From today's Washington Times:

"Sen. John McCain told a Hispanic group Saturday that passing an immigration bill to legalize illegal immigrants is `my top priority, yesterday, today and tomorrow'...."

From today's Washington Post:

"McCain...insisted that immigration `will be my top priority yesterday, today and tommorrow.' "

National Review's Byron York provides transcript here.

While the New York Times tells us some Americans are actually taking  the name "Hussein" in honor of  Barack Obama's to-date, third-rail- unmentionable-on-pain-of-social-and-professional-and-political-ostracism middle name--

“My name is such a vanilla, white-girl American name,” said Ashley Holmes of Indianapolis, who changed her name online [to Ashley Hussein Holmes] “to show how little meaning ‘Hussein’ really has”...Take me now, O Abyss--

Bill Clinton, the London Telegraph reports, is not exactly, all the way ready to make the change--or even pledge his fealty to his party's putative standard-bearer. According to a quoted senior Democrat: "He's saying he's not going to reach...

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This week's column  mentions a conversation I had with a conservative British MEP (Member of European Parliament) who took issue with my concern about the Islamization of Europe for two basic reasons: (One) For roughly the first 12 or 13 centuries of Islam until 1979, as he explained it, everything was effectively hunky dory with Islam; then that wascally wadical Ayatollah Khomeini showed up, ruining everything. In other words, Islam, which includes Islamic law (my concern), is fine; it's just those wascally wadicals who are a problem. And (two): My MEP told me he knows a perfectly lovely man who is Muslim--prays five times a day and everything--so, well then. At one point in the conversation, he rather abuptly said that if my reading of Islam's intrinsic incompatibility with Western-style liberty was correct, Europe had only two choices: Conversion to Islam or deportation of Muslims. Rather than face up to the hard-eyed task of...

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Charles Krauthammer on the stunning flips and flops of Barack Obama, and the even more stunning negligence on the part of the media in not  reporting on them:

I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

Readers concerned about incursions of Islamic law into Western society often ask me what they can do about. Well, besides filling your larders with Danish imports, here's something: Contact members of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees and urge them to pass the federal version of New York State's "Rachel's Law," which I have written about here. It is called THE FREE SPEECH PROTECTION ACT (S-2977 & H.R. 5814), and it has been introduced by Reps. Peter King (R-NY) and Anthony Weiner (D-NY) and Sens. Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and Arlen Specter (R-PA).

More info below, including lawmakers' email addresses. Like NYS's "Rachel's Law" this federal bill would protect American journalists from libel suits brought...

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This week's column:

As a dutiful American columnist, I should probably be pondering the half-baked presumption behind Barack Obama's bizarre "presidential" seal. Or shaking my head at John McCain's hair-trigger panic over an aide's answer to a question about terrorism's political impact. Or clucking over the irresponsibly childish $300 billion goodie bag -- I mean, mortgage bailout bill -- that just passed in the U.S. Senate. But I can't stop thinking about Europe.

No surprise there. I just returned from a swift-moving, fact-finding journey through six European countries. And that tally doesn't even include two side-trips: one to Luxemburg just to buy cheaper diesel fuel (no kidding); and one to the German town of Monschau in the northern Ardennes where my G.I. father, still wearing the summer-weight uniform that perfectly suited Normandy in June of 1944, contracted pneumonia in December of the same year, and was thus taken off the front line for medical treatment just days before the Germans launched...

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The New York Times today tells a harrowing story about the Islamic system of dhimmitude forced onto Christians in Iraq under the very noses of American forces--but it's clear the newspaper doesn't realize it. The subject at hand is a Sunni-insurgent version of the "jizya," or Islamic poll tax, which, since the days of Mohammed, has been collected from Jews and Christians according to Islamic law as payment for thepermission to worship non-Islamically. According to a Christian member of the Iraqi parliament quoted in the story, "All Iraqi Christians paid."  

From the Times report: 

MOSUL, Iraq--As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the...

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One of the many nice people I recently met in Europe was the Scandanavian blogger  Snaphanen. Having just visited his site--mainly in Danish, alas for me, although I notice he was kind enough to put up yesterday's post--I have come away with this video clip (above) taken from BBC's Newsnight. It is an interview with Margot Wallstrom, conducted in the wake of the spunky Irish No Vote against ratification of the EU's Orwellian Lisbon Treaty earlier this month. Wallstrom is a high EU official who, like other high EU officials, simply doesn't care whether EU-member states ratify the Lisbon Treaty: They will push it through regardless of  things like plebiscites, people's will, stuff like that.

The question she repeatedly and fascinatingly dodges in this clip is what  voters in Europe can  do to stop the Lisbon Treaty. Her point is: Nothing.

Which just goes to illustrate a...

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Proving that someone can be two places at once, Robert Spencer examines the means by which the West is strangling its own freedom of speech here and here.

If, as Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan said earlier this year to Germany's  sizeable Turkish minority, "assimilation is a crime against humanity," what might a predicted football victory by Germany over Turkey tonight in Switzerland be?

The Islamic strategy to compel the suicidal West to destroy its own  identifying liberties by exploiting capitalism's essential weakness-- blithering fear of shrinking markets--continues apace with renewed calls for an Islamic  boycott of Dutch and Danish goods.

The Jordan Times reports:

The ultimate goal, according to campaign spokesperson Zakaria Sheikh, is to enact a universal law that prohibits the defamation of any prophet or religion, similar to the international legislation banning anti-Semitism.

Aha: The "ultimate goal" is to outlaw debate and dissent about the  totalitarian tenets of Islamic ideology. This is a goal being simultaneously  pursued on all fronts.

Sheikh...

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Last summer, after writing a fantasy-column about what "President" Dick Cheney might have done during those few hours of presidential powers he held while George W. Bush was hospitalized for minor surgery, I received an email from Lt. Col. Allen West (USA ret.) (pictured above). He thanked me for including him the following "presidential" reverie:

Mr. Cheney checked his watch. It was already 35 minutes into his "presidential" term, but he had plenty of time left to issue presidential pardons for border agents Ignacio Ramos and Jose Alonso Compean (now serving excessively harsh terms for wounding a fleeing drug smuggler following a struggle). And while he was at it, what about presidential recognition for the service of some of our great soldiers who have been overzealously prosecuted...

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One thing I realized on my recent Euro travels is that President Bush set out to democratize the wrong part of the world. It is European-Union Europe  (gripped by welfare state socialists, identity-denying appeasers and leftist totalitarian bureacrats), NOT the Islamic Middle East, that could have actually benefited from an infusion of good, ol' fashioned democratic principles--you know, freedom of speech, respect for election results (see EU attempts to reverse Ireland's recent No vote on the Lisbon Treaty), things like that. 

That said, it is even more astonishing  to read in this morning's Washington Post how there is now a force on the global political spectrum to the Left of lefty Europe. It is called Barack Obama for President.  The Post, of course, didn't frame the story that way exactly, but the facts speak for themselves....

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Having just returned to these United States from what can only be described as a whirlwind European tour that included stopovers ranging from several days to several hours in eight nations (!), I return to blogging (gently) by posting my most recent column, just in case anyone missed it.  More, as they say, to come.    

Classic Clinton.

Heading out on assignment.

Posting (technology permitting) will be light for the next two weeks.

Fauzia Mufti Abbas, Pakistan's ambassador to Denmark, on the suicide bombing attack on Denmark's embassy in Pakistan:

'I'd like to know if your newspaper is satisfied with what it has done and what it has unleashed?'

Enough pictures of La Bardot as Sex Kitten. Above is a picture of a mosque in Paris, aka The City of Light, where, coincidentally, a court just found Brigitte Bardot--an animal rights activist who has long campaigned against bloody Islamic ritual slaughter--guilty for the fifth time of "inciting racial hatred" for writing in a letter to then-Interior Ministry that France was “tired of being led by the nose by this population that is destroying us, destroying our country by imposing its acts.”

Killing and chilling free speech, French style.

Just kidding, sort of.

Aaron Klein breaks ground on the staffing connections between Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and the all-but-official presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, Barack Obama, connections first reported by Debbie Schlussel:

Sen. Barack Obama employed and continues to employ senior staffers who belong to the Nation of Islam, and the presidential candidate has some "worrying" ties to the controversial group headed by Louis Farrakhan, a former key Obama insider told WND.

The story goes on to tick off these NOI-Obama staffing connections, which began during Obama's days as an Illinois state senator (which, of course, only ended four years ago). A couple of the more recent links Klein reports are: 

Jennifer Mason, who still works in Obama's Chicago Senate office as director of constituency services – "a key community liaison position," Klein writes--and Cynthia K. Miller, "whom the former insider identified as a Nation of Islam activist, served Obama in his early state Senate days and later as treasurer for his U.S. senatorial campaign."

...

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Nope, Hillary's not going anywhere yet. So long as a winning delegate count eluded Obama, that made sense. But after he clinched the magic number, what did she do?

Dick Morris, in a column advising Obama not to offer the veep spot to Hillary, thereby turning his ticket into a Clintonian menage a trois, put it this way:

Last night, when Obama went over the top in delegates and could claim the nomination as his, Hillary organized a rally of all of her supporters, directly competing for airtime with the newly minted nominee.

So, he wins and she wants to take the marbles home. She may well determine that it is actually to her advantage to go gracious and all ship-of-stately on us, but for now at least, we see the True Clinton shining through. In a word (at least, I think it's a word): Waaa-aaaa-aaaa!

Death...

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In the subterranean bowels of a provincial courthouse, a bizarre and frightening spectacle starts to unfold....

So begins Brian Hutchinson's  account in the National Post (Canada) of the kangaroo court proceedings now underway under the auspices of something called the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. (Folks, we are now officially beyond the bounds of Orwell.) These proceedings are  more than likely to culminate in a conviction against McLean's magazine for printing an excerpt of America Alone, the best-selling book by columnist Mark Steyn arguing that Western democracy is imperiled by the spread...

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Reading about the Talibanization of Pakistan in today's paper, and the suicide-bombing of the already skeleton-staffed Danish embassy essentially live on the Internet, I want to know about Pakistan's nuclear arsenal: namely, is it possible to destroy it, remove it (military options) or just neutralize it (spy stuff)? And if not, why not?     

And look at this snatch of background material from the Danish embassy story, which mentions, by the way, that there were new Motoon protests on Monday in the Pakistani city of Multan:

Denmark recently downgraded the embassy [in Pakistan] and moved out most foreign staff. In April, Denmark...

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Catching up on the Elle magazine's Green Issue (my hairdresser was late) , I now realize that recycling is so much more than newspapers.

California jewerler Suzanne Felsten is introducing a line of oceanic-themed cocktail rings made out of recycled 18-karat-gold.

Of course! Why didn't we think of this before?

By mixing rose, yellow, and white gold scraps filed off during the typical design process and fashioning them into prickly sea urchins--natch--the Los Angeles native hopes to remind people how important it is to be mindful of natural resources and minerals.

But not, apparently, their greenbacks: The peach moonstone ring Elle  features goes for $4,100 a pop. The mag is filled with similarly "important" "reminders," from organic cotton t-shirts to "vintage vegan leather" bags (?), to "cruelty-free mittens and hats [made] from baby alpacas that died of natural causes...

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