Presumptuous Politics : Nov 25, 2015

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Same old republican regime cartoon

Austrian ISIS 'poster girl' reportedly beaten to death after trying to escape Syria

One of two Austrian teenagers dubbed "poster girls" for ISIS was beaten to death after she was caught trying to escape the terror group's de facto capital in Syria, according to published reports.
Two Austrian newspapers reported Tuesday that Samra Kesinovic, 18, was murdered. One of the newspaper reports cited a Tunisian woman who lived with Kesinovic and her friend, Sabina Selimovic, before managing to escape.
The Austrian government declined to comment on the reports, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Thomas Schnoll saying, "We cannot comment on individual cases."
Kesinovic and Selimovic have now both been reported killed since they left their home city of Vienna to join ISIS in April 2014. Late last year, David Scharia, an expert on the U.N. Security Council's counterterrorism committee,said he had been told that one of the girls was killed during fighting in Syria, while the other had disappeared.
The Osterreich tabloid reported that Selimovic was killed in December of last year.
At the time of their disappearance, they left a note for their families saying "Don’t look for us. We will serve Allah and we will die for him." The Daily Telegraph reported that Kesinovic confirmed in a phone call to her sister that she had joined up with the terror group.
In October, it was reported that both girls had grown weary of ISIS' strict enforcement of Islamic law and had written to their families saying that they wanted to return home. The girls' families have made no public comment on the latest report of their deaths.
Both girls' families settled in Vienna after fleeing Bosnia-Herzegovina to escape that country's war during the 1990s.

College campus protests: This is the generation that will destroy America

Old Black Power Salute?

What in the name of John Blutarsky is happening on our university campuses?

A new survey from the Pew Research Center reveals that a shocking number of Millennials support curbing free speech.

Click here to join Todd’s American Dispatch – a must-read for Conservatives!

According to their findings, 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 believe the government should be able to ban any speech that is offensive to minority groups.

We have apparently raised a generation of snowflakes so fragile that their psyches can’t handle offensive words or photographs or images.

We have apparently raised a generation of snowflakes so fragile that their psyches can’t handle offensive words or photographs or images.
It seems the only free speech this perpetually offended generation supports is speech they agree with.
And it appears our nation's public universities have become breeding grounds for such anti-American and un-Constitutional beliefs.
Websites like Campus Reform have done a tremendous job documenting the methodical way in which our public institutions have been turned against us.
Administrators, faculty and student government leaders who do not agree with the rampaging mob of anti-free speech protesters are threatened – their voices silenced.
From the University of Missouri to U.C. Berkley -- where they are creating safe spaces to protect persons of color and those who identify as gender queer.
The University of Michigan added a three-year diversity requirement to its undergraduate curriculum in the school of business. As Campus Reform reported, they will teach students “how race, gender and sexual orientation connect to larger systems of power, privilege and oppression.”
At Dartmouth, Black Lives Matter protestors invaded the library -- verbally assaulting white students.
“F*** you, you filthy white f***s!”
That's what they screamed at the kids trying to study for exams.
And at the University of Vermont white students were carted off to the woods for a three-day retreat on white privilege.
Universities are now judging students on the color of their skin, instead of the content of their character.
Oh, what have liberal educators unleased on our great nation?
We are watching the coming of age for a new generation -- a generation of intolerance -- a generation that will one day shutdown free speech, a generation that will purge dissenting viewpoints, a generation that will shutter our churches and burn our books.
We are watching the generation that will destroy America.
Todd Starnes is host of Fox News & Commentary, heard on hundreds of radio stations. His latest book is "God Less America: Real Stories From the Front Lines of the Attack on Traditional Values." Follow Todd on Twitter@ToddStarnes and find him on Facebook.

Media escalate attacks over Trump stumbles, but he remains impervious

It hasn’t been a great few days for Donald Trump. And it doesn’t seem to matter.

The media refs are really savaging him after a couple of misstatements and missteps, even as they struggle to understand why he pays no penalty when they blow the whistle. What they don’t quite grasp is that their attacks only make him stronger.

This is not to let him off the hook for mistakes, just to recognize that Trump has completely rewritten the rule book, infuriating those who thought they enforced the rules. What’s more, some of the media attacks against the Republican front-runner are so virulent that they overshoot the mark, and possibly even backfire.

We have the New York Times editorial page accusing him of “racist lies.”

We have the Washington Post editorial page calling him a demagogue running a campaign of “growing ugliness” and declaring: “The only way to beat a bully is to stand up to him.”

And it’s hard to imagine the Post running this column headline about almost anyone else: “Donald Trump’s Rally Carries Echo of Hitler’s Rise to Power.”

A Trump adviser tells me that the mainstream media, Republican elite and Washington establishment—lumping them all together—will do anything they can to take down his boss. And the people who like Trump, in this adviser’s view, instinctively believe the media don’t treat people fairly.

Trump isn’t exactly meticulous when it comes to fact-checking. No one has been able to confirm his recollection that he saw, on television, thousands of people in New Jersey cheering when the twin towers came down. But after the Washington Post’s fact-checker gave Trump’s claim four Pinnochios, he found a small measure of vindication in a 2001article in that very paper that said: “Law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.” A “number of people” is not thousands, but Trump proudly quoted the piece at a rally.

The mainstream media, as Trump’s camp sees it, don't want to report that some people across the country were happy about the devastation of 9/11.

Trump also stumbled by retweeting some racial murder statistics that turned out to be bogus and wildly inaccurate. When Bill O’Reilly chided him for that, Trump said, “Am I going to check every statistic?”

The press has finally learned, after repeatedly being burned, not to seize upon controversial or questionable comments to predict Trump’s demise. So there is an anguished search for larger explanations: His supporters don’t care if he tells the truth, he symbolizes the modern-day GOP, and on and on.

This comes from all sides, with conservative commentators who fear he’s hijacked the party even harsher on Trump than liberal ones.

But here’s the thing: Trump projects strength, and part of that is not backing down, even when it’s obvious he has misspoken. In the wake of the Paris attacks, he’s going up in the polls, while Ben Carson is slipping. Trump leads nationally. He leads in Iowa, even with Ted Cruz surging. He has a huge lead in New Hampshire. A big lead in South Carolina. A huge lead in Florida. And that is driving the pundits crazy.

So let’s look at this latest media wave. Here’s that New York Times editorial: “America has just lived through another presidential campaign week dominated by Donald Trump’s racist lies…

“Mr. Trump has distinguished himself as fastest to dive to the bottom. If it’s a lie too vile to utter aloud, count on Mr. Trump to say it, often. It wins him airtime, and retweets through the roof.”

And here’s a NYT news story: “No one ever expected Mr. Trump to turn himself into the issues expert of the Republican presidential field. Yet the verbal shortcuts and salesmanlike stretches that he has relied on for months — generalities used to dodge questions, and questionable recollections — are tripping him up as the tenor of the campaign has grown more serious.”

Salon blames the press for letting Trump get away with untrue statements:

“The mainstream political media has such a pathological dedication to the notion of balance and ‘objectivity’ that it often finds itself at a complete loss when it comes to dealing with someone like Trump. But the kind of filth that he and others are putting out has long since moved past the debatable stage. There is an Islamophobic crisis building in this country.”

It’s not hard to imagine Washington Post columnist Chris Cillizza wringing his hands as he writes:

“In elections and campaigns past, there would have been a price to pay for The Donald's complete flouting of fact. It would have hurt him politically to just say things that aren't true.”

The reason, he says, is that “trust in the media — in both parties but especially among conservatives who comprise Trump's base — is at an all-time low. So, anything that a member of the media calls a ‘fact’ is inherently viewed as fishy (at best) by the people backing Trump. The media lies, we all know that, so why wouldn't they lie about this, too? All the mainstream media cares about is serving as the political correctness police, so if this did happen then of course they would work to cover it up, right?”

I think Cillizza nails it. And those of us in the media have no one to blame but ourselves. Donald Trump didn’t cause our slide in credibility, even as he feasts off it. And we’ll still be working on earning back trust long after this campaign has faded into history.

Fact check: Claims 'no refugees' since 9/11 took part in terror plots ring false

After the deadly terrorist attacks in Paris last week, many news sources claimed that not a single refugee had been charged with terrorism in the U.S. since the attacks on 9/11, but the assertion does not stand up to scrutiny.
The noted publication The Economist proclaimed: “750,000 refugees have been resettled in America since 9/11; Not one has been arrested on domestic terrorism charges.”
In fact, several refugees have been convicted in high-profile terrorism plots, and several more were “asylees” -- people allowed to stay in the U.S. for the same reasons as refugees, but who do not go through the same screening process. In one case, two Iraqi refugees in Kentucky were convicted after it turned out they had used IEDs to attack U.S. soldiers in Iraq and were plotting other attacks. An FBI agent recalled that they bragged about that and said they had soldiers “for lunch and dinner… meaning that he had killed them,” ABC News reported an FBI official as saying in 2013.

" ... it only takes a handful of ISIS infiltrators hiding among them to bring the carnage we saw in Paris to our streets.”
- Marc Thiessen, American Enterprise Institue

A Department of Justice report noted that one of those refugees, Waad Ramadan Alwan, left fingerprints on unexploded IEDs in Iraq and that he was sentenced to 40 years in prison after he “pleaded guilty to conspiring to kill U.S. nationals abroad; conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction (explosives) against U.S. nationals abroad; distributing information on the manufacture and use of IEDs; attempting to provide material support to terrorists and to [Al Qaeda in Iraq] and conspiring to transfer, possess and export Stinger missiles.”
His conspirator, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, was also let in through the refugee program and is now serving a life sentence.
Since that incident, government officials say they have tightened procedures for refugees and that people like those two would no longer get in. But officials have also said that while the U.S. has an extensive database of Iraqis and their histories, built up over years of occupying the country, similar information does not exist for Syrians, some 10,000 of whom could be coming to the U.S. under a White House proposal.
“If we don’t know much about somebody, there won’t be anything in our data,” FBI Director James Comey said in congressional testimony in October, adding, “I can’t sit here and offer anybody an absolute assurance that there’s no risk associated with this.”
In another recent case, an Uzbek refugee in Idaho was found guilty of conspiracy and attempting to support a terrorist organization, after he had allegedly been stockpiling explosives. His sentencing is scheduled for January.
A State Department spokesperson told FoxNews.com that “Of the three million refugees we have admitted to the United States since 1975, including nearly 785,000 refugees admitted to the U.S. since the events of 9/11, approximately a dozen -- a tiny fraction of one percent -- have either been arrested or removed from the United States due to security concerns that existed prior to their resettlement in the U.S."
The statement added: “While no immigration program is completely without risk, the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program is focused on upholding the national security of the United States.”
Supporters of letting more refugees in say that U.S. should not let the occasional danger get in the way of helping thousands.
“It’s a fairly small threat, and the benefits greatly outweigh it,” CATO immigration analyst Alex Nowrasteh told FoxNews.com, pointing to the results of past refugee flows.
“Every refugee flow in the past has been criticized and they turn out to be fine -- and a benefit in terms of economic growth and their contribution to the economy,” he said, adding that most refugees also have critical Arabic language skills and a dislike of ISIS that might prove a national security asset for future involvement in the Middle East.
But some terrorism experts say Americans should be very worried about taking more refugees.
“There are serious security concerns.The vast majority of Syrian refugees are legitimate victims of terror and persecution, but it only takes a handful of ISIS infiltrators hiding among them to bring the carnage we saw in Paris to our streets,” Marc Thiessen, American Enterprise Institute fellow and former senior policy adviser to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, told FoxNews.com.
“Moreover, polls show that while the vast majority of refugees oppose ISIS, about 13 percent support the terror network,” Thiessen noted.
Other high-profile terrorists entered the U.S. first and then applied for asylum, which can be granted to people who “meet the definition of refugee,” according to the government’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
That includes the Boston marathon bombers, who came from Chechnya and were granted asylum in the U.S. before killing three and injuring more than 250 people.
Members of the “Fort Dix 6,” who were convicted of conspiracy to murder U.S. military personnel, also entered seeking asylum; they were never granted it, but were never removed from the country, either.
Despite those cases, government officials caution that the vast majority of refugees are in need of help and don’t pose a risk.
But Thiessen said that while it is important to help desperate Syrian refugees -- for instance by creating “safe zones” in the Middle East -- the refugee program is not the best way to help.
“We need to help these people, but admitting them into the U.S. is not the best way to do it,” he said.