Will We Survive One More Year?

 

Obama Has Just Begun

How much damage can he do in his last year in office?

By Victor Davis Hanson — November 24, 2015

Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with Obama: Après nous le déluge.

By sheer force of his personality, Obama has managed to lose the Democratic Senate and House. State legislatures and governorships are now predominantly Republican. Obama’s own favorable ratings rarely top 45 percent. In his mind, great men, whether Socrates or Jesus, were never appreciated in their time. So it is not surprising that he is not, as he presses full speed ahead.

Obama certainly has doubled down going into his last year, most recently insisting on letting in more refugees from the Middle East, at a time when the children of Middle Eastern immigrants and contemporary migrants are terrorizing Europe. What remaining unpopular executive acts might anger his opponents the most? Close down Guantanamo, let thousands more refugees into the United States, free thousands more felons, snub another ally, flatter another enemy, weigh in on another interracial melodrama, extend amnesty to another million illegal aliens, make global warming laws by fiat, expand Obamacare, unilaterally impose gun control? In lieu of achievement, is the Obama theory to become relevant or noteworthy by offending the public and goading political enemies?

An Obama press conference is now a summation of all his old damn-you clichés — the fantasy strawman arguments; the caricatures of the evil Republican bogeymen; the demagogic litany of the sick, the innocent, and the old at the mercy of his callous opponents; the affected accentuation (e.g., Talîban; Pakîstan, Îslám, Latînos, etc.) that so many autodidacts parade in lieu of learning foreign languages; the make-no-mistake-about-it and let-me-be-clear empty emphatics; the flashing temper tantrums; the mangled sports metaphors; the factual gaffes; and the monotonous I, me, my, and mine first-person-pronoun exhaustion. What Obama cannot do in fact, he believes he can still accomplish through invective and derision.

In the 2016 election campaigns, most Democratic candidates in swing states will have distanced themselves from the last eight years. Otherwise, they would have to run on the patently false premise that American health care is more affordable and more comprehensive today than it was in 2009; that workforce participation is booming; that scandals are a thing of the past; that the debt has been addressed; that Obama has proved a healer who brought the country together; that immigration at last is ordered, legal, and logical; that the law has never been more respected and honored; that racial relations are calmer than ever; that the campuses are quiet; that the so-called war on terror is now over and won with al-Qaeda and ISIS contained or on the run; that U.S. prestige aboard has never been higher; that our allies appreciate our help and our enemies fear our wrath; that Iran will now not go nuclear; that Israel is secure and assured of our support; and that, thanks to American action, Egypt is stable, Libya is ascendant, Iraq is still consensual, and the Middle East in general is at last quiet after the tumultuous years of George W. Bush.

The hordes of young male migrants abandoning the Middle East for the West are merely analogous to past waves of immigrants and should be uniformly welcome. For Obama,  there is no connection between them and his slashing of American involvement in the Middle East — much less any sense of responsibility that his own actions helped produce the crisis he now fobs off on others.

If an American president saw fit to attack fellow Americans from abroad, and lecture them on their illiberality, there are better places from which to take such a low road than from Turkey, the embryo of 20th-century genocide, and a country whose soccer crowds were recently shouting, “Allahu akbar!” during what was supposed to be a moment of silence offered to the Paris dead. Surely an American president might suggest that such grassroots religious triumphalism about mass death is much more reprehensible behavior than are his own fellow citizens’ demands to vet the backgrounds of refugees.

If you suggested to Obama that, in his search for a contrarian legacy, he should do something to stop the slaughter in the Middle East and be careful about letting in more unexamined refugees, in answer, he would be more likely to do less than nothing abroad and vastly expand the influx of migrants. Getting under his critics’ skin is about all that is left of a failed presidency.

Many of our observers still do not quite grasp that Obama will end his presidency by seeking to get his opponents’ goat — and that his resentment will lead to some strange things said and done.

Few foresaw this critical element of the Obama character. The tiny number of prescient pundits who warned what the Obama years would entail were not the supposedly sober and judicious establishment voices, who in fact seemed to be caught up in the hope-and-change euphoria and missed entirely Obama’s petulance and pique: the Evan Thomases (“he’s sort of god”), or the David Brookses (“and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant, and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” “It is easy to sketch out a scenario in which [Obama] could be a great president.”), or the Chris Matthewses (“the feeling most people get when they hear Barack Obama’s speech. My, I felt this thrill going up my leg. I mean, I don’t have that too often.”), or the Michael Beschlosses (“Uh. I would say it’s probably — he’s probably the smartest guy ever to become President.”), or the Chris Buckleys (“He has exhibited throughout a ‘first-class temperament,’ pace Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man”), or the Kathleen Parkers (“ . . . with solemn prayers that Obama will govern as the centrist, pragmatic leader he is capable of being”), or the Peggy Noonans (“He has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief.”).

In truth, it was the loud, sometimes shrill, and caricatured voices of talk radio, the so-called crazy Republican House members, and the grassroots loudmouths of what would become the Tea Party who had Obama’s number. They warned early on that Barack Obama’s record was that of a petulant extremist, that his writing presaged that he would borrow and spend like no other president, that his past associations gave warning that he would use his community-organizing skills cynically to divide Americans along racial lines, that nothing in his past had ever suggested anything other than radicalism and an ease with divisive speech, that his votes as a state legislator and as a U.S. senator suggested that he had an instinctual dislike of the entrepreneur and the self-made businessman, and that his past rhetoric advised that he would ignore settled law and instead would rule by fiat — that he would render immigration law null and void, that he would diminish the profile of America abroad, and that he would do all this because he was an ideologue, with no history of bipartisanship but a lot of animus toward his critics, and one who saw no ethical or practical reason to appreciate the more than 60 years of America’s postwar global leadership and the world that it had built. Again, the despised right-wingers were right and the more moderate establishment quite wrong.

Abroad, from Obama’s post-Paris speeches, it is clear that he is now bored with and irritated by the War on Terror. He seems to have believed either that Islamist global terror was a minor distraction with no potential for real harm other than to bring right-wingers in backlash fashion out of the woodwork, or that it was an understandably radical manifestation of what was otherwise a legitimate complaint of Islam against the Western-dominated global system — thus requiring contextualization rather than mindless opposition.

A lot of ambitious and dangerous powers are watching Obama assume a fetal position, and may well as a consequence act foolishly and recklessly this next year. Not only Russia, China, and North Korea, but also Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, ISIS, and assorted rogue states may take chances in the next 14 months that they would otherwise never have entertained (given that America is innately strong and they are mostly in comparison far weaker) — on the premise that such adventurism offers tangible advantages without likely negative consequences and that the chance for such opportunities will not present itself again for decades to come.

At home, Obama feels liberated now that he is free from further elections. He thinks he has a legitimate right to be a bit vindictive and vent his own frustrations and pique, heretofore repressed over the last seven years because of the exigencies of Democratic electioneering. Obama can now vent and strike back at his opponents, caricaturing them from abroad, questioning their patriotism, slandering them for sport, and trying to figure out which emblematic executive orders and extra-legal bureaucratic directives will most infuriate them and repay them for their supposed culpability for his failed vero possumus presidency.

The more contrarian he becomes, and the more he opposes the wishes of the vast majority of the American people, all the more Obama envisions himself speaking truth to power and becoming iconic of something rather than the reality that he is becoming proof of nothing.

Hold on. We haven’t seen anything yet.

National Destruction by Misplaced Compassion

Governors Say “Not in My State!”

by Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum November 25, 2015

Defying the wishes of the American people, President Obama remains determined to import tens of thousands of poorly screened Muslims as refugees from the civil war in Syria, and scatter them in communities across America. Taxpayer-funded agencies are ready to help the refugees gain access to welfare programs and enroll their children in local public schools.

After FBI Director James Comey told Congress on Oct. 22 that his agency is unable to vet Syrians adequately, the House of Representatives voted by over two-thirds (289 to 137) to add an extra layer of screening to the refugee resettlement process.

Almost two-thirds of the nation’s governors (31 out of 50) have told the president not to send Syrian refugees to their states without assurances that the influx would not become a Trojan Horse. Even New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, who helped re-elect Obama in 2012 with a well-timed gesture of support during Hurricane Sandy, told the president that “I will not accept any refugees from Syria.”

Obama’s response to this groundswell of public opinion was to lash out with peevish petulance. Speaking in Turkey, which is 98% Muslim, Obama said: “When I hear folks say that maybe we should just admit the Christians but not the Muslims, that’s shameful. That’s not American. That’s not who we are.” A few days later in Malaysia, where Islam is the official state religion, Obama said that a preference for Christian refugees would constitute “prejudice and discrimination” that “helps ISIL and undermines our national security.”

Since Christians are the most widely persecuted group in the Middle East, you’d expect that Christians would be more likely to qualify as refugees, which requires demonstrating a “well-founded fear of being persecuted.” Yet of the 2,184 Syrian refugees Obama has already allowed to come here during the past four years, only 53 (or 2%) are Christian and 2,098 (96%) are Muslim, according to State Department statistics.

 After Donald Trump called for a “database” of Muslim immigrants, Dr. Ben Carson said “we should have a database on everybody who comes into this country. I want to know where they came from, I want to know where they’re going and why they’re here.”

Databases do exist but, as Trump says, our government lacks “good management procedures” to insure that visitors to our country follow the law. It’s estimated that half of the 11-plus million illegal aliens failed to leave when their time was up, even though they are on a government database.

It’s ludicrous to think that our government can effectively screen refugees from Syria or from any Muslim country. Consider the following security breaches that were reported in just one week since the Paris attacks on Friday, Nov. 13:

·         On Saturday, Nov. 14, three Syrian men were stopped in the Caribbean island of St.   Maarten after arriving on a flight from Haiti. Using fake Greek passports, they had already flown from Europe to Brazil, then to the Dominican Republic, then Haiti.

·         On Monday, Nov. 16, eight Syrians in two family units (two men, two women, and four

children) were caught illegally entering the United States from Mexico as they crossed the

Juarez Lincoln Bridge in Laredo, Texas.

·         On Monday, Nov. 16, six young men (five from Pakistan and one from Afghanistan)

crossed illegally from Mexico into Arizona near Tucson. They were captured 16 miles inside

our border, and Sheriff Paul Babeu warns that “terrorists are using well-established

smuggling routes to come across the border.”

·         On Tuesday, Nov. 17, five young men from Syria were detained in Honduras after

arriving from Costa Rica on their way to Guatemala and onward through Mexico to the

United States. They were using stolen Greek passports which had been doctored to replace

the original photos with photos of the Syrians.

·         On Wednesday, Nov. 18, a Syrian woman was stopped in Honduras and sent back to El

Salvador after flying on a Greek passport. On Thursday, Nov. 19, another Syrian woman

was arrested in Costa Rica after flying there from Peru with a fake Greek passport.

·         On Thursday, Nov. 19, eight tough-looking young men from Morocco were arrested at

the airport in Istanbul claiming to be tourists, but carrying maps and directions to Germany.

Turkish authorities believe the men were being smuggled by ISIS to join the fight in Europe

on behalf of the Muslim caliphate.

·         On Friday, Nov. 20, five Syrians, consisting of one family unit and two additional males,

crossed the international bridge from Mexico into the United States at Laredo, Texas. On

Saturday, Nov. 21, a Syrian woman and two Pakistani young men without passports were

detained by officials in Honduras after they entered that country by bus from Nicaragua,

presumably bound for the United States.

As a fitting conclusion to a week of broken borders, on Friday, Nov. 20, the Obama administration petitioned the Supreme Court to overrule the lower federal judges who blocked his executive amnesty of five million illegal aliens. Tell your elected public officials to just say no to Syrian refugees.

History According to the Judge

The President and the Rule of Law

11/12/2015 - Judge Andrew Napolitano Townhall.com

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court in New Orleans upheld an injunction issued by a federal district court in Texas against the federal government, thereby preventing it from implementing President Barack Obama's executive orders on immigration. Critics had argued and two federal courts have now agreed that the orders effectively circumvented federal law and were essentially unconstitutional.

Though the injunction on its face restrains officials in the Department of Homeland Security, it is really a restraint on the president himself. Here is the back story.

President Obama has long wished to overhaul the nation's immigration laws to make it easier for people who are here illegally to remain here and to make it easier for them eventually to acquire the attributes of citizenship. He may have a bighearted moral motivation, or he may have a partisan political motivation. I don't know which it is, but his motivation has driven him to use extra-constitutional means to achieve his ends.

During his first term in office, he attempted to have federal laws changed -- quite properly at first -- by offering proposals to Congress, which it rejected. That rejection left in place a complex regulatory scheme that is partially administered by DHS and partially by the Department of Justice. It left about 11.3 million people unlawfully present in the United States.

The conscious decision of Congress not to change the law in the face of such a large number of undocumented people here left those people, adults and children, exposed to deportation. It also left them entitled to financial benefits paid for by the states in which they reside.

Deportation is a lengthy and expensive process. The courts have ruled that all people subject to deportation are entitled to a hearing, with counsel paid for by the government. If they lose, they are entitled to an appeal, with counsel paid for by the government. The government has teams of prosecutors, defense counsel and judges who address only deportations. The highest number of people the government has successfully deported in a year is about 250,000, which was done in 2013. If you add removals without trial (many are voluntary) and rejections at the border, the number swells to 438,000 a year.

While awaiting deportation, those people here unlawfully and not confined are entitled to the social safety net that states offer everyone else, as well as the direct benefits states make available to citizens, such as public schooling, access to hospital emergency rooms, and housing and personal living assistance.

Frustrated that Congress thwarted his will, President Obama -- resorting to his now infamous and probably regretted one-liner that he can govern by using a pen and a phone -- issued a series of executive orders in 2012 to various federal agencies, directing them to cease deportation of undocumented people if they complied with certain standards that the president wished of them. The standards, compliance with which would bar deportation, were essentially the same as those that the president had sought and Congress had rejected.

Can the president write his own laws or procedures?

In the litigation that came to a head early this week, 26 states, led by Texas, sued the federal government. In that lawsuit, the states argued that they would be made to endure unbearable financial burdens if the undocumented folks stayed where they are and if the states continued to make the same social safety net available to them as they make available to their lawful residents. Thus, the states argued, the president forced the states to spend money they hadn't budgeted or collected to support a legal scheme that Congress had not only never authorized but expressly rejected.

Can the president write his own laws and procedures?

The states also argued in their lawsuit that if the DHS and DOJ complied with the president's executive orders, those federal departments would be exceeding their authority under the statutes because the president was exceeding his authority. This is a president who has argued dozens of times in public that he is not a king and that he lacks the ability to recast the laws as he wishes they had been written.

Can the president write his own laws and procedures?

In a word: No. The president can issue executive orders to officials in the executive branch of government directing those officials to enforce the laws as the president wishes them to be enforced -- within the letter and spirit of those laws. But those executive orders cannot write new laws or revise old laws or ignore existing laws that the Congress clearly expects to be enforced. That is just what a federal district court judge ruled earlier this year and just what a federal appellate court ruled in affirming the district court earlier this week.

All people who embrace the rule of law -- whether they are for open borders or for an impenetrable border wall -- should embrace these rulings because they keep the president within the confines of the Constitution, which he has sworn to uphold.

Under our constitutional system of supposedly limited government, all legislative power is vested in Congress. The president enforces the laws; he doesn't write them. His oath of office commits him to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution, and it further commits him to enforce the federal laws "faithfully" -- meaning whether he personally agrees with them or not.

The clash between the president and the courts is as old as our republic itself. Courts are traditionally loath to interfere with the business of Congress or the president. Yet when the behavior of another branch of government defies core constitutional norms, it is the duty of the courts in a case properly before them to say what the Constitution means and to order compliance with it.

Refugee Resettlement - Asking For Trouble

 

France Closes Its Borders; Why Can’t We?

by Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum November 18, 2015

The Friday night massacre of over 100 people at a soccer game, a rock concert, and five restaurants in Paris was apparently committed by 8 men working on behalf of ISIS, also called ISIL or the Islamic State. The day before the attacks, President Obama was on television reassuring George Stephanopoulos that “ISIL continues to shrink in its scope of operations” and that “we have contained them.”

Next week, some 20,000 people (including President Obama, John Kerry and 3,000 journalists) are expected in Paris for the UN convention on climate change, which Obama in May called “an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased … refugee flows.”

Based on a passport found next to his body, one of the 8 Paris terrorists was Ahmad al-Mohammad, 25, a native of Syria who passed through the Greek Island of Leros on Oct. 3 and crossed from Macedonia into Serbia on Oct. 7. He was part of the huge army of migrants flooding into Europe this year claiming to be refugees from the civil war in Syria.

Shortly after the coordinated attacks, France’s socialist president announced his decision to close the borders of France. “We must ensure that no one enters to commit any crimes, and also that those who have committed crimes can be arrested if they try to leave the country.”

Close the border – what a great idea! Unfortunately, France eliminated most border checkpoints as part of Europe’s Schengen agreement, which is how a Syrian so-called refugee got all the way from Serbia to Paris without being stopped.

Some say stricter border controls can’t prevent “homegrown” terrorists such as the Paris perpetrators who were native-born French citizens. But in virtually every case, “homegrown” terrorists are sons of Muslim immigrants who are drawn to their ancestral faith and homeland instead of assimilating to Western values.

For instance, the Tsarnaev brothers, who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts in a family of ethnic Chechens who came here in 2002 as refugees from Dagestan and frequently visited the country they were supposedly escaping from. At least 22 young Somali men who grew up in Minneapolis have left to train or fight with terrorist groups in Africa.

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez, who killed four Marines and a sailor at two U.S. military recruiting offices in Chattanooga in July, grew up in a family of Palestinians who came here in 1996 and frequently went back to the Middle East for reasons unknown. On the same day as the Paris massacre, FBI Director Comey told reporters he would not reveal what the FBI had learned about the Chattanooga shooter’s motivations because “We don’t want to smear people.”

While the Obama administration pledged to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees in the coming year, Hillary Clinton said in the Democratic debate that “we should increase numbers of refugees; I said we should go to 65,000.” Not to be outdone, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has called for 100,000 Syrians to be brought here.

Hillary promised that refugees would be put through “a screening and vetting process,” but FBI Director James Comey and National Counterterrorism Center Director Nicholas Rasmussen both testified in October that it is simply not possible to screen them adequately. Speaking cautiously and carefully, Comey said “there are certain gaps in the data available to us” and Rasmussen offered the understatement that “the intelligence picture we have of this particular conflict zone is not as rich as we would like it to be.”

When the first Syrian refugees began arriving in New Orleans last week without notice to local officials, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal sent President Obama a letter demanding answers about how they were screened and whether they will be monitored. Jindal concluded that in light of the Paris attack, “it would be prudent to pause the process of refugees coming to the United States.”

Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX), a freshman member of Congress whose son is a Navy SEAL, recently addressed the House for 45 minutes about refugee resettlement. “I found out that no one was asking – much less answering – the questions of who, how, when, where, and how much regarding these refugees.”

Babin continued, “nearly 500,000 new refugees have come into the United States under the Refugee Resettlement program since President Obama first took office.” Refugees “have been resettled by private contractors across this country in over 190 towns and communities whose local citizens have little to no say in the matter.”

Babin cited numerous examples of refugees or their children who have been found with ties to terrorist organizations or have even traveled overseas to join the fight against America. Although more than 90 percent of recent Middle Eastern refugees are on welfare, Babin noted that “the five wealthiest countries on the Arabian peninsula – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, and Bahrain – have not taken in a single refugee that we know of.”

A Quinnipiac poll taken in September found that 58 percent of respondents thought that admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees “would pose a threat to the national security of the United States.” Tell your member of Congress to eliminate refugee resettlement from the spending bill that must be passed by Dec. 11.

Present Day Words of Wisdom

Destroyed From Within

11/10/2015 - D.W. Wilber Townhall.com

In 1838 Abraham Lincoln spoke before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois and made the observation that “America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves”. In this speech, Lincoln, a Republican, was partly referring to the dangers of slavery.

In this same speech Lincoln also warned that a “tyrant” could take over the American political system from within. Lincoln went on to say that to prevent this Americans needed to “cultivate a political religion that emphasizes a reverence for the laws". An admonishment that we as a nation and a people must hold the Constitution of the United States and the laws that govern us as preeminent.

Aside from arguably being the greatest American president, and the one person with the strength of conviction and character to lead this nation through such terrible times as the War Between the States when brother fought against brother, was Lincoln also a prognosticator of future events?

Considering the current condition of our republic, both domestically and on the world stage under the presidency of Barack Obama, perhaps Lincoln could see into the future and was foretelling what we as a nation need be mindful of and protect against. Destroying ourselves from within, and allowing a tyrant to take over the American political system.

We have reached a time in American history where a president governs by edict rather than by the consent of the governed. Those that Barack Obama has surrounded himself with to help him govern also seem to feel as though the voices of Americans don’t matter. After all, as far as they are concerned we don’t really know what’s good for us. They know better.

Our country has been turned upside down. We have public high schools being directed by the federal government to allow an anatomically intact male student who “thinks” he’s a girl to take a shower with other teenage girls. Instead of doing what the young man really needs, which is getting him into psychiatric counseling.

A former soldier, dishonorably discharged and serving thirty-five years in a military prison for giving away secrets to our enemies starts calling himself ‘Chelsea’ instead of ‘Bradley’, and the American taxpayers end up being stuck paying for hormonal therapy so that ‘he’, can feel more like a ‘she’.

Israel, our closest ally in the Middle East faces threats from every direction simply for wanting to exist, and the Obama administration pushes them aside to embrace a tyrannical terrorist regime in Tehran. An Iranian regime mind you that is responsible for the deaths of countless Americas, and one who still abducts Americans at will and holds them hostage as political pawns. Something it has done repeatedly in the past.

Both major political parties in America have lost touch with the constituents they were elected to serve. Our political campaigns have become circus acts choreographed by ‘opposition research’, the traditional news media, and political candidates who haven’t had an original thought in their lives and simply parrot what ‘behind the scenes advisers’ tell them the American electorate wants to hear. And with no intention of carrying out any of their promises if they are ever elected.

When people like Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi can actually get elected in the first place, much less re-elected over and over again it shows there is something critically wrong with America.

Republicans have no corner on the market for ‘leadership’. Career politicians like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have proven that they are incapable of ‘leading’, and have shown they lack moral courage and are simply cowardly and unwilling to do whatever they can to prevent and undo the damage that has been done to this country, and continues to be done by the Obama administration.

In America we have such amazingly talented individuals, yet we keep getting stuck with people Like Reid, Pelosi, Boehner and McConnell, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Obama. Something is dreadfully wrong with an America that produced Abraham Lincoln, yet saddles us with the career politicians this country has had to endure for decades now.

This nation needs men and women of conviction like Abraham Lincoln, not people running for office whose convictions are based on focus group results and poll testing. One can only hope that we find them soon, other men and women of conviction who are willing to fight for what is right.

A fight that will become even more desperate in the remaining time that Obama has left in office to try to complete his “fundamental transformation of the United States of America”.

Native Americans Have The Answer

 

Can Europe Survive This Invasion?

11/10/2015 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

"A modern day mass migration is taking place ... that could change the face of Europe's civilization," warned Hungarian President Viktor Orban.

"If that happens, that is irreversible. ... There is no way back from a multicultural Europe," said Orban. "If we make a mistake now, it will be forever."

Orban acted on his beliefs. He erected a 110-mile fence on the Serb border, redirecting hundreds of thousands of migrants away from Hungary to Croatia, thence to Austria and Germany.

Sunday, after a third of a million had passed through, Croatia replaced a center-left with a rightist party. A fortnight ago, the right-wing eurosceptic Law and Justice Party won a landslide victory in Poland.

Support for Angela Merkel, who has opened Germany to a million migrants, is plummeting. Bavaria's CSU, sister party of Merkel's CDU, is in rebellion. Bavaria has been the main port of entry for the hundreds of thousands of arriving migrants.

Europe is undergoing the greatest mass migration since World War II, when 14 million Germans were driven out of Prussia and eastern Germany and Central and Eastern Europe.

That mass migration halted after two years. But no end is in sight to the migrations from Africa and the Middle East.

As long as Europe's borders remain open, they will come. And the people who wish to come number not just in the millions but the tens and scores of millions. And they know how to get there.

The routes -- through Turkey to the Balkans on land, or across a few miles of the Med to the Greek islands, or from Libya to Lampedusa and Sicily, or into the Spanish enclaves on the Moroccan coast, or out to the Canary Islands -- are arduous but not impossible.

Why should they not come?

Why should Arabs and Africans not flee the tyranny, terror, poverty and war that are their lot to come to Europe, live the good life, and have life's necessities provided for their families by the munificent welfare states of northern Europe? And what is to stop them?

Jean Revel's "The Camp of the Saints" is proving more prophetic than Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" or Orwell's "1984."

Considering the crises facing Europe, the question is no longer: Will the EU survive? It is Orban's question: Will European civilization survive the century?

This year, the EU monetary union, the eurozone, avoided breaking apart because Athens capitulated and accepted austerity, and the hard-bargaining Germans agreed to a bailout.

How long will Greeks and Club Med members of the EU accept austerity? How long will Germans bail out nations whose people like to work fewer hours while enjoying superior social benefits?

Under the Schengen Agreement, there are to be no barriers to trade and travel, to the movement of goods and people inside the EU.

Yet, across Europe, fences are going up, borders are being re-established, anti-immigrant and anti-EU parties like the National Front of France's Marine Le Pen, are gaining converts.

If the mass migrations are not halted, the rise of nationalist regimes at the expense of Europe's liberals and leftists is inevitable.

With birth rates in this smallest and least populated of continents below replacement levels for decades, Europe is aging, shrinking and dying, as it is being invaded and altered forever.

Optimists point to how America absorbed the 15 million that arrived in the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920.

But they ignore the differences. America's immigrants were Europeans from Christian nations coming to a country with a history of assimilation. And the Great Wave stopped in 1924, for 40 years.

Unlike America, Europe has never known mass immigration. And those pouring into Europe are Arab, African and Muslim, not European Christians or Jews. They come from other civilizations and cultures. And they are not all assimilating but rather creating enclaves in Europe that replicate the lands whence they came.

Last year, the Swiss voted to cut back on immigration.

This year, with the UK Independence Party growing in popularity, Prime Minister David Cameron is demanding reforms in the EU charter, before the British vote on whether to leave the EU altogether.

With migrants in the thousands milling around Calais and the entrance to the tunnel to Dover, Brits must be wondering whether it was wise to dig that tunnel beneath the Channel to their island home.

The threats raised by the mass migration into Europe rise to the level of the existential.

Can a civilization survive the replacement of the people who created it by people of other races, religions, and civilizations?

Ask the Native Americans.

Will Europe remain Europe if she is repopulated by Arabs, Muslims, Asians and Africans? What will hold Europe together? Free trade?

In 1981, when Solidarity was crushed by the Warsaw regime on the orders of Moscow, Americans took up the cry -- "Let Poland be Poland."

One day soon, a voice will arise across the Atlantic calling for an end to this invasion, by force if necessary, and declare: "Let Europe be Europe!"

Progressive Agenda - Dumb Down, Drug Down America

OK, Who Ordered the Mexican Heroin?

11/4/2015 - Ann Coulter Townhall.com

Heroin use in the United States increased by nearly 80 percent between 2007 and 2012 alone, and The New York Times' main reaction to this depressing fact is to be overjoyed that the new addicts are mostly white.

The important point is not that ragingly addictive drugs are sweeping small-town America, young lives are being cut short, or that we lost one of the most talented actors of his generation to a heroin overdose. What matters is that that the drug epidemic is not having a disparate impact.

Excitedly reporting that "nearly 90 percent of those who tried heroin for the first time in the last decade were white" -- yay! -- the Times claimed that, with white kids dying from heroin overdoses, their parents are taking a "more forgiving approach" to heroin addiction.

Assuming that's even true, are grieving parents the best source of public policy recommendations? If we're basing our drug policies on the feelings of parents whose kids overdosed on drugs, how about having the parents of kids who have been raped and murdered write our death penalty laws?

Columbia professor Kimberle Williams Crenshaw lamented that if only whites had been dying of heroin overdoses sooner, "the devastating impact of mass incarceration upon entire communities would never have happened."

The implication that black people have always had a more "forgiving" approach to drugs -- and whites are finally catching up -- is insane. Black leaders have been begging for more aggressive drug laws forever.

In the '90s, members of the Congressional Black Caucus repeatedly held hearings on the crack epidemic, crime and drugs. Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., called drug traffickers "a greater threat to our national security than communists." Jesse Jackson demanded "a comprehensive war on drugs." Lee Brown, Clinton's African-American director of national drug control policy, said that "that the legalization of illegal drugs would be the moral equivalent to genocide."

Nor did black citizens take a particularly "forgiving" approach to their children's drug addictions. In March 1987, The Miami Herald told the story of an African-American woman who called the police on her own son, telling them to arrest him, when his drug habit led him to burglarize homes in their neighborhood.

By contrast, the Times' big ideas for reducing heroin addiction in America are: (1) stop stigmatizing drug use; (2) stop imprisoning drug offenders; and (3) make a heroin antidote, naloxone, widely available, so Americans are prepared when their friends and relatives overdose.

The Times objects to stigmatizing behavior only when it doesn't really mind the behavior. It never advocates a "forgiving approach" toward things the Times dislikes. There will be no "forgiving approach" to abortion-doctor killers, Catholic priests who molest children or corporate polluters -- though those behaviors may also result from a "disease."

Instead of trying to prevent abortionists from being shot, why not give them bulletproof vests?

Rather than stigmatize priests who molest kids, shouldn't we put them in "diversion" programs, and have STD antidotes available for the molested children? And do we have to use such loaded term as "molest"?

How about "compassionate counseling" for socially irresponsible corporate conglomerates? Lets try recasting them in a less stigmatizing light -- avoiding words like "polluter" or "contaminate," and instead using terms that convey a chronic condition, like "rent seekers"?

If the Times had any genuine interest in reducing drug addiction, I suspect the paper would prefer the "stigmatizing" approach. It might even advocate policies to stop drug addiction, rather than policies to treat it.

As Rangel said in a 1992 speech to the National Press Club: "We all know that the availability of heroin and cocaine on our streets is because our borders are a sieve. I would like to believe that if the communists were still alive and well, and they were pushing bombs into communities that could cause the havoc, the pain and the cost that drugs are, that somehow the secretary of state ... would be involved."

Rangel is right. The drug problem exploded in the U.S. after we opened our southern border to one of the world's major drug-supplying countries: Mexico. The vast majority of all drugs in America -- heroin, cocaine, marijuana and, increasingly, methamphetamine -- are brought in by the people of Mexico, who make our country a more diverse tapestry of cultural richness.

In 2010, 38,329 people died from drug overdoses, twice the number a decade earlier. More people died of drug overdoses than from automobile accidents (30,196), murders (13,000) or gun accidents (700).

About 90 percent of heroin in the U.S. is brought in by Mexicans. In 2013, U.S. authorities seized 2,162 kilograms of heroin coming across our southern border -- compared to 367 kilos in 2007. The government has estimated that 660,000 Americans are using heroin and more than 3,000 are dying of it every year -- because Mexico is boosting the supply.

And yet in a major front-page article about America's "heroin crisis" last weekend, the Times never mentioned Mexico.

Even when Mexicans dump illegal drugs on our country, it's America's fault. As the Times explained in an Aug. 30, 2015, article, Mexico increased opium production by 50 percent in 2014, "the result of a voracious American appetite."

In what other circumstances do we absolve the seller of a dangerous product because a buyer exists?It's not the hit-man's fault -- that lady wanted her husband dead.

In any event, the "appetite" argument may work for pot, but America did not place an order for black tar heroin. According to a DEA agent quoted in The Washington Post, Mexican drug pushers stand outside American methadone clinics, selling their wares. Hey, senor, have you heard of this?

Despite the Times' neurotic obsession with the racial breakdown of heroin users, it seems sublimely uninterested in the ethnic composition of heroin pushers. This is more than the left's usual affection for criminals.

Contrary to the cliches, most drug dealers aren't black: They're Hispanic. In 2013, 48 percent of drug offenders in federal prison were Hispanic. Only 27 percent were black and 22 percent white.

All the left's blather about drug laws being used to lock up "black bodies" is a lie. Once again, the left is using African-Americans as a false flag to push policies that help Democrats, but hurt black people.

The Times doesn't mind black neighborhoods being seized by Mexican drug cartels. It doesn't mind if more white people die from heroin overdoses. The Times just wants to increase the number of Hispanics out of prison, on their way to citizenship, so they can start voting for the Democrats.