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The Democrats’ Self-Serving Distractions by Kevin D Williamson It is time for another round of Pin the Tail on Anybody but the Donkey. After the massacre at a gay club in Orlando, Fla., by an American Muslim of Afghan origin affiliated with the Islamic State, the editors of the New York Times argued that the fundamental problem was “hate” exemplified by . . . opponents of same-sex marriage. That was an interesting line of argument. Omar Mateen was not found with a natural-law treatise in his back pocket, and he wasn’t fresh from a Princeton seminar with Robert George. He never suggested that the Supreme Court had taken too broad a view of the 14th Amendment in Obergefell v. Hodges. He was a Muslim fanatic whose heroes throw homosexuals off of tall buildings and crucify Christians. The morning after that massacre, the New York Daily News reported the enormity under the headline: “Thanks, NRA!” Mateen was a friend of the Islamic State, not a member of the National Rifle Association. He was a member of the same political party as Barack Obama, not a crusading Second Amendment activist of the right. He’d thrice been interviewed by the FBI for suspected ties to terrorism, but the FBI saw nothing actionable. Afterward, there was a great deal of talk about forbidding firearms purchases by people on terrorism “watch lists,” which would be a violation of due process and in any case beside the point: Mateen was on no such list. But it was somehow a black eye for the NRA, which had nothing to do with any of it. When Timothy McVeigh bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City, President Clinton (weird thing, Millennials: Her husband used to be president! He was a lot of fun, but that’s a long story!) made an embarrassing and shameful effort to pin the crime on Rush Limbaugh, whom he blamed for cultivating what everybody called, for five minutes, a “climate of hate.” That phrase was revived for a minute when another sad lunatic in Arizona, who was obsessed with an implausible “infinite currency” conspiracy and the idea that NASA had been faking spaceflights — i.e., a fruitcake — shot Gabby Giffords. That one was Sarah Palin’s fault, you’ll recall: Palin’s graphic-design team had put crosshairs on the districts of Democrats “targeted” for electoral challenge. The president himself weighed in on the need for more civility. Everybody was all about civility for about two nanoseconds, and then it was time to blame the NRA for the Giffords shooting. Black Lives Matter has attracted some truly reprehensible people, and it will, in the end, almost certainly end up being a net loss for the economic and political well-being of black Americans. But it is not based on a fiction. Not entirely. We can argue (and should argue) over the data regarding black Americans’ interactions with the police, but there really isn’t any arguing that a significant share of America’s radically bifurcated black population is in a pretty grim position vis-a-vis municipal services, of which the police are one high-profile example among many. Given the state of education, housing programs, economic development, and simple services such as trash-collection in many black communities, it doesn’t exactly beggar belief to consider that African-Americans may be in many cases poorly served by the police, too. Pardon me for noticing, though: Who, exactly, is in charge of these cities and city agencies about which African-Americans do have many legitimate complaints? Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Baltimore, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago: Not exactly famous enclaves of conservative Republican political dominance. Because Dallas is in Texas, people sometimes forget that it is a city like any other American city, and Democrat-dominated. In Dallas, as in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, that Democrat domination is due in great part to a black Democratic voting bloc. Eventually, someone is going to figure out that the black progressives protesting municipal arrangements in places such as Baltimore are protesting the municipal arrangements created by black progressives working for the interests of the Democratic party. Dallas’s racial politics aren’t as one-sided as Detroit’s, and neither are its party politics; it is Democratic, but not as lopsidedly Democratic as, say, Philadelphia. It even has had a Republican mayor (the office is technically nonpartisan) within living memory. No doubt somebody in Dallas already is trying to figure out a way to blame that mayor for the murder of those five police officers. America’s cities are mostly a mess. America’s cities are mostly run by Democrats. With a few exceptions (San Diego and Indianapolis, and, until recently, New York) Republicans haven’t had much of a chance, politically, in the large cities. What we’ve had since the middle 1960s was a grand experiment: What would progressives do if given political hegemony, with essentially no meaningful opposition, in America’s cities? The protesters in Dallas know. The ones in Baltimore know even better. Barack Obama came into office promising an era of racial healing, and instead we’re back to something like the 1960s on a more modest (so far) scale: race riots and snipers. This isn’t the sunny uplands of history — it’s Newark. Which is why Democrats would prefer to talk about the NRA, or the specter of “right-wing terrorism,” or anything else other than the reality on the ground. Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437647/democratic-party-urban-poverty-distract-blame-gop

South Tyrol under pressure as Austria turns back migrants http://www.thelocal.at/20160518/south-tyrol-under-pressure-as-austria-returns-migrants … Road closed after police car torched in Paris protests. Follow here: http://www.thelocal.fr/20160518/police-car-torched-in-paris-at-anti-cop-hatred-protest … Crimes By Migrant Gangs Skyrocketing http://bit.ly/1sxxPLH Migrants Burn Down Lampedusa Refugee Welcome Center http://bit.ly/1XlKkoB

Why So Few Syrian Christian Refugees? For the Same Reason You Can’t Find Orphans in Haitian Orphanages By Johnathan Witt It seems bewildering that President Obama insists on opening the floodgates to Syrian Muslim immigrants even after the Paris terrorist attacks. It gets stranger. Ten percent of Syria is Christian, but on Obama’s watch, only about 2.5% of recent Syrian refugees have been Christian, and this even though — unlike their Muslim compatriots — Syrian Christians have nowhere in the Middle East they can go to be wholly free of persecution. So why the stacked deck? No, Barack Hussein Obama is not secretly bowing toward Mecca five times a day on an Oval Office rug. There are almost no Christian refugees from Syria for the same reason there are almost no orphans in Haitian orphanages. {snip} Many Americans would happily have us take in some nice Syrians who have nowhere in the Middle East to turn, who are hunted, plundered, raped, sold and sometimes murdered. And since we have limited capacity in a world of more than 7 billion people, it makes sense to focus on those who have nowhere safe in the Middle East to turn. Yes, Sunni and Shiite Muslims persecute each other in the Middle East, but each group has Sunni or Shiite enclaves they can retreat to in the region. The Christians, meanwhile, aren’t even safe in the refugee camps. So dangerous are the camps for Syrian Christians that they mostly avoid them. And the UN does its refugee head-counting in the refugee camps. If the Christians aren’t there to be counted, desperate as they are, then they don’t end up on the asylum lists the U.S. State Department uses for vetting potential refugees. So, why doesn’t the White House take steps to find and include persecuted Syrian Christian in numbers at least proportionate to their slice of the Syrian population? Maybe the Obama administration just doesn’t care, but even if they cared a little, doing something serious about it would risk annoying the Muslim leaders of the Muslim-dominated countries in the Middle East. As bad off as the Muslim refugees are, they aren’t without politically well-connected advocates in the Middle East. Many Muslim powerbrokers are happy to see Europe and America seeded with Muslim immigrants, and would surely condemn any U.S. action that appeared to prefer Christian over Muslim refugees, even if the effort were completely justified. By and large, they support Muslim immigration to the West and have little interest in seeing Christian refugees filling up any spaces that might have been filled by Muslim refugees. The deck, in other words, is heavily stacked against the Christian refugees. The White House has been utterly feckless before the Muslim power structure in the Middle East that is doing the stacking, and has tried to sell that fecklessness to the American people as a bold stand for a religion-blind treatment of potential refugees —religion tests are un-American! It’s a smokescreen. more at the link: https://stream.org/why-so-few-syrian-christian-refugees/ Christian Syrian Refugees -- United States Won't Admit Non-Muslims ... www.nationalreview.com/. Is This the End of Christianity in the Middle East? - The New York Times www.nytimes.com The other side: Syria's Christian Refugees: Four Wrong Assumptions - The New York ...kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/.

Actually, No. Hillary Clinton Isn’t Better Than Donald Trump FTA: Now that we have destroyed the most qualified and conservative field of GOP presidential candidates in the history of the nation and decided that an unstable Democrat named Donald will be the Republican standard-bearer, some Republicans are claiming that Hillary Clinton is a better choice. This thinking is no less deranged than the thinking that Donald Trump will not be a disaster, no matter if he wins or loses the election. Hillary Clinton’s sole preparation for and only qualification for any office she has held is the fact that she allegedly had sex with Bill Clinton over a period of years. She is an impulsive and vindictive person. She is monumentally unsuited to any enterprise whatsoever. Let’s just look at her record for a moment: Rose Law Firm. Whitewater. Hillary-care. White House travel office. Illegal use of White House to acquire campaign contributions. Allowing her grifting brothers access to the federal government to enrich themselves. Terrorizing Bill Clinton’s harem of former mistresses to keep them quiet and discredit them. The Clinton Foundation. Her private email system. Benghazi. Any public testimony she has given on any subject. The destruction of US foreign policy and alliances Where Donald Trump’s business career is an uninterrupted series of failures, the exact same critique applies to Hillary Clinton’s record each and every time she was allowed to actually exert personal authority over anything. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s failure as Secretary of State is the direct causation for the rise of ISIS, the civil war in Syria, and the refugee crisis hitting Europe. This is not even a question of choosing a “lesser of two evils.” Trump may be unable to dissociate fact from fiction, Hillary Clinton thinks they are the same thing. Saying that Hillary Clinton is better than Donald Trump is just as stupid as saying that Donald Trump is qualified to be president. He isn’t. She isn’t. Paul Ryan is creating a best, safe non-answer for other Republicans -- Trump has to prove he's worthy of my endorsement -- smart .

Also...................this a NYTimes article from September 2015.........its been discussed in other threads last year and specifically here http://forums.twobillsdrive.com/topic/186176-is-sargeant-1st-class-martland-a-hero/?hl=afghan

Flood of migrants coming to Europe makes mockery of £4billion deal to send refugees home http://dailym.ai/1SlKCFN Brussels suspect pictured with ISIS in Syria but was STILL able to sneak back into Europe http://dailym.ai/1S2z65i Migrant who punched and spat at mother deported... but only to Denmark http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/04/01/migrant-crisis-live-wire-rolling-coverage-europes-migrant-crisis-2/ … Norway won't take any more refugees from EU http://bit.ly/23oHRvE Heat sensors installed on Öresund bridge to stop asylum seekers walking to Sweden http://www.thelocal.se/20160408/heat-sensors-to-stop-deadly-asylum-treks-to-sweden … .

Another article on the disparity. The United States Bars Christian, Not Muslim, Refugees From Syriaby Elliott Abrams The title of this blog post–The United States Bars Christian, Not Muslim, Refugees From Syria–will strike many readers as ridiculous. But the numbers tell a different story: The United States has accepted 10,801 Syrian refugees, of whom 56 are Christian. Not 56 percent; 56 total, out of 10,801. That is to say, one half of one percent. The BBC says that ten percent of all Syrians are Christian, which would mean 2.2 million Christians. It is quite obvious, and President Obama and Secretary Kerry have acknowledged it, that Middle Eastern Christians are an especially persecuted group. So how is it that one half of one percent of the Syrian refugees we’ve admitted are Christian, or 56, instead of about 1,000 out of 10,801–or far more, given that they certainly meet the legal definition? The definition: someone who “is located outside of the United States; Is of special humanitarian concern to the United States; Demonstrates that they were persecuted or fear persecution due to race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group.” Somewhere between a half million and a million Syrian Christians have fled Syria, and the United States has accepted 56. Why? “This is de facto discrimination and a gross injustice,” Nina Shea, who is director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, told Fox News. Fox notes another theory: that the United States takes refugee referrals from the UN refugee camps in Jordan and there are no Christians there. more at the link: http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/2016/09/09/the-united-states-bars-christian-not-muslim-refugees-from-syria/

Bye, Refugees: Sweden Plans to Deport 60,000-80,000 Refugees the Next Couple Years http://buff.ly/1Sn34ll #tcot Migrants lying about their age is newest scandal growing amid Europe's asylum crisis http://dailym.ai/1KK8cJT 40% of Germans demand Merkel's resignation over #refugee policy, says @focusonline poll http://dw.com/p/1HldG

Wow, that makes .... sense. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2016/03/23/poland-wont-take-refugees-after-brussels-attacks.html … Poland won't take refugees after Brussels attacks

The Roots of Obama’s Appeasement :The president’s disastrous foreign policy is as much a product of his own vanity as anything else. By Victor Davis Hanson Members of the Obama administration have insisted that the Taliban are not terrorists. Those responsible for the recent Paris killings are not radical Islamists. The Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. Jihad is a “legitimate tenet of Islam.” And “violent extremism,” “workplace violence,” or “man-caused disaster” better describe radical Islamic terrorism. Domestic terrorism is just as likely caused by returning U.S. combat veterans, according to one report by a federal agency. What is the point of such linguistic appeasement? The word “appeasement” long ago became pejorative for giving in to bullies. One side was aggressive and undemocratic; the other consensual and eager to avoid trouble through supposedly reasonable concessions. But appeasement usually weakened the democratic side and empowered the extremist one. {snip} President Obama currently is convinced that his singular charisma and rare insight into human nature will convince the Taliban to peacefully participate in Afghan politics. Obama will supposedly also win over the Iranian theocracy and show it how nonproliferation is really to everyone’s advantage. “Reset” diplomacy with Putin was supposed to lessen tensions — if, after the 2012 election, Putin just had more exposure to a flexible statesman of Obama’s wisdom. More at the link: .

From NYT: "The official war for the Americans — the part of the war that you could go see — that’s over." "It’s only the secret war that’s still going. But it’s going hard." Says an unnamed "former Afghan security official," quoted in a NYT piece titled "Data From Seized Computer Fuels a Surge in U.S. Raids on Al Qaeda." .

Obama in Berlin: Climate change is the “global threat of our time” by Erika Johnsen Germany might be looking to scale way back on their own overly optimistic long-term and government subsidized renewable-energy plans as electricity prices are skyrocketing around the country, but that didn’t stop President Obama from advocating more of the same during his speech in Berlin today, accompanied by all of the usual grandiose platitudes. Via The Hill: “Peace with justice means refusing to condemn our children to a harsher, less hospitable planet,” he said in a speech at Berlin’s Brandenberg Gate. “The effort to slow climate change requires bold action.” Obama touted his first-term work on green energy and boosting auto efficiency rules, but added: “We know we have to do more – and we will do more.” … “With a global middle class consuming more energy every day, this must now be an effort of all nations, not just some. For the grim alternative affects all nations – more severe storms, more famine and floods, new waves of refugees, coastlines that vanish, oceans that rise. This is the future we must avert,” Obama said. “This is the global threat of our time. And for the sake of future generations, our generation must move toward a global compact to confront a changing climate before it is too late. That is our job. That is our task. We have to get to work,” he said, according to a White House transcript. And the White House is planning to do more, especially via executive and regulatory fiat. I mentioned last week that the Obama administration has been hinting to ardent climate-change activists and Democratic base supporters that they have big plans they’re going to reveal next month, and a White House spokesperson gave a few more not-unexpected indications about the type of rules and regs they have in the pipeline, reports National Journal: “If there’s one thing I learned in the four and a half years in the White House, it’s not to get in front of the big guy, but it is worth mentioning the Clean Air Act,” Heather Zichal, deputy assistant to the president for energy and climate change, said at a forum hosted by The New Republic. “This is a tool whether it’s the car rule or the mercury rule, we know that we can implement it with success.” This is the first time a White House official has said on the record that Obama’s forthcoming strategy, first reported by Bloomberg last week, will include some component of the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse-gas rules. Exactly what that means is still unclear. Zichal declined to offer details, including whether the July package would contain a proposal for existing power plants that account for 40 percent of the greenhouse-gas emissions in the country. EPA last year issued a draft rule for new power plants, whose impact on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions is significantly limited compared with the rules for existing plants. … The other two components of the strategy are tightening energy-efficiency standards of appliances and speeding up development of renewable energy on public lands. “None of them require new legislation and none of them require new funding,” she said of the three-part plan. Oh good, still more zealous rules and regulations with major implications for the entire energy sector handed down from on high — just what our economy needs! http://hotair.com/ar...at-of-our-time/ Mush from the wimp ..........NY Post Barack Obama bombs in Berlin: a weak, underwhelming address from a floundering president http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/nilegardiner/100222637/barack-obama-bombs-in-berlin-a-weak-underwhelming-address-from-a-floundering-president/

Europe facing fresh wave of refugees as Assad-Russian bombings drive civilians to Turkey http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/642172/Syria-fighting-north-Aleppo-fresh-wave-refugees-Europe …

Hey that's right Ox. its all of the "other board" refugees anniversary this week .

...does it need to be said just how the media would have handled this under a Republican administration?... http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/09/us-suffered-its-worst-airpower-loss-vietnam-last-week-and-no-one-really-noticed/57139/

Actually, the number of immigrants wrongly granted citizenship is double what was reported yesterday But don't worry................they'll "screen' the new refugees

Syrian Kurdish fighters rescue stranded Yazidis MALIKIYA, Syria (AP) — In a dusty camp here, Iraqi refugees have new heroes: Syrian Kurdish fighters who battled militants to carve out an escape route for tens of thousands trapped on a mountaintop. While the U.S. and Iraqi militaries struggle to aid the starving members of Iraq's Yazidi minority with supply drops from the air, the Syrian Kurds took it on themselves to rescue them. ... For the past few days, fighters have been rescuing Yazidis from the mountain, transporting them into Syrian territory to give them first aid, food and water, and returning some to Iraq via a pontoon bridge. (Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ... .

Bergdahl Rose Garden Ceremony Was an Insult to Flacks By Tim Cavanaugh The Obama administration’s now-defunct effort to turn the release of Army sergeant Bowe Bergdahl into a cheerable moment was more than just a failure of ethics. It was a failure of communication, and an outrage to the honorable profession of image management and crisis public relations. Put aside for a moment the very clear disrespect to both active and former service members implicit in trying to manufacture a feel-good narrative out of Bergdahl’s release by the Haqqani terror network in exchange for five high-value Taliban prisoners. {snip} The conventional wisdom now is that the Bergdahl story was at first viewed as a triumph, until questions began to emerge. This is not exactly true. National Security Adviser Susan Rice was already on the defensive by Sunday morning, when she made her infamous claim that Bergdahl had served with “honor and distinction.” The Rose Garden ceremony was creepy at its heart. Had it not been creepy, there was still a roughly 100 percent probability that people would pay attention to the story. The shilly-shallying and crabbed vocabulary coming out of the executive branch this workweek (State Department spokesman Marie Harf uncorked “fact pattern” Tuesday) indicate something worse than garden-variety presidential dishonesty. They indicate incompetence. It is a cardinal rule of image management that you never roll out a story you may have to walk back. In this respect, strict and well-supported factual accuracy is even more important to a flack than it is to a journalist. A reporter who gets something wrong can generally make post-facto corrections without much fuss. But if you’re trying to make a client look good (or just less-bad), even minor inaccuracies are poisonous. In this case, the weaknesses in the official story would have been clear to one of Kim Jong-un’s staffers. How much contempt must the president have for the voters if he can’t come out and say: Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has been freed in exchange for the release of five Guantanamo detainees. We thank the royal family of Qatar for helping negotiate the exchange. Sergeant Bergdahl, the last POW of the Afghan war, remains on active status and is being well treated? What was served by the Rose Garden show?....................................... What was the teachable moment? . .

Gov’t Confirms Authenticity of Contract Request for ‘Escort Services for Unaccompanied Alien Children’ at the Border http://www.theblaze....-at-the-border/ A January 29th application was posted on Federal Business Opportunities, a website that advertises government contract openings. The post says the government was preparing for the arrival of undocumented kids. They sought vendors to handle transportation logistics. The document states Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, has a “mission-critical responsibility for accepting custody of Unaccompanied Alien Children from US Border Patrol and other Federal agencies,” and then “transporting these juveniles to Office of Refugee Resettlement shelters located throughout the continental United States.” It says there will be “approximately 65,000” of these Unaccompanied Alien Children. A spokeswoman for ICE, Barbara Gonzalez, confirmed the posting was authentic, but couldn’t provide additional information in response to questions from The Blaze. She did promise to get back to them when more information becomes available. Don’t hold your breath. Well the children crossing the border from Mexico and Central America didn’t just wake up one day, tell their parents “so long,” and skip town. Apparently, as many suspected, somebody in the Obama Administration had advance knowledge that these thousands of undocumented children would be flooding the border, illegally, and would require transportation to secure facilities. Whoever that “somebody” in the Obama Administration is, they oughta tell President Obama that this border flood was planned in advance. When he finds out about this, how mad is he going to be?" .

Per the New York Times today: FTA; "Even if they were keeping it a secret — the peace talks — and pretending that the trade was just a trade, we could be fine with that,” the Afghan security official said. “But what has happened is worse than nothing: We are made to look weaker, and the Taliban is stronger.” The officials said the Afghan government would have gladly agreed to keep the five men in Kabul, where they would have stayed in guesthouses run by the National Directorate of Security, ensuring that they were both protected and kept from returning to the insurgency. The officials cited cases of former Taliban leaders who live in Kabul under similar arrangements. Their expenses are paid for by Afghanistan’s National Security Council, which gets funds from the C.I.A. “We would have used them to try to lever another approach to peace,” the former official said. “Could you imagine what it would have done to Taliban morale to see the five come to Kabul and have to live under the Afghan government?” “What does this say to every Afghan that has spent their entire adult lives fighting violent extremism?” said the former official, who is pro-American. “What does this say to all the Afghans that have already died or that will die next year? “We find Obama’s language about ‘this is how wars end’ extremely insensitive,” the former official continued. “It ends for Americans. But it’s not ending for Afghans. Their intellectual dishonesty here is astounding,” he said. “If all you want to do is leave, then just say it. We all know it.”

Releasing the Taliban Five: A Choice, Not an Obligation The U.S. can legally keep captured terrorists even after Afghanistan combat ends. By Andrew C. McCarthy FTA: Senator McCain was being interviewed by Candy Crowley, the Obama campaign savior in CNN garb. As recounted in a Corner post by Patrick Brennan, Ms. Crowley dutifully spun the reeling administration as being between a rock and a hard place, its options limited to: (a) getting captive Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl back now by exchanging the five Taliban commanders detained at Gitmo or (b) being compelled “to release the [Taliban] detainees when U.S. combat operations end in Afghanistan.” Senator McCain countered that this was a “false choice.” That is correct. Even if combat had ceased in Afghanistan, the release of these Taliban detainees would not have been required by the laws of war. My weekend column discussed the Obama fiction that the war in Afghanistan is coming to an end. In reality, the president is engaged in a slow-motion surrender to the Taliban and its jihadist allies that is arbitrarily scheduled to take two years — arbitrarily, that is, unless you think it is the American political calendar rather than Afghan battlefield conditions that decides when combat ends. Now, on top of that fiction, the administration and Ms. Crowley are stacking yet another, to wit: The winding down of combat operations in Afghanistan equals the end of the war on terror, triggering the law-of-war mandate to release all enemy combatants who cannot be charged with war crimes or other offenses. As we’ve been pointing out here for over a decade, combat operations in the ongoing conflict are taking place under a congressional authorization for the use of military force. The AUMF was enacted overwhelmingly a week after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Recognizing that the jihad against the United States is a global one carried out by an intercontinental network of terrorist confederates who do not restrict their operations to one country, the AUMF does not limit combat operations geographically. To the contrary, it authorizes the president to use force against the enemy — essentially, any persons, organizations, or countries complicit in the 9/11 attacks, or that have facilitated and harbored those who were complicit — anywhere in the world where the enemy can be found. More at the link:

Geez, every time you think that this administration could not get more incompetent............. ADMIN CONSIDERS RESETTLING THOUSANDS OF SYRIAN REFUGEES IN AMERICA... The Obama administration is considering resettling thousands of refugees who left Syria during the country's ongoing civil war to multiple towns and cities across the United States, the L.A. Times reports. A resettlement plan under discussion in Washington and other capitals is aimed at relieving pressure on Middle Eastern countries straining to support 1.6 million refugees, as well as assisting hard-hit Syrian families. The State Department is "ready to consider the idea," an official from the department said, if the administration receives a formal request from the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees, which is the usual procedure. The United States usually accepts about half the refugees that the U.N. agency proposes for resettlement. California has historically taken the largest share, but Illinois, Florida, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia are also popular destinations. .

Obama’s increasingly muddled Syria policy By Richard Cohen, I have written so many columns about the Syrian civil war they are like rings on a tree stump — a way of gauging Barack Obama’s steadfast inaction and what the cost has been. In one of my first columns about that war, I called on the administration to arm the rebels and impose a no-fly zone, grounding Bashar al-Assad’s attack helicopters and his airplanes. At that point — March 27, 2012 — the war had taken the lives of 10,000 Syrians. The figure is now at least 92,000. The war claims about 10,000 lives a month. It has pushed more than 1.5 million refugees over Syria’s various borders. It has destabilized the Middle East. It has sucked in jihadists from all over the region. It has become increasingly sectarian in nature and extended Iranian influence. Hezbollah, an Iranian client, has entered the fray, pouring over the border from Lebanon. Poison gas (sarin) has apparently been used by government forces. The larger this crisis gets, the smaller Obama appears. He has shrunk into insignificance. {snip} Obama’s approach to this crisis is stunningly chaotic. First he did next to nothing as the war got out of hand. Now he’s supplying what amounts to Daisy air rifles to the outgunned rebels. He draws the line at using U.S. ground troops — rejecting a demand that has never been made — and if he issues oaths to human decency and laments the huge loss of life, it must be over dinner with the kids. I look — so far in vain — for his policy, for his principles or even for his concern, but what I get is a steely determination to do nothing. There are two tragedies here — one in Syria and one in the West Wing. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/richard-cohen-obamas-increasingly-muddled-syria-policy/2013/06/17/6be2a17e-d77b-11e2-a016-92547bf094cc_story.html?hpid=z2

No, no, no, Don't go blaming us refugees from 14 months ago, for this current round of lightweights. .

WaPo: Obama’s wishful thinking won’t win war on terror The Washington Post’s editorial on the embassy closings and the worldwide terror alert is worth noting for a couple of reasons. First, the Post’s editors call out Barack Obama for his naïveté in dealing with terrorism, especially on the issues of captured terrorists and the administration’s utter lack of preparation of dealing with that issue in the future: THE STATE Department has shuttered 19 embassies for a week, fearing terrorist attacks. Hundreds of prisoners, including senior al-Qaeda operatives, have busted loose in prison breaks in Iraq, Libya and Pakistan. At Bagram air base in Afghanistan, The Post’s Kevin Sieff reports, U.S. forces are holding 67 non-Afghan prisoners, many of whom can’t be tried in court but are too dangerous to release. Meanwhile President Obama says he wants to “refine and ultimately repeal” the mandate Congress has given him to fight the war on terror. What’s going on here? Good question. The forces of AQ have just exploded over the last three-plus weeks, thanks to the eleven jailbreaks that seem to have been coordinated in correlation, at least, to the current threat. What will the US do with them if we capture those escapees in order to end the threat? Er … no one really knows: From the beginning of his tenure, the president has been reluctant to build a legal framework that would assume that the fight against al-Qaeda and like-minded groups might go on for a long time. He not only proposed closing the prison at Guantanamo, rightly given its poisonous effect on the United States’ image, but he also opposed options to hold prisoners taken in future operations. That may be one reason so many alleged terrorists have been killed during his time in office and so few captured. This President has been reluctant to even use the terminology of war, preferring anodyne euphemismslike “overseas contingency operations,” “kinetic military operations” (applied to Libyan intervention), and my favorite, “man-caused disasters.” All of those replacements intended to downplay the threat of terrorism and the actions needed to address it. That’s either explicitly dishonest or a case of wishful thinking, although I’d bet that it’s the latter more than the former. {snip} Finally, the editors express amazement that Obama is talking about ending the war as AQ is obviously expanding it. John Kerry made a commitment to end drone strikes in Pakistan “very, very soon,” based on a “very real timeline” from Obama himself, who said in May that “This war, like all wars, must end.” A refusal to fight a war is not the same as ending it, the Post reminds the President: But like all wars, this one will end only if one party is defeated or both agree to lay down their weapons. Neither appears likely any time soon, and the president’s eagerness to disengage, while understandable and in sync with U.S. public opinion, may in the end lengthen the conflict. His hope of fighting the bad guys as antiseptically as possible, with drone strikes and a minimal presence, may prove as forlorn as President Clinton’s similar effort in the 1990s, when the equivalent weapon at his disposal was cruise missiles. That’s exactly correct. The question will be whether this week’s events will change the calculus in the White House. If ever there was a wake-up call on the danger of al-Qaeda that doesn’t involve a successful terrorist attack, this should be it.