While the latest media-driven culture-war frenzy leaves America doubled over in agony about the Confederate battle flag, the path of tolerance and historical memory is much easier in the Brazilian town of Santa Barbara D’Oeste, where regular events bring together descendants of some ten thousand Confederates, seven generations removed, for what the BBC describes as “a sort of family reunion.”
There is great power in symbols, especially in an era when so many people have been taught to emote rather than thinking. The quick surge of emotion people feel upon viewing a potent symbol can be bottled and used in politics. It’s excessively charitable to call the current flag battle a “debate,” because it mostly consists of one side screaming that anyone who hesitates to dump that flag into the wood chipper of historical oblivion is either a racist, or an accessory to racism in the first degree. There isn’t much in the way of measured reason involved here.
CNN has a long buildup to the introduction of Saudi comedian Nasser al-Qasabi, stressing how amazing it is to see the menace of ISIS tackled with humor. “Humor may not be the first thing that comes to mind when the topic is ISIS, a group known for mass rape and torture, and for posting videos of its members beheading captives or burning them alive,” the network writes. “Not a lot of yuks in that, it wouldn’t seem.”
The Boston Globe reports an astounding admission from Hillary Clinton during an interview with WMUR radio in Boston: the former Secretary of State was well aware that her department was under constant cyberattack, but she broke the rules, and possibly laws, to build a dangerously insecure email server for herself and top aides anyway.
That’s Big Government failure in a nutshell, isn’t it? It’s everyone’s fault, which means it’s no one’s fault. The bigger the federal government gets, the less anyone within it worries about the consequences of abuse or failure.
What if we’d known from Day One that the real number is more like 18 million current, former, and prospective federal employees, as CNN reported on Monday night? Just the other day, Administration flacks were whining that the 14 million worst-case number floated by some security analysts was exaggerated; now it looks like that was a lowball estimate. America has suffered an act of war, but this White House remains more interested in keeping it quiet than dealing with it.
According to Kurdish officials, eight of the 22 ISIS fighters killed by recent coalition airstrikes in northern Iraq were German nationals. The airstrikes were conducted in the Aski Mosul region, west of the ISIS stronghold in Iraq, the city of Mosul. Kurdish forces were said to be involved in providing intelligence for the air campaign.
The UK Sunday Express notes that masked British-sounding executioner “Jihadi John,” star of many a disgusting ISIS propaganda video, has not appeared in one of those head-chopping productions since the January murder of Japanese captive Kenji Goto.
American troops are being told to share quarters with extremist Iran-backed Shiite militias in Iraq, the people who were murdering them with roadside bombs just a few years ago. Given the insane disaster Obama has made of Iraq, Syria, and Libya, there might not be any other way to check ISIS.
It’s a year later. Nobody ever really got fired over the VA debacle. And while we’re hopefully past the business of supervisors cooking the books to collect performance bonuses, according to the New York Times, the waiting lists are worse than ever.
Here we have the alarmists taking it up a notch, and the Daily Mail reporting their prophecies of doom without informing readers of a very salient point right up front: the lead “scientist” is a hysteric who has never been right about anything, after decades of peddling apocalyptic environmental prophecies.
Everyone knew Gruber was critical to ObamaCare, and when he was caught on tape high-fiving himself for helping to fool what he described as “stupid” American voters with the Affordable Care Act’s web of false promises and ludicrous projections, he was speaking from the Administration’s heart.
A bizarre government assault on Reason Magazine has been in progress for the past two weeks, and in a nice Kafkaesque touch, the magazine was barred from talking about the situation with a gag order.
Five albino children from Tanzania are receiving care at Shriners Hospital in North Philadelphia after witch doctors cut off their arms and hands, according to a superstition that says the limbs of albinos are good luck charms that bring fortune and wealth.
Not only has the American human intelligence system been disastrously compromised around the world, but back here at home, the intel community is going to be playing defense for years to come, worried sick about how many government employees with security clearances might have been approached for recruitment or blackmail by China and its allies.
It is one of these stories that can be told in a single sentence: Cambodia is training an elite squad of giant rats imported from Africa to detect landmines.
The bombshells just keep coming in the Office of Personnel Management’s hack, which is bidding to eclipse Obamacare’s launch as the most stunning example of Big Government incompetence in the Information Age. The latest bad news is that Chinese hackers had a full year to rummage around inside the OPM’s security clearance system–plenty of time to take just about anything they wanted.
Hillary Clinton’s one-time consigliere Sidney Blumenthal passed on bad intelligence to the then-Secretary of State, emails provided to Congress now show.
Liberals get to rerun the same tired plays, over and over again, year after year, until they eventually wear down resistance and get what they want… at which point they immediately declare the matter settled for all eternity, no further discussion permitted.
The Turkish government’s uneasy relationship with freedom of the press led to another bit of unpleasantness on Tuesday, when four journalists made the mistake of asking the governor of a border town if he was concerned that ISIS militants fleeing a defeat at Kurdish hands might cross into Turkey and cause trouble.
Sources tell NBC News that during his confession, Roof said he “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him,” but in the end decided he had to “go through with his mission.”
The United States will contribute $5 million to fund a multi-national, anti-Boko Haram task force, based in Chad but led by Nigeria, according to Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Linda Thomas-Greenfield.
The government knew security was wide open for years, and did nothing. It’s a wonder they weren’t hacked before now. There will be no “accountability” for any of this. The Obama Administration doesn’t like to concede any sort of error by collecting scalps from inept high-level employees, and it worries a great deal about what some of them might say in whistleblower interviews or tell-all books.
It will be loads of fun watching the Left strip-mine the papal encyclical for politically useful passages while ignoring the rest of what Pope Francis says. Liberals already have a religion, and it is known for punishing apostasy. Ask any of the properly skeptical scientists who have been hounded and destroyed for daring to question “climate change” orthodoxy.
The killer evidently attended the prayer meeting he attacked for nearly an hour before opening fire and killing nine people.
