Obama Warns Against Income Inequality While Delivering $7,700-a-Minute Speech

At Breitbart, via Instapundit, "OUR RULING CLASS IN A NUTSHELL."

FLASHBACK: Barry Rubin, Silent Revolution

Since I'm blogging about all these violent crazy leftists, who worry me sometimes, here's a flashback to the late Barry Rubin's excellent book.

At Amazon, Silent Revolution: How the Left Rose to Political Power and Cultural Dominance.

President Obama Surprises Vice President Joe Biden with Presidential Medal of Freedom (VIDEO)

Biden was generally surprised.

He truly thought it was a farewell ceremony, and that folks were mostly going to say good things about each other, blah, blah. And then the president announced the award.

I'll be glad when this administration is gone, and I frankly don't remember so much glad-handing, back-slapping, and mutual encomiums when the G.W. Bush administration left office. I think O's taken narcissism to a whole new level.

Still, I gotta admit this moment was pretty amazing. That's genuine emotion coming from the vice president (who, I believe, is a decent man, despite his far-left proclivities).

The story's at USA Today.

And at CNN, which I had going live in real time:

Race-Baiter-in-Chief

Ain't it the truth?

From Ben Garrison:

The Final Countdown! 12 Days till the "Race Baiter in Chief" is out of the Oval Office! #Obama #ObamasLegacy #Soros https://t.co/Oj98iIxEAZ pic.twitter.com/kYJnCm5xfK

— BenGarrison Cartoons (@GrrrGraphics) January 7, 2017

Sunday Cartoons

At Flopping Aces, "Sunday Funnies."



And at Theo's, "Cartoon Roundup..."

Cartoon Credit: A.F. Branco, "Make War Not Love."

Bears Ears National Monument and Gold Butte National Monument

The Obama regime is really going on an end-of-year administrative blitz, especially on the environment.

So craven and dishonest. Why not push these initiatives during the first administration, or before the 2014 midterms? Of course O's regime knew they'd be unpopular and the Democrats would face massive backlash.

Anyway, at Memeorandum, "Statement by the President on the Designation of Bears Ears National Monument and Gold Butte National Monument."

And at LAT:

President Obama designates two new national monuments in the West https://t.co/SYKbJj8aXF pic.twitter.com/2vslGHuwdJ

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) December 28, 2016

More, at Western Journalism, "Utah Lawmakers Vow to Fight Obama’s Creation of National Monuments."

Obama's Tragic Let 'em Out Fantasy

A most excellent analysis, from Heather Mac Donald, at the Wall Street Journal, "The president leads the charge to cut the prison population, but mass incarceration isn’t the problem. Rising crime is."

Knife-Wielding Palestinian Girl: 'I Want to Stab a Jew'

Watch, at Truth Revolt, "This is what we're up against."

Eritrean Asylum Seeker 'Lynched' in Israel (VIDEO)

This is just a horrible, stomach-curdling story.

At the Los Angeles Times, "'One crime breeds another': Bus station shooting sparks a 'shocking lynching' in Israel."

And at the Times of Israel, "Soul-searching in Israel after mob beats Eritrean misidentified as terrorist":

The recent wave of terror attacks has led to fear and panic but the events in Beersheba Sunday night brought things to a whole new level.

JERUSALEM (AP) — The death of an Eritrean migrant who was shot and beaten by a mob that mistakenly believed he was a Palestinian attacker set off a round of soul-searching Monday amid the jittery atmosphere sweeping Israel in a wave of unrest.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu condemned the vigilantism. Some critics accused Israel’s leaders of fostering the charged climate, while others called for the swift prosecution of the crazed mob.

“It is a disgrace to Israeli society, and those that carried out this lynching need to be found and brought to justice,” said Yaakov Amidror, Netanyahu’s former national security adviser.

“Even if it was the terrorist himself, by the way, after he was shot, after he was neutralized and lying on the floor, you need to be an animal to torment him,” he told Israel Radio.

Eight Israelis have been killed in the past month in the attacks, mostly stabbings, on city streets. At least 42 Palestinians have been killed — including 20 identified as attackers; the rest died in clashes with Israeli forces.

Amid the seemingly random attacks, Israelis have stocked up on mace and pepper spray, and some public officials are openly carrying personal weapons and encouraging the public to do the same. Security has been increased, and especially in Jerusalem.

The violence has led to fear and sometimes outright panic...

Plus, more video at Reuters, "Eritrean mistaken for gunman killed in Israeli bus station attack."

Palestinian Leaders Have Created a Culture of Death That's Motivating the Latest Violent Terrorism

I think Jeffrey Goldberg's phrase, "the stabbing intifada," really captures it.

And here's more, from Tzipi Hotovely, at the Wall Street Journal, "Abbas: ‘We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem’":

The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Keep reading.

Why Israel Will Never Be Able to Separate from the Palestinians

From Caroline Glick, at FrontPage Magazine, "KERRY, ISRAELI ARABS AND THE SEPARATION DELUSION."

And her latest book is most timely, at Amazon, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.

The Paranoid, Supremacist Roots of the Stabbing Intifada

From Jeffrey Goldberg, at the Atlantic:

Knife attacks on Jews in Jerusalem and elsewhere are not based on Palestinian frustration over settlements, but on something deeper.

*****

The current “stabbing Intifada” now taking place in Israel—a quasi-uprising in which young Palestinians have been trying, and occasionally succeeding, to kill Jews with knives—is prompted in good part by the same set of manipulated emotions that sparked the anti-Jewish riots of the 1920s: a deeply felt desire on the part of Palestinians to “protect” the Temple Mount from Jews.

When Israel captured the Old City of Jerusalem in June of 1967 in response to a Jordanian attack, the first impulse of some Israelis was to assert Jewish rights atop the Mount. Between 1948, the year Israel achieved independence, and 1967, Jordan, then the occupying power in Jerusalem, banned Jews not only from the 35-acre Mount—which is known to Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary—but also from the Western Wall below. When paratroopers took the Old City, they raised the Israeli flag atop the Dome of the Rock, but the Israeli defense minister, Moshe Dayan, ordered it taken down, and soon after promised leaders of the Muslim Waqf, the trust that controlled the mosque and the shrine, that Israel would not interfere in its activities. Since then, successive Israeli governments have maintained the status quo established by Dayan.

There is another status quo associated with the Temple Mount, however, that has been showing signs of weakening. This is a religious status quo. The mainstream rabbinical view for many years has been that Jews should not walk atop the Mount for fear of treading on the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Temple that, according to tradition, housed the Ark of the Covenant. The Holy of Holies is the room in which the Jewish high priest spoke the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable name of God, on Yom Kippur.

The exact location of the Holy of Holies is not known, and Muslim authorities have prevented archeologists from conducting any excavations on the Mount, in part out of fear that such explorations will uncover further evidence of a pre-Islamic Jewish presence. This mainstream rabbinical view concerning the Mount—that it should be the direction of Jewish prayer, rather than a place of Jewish prayer—has made the lives of Jerusalem’s temporal authorities easier, by keeping Muslim and Jewish worshippers separated.

In recent years, however, small groups of radical religious innovators who oppose the mainstream rabbinical view have sought to make the Mount, once again, a site of Jewish prayer. (Here is a New York Times Magazine story I wrote about these radical groups.) These activists have gained sympathizers among some far-right political figures in Israel, though the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has not altered the separation-of-religions status quo.

Convincing Palestinians that the Israeli government is not trying to alter the status quo on the Mount has been difficult because many of  today’s Palestinian leaders, in the manner of the Palestinian leadership of the 1920s, actively market rumors that the Israeli government is seeking to establish atop the Mount a permanent Jewish presence.

The comments of the Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas—by general consensus the most moderate leader in the brief history of the Palestinian national movement—have been particularly harsh. Though Abbas has authorized Palestinian security services to work with their Israeli counterparts to combat extremist violence, his rhetoric has inflamed tensions. “Every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem is pure, every martyr will reach paradise, and every injured person will be rewarded by God,” he said last month, as rumors about the Temple Mount swirled. He went on to say that Jews “have no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet.” Taleb Abu Arrar, an Israeli Arab member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, argued publicly that Jews “desecrate” the Temple Mount by their presence. (Fourteen years ago, Yasser Arafat, then the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told me that “Jewish authorities are forging history by saying the Temple stood on the Haram al-Sharif. Their temple was somewhere else.”)

Keep reading.

Israel Builds Temporary Security Walls Between Jewish and 'Palestinian' Neighbourhoods (VIDEO)

Postcards from the "Palestinian" peace process, via France 24:



Also, at Israel Matzav, "Breaking: Five Israelis wounded as two 'Palestinian' terrorists open fire in BeerSheva - UPDATED."

Radical Leftists Demand 'Justice for Palestinians' at Anti-Israel Protest in London (VIDEO)

Behold the complete moral bankruptcy of the contemporary "progressive" left. When you're protesting to defend Palestinians murdering innocent Jews with butcher knives and meat cleavers, there's something deeply wrong with your fundamental values.

Previously, "New Palestinian Intifada 'is drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate...' (VIDEO)," and "Fanatical Palestinian Slams Car Into Bus Stop, Jumps Out and Hacks Israeli to Death (VIDEO)."

And at the video, hate-mongering ghoul George Galloway leads despicable, demonic leftists in London's anti-Israel demonstration, via Ruptly:

Fanatical Palestinian Slams Car Into Bus Stop, Jumps Out and Hacks Israeli to Death (VIDEO)

Leftists support this terrorism and murder in the name of social justice.

At Hot Air, "Video: Palestinian terrorist runs over Israelis, hacks one to death."

The video's here.

Monstrous evil.

But that's the left for you.

Palestinian Posing as Journalist Stabs Israeli Soldier with Knife (VIDEO)

At Weasel Zippers, "Palestinian Posing as Journalist With ‘Press’ Logo Stabs Israeli Soldier."

New Palestinian Intifada 'is drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate...' (VIDEO)

From Jonathan Tobin, at Commentary, "Clueless About a Religious War":

While the narrative about this latest outbreak of violence from critics of Israel is that it is all about the sins of the “occupation” and Israel denying hope to the Palestinians, what we hearing from them is a very different story. Read any of the accounts of the motivations of the people going into the streets to stab random Jews they encounter or the mobs in the West Bank who are seeking to set off confrontations with Israeli troops, and you don’t hear much about frustration about the peace process. The same applies to clips from Palestinian television that Palestine Media Watch provides. What you do see are accounts of Muslim religious fervor that is drenched in the fever of martyrdom and faith-based hate...

More.

And see, "Why Are Palestinians Doing It?"

President Obama Golfing at Torrey Pines Golf Course (VIDEO)

BUMPED!

Heh, it's all the guy does these days, lol.

At ABC News 10 San Diego, "President Obama Waves from Golf Cart at Torrey Pines Golf Course."

Added: "President Obama Plays Golf at Torrey Pines."

And at Weasel Zippers, "Russian Missiles? Intifada In Israel? Obama Takes to the Golf Course!"

Hamas Chief Calls Surge of Violence a New Palestinian Intifada (VIDEO)

At the Times of Israel, "Hamas leader declares ‘intifada’ in the West Bank":

Hamas’s chief in Gaza on Friday called violence that has hit Israel and the West Bank in recent days an “intifada” and urged further unrest.

“We are calling for the strengthening and increasing of the intifada… It is the only path that will lead to liberation,” Ismail Haniyeh said during a sermon for weekly Muslim prayers at a mosque in Gaza City.

“Gaza will fulfill its role in the Jerusalem intifada and it is more than ready for confrontation,” he added.

The Islamic terror movement Hamas rules Gaza, the Palestinian enclave squeezed between Egypt and Israel and separated from the West Bank.

Gaza has been the site of three wars with Israel since 2008, but it has remained mainly calm amid the recent unrest in Israel and the West Bank...

Also at the Guardian UK, "Violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories – the Guardian briefing," and "Hamas leader in Gaza declares intifada as deadly attacks continue."

Obama's Justice Department to Release 6,000 Prisoners, the So-Called 'Non-Violent' Drug Offenders

I'm obviously not so thrilled about this, but Obama promised a fundamental transformation, so there you go.

At the New York Times, "6,000 Inmates to Be Freed as U.S. Tries New Tack on Drugs."

Also at Pajamas, "Happy Halloween! Feds to Release 6,000 Prisoners at End of Month."

FLASHBACK: From Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal, "Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?"