Donald Trump’s Outlandish Abortion Comments Mirror Republican Confusion

Donald Trump, Law, Private Property, Republicans

In defense of Donald Trump’s outlandish abortion comments; Republicans themselves are vague and confusing on the matter. I’ve never heard a Republican say outright that “only the person performing the abortion should be punished.” If this is the official GOP position, it seems as bizarre as Trump’s statement. I can see why he was confused. Why punish service provider and not service seeker?! (Don’t tell me; spare me.)

Background via BBC News:

US presidential hopeful Donald Trump has withdrawn a call for women who have abortions to be punished, only hours after suggesting it.

He had proposed “some form of punishment” for women who have abortions if they were made illegal.

But after strong criticism, Mr Trump repeated the Republican party line that only the person performing the abortion should be punished, not the women.

The Republican front-runner supports a ban on abortions, with some exceptions.

Abortion has been legal in the United States since 1973 after a landmark Supreme Court ruling.

Only the Supreme Court or a constitutional amendment has the power to overturn Roe v Wade and make abortion illegal.

I would have thought that Republicans ought stick to reality. In America, “women have the right de jure to screw and scrape out their insides to their heart’s content.” The only question is, should taxpayer rights, especially the rights of the anti-abortion faithful, be compromised to fund the procedure.

I would have thought that Republicans ought to explain that when feminists and their media lickspittles speak of “abortion rights,” they mean federal funding for abortion. Nothing else. A “right” to undergo an abortion is to be distinguished from a right to federal funding of your abortion. Don’t conflate “abortion rights” with federal funding for abortion.

More about the distinction in “From Benghazi To The Abortion Killing Fields.”

But Republicans have, understandably, confused Mr. Trump. By now, Trump, however, should no longer be winging it.

Donald Trump’s ‘He Started It’ Argument Is Libertarian

Conservatism, Donald Trump, Feminism, Free Speech, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Logic, Reason

Donald Trump’s ‘He started it’ argument, whinged CNN’s Anderson Cooper, is a five-year-old’s argument. Maybe. But it’s also the skeleton of the libertarian, non-aggression axiom: aggression against aggressors only.

First, context via Gawker:

During last night’s CNN-hosted Republican town hall in Milwaukee there was a funny, and perhaps even cathartic, exchange between Anderson Cooper and Donald Trump over Trump’s hounding of Ted Cruz’s wife, which culminated with Cooper telling Trump he was acting like a child while Trump insisted that he wasn’t acting like a child. …

MORE.

It’s not enough to malign something as childish. You have to show that the maligned childish thought or act is wrong. Children can be right, on rare occasions. Besides, the liberal left worships The Children (as do their partners among new, feminized, Michelle-Fields conservatives). Adults are the dolts in every Hollywood film. In liberal lore, those founts of knowledge and wisdom spring from the effing kids, mostly.

In this case, The Donald aka The libertarians aka The Kids are correct. Aggression against aggressors is justifiable.

Of course, verbal aggression is not the aggression libertarians are referring to when we apply libertarian law. Speech is not aggression.

‘How ISIS Built the Machinery Of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze’ (UPDATE: 4/22)

EU, Europe, Homeland Security, Islam, Jihad, Terrorism

Donald Trump is right, Again. Europe and the UK are unsafe. ISIS is operating in plain sight. With imprimatur, if to go by the New York Times’ “How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze.” The ISIS EU operatives are often given free passage by European gatekeepers. The question: Who’s complicit and is this treason by design or by accident?

Highlights from “How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze” :

… the signs of this focused terrorist machine were readable in Europe as far back as early 2014. Yet local authorities repeatedly discounted each successive plot, describing them as isolated or random acts, the connection to the Islamic State either overlooked or played down. …

… For much of 2012 and 2013, the jihadist group that eventually became the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, was putting down roots in Syria. Even as the group began aggressively recruiting foreigners, especially Europeans, policy makers in the United States and Europe continued to see it as a lower-profile branch of Al Qaeda that was mostly interested in gaining and governing territory.

One of the first clues that the Islamic State was getting into the business of international terrorism came at 12:10 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2014, when the Greek police pulled over a taxi in the town of Orestiada, less than four miles from the Turkish border. Inside was a 23-year-old French citizen named Ibrahim Boudina, who was returning from Syria. In his luggage, the officers found 1,500 euros, or almost $1,700, and a French document titled “How to Make Artisanal Bombs in the Name of Allah.”

But there was no warrant for his arrest in Europe, so the Greeks let him go, according to court records detailing the French investigation.

Mr. Boudina was already on France’s watch list, part of a cell of 22 men radicalized at a mosque in the resort city of Cannes. … his ties to the [ISIS] group were buried in French paperwork and went unconnected to later cases. … Like the killers in Paris and Brussels, all of these earlier operatives were French speakers — mostly French and Belgian citizens, alongside a handful of immigrants from former French colonies, including Morocco.

They were arrested in Italy, Spain, Belgium, France, Greece, Turkey and Lebanon with plans to attack Jewish businesses, police stations and a carnival parade. They tried to open fire on packed train cars and on church congregations. In their possession were box cutters and automatic weapons, walkie-talkies and disposable cellphones, as well as the chemicals to make TATP.

Most of them failed. And in each instance, officials failed to catch — or at least to flag to colleagues — the men’s ties to the nascent Islamic State. …

… In one of the highest-profile instances, Mehdi Nemmouche returned from Syria via Frankfurt and made his way by car to Brussels, where on May 24, 2014, he opened fire inside the Jewish Museum of Belgium, killing four people. Even when the police found a video in his possession, in which he claimed responsibility for the attack next to a flag bearing the words “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” Belgium’s deputy prosecutor, Ine Van Wymersch, dismissed any connection.

“He probably acted alone,” she told reporters at the time.

“All of the signals were there,” said Michael S. Smith II, a counterterrorism analyst whose firm, Kronos Advisory, began briefing the United States government in 2013 on ISIS’ aspirations to strike Europe. “For anyone paying attention, these signals became deafening by mid-2014.” …

… Intelligence officials in the United States and Europe have confirmed the broad outlines of the external operations unit: It is a distinct body inside ISIS, with its command-and-control structure answering to Mr. Adnani, who reports to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State. …

… In an audio recording released on Sept. 22, 2014, Mr. Adnani, the ISIS spokesman and chief of the external operations wing, addressed the West.

“We will strike you in your homeland,” he promised, calling on Muslims everywhere to kill Europeans, “especially the spiteful and filthy French.” And he urged them to do it in any manner they could: “Smash his head with a rock, or slaughter him with a knife, or run him over with your car,” he said, according to a translation provided by the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors extremist propaganda.

In the months that followed, a man decapitated his employer near the French city of Lyon, sending a snapshot of the severed head to the Islamic State. Another man stormed a police station in Paris, carrying a butcher’s knife and a photocopy of the Islamic State’s flag. …

… the group’s method for carrying out jihad in Europe involves an adaptation of Auftragstaktik, a combat doctrine within the German Army in the 19th century. Those tactical guidelines call for commanders to give subordinates a goal and a time frame in which to accomplish it, but otherwise to give them the freedom to execute it.

The Islamic State explains in the article that it adopted the system to give recruits “complete tactical autonomy,” with few fingerprints that could be tracked back to the group, and “no micromanaging.”

.. That network stretched like a web across Europe to at least a dozen other accomplices, including a cell holed up in an apartment in the Brussels neighborhood of Schaerbeek, where two other teams of Islamic State fighters prepared the bombs detonated last week in Brussels Airport and a metro station.

And Trump is right about community complicit, too.

The overpowering odor that comes with refining and storing TATP was noticed by the building’s owner weeks before the bombings, Belgian officials said, but he did not report it until after the attacks.

READ “How ISIS Built the Machinery of Terror Under Europe’s Gaze.”

AND NOW (4/22):

If Honest Abe Stole Elections, Then It Must Be OK, Right?

Conservatism, Elections, History, Republicans

Heroic Lincoln heretic Thomas DiLorenzo reminds us that stealing elections is a venerated GOP tradition:

Scott Walker has reminded his fellow neocons that Abe Lincoln was nominated in a “brokered convention.” (Scroll to the last paragraph of the linked article). This follows the 150-year tradition of the Grand Old Party of Thieves and Murderers: If Abe illegally suspended Habeas Corpus and imprisoned tens of thousands of Northern-state political dissenters, it must be OK for us to do it. If Abe ran an empire of gulags for political dissenters imprisoned without due process, it must be OK for us to do it. If Abe shut down hundreds of opposition newspapers, it must be OK for us to do it. If Abe orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of his own citizens in order to destroy the principles of a voluntary union and the notion that a government’s just powers rest upon the consent of the governed then, why, of course it is OK for us to just ignore the consent of the governed in the Republican primaries. Abe would be looking up at us from where he is now and smiling. (Thanks to Chris Rossini).

Links.