Posts Tagged ‘chemical weapons’

LinkSwarm for July 6, 2018

Friday, July 6th, 2018

Hope you had a great July 4th! Sadly, it was raining here, so we didn’t get a chance to blow things up…

  • The Left needs to face the reality that Trump is winning:

    To understand the madness gripping American leftists, try to see the world through their eyes. Presto, you’re now part of the raging resistance.

    Like the Palestinians who mark Israel’s birth as their nakba, or tragedy, you regard Donald Trump’s 2016 victory as a catastrophe. It’s the last thing you think of most nights, and the first thing most mornings.

    You can’t shake it or escape it. Whatever you watch, listen to or read, there are reminders — Donald Trump really is president.

    You actually believe the New York Times is too nice to him, so you understand why a Manhattan woman urged a reporter there to stop covering Trump to protest his presidency.

    And where the hell is Robert Mueller? He was supposed to save us from this nightmare — that’s what Chuck Schumer banked on. Well?

    You spend your tax cut even as you rail against the man who made it happen. And you are pleased that cousin Jimmy finally got a job, though you repeat the daily devotional that Barack Obama deserves credit for the roaring economy.

    And now this — Justice Anthony Kennedy is retiring, and Trump gets another Supreme Court pick. The court might tilt right for the rest of your life. He’s winning.

    NOOOOOOOOO!!!

    In a nutshell, our visit to the tortured mind of a Trump hater explains everything from Saturday’s mass marches to why a Virginia restaurant owner declared No Soup for Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

    Their loathing for Trump is bone-deep and all-consuming. This is war and they take no prisoners.

    For most marchers, border policies offer a chance to vent. They didn’t make a peep when Obama did the same thing.

  • Austin’s liberal leadership is making the same mistakes liberal Democrats in places like New York City and San Francisco make. “Public order makes urban life possible. How will the virtue-signaling hipsters react when Austin’s beloved 6th Street morphs into the seedy Times Square of yore?”
  • Kurt Schlicter on the glorious humiliation of #NeverTrump:

    Last week was especially glorious not just because we rejected the latest GOPe amnesty scheme, not just because we defunded the left’s union cash extortion machine with the Janus decision, and not just because Justice Kennedy is leaving to be the swing vote on his retirement community HOA. It was especially glorious because these enormous victories – these latest enormous victories – were the direct result of normal Americans giving the gimps, grifters, and geebos of Never Trump the George Costanza treatment by doing precisely the opposite of our alleged betters’ political instincts.

    Everything they told us was wrong. If we had done what they demanded, we would not be revelling in the joy of conserva-victory. We would be resigned to yet another defeat. “But Gorsuch” indeed, you never-been-kissed band of losers.

    If we had listened to Never Trump, we’d have voted for Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit and we would not only have Merrick Garland (or worse) on the SCOTUS but now she’d be picking another pinko who agrees with the lib bloc that the First Amendment has hitherto unknown asterisks that prevent conservatives from using it, that a bunch of other rights that aren’t in the Constitution actually are, and that the Second Amendment stuff about not infringing on our right to keep and bear arms really means libs can totally infringe on our right to keep and bear arms. Let’s leave aside our booming economy and crushing ISIS and pulling out of the climate scam and maybe peace with North Korea. Just these two Supreme Court picks makes Trump the most important and successful conservative president since The Big R. And we wouldn’t have any of it if that nattering pack of insufferable sissies had had their way.

    Snip.

    The remaining rump of Never Trumpers is here to lose. That’s their goal. Team Muh Principles always intended to lose. Oh, they try to play off their objections to the president as purely one of style. It’s because Donald Trump is so…so…so…oh well I never. But their displeasure with Trump’s aesthetic deficiencies is not the sole, nor even the most significant, reason for their fury at the orange-y interloper. They are really mad because, under Trump, these dorks can’t get the White House to return their calls.

    Trump threw the Fredocons out of the family business. They are nothing to us. They are not brothers-in-arms and they are not friends. We don’t want to know them or what they do. We’d take them out in a figurative row boat onto Lake Tahoe but we don’t want to be seen hanging around with them.

    We ruined their scam. They miss the cruise ships, filled with marks handing over cash to mingle with second-tier scribes from magazines put out by lesser sons of greater fathers that we stopped reading when they stopped mattering. Never Trump wants to once stand on a sold-out cruise ship’s bridge, pale puny arms spread wide, shouting, “I’m a minor duke of the world!”

    They’ve been stripped of their silly status, but that silly status – “Oh, I am an assistant fellow at the Institute to For Conservative Studies and Mailing List Compilation” – was all they had. In the DC milieu they want to return to, they were never kings, or even princes (though they sure dig the hereditary titles vibe), but just minor royalty jealously guarding their little, tiny fiefdoms. Sure, the liberal establishment ran things, but the Professional Cons had their own petty gigs pretending to resist, pretending to care, all the while treading water in a sea of mediocrity and ineffectuality.

  • If you hadn’t heard already, Harvard’s admission process was biased against Asian Americans:

    My father always thought it was remarkable how, despite the bias against Jews in higher education, so many Jews of his generation, and the generation before his, still managed to go to college and become doctors and lawyers. Why did it happen? Because it was a cultural imperative imposed at the family level. If Harvard wouldn’t take you, try Yale. If Yale said no, try Cornell. If none of the Ivies wanted you, try the University of Michigan (my Dad’s alma mater). The stereotype of Jewish families placing an enormous emphasis on education is a stereotype for a reason.

    Asian Americans have a similar stereotype, and it too has a basis in reality.

    Anyway, here’s my theory. According to reports, Harvard discriminated against Asian applicants because they had “bad” personalities. Wesley Yang has a moving op-ed in the New York Times today on the subject. He recounts how Casey Pedrick, an assistant principal at (the ruthlessly meritocratic) Stuyvesant High School in New York City was brought to tears by the evidence that Harvard discriminated against high-scoring, high-achieving, Asian-American students. Yang writes:

    Ms. Pedrick knows that her Asian students believe they have to earn their admission to Stuyvesant in the only way anyone has for more than four decades: by passing a rigorous entrance exam. Their parents will often invest a major share of the family income into test preparation courses to help them pass — this despite the fact that more Asians live in poverty than any other group in New York City.

    Asian students come from families that put an enormous emphasis on education as a bulwark against poverty and as a ticket to economic prosperity (not always the same thing). Contrary to some reporting, this doesn’t mean they don’t spend time on extra-curricular activities. The Asian students had more extra-curricular activities than white applicants. But, I would bet that the Asian kids were more focused on education as high-end vocational training. The white kids come from a milieu where college is seen as a place for making social connections and a rite of passage. The Asian kids want careers, specifically careers in STEM professions.

    So here’s my theory: It’s not that these kids don’t have good personalities, it’s that they don’t have fully “woke” personalities. They don’t speak the language of cosmopolitan, secular noblesse oblige that so often takes the form of political correctness — at least not with sufficient fluency. They don’t know the shibboleths that demonstrate they understand what higher education is really for.

    Moreover, their inability or unwillingness to care enough about such stuff is an indication of what they want out of college. Perhaps there are a bunch of Asian-immigrant parents out there who would be perfectly happy to have their kids go to Harvard and major in gender theory or some such. But I suspect not.

    As I recently recounted, my father-in-law had the kind of practicality that comes from being a refugee. His favorite response to self-indulgent ideas about what to do for a living was, “Yeah, but can you eat it?” What he meant was that careers, education, and business ideas should be grounded in something real, something useful. I suspect that there are many Asian-American Paul Gavoras out there.

    If Harvard lifted its anti-Asian criteria, Harvard’s own Office of Institutional Research said the share of Asian students at Harvard would more than double, from 19 percent to 43 percent. But that 43 percent wouldn’t be distributed equally among all courses and disciplines. It would be a boon for computer-science and biology classes, but even more seats would go empty in women’s history or poetry courses. And I can’t help but think that the faculties in the humanities and the softer social sciences have disproportionate sway on the cultural and political assumptions of the school’s administration. They are, after all, the talkers.

  • “The Left is turning against the First Amendment because absolute respect for freedom of speech is not consistent with tearing down capitalism.”
  • Merkel blinks, to set up immigration screening centers on border to keep her coalition together.
  • The Army is working on 100 KW anti-drone lasers. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Shoko Asahara, the leader of Aum Shinrikyo, and six of his followers were executed in Japan for their role in the sarin gas attacks against the Tokyo subway system in 1995 that killed 12, in addition to another 24 or so victims of other cult attacks. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Feds bust cartel ammo runner in McAllen:

    Federal agents arrested a legal permanent resident from Mexico who bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition for smuggling into the Mexican border city of Matamoros — the scene of large-scale internecine Gulf Cartel gun battles.

    The arrest took place over the weekend when 48-year-old Ruben Ramos Beltran went to a local gun store and bought 5,000 rounds of ammunition, a criminal complaint obtained by Breitbart Texas revealed. Authorities describe the man as a Mexican national who is a legal resident in Texas. Homeland Security Investigations was carrying out a surveillance operation at the local gun store and spotted Ramos pick up an order of 5,000 rounds of 7.62×39 ammunition, a type typically used in AK-47 type rifles which are heavily favored by cartel gunmen.

    5,000 rounds is not a small amount, and at current prices that works out to a bit over a grand. On the other hand, if that’s your primary gun, and you’re a “100 rounds at the range every week” sort of guy, that’s not that far off the curve… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Juggalos 1, Face Recognition Software 0. And it’s not like I can pass up a chance to use the “Insane Clown Posse” tag…
  • Rolling Stone writer gets trolled into wearing MAGA hat in search of an interview. “I directed Ms. Robb up the hill and to a pleasant location near the lake in the nearby State Park where I imagine that I might have waited, had I actually left my house, which I hadn’t.”
  • The Alamo Drafthouse is testing a pilot subscription program. Probably not for me, unless someone wants to pay me to be a full-time movie critic.
  • Johnny Manziel sobers up. Good for him. If it sticks.
  • I know this is super late, but it is still Friday…

    UN: Hey, Let’s Inspect This Entirely Peaceful Site Hit By Missiles. Syria: Die In A Fire

    Tuesday, April 17th, 2018

    Syria has sworn up and down that missiles from the United States, the UK and France only hit peaceful sites of toys for crippled orphans a baby milk factory a cancer research center (no really, that’s their story this time) rather than a chemical weapons facility.

    So naturally, they would have no problem with UN inspector’s visiting the site, right?

    We all know exactly how that movie turned out:

    The international chemical weapons watchdog that sent a fact-finding team to Syria said Monday that Syrian and Russian officials blocked efforts to reach the site where rebels claim government forces unleashed chemical weapons against civilians.

    The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) said the team arrived in Damascus on Saturday and met with government officials to work out a plan for deployment to Douma.

    The Syrian and the Russian officials informed the team that “pending security issues” needed to be worked out before the group went to Douma, the organization’s director general, Ahmet Üzümcü, told an emergency meeting of the group’s executive council in The Hague, Netherlands.

    Of.

    Course.

    Some other Syria strike news:

  • Hezbollah says that “Syrian air defenses had intercepted three missiles aimed at Dumair military airport north east of Damascus.”
  • ZeroHedge is reporting that Israel just hit Syrian sites near Homs. Not seeing any confirmation right now.
  • Speaking of ZeroHedge reports on Israel strikes against Syria, they also reported another Israeli airstrike two days ago I haven’t seen other confirming reports of. “I know what you’re thinking, punk. Did I hit Syria six times, or only five? In all this excitement, I sort of lost track myself…”
  • In fact, this New Yorker piece asserts that Israel has launched more than a hundred trikes in Syria since the civil war began.

    Israel has hit a wide range of sites, including convoys of Hezbollah or Iranian fighters near the Golan, trucks ferrying missiles and rockets destined for Hezbollah en route to Lebanon, bases for Iranian drones, and an Iranian command-and-control center.

    “We are facing now a determined decision by Iran to take advantage of the vacuum in Syria, the coming victory of Assad, and the defeat of ISIS to extend Hezbollah’s stand in Lebanon at the expense of Syrian territory, especially in the Golan Heights,” Amos Gilead, a retired Israeli major general who now heads the Institute for Policy and Strategy in Herzliya, told me. “This is a strategic threat. It’s an intolerable plan. We are trying to preëmpt them and protect Israel.”

  • Israel confirmed it hit Syria on April 9, as previously reported.
  • French President Emmanuel Macron says he convinced President Donald Trump to join in on strikes against Syria. France wants to initiate military action in the Middle East about as often as Henry Youngman’s wife wants to have sex. (She died in 1987, so: Not often!) But France has a continuing relationship with both Syria and Lebanon, having administered the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon between 1923 and 1946. France still has extremely close relations with Lebanon, and has been royally pissed with Assad’s consistent meddling there, especially the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.
  • Israel (Probably) Bombed Syria Last Night

    Monday, April 9th, 2018

    Somebody hit a Syrian airbase near Homs last night; we’re denying it was us, and both Syria and Russia are pointing the finger at Israel:

    The Syrian government and its ally Russia have blamed Israel for a deadly attack on a Syrian military airport.

    Monday’s attack hit the Tiyas airbase, known as T4, near the city of Homs. Observers say 14 people were killed.

    Israel, which has previously hit Syrian targets, has not commented. Syria initially blamed the US for the strike.

    The incident comes amid international alarm over an alleged chemical attack on a Syrian rebel-held town. The US and France had threatened to respond.

    US President Donald Trump said there would be a “big price to pay” for the alleged chemical attack in Douma, in the Eastern Ghouta region, near the capital Damascus. He branded Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad an “animal”.

    Snip.

    Syrian state news agency Sana, quoting a military source, reported that air defences had repelled an Israeli missile attack on T4, saying the missiles were fired by Israeli F15 jets in Lebanese airspace.

    If true, these would likely be F-15I Strike Eagles firing Israeli Popeye missiles.

    Russia’s defence ministry said that, of eight missiles, five were shot down and three reached the western part of the aerodrome.

    I would take any sort of Russian claims about Israel missiles being shot down with several grains of salt. Maybe they were, and maybe they weren’t. Either way, Russian air defense systems have not exactly covered themselves in glory in the Syrian conflict.

    Israel rarely acknowledges carrying out strikes, but has admitted attacking targets in Syria dozens of times since 2012. Its heaviest air strike on Syria, in February this year, included targeting the T4 air base.

    That followed an incursion by an Iranian drone into Israel and the shooting down by Syrian air defences of an Israeli F16 fighter jet.

    Israel has said it will not allow Iran, its arch-foe, to set up bases in Syria or operate from there, something Israel considers a major threat.

    The Israeli military said Iran and its Revolutionary Guards had long been active in the T4 base, and were using it to transfer weapons, including to Lebanese Shia militant group Hezbollah, an enemy of Israel.

    Israel also hit a Hamas military compound in Gaza.

    One interesting aspect to the strike was that all the major new services seemed asleep at the switch while reports of the strike from sources on the ground in Lebanon and Syria went out in real time. So if you want to launch a military strike in the Middle East, Sunday night seems to be the time to do it…

    Israeli Strike On Syrian Chemical Weapons Facility Confirmed

    Thursday, September 7th, 2017

    Looks like we have confirmation of Israel’s strike on the Masyaf chemical weapons facility:

    The Syrian army says Israeli jets have attacked a site in the west of the country where Western powers suspect chemical weapons are being produced.

    An army statement says rockets fired from Lebanese airspace hit a military post near Masyaf, killing two soldiers.

    A monitoring group says they struck a scientific research centre and base storing surface-to-surface missiles.

    Israel, which has carried out clandestine attacks on weapons sites in Syria before, has not commented.

    The attack comes a day after UN human rights investigators said they had concluded a Syrian Air Force jet had dropped a bomb containing the nerve agent Sarin on a rebel-held town in April, killing at least 83 people.

    Funny how Israel is far more willing to enforce Obama’s chemical weapons “redline” in Syria than Obama ever was…

    Did Israel Just Bomb a Syrian Chemical Weapons Plant?

    Wednesday, September 6th, 2017

    Seeing assertions of an Israeli strike on a Syrian chemical weapons plant in Masyaf, Hama this from random people on Twitter:

    Not seeing any confirmation from news outlets yet.

    Developing…

    Update: Yes they did.

    Intervening in Syria is STILL a Bad Idea

    Thursday, April 6th, 2017

    Note: This post is 75% rerun by weight from this piece, because pretty much all the reasons listed there are still valid.

    Following a new report of chemical weapons use by the Assad regime in Syria, certain factions of the Washington establishment are demanding that President Trump “do something” to “punish” Assad.

    To which I reply: Why?

    Even assuming the report is true (at least some observers think the chemical attack report is a false flag), last time I checked, the United Nations had not made the United States the designated enforcer of Security Council Resolution 2118.

    We can’t back the good guys in the Syrian civil war because there are no good guys. Assad’s ruling faction are scumbags. The Russians backing Assad are scumbags. Hezbollah, fighting on Assad’s side, are scumbags. The Iranian mullahs backing Assad are scumbags. Turkey is currently ruled by Erdogan’s Islamist scumbags, and Turkey is more interested in attacking the Kurds than the Islamic State. The Free Syrian Army is riddled with Islamist scumbags. The al-Nusra front are scumbags. The Islamic State is made up of the very worst scumbags in the region (and world). The only notable faction that aren’t scumbags are the Kurds, who, as an ethnic and geographic minority, are in no position to rule Syria, or even a significant fraction of it.

    To the extent that Obama’s imaginary red lines and desultory, ineffectual backing of Syrian rebel groups harmed America’s reputation for competence in the region, the damage has already been done. (Indeed, the Obama/Clinton/Kerry strategy for fomenting regime change in the hope that things would turn out better, like a liberal funhouse mirror distorted reflection of George W. Bush’s far more limited regime change goals in Iraq, have made things worse across the region.) We have no pressing national interest at stake in the Syrian civil war, there’s not a contending faction (outside the peripherally-involved Kurds) worth backing, and it’s not apparent what such an intervention might reasonably achieve.

    All of which makes me incredulous when I read pieces that suggest that President Trump is considering military actions in Syria.

    Even some on the right have been agitating for the United States to “do something” in Syria, and S. E. Cupp’s Twitter timeline has (yet again) gone to an “all heart-tugging photos of Syrian children” format without saying why it is the United State’s interest to intervene in Syria or proposing anything concrete as to what form that intervention should take beyond vague talk of “safe zones.”

    A large part of the latest push to intervene in Syria still seems to be coming from an interest group called The Syria Campaign. Who is behind it?

    From that Zero Hedge piece:

    A careful look at the origins and operation of The Syria Campaign raises doubts about the outfit’s image as an authentic voice for Syrian civilians, and should invite serious questions about the agenda of its partner organizations as well.

    A creation of international PR firms

    Best known for its work on liberal social issues with well-funded progressive clients like the ACLU and the police reform group, Campaign Zero, the New York- and London-based public relations firm Purpose promises to deliver creatively executed campaigns that produce either a “behavior change,” “perception change,” “policy change” or “infrastructure change.” As the Syrian conflict entered its third year, this company was ready to effect a regime change.

    On Feb. 3, 2014, Anna Nolan, the senior strategist at Purpose, posted a job listing. According to Nolan’s listing, her firm was seeking “two interns to join the team at Purpose to help launch a new movement for Syria.”

    At around the same time, another Purpose staffer named Ali Weiner posted a job listing seeking a paid intern for the PR firm’s new Syrian Voices project. “Together with Syrians in the diaspora and NGO partners,” Weiner wrote, “Purpose is building a movement that will amplify the voices of moderate, non-violent Syrians and mobilize people in the Middle East and around the world to call for specific changes in the political and humanitarian situation in the region.” She explained that the staffer would report “to a Strategist based primarily in London, but will work closely with the Purpose teams in both London and New York.”

    On June 16, 2014, Purpose founder Jeremy Heimans drafted articles of association for The Syria Campaign’s parent company. Called the Voices Project, Heimans registered the company at 3 Bull Lane, St. Ives Cambridgeshire, England. It was one of 91 private limited companies listed at the address. Sadri would not explain why The Syria Campaign had chosen this location or why it was registered as a private company.

    Along with Heimans, Purpose Europe director Tim Dixon was appointed to The Syria Campaign’s board of directors. So was John Jackson, a Purpose strategist who previously co-directed the Burma Campaign U.K. that lobbied the EU for sanctions against that country’s ruling regime. (Jackson claimed credit for The Syria Campaign’s successful push to remove Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s re-election campaign ads from Facebook.) Anna Nolan became The Syria Campaign’s project director, even as she remained listed as the strategy director at Purpose.

    From The Syria Campaign’s own website:

    The Syria Campaign is a non-profit organisation registered as a company in the United Kingdom as The Voices Project—company number 8825761. (You can’t be a registered charity in the UK if most of your work is campaigning.)

    We have a Governing Board who are legally responsible for the organisation and oversee strategy and finance for The Syria Campaign. The board members are Daniel Gorman, Ben Stewart, Sawsan Asfari, Tim Dixon and Lina de Sergie.

  • Jeremy Heimans co-founded “a campaign group in the U.S. presidential elections that used crowd-funding to help a group of women whose loved ones were in Iraq hire a private jet to follow Vice-President Dick Cheney on his campaign stops, in what became known as the “‘Chasing Cheney’ tour” among other leftist activism.
  • Daniel Gorman heads “the UK’s largest festival of contemporary Arab culture.”
  • Ben Stewart is a Greenpeace activist who has a grudge against Russia for detaining 30 of his fellow travelers.
  • Sawsan Asfari is “active in various charities that help Palestinians across the Arab world” and is the wife of Syrian-born British billionaire Ayman Asfari.
  • Lina de Sergie seems to more commonly go by Lina Sergie Attar. “She is a Syrian-American architect and writer from Aleppo. She co-developed Karam’s Innovative Education initiatives: the creative therapy and holistic wellness program for displaced Syrian children and the Karam Leadership Program, an entrepreneurship and technology program for displaced Syrian youth.” Yes, I’m sure “holistic wellness” is a big priority for Syrian refugees. Karam’s Mission Statement: “We develop Innovative Education programs for Syrian refugee youth, distribute Smart Aid to Syrian families, and fund Sustainable Development projects initiated by Syrians for Syrians.”
  • Tim Dixon has quite an extensive resume, being a former speechwriter to two Australian Labor Party Prime Ministers and involved in a large number of causes:

    – a large-scale initiative to help change hearts and minds on the global refugee crisis;
    – The Syria Campaign, to move the world to action on the humanitarian crisis in Syria;
    – Everytown, the movement to tackle gun violence in America

  • Etc.

    So, to summarize: It’s run by international left-wing activists in favor of Europe accepting more “Syrian” “refugees”, soft jihadis, and gun banners.

    These are not the sort of people I want driving American national security decisions.

    The situation in Syria is horrible, but outside territory held by the Islamic State, it’s the same type of horrible that has plagued the Middle East pretty much constantly absent control by a ruling power with sufficient force to keep the endemic ethnic strife under wraps. Wars there are fought under Hama rules, not those of the Geneva Convention.

    It is not in the best interests of the United States to intervene militarily in Syria. We have no compelling national security interest in Syria right now, there’s no faction worth backing, and trying to “create safe areas” or “establish no-fly zones” would be dangerous, cost-prohibitive and unlikely to succeed.

    The fact that Barack Obama and John Kerry screwed up, drew a red line they were unwilling to enforce, pretended they got Syria to give up all their chemical weapons, and then walked away from their latest foreign policy disaster while loudly declaring victory doesn’t obligate President Trump to clean up their mess. Assad is a complete and utter bastard, but there is still no plausible candidate to replace him with that we could say with 100% certainty wouldn’t be just as big (or bigger) a bastard.

    Retaliating against Assad would be a huge distraction from something that is a compelling American (and world) interest: crushing the Islamic State so completely and thoroughly that it will arise again in our lifetime.

    Military intervention in Syria is still an amazingly foolish idea.

    Sometimes the best choice is doing nothing at all.

    Update: President Trump just launched a cruise missile strike at Syria. I suspect I hit post while the missiles were literally in the air. Word is this is a limited one-time strike. Is that’s the case, it may have a salutatory effect on the other bastards of the world like Kim Jong-Un, putting them on notice that President Trump is a whole lot more serious about using force than Obama was. If that’s the end of it, it may. turn out to be a net positive. But that’s a big if, and intervention in Syria is still a bad idea, for all the reasons listed above…

    LinkSwarm for July 11, 2014

    Friday, July 11th, 2014

    More news from inside the handbasket, including the dust-up in Gaza and the illegal alien surge at the border:

  • Israel hits Gaza for a third day in retaliation for yet another round of rocket attacks. Is there really anything left to say about this that hasn’t been said before? Hamas is the elected government of Gaza, they fire rockets indiscriminately against Israeli civilians and fire them from their own civilian areas to maximize civilian damage at both ends, making them legitimate military targets under international law.
  • And speaking of rockets, Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system racks up a 90% success rate. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ, who adds “Suck It 1980s Lefties”.)
  • And Hamas might be receiving taxpayer money.
  • Also speaking of rockets, in Iraq ISIS seizes control of one of Saddam’s chemical weapons sites, filled with rockets full of nerve gas agents. You know, the ones liberals swore didn’t exist in 2004…
  • Food inflation costs overwhlem wage growth.
  • Get ready for the next round of ObamaCare rate shock.
  • Scabies outbreak at the border. Well, that’s just lovely. Thanks, Obama!
  • Even Democrats think Obama should visit the border.
  • Are veterans being turned away from appointments because treating illegal aliens takes precedence? Caveat: Twitter is not a source.
  • But the Obama Administration seems to be going to great lengths to prevent lawmakers from inspecting illegal alien holding facilities.
  • “We can medically treat non-citizens in a few days, maybe even hours, but not our own veterans.”
  • Planes full of illegal aliens landing in El Paso.
  • They’re even trying to house illegal aliens in Virginia.
  • The scale of the problem:

  • Important reminder: Not all Hispanic immigrants are in favor of unlimited illegal aliens coming to the country.
  • Greg Abbott criticizes Obama. “Whether it’s on the broken VA system, or our porous border, he is all talk and no action. He’s all hat and no cattle.”
  • Airlines reduce flights to Venezuela due to cash trapped in the country by currency controls. How’s that socialism working out for ya?
  • Hillary Clinton and Adultery. Then again, maybe Hillary is one of Ashley Madison’s fake profiles.
  • Hillary’s book drops off the Amazon 100 list. Evidently there are tens of millions of Democrats who found that not buying Hard Choices was, in fact, an easy choice…
  • Public employees union AFSCME severs ties with the United negro College Fund because they took money from the Koch brothers. So it’s more important to display their hate than to help black people go to college…
  • 50 colleges now charge more than $60,000 a year to attend, and Harvard, Yale and MIT are not among them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Evidently former Merrill Lynch chairman Stan O’Neal wants this to disappear.
  • WMD Found in Iraq

    Sunday, October 24th, 2010

    According to the latest batch of Wikileak documents. In particular, coalition troops kept coming across numerous artillery shells filled with mustard gas.

    Remember the terms of Section 8 of UN resolution 687 that ended the first Gulf War:

    Iraq shall unconditionally accept the destruction, removal, or rendering harmless, under international supervision, of:

    (a) All chemical and biological weapons and all stocks of agents and all related subsystems and components and all research, development, support and manufacturing facilities

    Thus the instance of a single chemical weapon in Iraq violates the terms that ended the Gulf War, and thus the decision by George W. Bush to carry out the liberation of Iraq in 2003 was both legal and justifiable. (This is in addition to the other numerous instances of jus ad bellum cited by Bush in his speech on that reasons behind that decision.)

    Liberals, look at yourself in the nearest mirror and repeat after me: “George W. Bush was right and I was wrong. George W. Bush was right and I was wrong.”