC lead on county lines, said 10,000 was a “reasonable” estimate of the number of children now being used, with most being boys aged 15 to 17.

He said the youngest gang member police had safeguarded was just 11 but there was evidence gangs were grooming younger children so they could join their operations when they reached 11.