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The Resistible Rise of Donald Trump By David P. Goldman

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

“Imagine if Hitler had liked Jews,” I told an Israeli politician recently who asked me to characterize the Republican frontrunner. The comparison seems more apt every day. The title of this note refers to Bertolt Brecht’s 1941 satire, “The Resistible Rise of Alfonso Ui,” portraying Hitler as gangster in the mode of Al Capone.

Donald Trump has tapped an ugly mood in America’s middle class, whose prospects have dimmed noticeably since the 2008 financial crisis. For the first time since the Great Depression Americans are losing ground that they cannot regain. Median household income fell by nearly 10% from 1999 through 2011 and remains far below previous peaks. Home ownership is down from 69% in 2008 to just 64%. The rate of participation in the labor force has fallen from 66.5% before the crisis to just 62%, the lowest since the 1970s. A generation of young people has graduated from college with mediocre earnings prospects and mountains of student debt.
Median Income Falls for the First Time Since the Great Depression

Jobs are to be had flipping burgers, emptying bedpans or driving a UPS truck.
Burger and Bedpan Jobs Predominate

The last two generations of American entrepreneurs–the dot.com bubblers of the 1990s and the mortgage manipulators of the 2000s–got carried out in body bags. The great mortgage scam sucked tens of millions of Americans into the bubble. Late entrants lost their homes, with 4 million homes under foreclosure by 2012 and another 6 million at risk. It’s not just that Americans are earning less, but that their path back to financial security is cut off.

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Peter Smith Taqiyya on Tap

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

There is no problem whatsoever in reconciling Islam with the West in general and Australia in particular, according to the National Imams Consultative Forum. And they’re right! Some sleight of hand and a judicious doctrinal omission or ten and it’s all hugs and kisses
I had missed it before I was alerted to it a little time ago. I took a quick look and put it aside. Life is too short I thought to attend to yet more platitudinous Islamic propaganda. But hey, all it takes for evil to triumph and all that.

The slippery document in question, issued by the National Imams Consultative Forum, is titled “An Muslim Australian perspective on some key contemporary concerns.” It was apparently the product of workshops held in 2014/15. It is comprised of 53 paragraphs under a number of headings. I will just take up a few points, but really it needs thoroughgoing scrutiny and testing.

A first thing to say is here we go again. This lot operating under the banner of Islam are a problem writ large. That is why we have to put up with a stream of apologia to camouflage the obnoxious nature of their supremacist scriptural credo and its worldwide effect of poverty, violence, cruelty, intolerance, discrimination and sexism.

It sticks out like a beardless imam; there is not a mention of any confirming Koranic verses or hadiths in the document to support the underlying theme that Islamic and Australian values don’t clash.

Under the heading of citizenship we are told, inter alia, that Muslims can be Australian citizens, while retaining brotherhood and sisterhood to all Muslims worldwide, and are not “automatically” required to take up arms to support one side or other when Muslims fight each other. Moreover, we are told: “There is no conflict between loyalty to Islam and commitment to Australia.” Bully for Islam. But, when push comes to shove, what happens if Australia is pitched in war with a Muslim country? I will leave the question hanging.

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PEGIDA planning mass demonstrations across Europe By Carol Brown

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) is a grassroots movement that was formed in Germany a little over two years ago. The scale of their rallies has rapidly grown. And now they’re organizing mass demonstrations for February 6th to be held in cities across Europe.

For those not familiar with PEGIDA, or for those who want to learn more, here’s a bit of background:

PEGIDA provides a structure for citizens to come together to celebrate national pride and to express opposition to Merkel’s suicidal open door immigration policy that has allowed in throngs of Muslims from Islamic countries – a policy that is destroying Germany in unthinkable ways.

If you’ve ever seen a video of a PEGIDA march, you’ll notice young and old, healthy and infirmed, day or night, in all kinds of weather, patriotic Germans show up and wind their way through the streets. Some carry flags while others hold signs. There is often an eerie silence, though occasionally a chant breaks out or you can hear the national anthem being sung. (See here, here, here, here, here, and here for a sample of videos from a few of their marches.)

The size of the demonstrations is often large, with numbers reaching into the tens of thousands. Beginning in October, the group organized weekly marches in Dresden and other cities primarily located in the eastern part of Germany (which is likely no coincidence given the region’s history and people’s first-hand knowledge of life under totalitarian rule).

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Climate changers shocked and puzzled by snow in January By Ethel C. Fenig

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

So, how are the settled science climate changers, global warmers, global coolers going to explain last weekend’s “snowmageddon” “snowcalypse” (not my words), where several more inches than normal of the white stuff temporarily buried a large section of the eastern United States? But…but…snow in January, snow in winter wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, according to the Great Minds of Science who have built a nice money-making racket on denying reality.

For instance, take Nobel Peace Prize winner (read, and try not to laugh, his climate change acceptance speech here and old male white Oscar winner (listen to his acceptance speech here and Grammy winner and former vice president and president wannabe Al Gore (D)’s past definitive climate warning gurgles. Please!

Speaking to an audience in Germany five years ago, Gore — sometimes ridiculed as “The Goracle” — alleged that “the entire North Polarized [sic] cap will disappear in five years.” “Five years,” Gore said again, in case anybody missed it the first time, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”

The following year, Gore made similar claims at a UN “climate” summit in Copenhagen. “Some of the models … suggest that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years,” Gore claimed in 2009. “We will find out.”

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The Patience of the Jihadists By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

The ongoing interpretations concerning natural-born citizenship may eventually become a moot point. With the burgeoning immigration of groups of people who have little to no devotion to American ideals but who will have children born on American soil, one can easily envision that, in the not so distant-future, an American-born individual schooled in the hatred of jihad could conceivably occupy the White House.

Already the radical Muslim Brotherhood has “built the framework for a political party in America that seeks to turn Muslims into an Islamist voting bloc.” The U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO) aims to elect Islamists in Washington in order to institute sharia law and dismantle the American Constitution.

The Center for Security Policy’s Star Spangled Shariah: The Rise of America’s First Muslim Brotherhood Party is part of its Civilization Jihad Reader Series (Volume 5). The Center asserts:

[T]he Muslim Brotherhood has been actively infiltrating American government and society since shortly after the Second World War. But March 2014 marked a significant step forward for the Brotherhood in America. Some of its key leadership figures joined together to establish the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO), the first political activist group in this country to be openly associated with the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. Formation of the USCMO was announced … [in] March 2014, just blocks from the U.S. Capitol Building. At the podium were: Ousama Jammal, Secretary General USCMO and past President of The Mosque Foundation; Naeem Baig, President, Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA); Nihad Awad, National Executive Director, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR); Mazen Mokhtar, Executive Director, Muslim American Society (MAS); Imam Mahdi Bray, National Director, American Muslim Alliance (AMA)[.] The significance of this move is best understood in the context of what the Muslim Brotherhood itself calls ‘civilizational jihad,’ a term used in its 1991 strategic plan: An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Group in North America. As the Explanatory Memorandum states, the Brotherhood’s mission in America is ‘destroying Western civilization from within,’ preparing the way for its replacement by the rule of Islam’s supremacist code, shariah (Islamic law). Unlike more immediately violent Brotherhood off-shoots – for example, al-Qa’eda, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Islamic State or HAMAS, the Brotherhood in the West has generally taken care to operate stealthily, under the radar, even to the point of sometimes denying its very presence in the United States.

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What Ted Cruz Values The Texan is repelling millions who believe in an America of the future, not the past. By Bret Stephens

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

Rancho Mirage, Calif.

It’s 70 degrees in this desert oasis, where I’m attending a writers’ festival, and I’m looking up at a vista of snowcapped peaks, cerulean skies and pink clouds that looks like a Bob Ross painting, only happier. But there’s only so much California positivity a man can handle, especially when he doesn’t play golf. That snowbound den of depravity known as Manhattan is calling me home.

With apologies to Billy Joel, I’m in a New York values state of mind.

Maybe I’d be a better person if I got away from the coasts more often, or visited a gun range. Maybe my conservative principles would be less attenuated if I weren’t surrounded, as Ted Cruz put it the other day, by people who “are socially liberal or pro-abortion or pro-gay marriage,” and “focus around money and the media.” Maybe I should start listening to country music, the way Mr. Cruz did after he decided, in good Soviet fashion, that his musical taste ought to be dictated by political considerations.

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. Ted Cruz at a campaign stop Jan. 19 in Freedom, N.H. Photo: John Minchillo/Associated Press

And maybe I wouldn’t be quite so nauseated by the junior senator from Texas if the cynicism with which he mounted his attack last week on “New York values” weren’t so wholly matched by the sinister taint of an ambitious sophist who takes his audience for fools. Ted Cruz is the guy who made Donald Trump look tolerant and statesmanlike. That’s saying something.

Already it has been widely mentioned that Mr. Cruz’s wife, Heidi, is a senior executive with Goldman Sachs, which isn’t exactly an Iowa values kind of institution, and that Mr. Cruz’s 2012 run for Senate was financed with the help of $1 million in low-interest loans from Goldman. Also noted is that Mr. Cruz owes his political career to the backing of billionaire Peter Thiel, who is libertarian, gay, and perhaps wondering what he was thinking.

And it goes without saying that most of us would prefer the values of the lowliest New York Fire Department cadet over the cleverest Harvard Law graduate any day we need to get out of trouble that isn’t of our own making.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Second Only to the Rothschilds Speyer banks funded the London underground, placed the first Union Civil War bonds in Europe and built the Madeira-Mamore railroad.By Charles R. Morris

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

Before World War I, Edgar Speyer headed the London branch of the German-based Speyer banking conglomerate. Among other things, he was a great lover of music. His mansion on Grosvenor Square was a cynosure for composers— Debussy, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg—all of whom availed themselves of the luxuries of the house, playing or conducting their work in private performances. “We live even more elegantly than kings and emperors,” Grieg wrote, referring to the mansion’s suite of rooms for visitors.

Not all of Edgar Speyer’s interests were so ethereal. The British Speyer branch was a key source of railroad finance, and Edgar himself was best known for creating—in partnership with Charles Yerkes, a Chicago entrepreneur—the London tube system, with its innovative “deep-tube” design. Edgar persisted in expanding the system despite its precarious finances and for many years functioned as its chief executive.

Although Edgar Speyer was a baronet and a member of the king’s Privy Council, he would become a target of the McCarthy-style attacks that were directed at Germans in England during World War I. The attacks grew to such an intensity—Speyer was accused of signaling to German submarines—that he resigned his official positions, over the protests of the king and prime minister. He soon liquidated the British branch of the firm and joined his elder brother, James, in New York. James was then running the Speyers’ branch in America, but it too would succumb before the next war broke out. It is this arc of centuries-long success and sudden diminishment that George W. Liebmann describes in “The Fall of the House of Speyer,” a solid work of financial and social history. They don’t make bankers like this anymore.

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Islamic State Said to Have ‘Industry of Fake Passports’ French Minister Bernard Cazeneuve urges Europe to create task forces to help identify bogus papers By Valentina Pop

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

AMSTERDAM—Islamic State has created an industry from passports seized in Iraq, Syria and Libya, French interior minister Bernard Cazeneuve said Monday.

At a meeting of interior ministers in Amsterdam, Mr. Cazeneuve made the case for setting up special task forces to be sent to Greece to assist the identification of fake or stolen passports.

“Daesh has managed to seize passports in Iraq, Syria and Libya and to set up a true industry of fake passports,” Mr. Cazeneuve said in a news conference after the meeting, using the Arabic acronym for Islamic State.

He made the case for establishing this task force and for authorities in the European Union to upload any relevant information to the counterterrorism databases in the bloc.

At least two of the terrorists in the Paris attacks in November traveled on the migrant route through Greece using Syrian passports and posing as refugees, as over one million people arrived on the continent last year, mostly via Greece.

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Iran President Visits Europe to Seal Post-Sanctions Deals Worth Billions French car maker Peugeot expected to sign one of a host of deals likely to be announcedBy Stacy Meichtry in Paris and Robert Wall

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

European companies are promising billions in new deals in Iran—€5.7 billion from Italian steelmaker Danieli and more than €300 million from French car builder PSA Peugeot Citroën, among others—as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani works to revive trade and political ties on the Continent this week.
Mr. Rouhani landed in Rome on Monday on his first overseas trip since the European Union lifted sanctions on Jan. 16 in return for Tehran’s implementation of key restrictions on its nuclear program.

The trip will take Mr. Rouhani from Vatican City—marking the first meeting between an Iranian president and a pope since 1999—to the gilded halls of Paris’s Élysée Palace.

With a number of U.S. sanctions still in place, European countries are moving quickly to re-establish ties to sell everything from consumer goods to aircraft.

Italian and Iranian companies signed deals valued at about €17 billion ($18.36 billion) late Monday ahead of a formal dinner between Mr. Rouhani and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi. Earlier in the day, Italian steel firm Danieli said it would sign deals valued at about €5.7 billion during the visit. Other firms signing agreements on Monday included oil-field services company Saipem SpA, energy group Ansaldo Energia and ship maker Fincantieri SpA, but further details weren’t available.

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SAUDI MAN FACES 1,000 LASHES FOR HAVING SEX WITH VACUUM CLEANER BY BOB FLANAGAN !!!????

Posted By on January 26th, 2016

thanks to e-pal Bruce P……rsk
Riyadh | Saudi police officers in the district of Al-Mansuriyya in the branch municipality of Al-Shifa have arrested a man accused of having sex with his vacuum cleaner, reports the Riyadh Daily.

The man was caught in full action by his wife of 17 years before she reported her husband to authorities.

“After 17 years of loyalty, this is how this miscreant treats me,” she told local reporters. “I feel used, I feel dirty,” she added.

The suspect has denied any wrong doing and blames his wife for inventing the whole affair of which he could face 2 years in jail and 1,000 lashes for adultery

As adultery is a crime punishable by death in Islamic law, usually performed by stoning the person to death, experts believe the man’s condemnation is a light one.