Isn’t it obvious by now that the EU doesn’t really care about a nuclear Iran? Well, not more than they care about selling goods and services to Iran.
If they can’t survive economically without Iran, they’ve got a huge problem. There’s a world of customers out there, Iran doesn’t have to be one of them. And, funding a state sponsor of terror to the point that would enable Iran to lob a nuke their way makes sense to who?
Link: Europe Asks U.S. for an Exemption From Sanctions on Iran
In the U.K., anybody who does not follow and subscribe to the orthodoxy of the left — including open-border immigration, permitting endless streams of militant Islamists into European countries, if you oppose that — you are being categorized as “far right” and can be arrested, according to Great Britain’s laws.
Tommy Robinson not only doesn’t approve of that, he reports on the effects of that, including the trial he was covering that was about sex rings run by these immigrants. 80% of whom are Islamists. And was arrested for it.
The judge put a gag order on Robinson’s arrest AND a gag order on the news media from covering the trials. Nothing like protecting the perps and arresting transparency.
Great Britain has no Constitution or guaranteed right of free speech. There’s a reason the Founding Fathers believed in that basic freedom, not derived from government, but from God.
But it gets worse for Tommy Robinson. Going to prison among the Muslim prisoners will most likely be a death sentence for him. Great Britain has lost control.
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In a speech to the National Rifle Association (NRA) on Friday, referring to the shooting of victims in the Paris rampage, Trump said if civilians had been armed “it would have been a whole different story.” Considering the host audience, a quite natural observation. Maybe that’s why Macron and Le Maire were not invited to be speakers?
French President Macron’s statement “France is proud to be a country where acquiring and carrying firearms is strictly regulated.”
His world experience is limited though. At 40 years old, he doesn’t understand the concept that America is a proud country where the citizens have a right to bear arms.
French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire said he hoped Trump “would come back on his words and express regret”. No regret for a country that incorporates the right to bear arms into its Constitution.
Were it not for citizens bearing arms, there would have been no War for Independence from Britain that France helped us win. Americans acknowledge and Thank You for your participation. Appreciate the Statue of Liberty too!
With open borders and all that comes with it, seems to me gun control is the least of their problems.
Pulling out of the Paris Accord is best for America. The anti-capitalist anti-American community are pushing the narrative that man-made global warming is going to kill the planet, and that the United States is responsible, and should set the example by agreeing to it.
The [agreement] promises to damage the economy while surrendering American sovereignty over climate policy to yet another international, largely anti-American enterprise. Our climate policy — which incorporates health and economic policy — would be mandated by the terms of this agreement. It is a hard-and-fast agreement that targets the United States as the primary culprit and requires the United States to carry the primary burden in fixing what isn’t broken, in stopping what isn’t happening: Man-made climate change.
We are setting the example already, and don’t need to shift trillions of taxpayer dollars from our side of the planet to the other. Get back to me when the rest of the world, including China and India, can run their industrialized economies as efficiently and environmentally friendly as we do. Then tell me what the global temperature should be, and how to keep it from changing.
They can’t control the border but think they can control the heavens…”it’s literally insane…”@MarkSteynOnline #ParisClimateDeal @foxnews
— Mark Steyn (@MarkSteynOnline) June 1, 2017
German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s “Christian Democrats Party” was handed a “sobering defeat.” Beaten into third place, in what was the first of five regional votes before a national election expected next September. Turning in an all-time low result was a “stinging defeat” for Merkel in her home district.
She was beaten by a relatively new political party, the Alternative for Germany (AfD), that campaigned against her open border policies. Policies that have hurt, if not transformed, German life in the same way it has affected the EU in general.
Not surprisingly, the media characterizes the AfD, not as pro-Germany, nationalist, or populist. Not as anti-Merkel. But as anti-immigrant and anti-Islam. Same media. Different continent.
AfD party chair, Frauke Petry, described Sunday’s result as a blow to Angela Merkel. “Now it is our responsibility to make politics for the people. The people no longer trust the old establishment parties to do so,” Petry said.
Whether this election or the AfD signals a shift in German politics remains to be seen. But it does have the same organic feel like the Tea Party in the U.S. or Brexit in the U.K.
Link: Merkel’s party beaten by rightwing populists in state election
Alexis Tsipras has hailed a “victory of the people” after his left-wing Syriza party won Greece’s fifth election in six years. Mr. Tsipras said his decision to call an early election was vindicated and that he had been given a clear mandate.
Since Greece produces very little in terms of manufacturing, they rely on imports to exist. Manufacturing is down 40% and imports are down 33%. The Greek economy was growing in the second half of last year. Businesses began hedging their bets for expansion when ‘capital control’ started in July. Now, investments have dried up completely. Now the Tsipras government is poised to take even more of their profits.
Many businesses can’t pay their suppliers without getting special permission for a loan from the central bank. How’s that for instilling business confidence? Unemployment is over 25% and youth unemployment is over 50%. And Greece’s economy is tanking.
Rejecting the EU, IMF, the ECB, Greece seems to have given Tsipras a mandate to suicide.
Link: Greece election: Alexis Tsipras hails ‘victory of the people’
To say that the Obama administration represents Jimmy Carter’s “second term,” is not a stretch. That’s because the labor participation rate hasn’t been this low since the malaise of the Carter era.
The “labor participation rate” is the percentage of people who can work that are working. The labor participation rate for April 2015 is 62.8 percent. More than one-third of the American work force, ninety-three million, are looking for work.
This is what the Obama administration is touting as a recovery. And President Obama readily admits, “there’s more work to do.” Translation; “what I’m doing isn’t working the way you think it should, but you’ll get used to it after a while. Remaking America takes time.”
Here’s how the BLS describes it . . .
[T]he dynamic demographic, economic, and social forces that once spurred the level, growth, and composition of the labor force have changed and are now damping labor force growth.
To illustrate what 93,000,000 Americans out of work represents, look at it this way. It could represent the populations of Ireland, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden, Hungary, Portugal, Greece, Belgium, and Lithuania combined. Or ALL of Germany, or Turkey, or the United Kingdom, or France, or Italy, and a few million more.
And look at the president’s solution. Grow government and shrink the private sector, raise taxes, raise national debt, and make more people dependent on the dwindling number of taxpayers lucky enough to still have a job. He has a perverse view of economics. He thinks expanding government and spreading the wealth around amounts to economic recovery.
And it’s not because he doesn’t know what it takes to stimulate economic activity to actually grow the economy. It’s because he knows that growing the economic pie would mean shrinking government and its control over the people. And that goes against his goal of remaking America as he sees it. As though we have a new founding father in The White House.
Speaking of learning from mistakes, Thomas Sowell takes that theme and covers a range of teachable moments. From anti-trust laws to lawlessness, economics, immigration, and more.
We all make mistakes and some of us learn from them. What is even better is to learn from other people’s mistakes, where they pay for those mistakes while we learn free of charge.
Many Americans who say that we should learn from other people, especially Europeans, mean that we should imitate what they did. That may make those who talk this way feel superior to other Americans. But let us never forget that the most disastrous ideologies of the 20th century — Communism, Fascism and Nazism — all originated in Europe. So did both World Wars.
More recently, Europe has been belatedly discovering how unbelievably stupid it was to import millions of people from cultures that despise Western values, and which often promote hatred toward Western people.
Maybe that is a mistake that we can think about when Congress finally decides to do something about our open borders and our immigration laws that we refuse to enforce. . . . . more
President Obama, our elected Commander-in-Chief, has demonstrated over and over his naiveté in foreign policy. If you can point to one successful, tactical foreign policy decision, then you’re a magician because there isn’t one. North Korea, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Russia, Ukraine, Egypt, Eastern Europe’s missile defense shield, Israel, Lebanon, Arab Spring, Red Lines.
Likewise, his military acumen as a warrior is totally laughable. Except for the fact that he is responsible for our sons and daughters in harm’s way. He fights wars based on timetables instead of results. And he announces them, not just to his political hacks but, to the enemy. He creates a false narrative about the Benghazi attack, and broadcasts apologies to the Islamist goons in Pakistan about a movie that they likely never saw. As if they will do anything other than laugh at his amateur hour.
Withholding judgment whether Bowe Bergdahl is a deserter (an investigation will tell), this latest prisoner swap (he does negotiate with terrorists) is yet another example of how far Barack Obama will go to 1) stick it to the military, 2) appease terrorists in hoping (“hope” is not a strategy) that they’ll like us, 3) let these 5 terrorist kingpins go free after one year (who were supposed to be detained until the cessation of hostilities, ie. indefinitely). That is, if Qatar doesn’t release them or allow them to escape beforehand, and 4) he finally has a chance to give preference or weight to an Islamist goon, over an American. When the era of slavery was coming to an end, there was a time when slaves counted as 3/5 of a person. But today, President Obama (who claims to be Black) has a chance to exercise a little payback. Bergdahl weighs in at 1/5. One American, in exchange for the 5 most dangerous terrorists on the planet.
And that makes sense to who? Makes one think that President Obama is on the wrong side in this war. Problem is, he thinks he’s on the right side.
Link: Obama defends operation to rescue U.S. soldier from Taliban
Croats voted overwhelmingly in favor of defining marriage in the constitution as a “union of man and woman” on Sunday. Croatia now shares its constitutional definition of marriage with Belarus, Poland, Moldova, Bulgaria, Montenegro and Serbia.
Almost 66 percent of those who voted in the referendum in the new European Union member endorsed the initiative, launched by the Catholic group “In the Name of the Family”, according to preliminary results on Sunday night. Turnout was 37 percent. The vote was not surprising given that 90 percent of Croatia is Roman Catholic.
Current law in Croatia states that marriage is between a man and woman. The point of the constitutional referendum was to insure that no laws would or could change that definition, short of a constitutional amendment which would need a two-thirds vote, 66 percent. Despite the overwhelming majority of the effort to put it in the constitution, the Croatian government was opposed to it but will comply with the referendum. The government will be making laws to grant equal rights to same-sex couples instead of changing or expanding the definition of the word. It is also considering changes to the constitutional referendum process to restrict the ability for the public to start changes to it.
It is instructive to see the liberal bias in the news reporting of the referendum. More than just defining the meaning of the word in the constitution, there are headlines like “Same-sex marriage ban divides Croatia” and “Croatians Vote Against Same-Sex Marriage.” Choosing automatic victim status, in true liberal fashion, Croatians didn’t vote for the normal definition of marriage, they voted against gays. There was no same-sex marriage ban. In Croatia, same-sex marriage isn’t now and never has been legal. And if anything, the referendum united Croatia on what marriage is. It didn’t divide it.
