Like Chick-fil-A Cows, Muslims Migrants in Italy Riot for Chiken

Shot:

A number of mostly Muslim migrants hosted in a hotel in the northern Italian town of Chioggia [on the south end of the Venetian lagoon] ripped down the Italian flag in protest of an Easter meal of pasta in place of their usual chicken and french fries.  The menu change triggered the anger of the migrants, who then staged a protest. “No pasta, it’s a disgrace. We want our chicken and french fries,” they reportedly shouted.  Some of the migrants then grabbed hold of the Italian flag hanging in one of the common rooms and ripped it down in protest.  The police were called in and sent three patrol cars to restore the calm, finally convincing the migrants to eat their pasta. According to reports, the migrants’ anger may have been ignited by the commemoration of Easter as a holiday more than just the corresponding change of menu, since almost all of them are Muslims.

Chaser:

So far this year, the Italian interior ministry has documented 16,075 migrants crossing to its shores, compared to just over 10,000 during the same period in 2015....  [Since the recent effective] closing [of] the so-called “Balkan route” north from Greece into Europe ... traffickers have been scrambling to devise new routes to bring prospective migrants into the continent, primarily through Italy....  [As] borders have been closed along migrant routes, Italy may be now forced to hold on to the majority of people landing on its shores.....  Italy has struggled to expand its capacity to receive and process migrants. In March 2014, it was hosting 29,000 asylum seekers; by 2015 the number had increased to 67,000, and this March the number has risen to 106,000. This number is sure to increase dramatically in the next several months.

Hangover:

A report from Libya claims there are at least 800,000 migrants on the coast waiting for the right moment to cross the sea to Italy.

The times, they are a-changing.

R Balsamo

h/t: Ed Driscoll

The Twilight of Chicago and the Democrat Model of Government

The days of reckoning draw near for the effectively bankrupt City of Chicago, after more than 50 years of financial corruption by the ruling Democrat Party.  Two baleful news items about the city hit the wires today.

First, the Illinois Supreme Court today declared unconstitutional, under the state constitution, a plan by the desperate Chicago Democrat mayor to reduce some public employee pension payments.  The major driver of Chicago’s financial disaster is the massive annual payment required to fund the current pension plan for retired and active employees.  The mayor’s plan runs afoul of the public employees pension protection provision of the Illinois constitution, says the high court, a provision snuck in by Democrats when the state constitution was rewritten in 1970.  Now those generous pensions – far better than those in the private sector, aggrandized by various abuses such as the notorious and common practices of “pension spiking” and “double dipping,” and underfunded for years by the Democrats themselves who spent the money on other stuff for themselves – have bankrupted the city (as well as the state and many of its cities and other units of government).  To raise cash, Chicago Democrats last year enacted a massive property tax hike, and after today more such increases are likely to follow as the Democrat takers squeeze more and more cash from the producers.  But a greedy parasite that kills the host off which it lives ultimately causes its own death as well.  Chicago and Illinois Democrats have been doing that in slow motion, having learned nothing from the smoldering ruins of the Democrat Party paradise of Detroit. 

Second news item – the top headline today at the website of the now ultraliberal, Democrat-friendly Chicago Tribune:  “Chicago area sees greatest population loss of any major U.S. city, region in 2015.”  Just one more piece of evidence that Democrats have yet to realize that many tax-paying citizens and businesses can simply move away when they have had enough.   More and more workers are work-at-home and thus can live anywhere, and retirees can also pack up and leave for states with less corruption and lower taxes.  And all that is happening.        

The lesson that Democrat takers have yet to learn is that they must control their greed and corruption, since the producers, the people who work to support them in their corrupt excesses, can move away, and a city left with only Democrats trying to live off each other soon collapses. 

R Balsamo

Remembering Edward Everett Horton

Has there ever been anyone funnier in film than Edward Everett Horton?   I first met him, or met his voice that is, early on – he was the narrator of the Fractured Fairy Tales series that was a regular part of the animated Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.  Growing older I’ve come to enjoy his every film appearance.  He excelled in playing cheerful though slightly befuddled and often exasperated characters and was a master of the delayed double-take.  Three favorites:  Holiday, Springtime in the Rockies, and Arsenic and Old Lace.

Then there are his Astaire/Rogers pictures, three of the best, in which he practically steals every scene he’s in:  The Gay Divorcee, Top Hat, and Shall We Dance.  His scenes with the daffy, screwball Alice Brady in The Gay Divorcee are alone worth the price of admission, and as a bonus he has the Let's K-nock K-nees dance number with Betty Grable no less.  The Gay Divorcee, incidentally, features the then new song The Continental in a 20-minute song and dance extravaganza (here's a part); it later won the very first Academy Award for best original song, back in the good old days when such awards were merit-based.  His scenes (link; link) with Eric Blore are priceless.

Per Wikipedia, the New York Times, and other sources, Horton was born one hundred thirty years ago today in Brooklyn to parents of Scottish extraction.  Horton’s grandfather was writer Edward Everett Hale, who was a nephew of Edward Everett, the orator and statesman, and a grandnephew of Nathan Hale, the martyred spy of the American Revolution.  He attended college for a while at Oberlin, until, showing an early theatrical bent, he was “asked to leave” after climbing to the top of a building, and after gathering a crowd below, threw off a dummy the audience mistook for him.  He moved back to New York City, attended Columbia University for a time, and began his performing career in acting and singing.

He started in silent pictures in 1918, and from then on was based on the West Coast.  His first talkie was the 1931 version of The Front Page.  He was an entrepreneur as well – he would lease a theater and produce a play in which he would star; in 1932 he leased the Hollywood Playhouse for a year and put on Springtime for Henry, in which over his lifetime he would appear more than 3,000 times.  From all this he earned enough to spring for a summer home on Lake George in the Adirondacks in upstate New York.

After finding success in Hollywood, he bought 23 acres of land in the Encino section of Los Angeles and established a compound of houses where he, his mother, his sister, and his brother lived with their families.  He was an avid antique collector, acquiring a valuable collection over the years.  Horton died in Encino in 1970 at the age of 84 and is buried in Forest Lawn, the cemetery of the stars.  His work, fortunately for us, lives on.

R Balsamo

Organized Mob Action Disrupts Trump in Chicago; Cruz Goes Off the Rails

Yesterday evening, an organized mob action disrupted, with some minor violence, a planned rally in Chicago for leading Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.  The disruption was promoted via social media.  It is politely being called a “protest” by its defenders, but it was nothing of the sort.  Many Trump haters were inside the building and began their disruption there; they were not just peacefully protesting outside.  People have a right to peaceful protest, but not a right to disrupt and prevent others from speaking.  This was massive criminal behavior that the Chicago police seemingly did little to stop.  Watching this on TV one could see among the protesters sombreros, “Muslims Against Trump” t-shirts, Mexican flags, and Bernie Sanders posters, among other things.    

Trump haters say this was democracy in action, and that Trump brought this on himself by his condoning of violence against his opponents.  But that is a lie.  Rightly or wrongly, he has only condoned violence, on a few occasions with off-hand remarks in the heat of the moment, against violent disrupters at his rallies who are assaulting and attacking his supporters.  That is self-defense.  He has not suggested or encouraged his supporters to roam the streets causing trouble for others.  Trump holds rallies, and the anti-Trump mob comes to him, to prevent him from speaking and to assault his supporters.  These neo-fascists are attacking him, not vice versa.  Conservatives and Republicans do not do that to their opponents, they have not disrupted Clinton and Sanders rallies, and they are tired of others doing it to them.  Disruption, intimidation, assault, and battery are tactics increasingly used by neo-fascist leftist groups such as Code Pink, Occupy, and Black Lives Matter.  Of course, they are only following the guidance of Barack Obama, who famously urged his supporters to "get in the faces" of their opponents and "punch back twice as hard."  But most Americans I suspect have had enough of this.   

To blame Trump and his supporters for defending themselves inside their own rallies against violent agitators who come to disrupt their events is too much.  But that is the liberal smear right now.  Even worse, I am very, very disappointed to see that Ted Cruz has joined in that very smear, desperately seeking to score cheap political points by siding with those who hate free speech and who seek to silence their political opponents. 

This anti-democratic mob action to deprive the leading Republican presidential contender of his right to speak to his own supporters at his own rallies will likely only help Trump in public opinion and hurt the anti-democratic liberal fascists.  I have not been a Trump supporter, but after years if not decades of failed Republican Party leadership I very much understand his appeal on some specific positions as well on his apparent willingness to politically fight hard for his convictions.  

And all this should hurt Ted Cruz as well, whom I have supported for president, who should know better than to side with the neo-fascist mob.  Who will stand up with him when the mob next comes for him?    

R Balsamo               

Weak Horse Romney Attacks Strong Horse Trump

Today Republican Mitt Romney made a big speech denouncing his party’s leading presidential candidate Donald Trump as a “phony and a fraud.”  Of all people to deliver that message!  Mitt Romney had his chance but showed the very weakness before vicious smears and attacks that Trump, to the delight of many long-suffering Republican voters, repudiates.  If Romney were nearly this forceful against Obama four years ago he would be president.  As bin Laden once said, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse they are naturally drawn to the former.  And nothing is more revolting than Republicans like Romney, who, like the presidential nominee before him John McCain, are forceful only when attacking other Republicans while they cower before Democrats.   

After seeing the Trump phenomenon these last six months, about strength and confidence and attitude as much as anything else, how can Republican leaders be so clueless as to think Romney, of all people, is the one to take down Trump?  Romney, the guy who let Democrat operative Candy Crowley, masquerading as a TV journalist, push him around when she jumped into a debate to defend Obama (with misinformation to boot).  Romney let it happen, but Trump never would have.  Moreover, Crowley never would have tried that with Trump because she would have known that Trump would rip her apart.  Weakness, as they say, is a provocation.

If Republican leaders are really serious about stopping Trump, they would induce Rubio to drop out and coalesce behind Cruz.  Rubio’s betrayal on amnesty and illegal immigration still infuriates a large segment of Republican base and caps his upside.  Moreover, he seems too young, too unseasoned, and doesn’t have the intellectual heft that Cruz has – he showed he can be rolled by fast-talking Democrats like Chuck Schumer.  I’m for Cruz.  I know he isn’t a perfect candidate – way too much of that Southern Baptist preacher shtick for one thing.  Yes, Republican leaders hate him because he doesn’t play their go along – get along insider Washington game, but nevertheless their choice is Cruz or Trump if they want a shot to win in November, or rig the convention against Trump and destroy the party.

R Balsamo         

Liberal Political Correctness & Weak Republican Leadership Continue to Strengthen Trump

In this presidential election cycle, I’m for Ted Cruz.  Nevertheless, I understand full well the appeal of Donald Trump, and how his candidacy has been created by the serial spinelessness, foolishness, and unfaithfulness of Republican Party national leaders.  Even more than his specific stance against open borders, an American wage killer and Democrat vote generator loved by the elites in both major parties, it is Trump’s projection of strength that has propelled his rise.  He refuses to apologize for American success and traditional American sensibilities.  He lets no one kick sand in his face.  Imagine, for example, if Democrat operative Candy Crowley, masquerading as a TV debate “journalist,” improperly intervened in a presidential candidate debate, with misinformation to boot, to protect Obama against Trump.  Unlike the weak Romney, Trump would have ripped her apart.  But she would have known his strength beforehand, and wouldn’t even have tried.  As the saying goes, weakness is a provocation.   

Now some kook allegedly in the KKK, which historically has been the militant wing of the Democrat Party and whose notable leaders through the years have all been Democrats, supposedly “endorsed” Trump.  Thus the liberal media is all atwitter demanding that Trump say nasty things about the KKK.  The tactic is obvious – make an association between the KKK and the Republican Party in the minds of fools and the foolable, and keep peppering Trump, and other Republican candidates, with this “issue” as a distraction and a smear.  No one really thinks Donald Trump cares about the handful of Democrats in what’s left of the KKK.  But new Republican Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, perhaps the greatest and fastest political disappointment in a generation and BFF with the nasty, open-border Hispanic racist politician Luis Gutierrez of Illinois, taking his cue from Democrats now demands Trump and other Republicans denounce all bigoted groups, as if Republicans were somehow connected with them and responsible for them.  One of Trump’s most appealing characteristics is that he aggressively rejects biased premises.  Here, the Democrat smear is that many Republicans are crypto-bigots, so their leaders must publicly denounce any and all bigots; Trump rejects the premise, while Ryan accepts it.  Ryan is a foolish man, and a lousy retail politician.  Challenge Trump on issues and on character, not with smears – it just makes him more sympathetic and stronger.  Next Ryan will demand Trump denounce Adolph Hitler (who in reality was a socialist).  If Ryan was this forceful with his Democrat buddies the Republican Party wouldn’t be in the mess it’s now in.  The end result of all this Democrat-driven nonsense is more votes for Trump.        

Seeing the Democrats about to nominate Hillary Clinton, patently the most corrupt major politician in American history, whose party has weaponized government against conservatives, makes me despair for the Republic.  Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.  If the American experiment devolves and the era of the strongman is upon us, I certainly would prefer Trump to Clinton, any time and place.

R Balsamo