Former Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly tried to meddle in Middle East peace talks, allegedly telling a close associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas not to “yield to President Trump’s demands.”
Israeli news outlet Maariv reported on the apparent meeting between Kerry and Hussein Agha in London, where the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee also reportedly floated a possible encore bid in 2020.
But in the conversation, Kerry reportedly told Agha to share a message with Abbas – urging him to “hold on and be strong” during talks with the Trump administration and “play for time … [and] not yield to President Trump’s demands.”
Kerry, who served as former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state during his second term, also reportedly told Agha that Trump would not be in office for long, suggesting he could be out in a year.
According to the report, Kerry used derogatory terms when referring to Trump, and offered to help the Palestinians create an alternative peace initiative. He reportedly asked Abbas not to attack the U.S. or the Trump administration, but rather focus attacks on the president himself.
(Caveat: I don’t know enough about Maariv to judge the veracity of its sources (it’s generally described as “centrist” and critical of the Netanyahu government), and the report includes those “allegedly” and “apparent” words that are so frequently the hallmark of fake news in American media outlets.)
I would say this is a new low for Kerry, but the Iran deal is still more idiotic and there was little indication that the intransigent dumbasses running the Palestinian state were even remotely interested in making peace with Israel anyway. But trying to thwart any chance at peace in the Middle East because you hate President Trump, hate Israel, and treat the terrorism-loving Palestinians as some sort of progressive victimhood identity politics totem for Democrats is plenty low indeed.
This would also appear to be a clear violation of the Logan Act, everyone’s favorite unenforced statute from 1799 that criminalizes freelance negotiation by American citizens with foreign governments hostile to the United States.
Hillary Clinton was running a crooked pay-for-play graft machine out of the State Department and yet, somehow, she was only Obama’s second-worst Secretary of State…
Republicans have serious leads in West Virginia, where incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin trails by 14 points; North Dakota, where incumbent Democrat Heidi Heitkamp trails by 8; Indiana, where incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly trails by 5; Missouri, where incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill trails by 5; Montana, where incumbent Democrat Jon Tester trails by 5; Florida, where incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson is locked in a near-deadlock with Rick Scott; and Pennsylvania and Ohio, where incumbent Democrats Bill Casey and Sherrod Brown are leading by less than two points each, plus Virginia, where Tim Kaine leads by just 3 on the generic ballot.
When Obama left the White House in a helicopter that horrible day, I had the impression our true father was leaving & the nation was stuck with a stepfather who was going to rape us. Now I increasingly believe that the media is the mother who won’t stand up for us & defy him.
Bill Clinton Bill Cosby and Roman Polanski have been expelled from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Forty years of tolerating a Hollywood director anally raping a 14-year old is enough!”
Israel steals a ton of documentation that proved that Iran lied about the nuke deal. Duh. Everyone in the world except Obama’s moronic clutch of idiot weasel sycophants knew Iran was lying.
Salah Abdeslam, the sole surviving suspect from the 2015 Paris attacks, has been jailed for 20 years in Belgium over a gunfight that led to his arrest.
Abdeslam, 28, and co-defendant Sofien Ayari were both convicted of terror-related charges of attempted murder.
Ayari, 24, was also given a 20-year sentence. Both fired on officers who raided a flat in Brussels in 2016.
Abdeslam is being held in a jail in France and is due to face trial there over the Paris attacks themselves.
He had refused to answer questions from the judge in the trial in Brussels, and eventually refused to attend the hearings.
Neither he nor Ayari, a 24-year-old Tunisian national, was in court as the verdict was read out on Monday. Both received the maximum 20-year term requested by prosecutors.
The judge, Marie France Keutgen, said that “there can be no doubt” about the two men’s involvement with “radicalism”.
“Radicalism.” No mention of what kind of “radicalism” yet…
She added: “Their intention is clear from the nature of the weapons they used, the number of bullets they fired and the nature of the police officers’ wounds. Only the officers’ professional response prevented it being worse.”
On 15 March 2016, Belgian police hunting Abdeslam carried out a raid in the Forest area of Brussels.
They targeted a flat believing that the suspect – who by then had been on the run for four months – had been there.
When they moved in they exchanged fire with the three occupants. One of the three was killed and three officers were wounded.
Abdeslam and Ayari managed to escape, but Abdeslam’s fingerprints were found in the flat, confirming his presence there.
He was picked up days later in a raid in the nearby Molenbeek area, and later transferred to France.
He is a French national who was born in Brussels to French-Moroccan parents.
He was involved in petty crime in Belgium as a youth, and is believed to have become radicalised along with his brother Salim around 2014.
There’s that “radicalism” again.
Both then reportedly joined a French-Belgian network linked with the Islamic State group (IS), which later claimed the Paris attacks.
And there it is! Some 16 paragraphs into the story, the BBC finally deigns to tell us what these “attacks” and “radicalism” were all about: Islamic terrorism. But it only get mentioned because it’s in the name of the Islamic terrorist entity Abdeslam is affiliated with.
The network was involved in both the Paris attacks and bombings that struck the Brussels metro and airport on 22 March 2016, just days after Abdeslam’s arrest, killing 35 people.
In Monday’s ruling, the court denied a request by victims from those attacks that they be regarded as a civil party to the case, saying no link had been established with Abdeslam and Ayari.
He is believed to have played a key role on 13 November 2015 – when militants targeted a concert hall, stadium, restaurants and bars, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more.
“Militants.”
It’s been nearly two decades since 9/11, and mainstream western media outlets still insist in speaking in code-words when it comes to Islamic terrorism.
The attack on April 13th went up against a 21st-century Russian superweapon–the S-400 Triumf air-defense system, a mobile state-of-the-art anti-aircraft and missile network featuring four distinct missile types targeting aircraft in any performance envelope from treetop level to high altitude – including stealth aircraft (at a range of 150 miles, yet). For a decade we have been assured by military analysts that the S-400 is a game-changer – a system that could rend the heavens in twain and call into question the very concept of air power under battlefield conditions.
And yet, last Friday, the epoch-making Triumf failed to let out so much as a peep as 105 cruise missiles trashed Bashar Assad’s chemical warfare plants. Not a single SAM left the rack while the attack was proceeding. (The Syrians did fire over 40 missiles at nothing, but only after the attack was completed. This is standard behavior among Arab armed forces – the Libyans and Iraqis did the same thing.) The Russians claim to have shot down over 70 of the attacking cruise missiles. How do we know this isn’t true? First, because the targets were utterly destroyed, and second, because the French were involved. If the Russians had shot down any U.S. missiles at all we would be hearing from Paris that American “missiles de croisière” are useless, and that’s why we had to turn to the French, who invented the cruise missile in 1689. (This is scarcely an exaggeration – Emmanuel Macron has gone on record to state that it was he, le président de la France, who persuaded Donald Trump to carry out the strike.)
Some might argue that the new AGM-158 JASSM stealth missile foxed the S-400, but half the missiles launched were actually thirty-year-old BGM-109 Tomahawks, the equivalent of Colt Peacemakers as far as the world of missile development is concerned. If the mighty S-400 can’t shoot down a thirty-year-old missile, what can it do?
Also this: “Russia today is what it always was – a Potemkin village hiding a nation in a state of suspended collapse.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings hit 51%.
Hours after being alerted by KrebsOnSecurity, Facebook last week deleted almost 120 private discussion groups totaling more than 300,000 members who flagrantly promoted a host of illicit activities on the social media network’s platform. The scam groups facilitated a broad spectrum of shady activities, including spamming, wire fraud, account takeovers, phony tax refunds, 419 scams, denial-of-service attack-for-hire services and botnet creation tools. The average age of these groups on Facebook’s platform was two years.
Former presidential candidate Evan McMullin owes his former campaign staff members tens of thousands of dollars and most believe he has no intention of ever paying them, a former campaign worker tells The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Right before McMullin’s failed bid for president in 2016 as the conservative alternative to President Donald Trump, the campaign was inundated with debt. The disastrous fiscal situation was a combination of frivolous spending by McMullin and his campaign manager Joel Searby, according to the former staffer.
McMullin received news weeks before Election Day 2016 about how dire the campaign’s finances were, and he had “no remorse” and said “I have qualms about this thing ending badly in debt,” the former staffer claimed. McMullin’s cavalier attitude towards the campaign’s spending struck many as a surprise, particularly because he billed himself as a fiscal conservative, he added.
The staffer also claims the campaign never paid him somewhere between 12-15 thousand dollars on top of a few thousand dollars in reimbursements. While he has since recovered, he expressed concern about former staffers with “families and children.”
I’ll never forget the first time I went to a steakhouse here. I thought I’d eaten steak before. I was expecting this small, flat circle of meat, maybe a couple of fries on the side. Fine. C’est bon.
So in Texas, steak is a different thing. I’m at this restaurant and they put this plate in front of me, and, well, there was barely any plate visible — all I saw was this was this big, big piece of meat. I look around, maybe I had been mistaken in what I ordered. Maybe this waiter was playing a prank on me. It looked like a whole farm animal in front of me. But everyone with me laughed and nodded and told me that in Texas, this is a steak.
Then I was introduced to these other foods I’d never seen before but were totally amazing. Mac and cheese, man. Guys, you are blessed for having mac and cheese here. It’s a work of art. Bravo, guys.
And that was the first time I thought, O.K. O.K., I think I can get used to this place.
But if he really wants to be “King of Books,” he should know that road runs through me…
The New York Times was kind enough to notice that public employee pensions are bankrupting many portions of the country:
A public university president in Oregon gives new meaning to the idea of a pensioner.
Joseph Robertson, an eye surgeon who retired as head of the Oregon Health & Science University last fall, receives the state’s largest government pension.
It is $76,111.
Per month.
That is considerably more than the average Oregon family earns in a year.
Oregon — like many other states and cities, including New Jersey, Kentucky and Connecticut — is caught in a fiscal squeeze of its own making. Its economy is growing, but the cost of its state-run pension system is growing faster. More government workers are retiring, including more than 2,000, like Dr. Robertson, who get pensions exceeding $100,000 a year.
Left out of that list: California, New York and Illinois.
The bill is borne by taxpayers. Oregon’s Public Employees Retirement System has told cities, counties, school districts and other local entities to contribute more to keep the system afloat. They can neither negotiate nor raise local taxes fast enough to keep up. As a result, pensions are crowding out other spending. Essential services are slashed.
Continue reading the main story
“You get to the point where you can no longer do more with less — you just have to do less with less,” said Nathan Cherpeski, the manager of Klamath Falls, a city of about 21,000 in south-central Oregon.
Klamath Falls’s most recent biennial bill from the pension system, known as PERS, was $600,000 more than the one before. PERS has warned that the bills will keep rising. Mr. Cherpeski has had to cut back on repairing streets and bridges.
Even as the American economy is humming, many states and cities are still hurting from the 2008 financial meltdown. The crash hammered their pension funds and tax revenues, but didn’t reduce the amounts they owe retirees.
It wasn’t until 2016 that average state tax collections returned to pre-2008 levels. In the meantime, states and cities have had to rebuild pension funds to cover the rising numbers of retirees drawing benefits. That has left less money for the police, school sports programs and everything else. Local residents might not know why, but they are paying more taxes and getting scantier services in return.
Golly, if only the New York Times had been reading conservative and libertarian new source like BattleSwarm and Pension Tsunami, they could have found out this starting information years or even decade ago.
In related news, Illinois courts are already imposing mandated tax hikes on various municipalities to shore up underfunded public pension programs.
However, I bet that the next links in the logic chain (that all these locals seem to be controlled by the Democratic Party, and that fat pensions are a naked political payoff for the support of public employee unions who donate to and vote for Democrats, at the expense of the poor and middle class who see public services cut to pay for those fat pensions) will somehow continue to elude the New York Times…
Weeks after the militants seized the city, as fighters roamed the streets and religious extremists rewrote the laws, an order rang out from the loudspeakers of local mosques.
Public servants, the speakers blared, were to report to their former offices.
To make sure every government worker got the message, the militants followed up with phone calls to supervisors. When one tried to beg off, citing a back injury, he was told: “If you don’t show up, we’ll come and break your back ourselves.”
The phone call reached Muhammad Nasser Hamoud, a 19-year veteran of the Iraqi Directorate of Agriculture, behind the locked gate of his home, where he was hiding with his family. Terrified but unsure what else to do, he and his colleagues trudged back to their six-story office complex decorated with posters of seed hybrids.
They arrived to find chairs lined up in neat rows, as if for a lecture.
The commander who strode in sat facing the room, his leg splayed out so that everyone could see the pistol holstered to his thigh. For a moment, the only sounds were the hurried prayers of the civil servants mumbling under their breath.
Their fears proved unfounded. Though he spoke in a menacing tone, the commander had a surprisingly tame request: Resume your jobs immediately, he told them. A sign-in sheet would be placed at the entrance to each department. Those who failed to show up would be punished.
Meetings like this one occurred throughout the territory controlled by the Islamic State in 2014. Soon municipal employees were back fixing potholes, painting crosswalks, repairing power lines and overseeing payroll.
“We had no choice but to go back to work,” said Mr. Hamoud. “We did the same job as before. Except we were now serving a terrorist group.”
Snip.
After seizing huge tracts of Iraq and Syria, the militants tried a different tactic. They built their state on the back of the one that existed before, absorbing the administrative know-how of its hundreds of government cadres. An examination of how the group governed reveals a pattern of collaboration between the militants and the civilians under their yoke.
One of the keys to their success was their diversified revenue stream. The group drew its income from so many strands of the economy that airstrikes alone were not enough to cripple it.
Ledgers, receipt books and monthly budgets describe how the militants monetized every inch of territory they conquered, taxing every bushel of wheat, every liter of sheep’s milk and every watermelon sold at markets they controlled. From agriculture alone, they reaped hundreds of millions of dollars. Contrary to popular perception, the group was self-financed, not dependent on external donors.
More surprisingly, the documents provide further evidence that the tax revenue the Islamic State earned far outstripped income from oil sales. It was daily commerce and agriculture — not petroleum — that powered the economy of the caliphate.
They also seized land and goods from Shia, Christians, etc. and redistributed it to their followers as ‘war spoils.”
Also this: “Mr. Hamoud noticed something that filled him with shame: The streets were visibly cleaner than they had been when the Iraqi government was in charge.”
Read the whole thing.
Last week: Kevin D. Williamson leaves National Review for The Atlantic. This week: The Atlantic fires Kevin D. Williamson for wrongthink. Well, there goes my chance to snag the Sarcastic Texan Chair at National Review…
Black people should stop mindlessly voting for the Democratic Party says…Donna Brazile?
“We have to stop giving up our votes. I have done just about everything in the Democratic Party but run for office – everything that they have asked me to do. I have done it. I have registered millions of people in my lifetime. I have knocked on so many doors that I cannot even see the black of my own knuckles. I have carried their water,” Brazile said during her keynote address at the Stateswomen for Justice Luncheon last week, which was organized by Trice Edney Communications.
“I have put their platform within my heart to support. I have championed their issues. And when it came time for me to say what I believed was important, they said ‘shut up, Donna’ and I said ‘hell no, I am not shutting up,’” she added.
Forgive me if my enthusiasm for Brazile’s truthtelling is tempered by the suspicion it comes less from deep philosophical conviction than resentment at taking the fall for Hillary’s dishonest and incompetence.
“Study: 70% of Europeans see rapid population growth of Muslims as a serious threat.”
“Anti-Mass Migration Sweden Democrats Polling First Among Young Voters.” It’s almost like a party standing against rape is more popular than the party standing for “multiculturalism.”
Chicago suburb Deerfield, IL passes law allowing confiscation of modern sporting rifles if they have more than a ten shot magazine. (Gun owners have already filed a lawsuit, backed by the NRA-ILA.) So remember: When Democrats state they “don’t want to confiscate your guns,” they’re lying. (Hat tip: Director Blue)
68% of India’s military equipment is “vintage” (i.e., old Soviet crap).
Apple to drop Intel? Maybe, but not until 2020. If so, does this mean Apple will build their own fab? That would be an expensive proposition, but one Apple would be one of the few companies in the world capable of affording. Or they could keep getting their chips fabbed by TSMC. (Or, the hybrid option, pay TSMC to open up a fab dedicated to producing the new chip at x number of years for y price, after which TSMC would own and run the fab, a technique Apple has used for other component manufacturers before.)
Kurt Eichenwald pens a bold screed at the evil conspiracy to make him look foolish, mentioning Parkland kid Kyle Kover but oddly omitting a certain media figure whose initials are “K.E.”…
If you view the crucifixion of Jesus Christ as Christ having “masochistic sexual relations with his own father,” then maybe you shouldn’t be teaching at Holy Cross.
Ann Althouse watches and annotates an episode of Roseanne so you don’t have to. However, one correction: I’m pretty sure that the Conners don’t think of themselves as “poor,” they think of themselves as “broke.”
If you ever wanted something from the Zsa Zsa Gabor estate, now’s your chance. Especially if you wanted a painting of Zsa Zsa or her sisters: she had plenty…
She evidently had a grudge against YouTube, though whether they had “demonitized” her channel (as they have done to so many conservative and gun channels) is unclear.
Evidently you can check a whole lot of “intersectionality” boxes and still be a crazed shooter. Who knew?
NBC’s live production of the Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar on Easter Sunday was a fairly daring undertaking, in that hundreds of things (at a minimum) could have gone wrong, and only about a dozen did. Never mind that this isn’t the production I would have staged, or that its partisans (or fans of the individual singers involved) are already wildly overpraising it as “OMG the best thing EVER!!!!” It was a very solid, and very credible effort that took the source material (both the musical and the underlying Biblical story of Christ’s last few days) seriously.
The overall production design made no attempt at mimetic realism, depicting a open performance space surrounded by visible stage scaffolding with the audience on two sides, visible costumed musicians who wove their way in and out of the action, a graffitied wall backdrop, and cameras that looped in and out for closeups in the middle of the action (and so carefully choreographed they never appeared on screen).
Things that work:
Judas (Brandon Victor Dixon) is a stronger singer than Jesus (John Legend), which is a necessity in the score.
Doing the piece as halfway between a live concert and an actual stage production could have failed miserably and doesn’t, and gives the production a palpable energy.
The serious pieces are serious, and the tacky showbiz pieces (like the title track and “King Herod’s Song”) are really, really tacky, and that too is true to the original score. (They represent the fleeting glory of this world.)
Alice Cooper makes a credible Herod.
Sara Bareilles was excellent as Mary Magdalene, who is there to sing ballads and provide a female lead (Because Musicals).
And they did include “Could We Start Again, Please,” the one song in the Broadway production that wasn’t on the original London precast album. (Indeed, I ended up arguing about this with Salena Zito on Twitter.)
They also used the extended version of “Trial Before Pilate” from the Broadway production.
Though I’m not wild about the set or costume design, they use it consistently, putting it a step up on many a Julie Taymor production.
There are two images that fully tap into the lasting power of the underlying story. One, where the sick overwhelm Jesus in the Temple:
That’s an apt visual metaphor: a broken world, desperate for Christ’s salvation.
So too does the final message of a crucified Christ ascending into heaven through a cross-shaped opening in the rear backdrop, backlit by light, make you willing to forgive the previous excesses in staging:
These impressions are proving not so brief. Possibly more later.
But they staged a credible production of a very difficult musical, and for that they deserve a lot of credit.
I would confess my love of Jesus Christ Superstar as a guilty pleasure but I’m honestly not the least bit guilty about it. It’s musically the strongest of all the “rock operas” that made it to Broadway in the late 60s and early 70s. Thanks to the power of the source material, it’s a much more compelling musical than any of Webber’s later work. Though Christians may object to portions of it (Judas is portrayed more as a victim of God’s machinations than The Great Betrayer), most of it the story is recognizably faithful.
And broadcasting a live musical on network television? That’s the sort of risk-taking that deserves to be rewarded.
