Pompeo destroys Obama’s ideological legacy in the Middle East

While Obama castigated the United States and the West collectively, he cast Islamic terrorism and other forms of Muslim aggression against the U.S. and the West as the misdeeds of mere “violent extremists,” . . . "Far from rooted in their own ideological or religious beliefs, the crimes of this small minority of “violent extremists” were, in his telling, provoked by American and Western collective malevolence and ill-treatment.

snippits-and-slappits

 Caroline Glick  "From the moment that President Donald Trump entered office two years ago, he has been stripping away his predecessor Barack Obama’s legacy in the Middle East, piece by piece.

"It hasn’t been easy.

"It took Trump a year to finally overcome the opposition of the professional bureaucracy at the State Department and the Defense Department, and overrule the opposition of his then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to recognize Israel’s capital, Jerusalem. Trump had to overcome further opposition from his senior advisors and the consensus view of the foreign policy establishment to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

"So too, to walk away from Obama’s signature foreign policy, his 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Trump had to overcome opposition from Mattis, the foreign policy establishment, the European Union, and the media." . . .

. . . 

"After demonizing America’s closest ally in the Middle East, Obama turned his attention to Iran. Far from committing himself to preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, Obama committed himself to appeasing Iran. He placed the blame for Iranian hostility towards the U.S. on the CIA’s role in the 1953 coup that brought about the overthrow of then-Iranian President Mohammad Mosaddegh.

"Then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak boycotted Obama’s address and refused to follow protocol and greet Obama as he alighted Air Force One at the airport in Cairo. Mubarak turned a cold shoulder to Obama because Obama insisted on inviting Muslim Brotherhood members to his speech." . . .

Obama never met an anti-American he didn't like.

Democrats Attempt to Legalize Voter Fraud (Updated)

iOTWreport  . . . "just in time for the 2018 midterm elections, the California legislature legalized a… vote-harvesting scheme and much more.  The rules changes worked so well that on election night, GOP shoe-in seats in the few remaining solidly Republican areas like Orange County evaporated.

"Per Townhall, anyone can “walk into an elections office and hand over truckloads of vote-by-mail envelopes with ballots inside no questions asked, no verified records kept.”  Democrat operatives cased nursing homes, low-income neighborhoods, illegal alien work sites, etc. to “help” people vote or to pick up and deliver their ballots.  California’s newly relaxed voting laws enabled cheating on an industrial scale that will perpetuate Democrat control.

"…the new majority-Dem U.S. House of Representatives went the state one better and, on March 8, passed H.B. 1, a near copycat “For the People Act,” by a party-line 234-193 vote.  Like California’s new rules, this seemingly virtuous bill would force early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting in all 50 states and similarly skew national election results heavily toward Democrats." . . . more
"Tom Fitton Warns About “Ballot Harvesting’"

(Update) House Dems attempt to legalize voter fraud  . . . "Seeing California’s success, the new majority-Dem U.S. House of Representatives went the state one better and, on March 8, passed H.R. 1, a near copycat "For the People Act," by a party-line 234-193 vote.  Like California’s new rules, this seemingly virtuous bill would force early voting, automatic voter registration, same-day registration, online voter registration, and no-fault absentee balloting in all 50 states and similarly skew national election results heavily toward Democrats.  

"It may not pass the current Senate, but this bill clearly reveals which party is pursuing absolute power by any means necessary while disingenuously claiming the moral high ground.  Hint — it’s not the GOP or even Russia."

'Madam Secretary' Lectures Christians: ‘Hard to Claim You Love the Creator, If You're Ignoring’ Global Warming

Newsbusters  "Like any good liberal disciple, CBS’s Madam Secretary is back preaching about the fire and brimstone of climate change during Lent. The metaphor becomes more apt when the show literally goes against religious believers who dare question the will of scientists and fear-mongering politicians. After all, we’re "past the point of no return" already.

"The March 17 episode’s title “The New Normal” refers to the so-called "new normal” of natural disasters caused by global warming. For example, a storm known as “Typhoon Blessing” begins developing across the Pacific Ocean two months before the typhoon season begins. Although it doesn’t threaten the United States, it does target the small country of Nauru. The cause, of course, is none other than climate change.

"Of course, this wouldn’t be a full defense of the Church of Global Warming without a few dissenters. The designated climate change denier for this episode comes in the form of not a politician but Pastor Eli Bragg (Jim True-Frost), the leader of a large Christian organization known as the Christian Redeemers Network. In a speech to this group, Secretary of State Elizabeth McCord’s (Téa Leoni) husband Henry (Tim Daly) quotes the Bible and beseeches the room to accept the infallible word of climate scientists as their Lord and Savior, in the name of their actual Lord and Savior." . . .

Elizabeth Warren's call to abolish the Electoral College is part of a pernicious pattern

Monica Showalter  "Unlike, say, Beto O'Rourke, who offers nothing upstairs, or Kamala Harris, who flits with the wind with regard to what she's in favor of, Elizabeth Warren is a Democratic presidential candidate with some specific ideas.

"And they're not good ones. 

"Here's what's probably her worst, from Twitter:

Elizabeth Warren

✔ @ewarren

Every vote matters. We need to get rid of the Electoral College so that presidential candidates have to ask every American in every part of the country for their vote, not just those in battleground states. #WarrenTownHall

"It's a programmatic call from the worst of the Democratic electoral operatives' dream book: to wipe out the constitution and replace it with riggings for Democrats.  With Warren, it's now coming into the mainstream as a respectable idea.

"It's also awful, an idea clothed in the California-style slogan of "count all the votes," which is the rationale used for the open practice of ballot-harvesting there.  "Count all the votes."  "Every vote matters..."

"What it is is a bid to second-guess and smash up the wisdom of the founding fathers for the sole reason that Democrats don't like losing.  Call it the Democrat Pacifier for Permanent Power Act of 2020."

Save the Electoral College

CNN Brags About Winning Award For Much-Maligned Parkland Townhall. Dana Loesch Crushes Them.

Daily Wire

On Tuesday, CNN trumpeted that the network had won the Walter Cronkite Award, administered by USC’s Norman Lear Center and announced by the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, for the Parkland Townhall in which NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch was booed and even called a “murderer.”
. . . 
Loesch expressed her feelings in her typically blunt way on Twitter, while illuminating exactly what happened at the townhall:
. . . 

Verified account @DLoesch  tweeted:

Some interesting notes: CNN set this up like a WWE event. Purposefully. They allowed Scott Israel to take the stage before the cameras turned on and electioneer; he took that time (about 20 minutes) to start blaming law-abiding gun owners. Loesch tweeted later: After the broadcast ended, one of my detail had to stop a woman who rushed the stage to tackle me from behind. That is when Tapper asked me if I had an escort out. I am positive that CNN’s cameras, still operational, observed this and would like for them to release the footage.

California solar power plants ignite birds mid flight

WUWT

. . . ‘This project will fuel 140,000 California homes.’

At night? Not just birds on fire, that guys pants are on fire.

Reply

• Gary Wescom

  March 17, 2019 at 8:04 pm

  Yep, never an actual daily KWH output from the plant. Only its maximum capacity under optimum conditions.

  Reply
  • Greg

    March 18, 2019 at 2:01 am

    Note that the PR guy carefully avoids a reply which involves any scientific units, only answering with meaningless, unverifiable “California homes” units of measurement.

Stick a Fork in O’Rourke; "The boutique candidate will quickly get eaten up by the media"

. . . This man is a boob, a dolt. He is vulgar and ungrammatical, knows nothing, and makes no sense. He can’t keep his mouth shut for five seconds and he is wired like an early helicopter with a vertical rotor on its tail: he can’t gabble out his nonsense without waving his arms around." . . .

Ian Macfarlane

Conrad Black  "If, as I wrote last week here, Joe Biden may save the Democratic party from a horrible debacle at the polls next year, Beto O’Rourke may be doing the whole process a good turn now. Biden, despite his efforts to masquerade as the vanguard of what is now called progressivism, is politically sane and, if nominated, might hold his shaggy legions back from holus-bolus embrace of the many suicide potions being offered to the Democratic contestants. To date, the most lethal intoxicants that have been extolled by some of the candidates are legalized infanticide, open borders, reparations to African and other minority Americans, nationalized health care, a fascistic and Luddite green policy, and top personal-tax rates above 70 per cent. So far, this cocktail, which is such an assault on the sanity of an electorate that it could reduce the Democrats to splinters, has scared off Michael Bloomberg, Sherrod Brown, and Hillary Clinton (though she is probably contemplating her legal future with some well-founded consternation too).

Townhall

"But another candidate-benefactor is also in sight, and so hyperactive and in his way irresistible that it is hard to get him out of your sight. Beto O’Rourke is stoking up one the great bonfires of modern political history; he is a phenomenon of these strange times so unique that no one could have imagined him. Even the Trump-hating media, desperate to find a Democrat who can win, in despair at the collapse of the impeachment bubble, demoralized and hung over from pelagic overconsumption of sour Kool Aid, are taking a break from their sacred mission to destroy Trump. They are not turning their swords into ploughshares, but some sort of quasi-Biblical grace of change is occurring. 

"All of the Democratic candidates and the entire political process are being taken over and occupied by the invasion of the whole public space by Robert Francis O’Rourke. No one has ever heard or seen anything like this candidate: a hyperactive limb-flailing imbecile, babbling compulsively in a torrent of extremist nonsense barely couched in comprehensible syntax. No idea is too stupid to be endorsed in terms of absolute finality: “If we do not abolish all fossil fuels within twelve years, everything on the planet will be dead. The scientists are 100 percent united on this. Just as Americans of the past had to fight at Normandy, we have to fight this now, and save our planet.” . . . (Emphasis added, TD)

Waging War against the Dead

Victor Davis Hanson

Destroying history will not make you feel good about the present.

Damage to a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee at Duke University’s Duke Chapel in Durham, N.C.

"The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past.

"In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam.

"In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Mohammed.

"The West prides itself on the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again.

"In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descendants of Southern slaves — 154 years after the extinction of the Confederate states." . . .

‘Damn socialism, why are you chasing me?’ Chinese-Americans see ghost of communism in Democrats’ leftward turn

Washington Examiner

"When Saga Zhou first moved to the United States from China in 2009, she steered clear of politics. The Communist Party rules supreme in China, so most Chinese immigrants bring a built-in aversion to political involvement.

"But Zhou’s interest in politics was piqued as she began to see the American Left embracing policies that reminded her of those she’d fled in China.

"One such policy was the Left’s support for late-term abortion. When she lived in China, Zhou, like many young Chinese, didn’t consider abortion to be a big deal. But her view changed after moving to America, getting married, and bearing two children." . . .

“ 'Oh, when I saw the news, I cannot even open [the article],” Zhou said through tears. “It was really hard. I just felt something really strong into my chest. And then I said, ‘Let me adopt him, don’t kill him.'”

"The proposed law hit especially close to home for Zhou, whose mother became pregnant with her just as China’s government began implementing its brutal one-child policy.

"The policy prohibited most couples from having more than one child. Women who became pregnant with a second child were often forced to undergo sterilization; sometimes their babies were killed in the womb. Though she was her mother’s second child, Zhou escaped death because the one-child policy had not yet been implemented in her city." . . .

. . .  [George] Li believes the Republican Party is a natural fit for Chinese-Americans.

Traditional Chinese culture is conservative, he said, emphasizing hard work, independence, education, and family values.

He finds the Left’s obsession with political correctness maddening because it intimidates people into silence. “This intimidation is so bad for freedom of speech,” he said. “A lot of things I see in this country are very similar to what I saw in the Cultural Revolution era in China,” He calls political correctness a “form of cultural Marxism.” . . .

. . . "Benjamin Yu, also of Irvine, saw the Democratic Party moving toward socialism long before some of its members began embracing the term.

"Yu immigrated to the U.S. with his mother in the late 1990s. In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, Yu, then a U.S. Green Card holder, felt a “surge of patriotism,” prompting him to join the Army.

“ 'When something happens so close to you, it doesn’t matter if you are an American by legal status,” he said. “You get a sense that that’s your country. You feel part of the community.' ”  . . .

KOMO News’ special: Seattle is Dying

Hot Air

“People didn’t use to use the word embarrassing about Seattle, but they use it a lot now,” the narrator to a new KOMO News special titled “Seattle is Dying” says. The focus of the special is homelessness and the ways in which it has changed the city.

"There’s a section featuring angry residents of one area of the city who are screaming at their representatives for action. They want the tent cities managed and they’re tired of calling the police only to find out the police can arrest people but those same people will be back on the street, sometimes within hours.

"It also asked Seattle police officers to comment anonymously on what was happening and those responses are enlightening. One officer told KOMO, “People come here because it’s called Free-attle and they believe if they come here they will get free food, free medical treatment, free mental health treatment, a free tent, free clothes and will be free of prosecution for just about everything; and they’re right.”

"The special also addresses the reasons this is happening. One homeless woman named Melissa Burns tells KOMO, “I have not met anyone else on the street who is not in some phase of addiction, I mean of use, of serious use and I think that’s the starting point. You just have to address that.' ” . . .