Happy Leap Day, everyone! Enjoy a yuge LinkSwarm, and if you’re in Texas or another Super Tuesday state, take time to dig out your voter registration card for tomorrow.
The Case for Cruz: The Math. “In the states where Cruz is ahead of Rubio in the upcoming Super Tuesday, he is either beating Trump or within striking distance. In the states where Rubio is ahead of Cruz in the upcoming Super Tuesday, Trump has a huge lead. Rubio doesn’t lead in a single state.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Our cultural elites just can’t figure out why those ignorant gun- and religion-clinging redneck freaks of JesusLand keep flocking to Trump when he says he love them. It’s an insoluble mystery…
Trump University was a scam. “Many people believe that higher education is a de facto scam. Trump University, Donald Trump’s real-estate institution, was a de jure one.”
DNC vice chair steps down to support Bernie Sanders. An understandable move, given the DNC is so far in the tank for Hillary under Debbie Wasserman Schultz that supporting Sanders is probably looked on as akin to treason… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Mark Steyn lays out some grim election analysis: “No one loses as expensively as Republicans.”
720,000 taxpayers have their tax form information stolen from the IRS. Our country is in the very best of hands!
Merkel must have a political death wish: “German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday defended her open-door policy for migrants, rejecting any limit on the number of refugees allowed into her country despite divisions within her government.”
Stratfor analyses China’s new military facilities on Woody Island. “While the media’s response to China’s actions on Woody Island suggests that they represent a watershed moment in the militarization of the South China Sea, in reality they are neither surprising nor particularly meaningful.”
The truth about the MiG-29. Longish but interesting piece. Turn out the Soviet super fighter was very good at basic fighter aircraft maneuvers, but had poor avionics that severely limited the pilot’s situational awareness.
Beloved, innocent man shot down by Seattle police. And by “innocent” I mean “a convicted rapist with a gun, crack and heroin.”
“Turn down the fucking music.” “The more and more you attempt to compensate for the fact people have no social skills, making the music so loud conversation is impossible, the more and more intelligent and competent people you will drive away.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
I hope everyone had a merrier Christmas than I did. (My father recently went on hospice care after a two year fight with cancer, so I was back home helping my mother care for him.) Here’s a LinkSwarm to start your week with.
What would Democrats do to defeat the Islamic State? Not a damn thing.
Iraqi government forces retake Ramadi, the Anbar province city the Islamic State took in May.
“Two weather occurrences – the Arctic Oscillation and El Niño – are combining to shake up temperatures from coast to coast in the U.S., bringing springlike conditions to the Northeast for much of this month and leaving parts of the West colder and wetter than usual.”
Adjusting for inflation, the gross domestic product of the 19 countries now sharing Europe’s common currency, the euro, was less in 2014 than it was in 2007. Widespread joblessness and diminishing opportunities confront an entire generation of young Europeans, especially in Spain, Italy, France and Greece. The economic malaise tinges everything: Young people resist marriage for lack of economic opportunity. Poorer European countries are experiencing brain drains as many of their best young professionals and college graduates move abroad. Numerous Greek doctors, for instance, now work in more prosperous Germany while Greece’s health system is in crisis.
Pennsylvania’s insane, disgraced Democratic Attorney General Kathleen Kane accused of suborning perjury.
Democrats in congress have proposed a sweeping gun control bill. Because that’s always such a big electoral winner. It just kills liberals that free citizens are allowed to remain armed…
I have drafts of both a new Texas vs. California Update and a new LinkSwarm bubbling along, but the jihad-related news just keeps coming down the chute:
What has decades of Islamic immigration done to tolerant Sweden? Made life suck. “No Apartments, No Jobs, No Shopping Without a Gun.”
During the last few decades, Swedes have had to get used to the government (left and right wing parties alike) prioritizing refugees and migrants above native Swedes. The high tax level (the average worker pays 42% income tax) was been accepted in the past, because people knew that if they got sick, or when they retired or otherwise needed government aid, they would get it.
Now, Swedes see the welfare system failing them. More and more senior citizens fall into the “indigent” category; close to 800,000 of Sweden’s 2.1 million retirees, despite having worked their whole lives, are forced to live on between 4,500 and 5,500 kronor ($545 – $665) a month. Meanwhile, seniors who immigrate to Sweden receive the so-called “elderly support subsidy” — usually a higher amount — even though they have never paid any taxes in Sweden.
Worse, in 2013 the government decided that people staying in the country illegally have a right to virtually free health and dental care. So while the destitute Swedish senior citizen must choose between paying 100,000 kronor ($12,000) to get new teeth or living toothless, a person who does not even have the right to stay in Sweden can get his teeth fixed for 50 kronor ($6).
The injustice, the housing shortage, the chaos surrounding refugee housing units and the sharp slide of Swedish students in PISA tests — all these changes have caused the Swedes to become disillusioned.
You know who those fun-loving newlyweds slaughtered in San Bernardino slaughtered? The same people who had thrown them a baby shower.
Startling insight from the paper of record: “Couple Kept Tight Lid on Plans for San Bernardino Shooting.” As opposed to all those Islamic terrorists who announce the time and location of their atrocity in advance. “Do you think Syed Forook carried out the massacre?” “Oh definitely! It was all he ever talked about!”
San Bernardino shooter Tashfeen Malik passed an DHS background check. You can bet all those “Syrian refugees” will be vetted just as thoroughly…
No link, but just how did CAIR have a news conference with the family members within minutes of the official announcement of the San Bernardino jihadists’ identities?
Welcome to the Friday LinkSwarm, where two themes are jihadis enjoying the benefits of the welfare state, and Hillary Clinton enjoying treating campaign finance laws as “optional suggestions.”
96% of Australian jihadis who joined the Islamic State were on welfare.
Sweden’s national job agency fires its entire network of “immigrant resettlement assistants” because they were finding them jobs with the Islamic State.
Dana Milbank is very, very upset that Scott Walker isn’t biting on liberal gotcha questions. Oddly enough, I don’t think this concern extends to Hillary Clinton ducking Benghazi questions…
Speaking of Hillary, blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng says that, despite her boasts to the contrary, Hillary didn’t do squat to help him. (Hat tip: Moe Lane.)
So Turkey isn’t willing to lift a finger to save Kurds or Yazidis, but they’re willing to invade Syria to protect an Ottoman tomb.
Mike Rowe defends minimum wage jobs and says why there’s no such thing as a “bad job.” “Work is never the enemy, regardless of the wage. Because somewhere between the job and the paycheck, there’s still a thing called opportunity, and that’s what people need to pursue.”
The PLO and the Palestinian Authority have been found liable in terrorism jury trial. Does this mean funds can be garnished directly at the UN? (Hat tip: Legal Insurection.)
Liberals are shocked that college “study centers” designed to attack Republicans are being closed by Republican legislators. “Mr. Nichol said the center’s only agenda was to raise the profile of poverty in the state through research, teaching and advocacy.” One of these things is not like the others. Research and teaching are fine. Do your “advocacy” on your own time and dime, not the taxpayers.
Chicago has it’s own secret black site prison. It’s almost like it’s a corrupt one-party police state…
Wikipedia: “Alexis Tsipras is a Greek politician who is the 186th Prime Minister of Greece since 26 January 2015.” By my calculations, that works out to about 5 Prime ministers a day…
Why did Governor SexPuppy resign? Because he tried to go all Lois Lerner on his emails. (Via AceOfSpadesHQ.)
DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz offers to change her position on medical marijuana if a trial lawyer would just stop saying mean things about her. Way to look both corrupt and pathetic at the same time…
Old and Busted: Democrats attacking the Koch Brothers. The New Hotness: Democrats attacking Democrats attacking the Koch Brothers as the reason they lost in 2014.
Your standard progressive activist has really done nothing very interesting, so he or she needs to get proper credentials, to show that he or she knows what’s what, and that progressivism is what the world needs to deal with “problems”–after all, isn’t life just a series of problems calling for progressive intervention? They want to see what they believe.
We, hence, have progressives making up the sort of stuff that puts them, the elite, in the center of the battle, on the ramparts, in the muddy trenches and downed helicopters with the common schlubs–the sort of worldly experience that allows progressives to tell us how to live our lives.
Not to mention the fact that they doubt anyone will ever call them on their BS. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Swastikas and “F#ck Jews” painted on 30 houses in: A.) Paris, B.) Copenhagen, or C.) Madison, Wisconsin?
Pat Condell offers some pungent thoughts on the connection between mass Muslim immigration and rising rape statistics in Sweden:
Is Sweden the rape capital of Europe? Indeed, this BBC report confirms it, though they claim that it’s an artifact of how the statistics are kept.
However, I’m finding a hard time finding official statistics to verify what percentage of rapes are committed by immigrants or by the children of immigrants. (I have seen these statistics referred to in some discussions, but have not been able to locate them directly.) There does seem to be evidence that immigrants are “five times more likely to be investigated for sex crimes.” But that’s from 2005. Are Muslims committing the majority of rapes in Sweden? It seems entirely possible, but I don’t want to fall prey to my own confirmation bias.
Of course, since Sweden has fined Michael Hess for making a connection between Islam and rape, one can understand why published statistics could be hard to come by. Especially since “the question of whether Michael Hess’s statement is true, or at least for Michael Hess appeared to be true, is irrelevant to the proceedings.”
And speaking of Michael Totten, he has an interview with Giulio Meotti, the author of A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism. Lots of bracing, disheartening information in that interview. “Europe is an anti-Semitic continent.” “The current European anti-Semitism is a powerful mix of Islamist pressure on Europe by large Muslim communities in its midst and a leftist-progressive ideology.”