An Opportunity

…in the hands of competent authority.

ISIS fighters who fled to the terror group’s Iraqi stronghold of Mosul after being defeated in Ramadi were burned alive in the town square, sources told FoxNews.com, in an unmistakable message to fighters who may soon be defending the northern city from government forces.

Several residents of Mosul recounted the grisly story for stateside relatives, describing the deadly reception black clad jihadists got when they made it to Mosul….

Notice that. These were guys who’d either rejected the martyrdom of dying in place or who had recognized a lost position and departed in order to resume the fight in another place and time.

Here’s the opportunity: guys like this aren’t going to be allowed, in Tacitus’ words, to “fight and run away, To turn and fight another day.” No, they’ll die, anyway, a grisly death of the sort reserved for the enemies of the Daesh. So: make it easy for them to surrender rather than retreat.

Of course, that would require their Arab or Kurdish captors, of whatever sect of Islam, to treat them with some semblance of humanity. But that’s another opportunity, this time for Arabs and Kurds, of whatever sect of Islam, themselves.

No Pandering Here

Mm, mm. Nosirree, Bob. Democratic Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton wouldn’t do that.

Democratic Party presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton joined her rivals Monday in opposing the Obama administration’s deportation raids targeting Central American immigrants who entered the US illegally and ignored deportation orders.

Never mind that just a bit over a year ago, in 2014 before she announced her candidacy, she said that

unaccompanied Central American minors who had crossed the southern border should be returned to their home countries.

What is it with Democrats that they’re all for things before they’re against them? Except when they’re against things before they’re for them?

This Should Seal the Deal

Even if we might well have to wait until 2017. The statute of limitations will not have run its course, by then.HillarySendClass

Read the sequence from bottom to top; the bottom email is the earlier one. As is clear from this exchange, Clinton not only knew she was getting classified emails on her unclassified, unprotected, private email server via her unclassified, unprotected, private email address, she was actively instructing her underlings to send her classified emails on her unclassified, unprotected, private email, carefully stripped of classification markings.

The Left and Gun Control

A 23-year-old man, 5′ 11″ tall and weighing 200 lbs, stalked and tried to assault a 65-year-old woman, standing 4′ 11″ and weighing all of 105 lbs. This thug followed her from a convenience store stop she made on the way home from work to her parking spot in her apartment complex.

When he grabbed for the woman, she drew her (legally owned and carried) pistol and shot him, thereby successfully defending herself from what was, at best, a strong-arm robbery attempt, and quite possibly a follow-up murder.

Let me emphasize that: this small, older woman successfully defended herself against a man one-third her age and twice her size with the only equalizer adequate to the task, a firearm.

Let me emphasize one more item: this is the sort of thing that President Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats and Progressives actively seek to prevent: a citizen defending himself—herself in this case—without benefit of Big Government’s good offices from an assault that even the police are powerless to prevent, only to react against well after the assault has run its course.

But, of course, Obama and Democrats and Progressives know full well that independent, self-reliant citizens are anathema to their policies.

This is…Foolish

More on the question of rebuilding Ramadi.

The US government and some of its allies said last week they had contributed $50 million toward a United Nations “stabilization fund” meant to rebuild the country—months after a similar $8.3 million pledge from the United States Agency for International Development.

Even if the UN (and the USAID) were honest thieves, this is just too much middle-man-ery, with too many intervening steps in which to siphon off the money. The funds—and future funds—are better given as loans directly to the Iraqi government, hard-coded for the Ramadi rebuild. Of course, that also assumes the Iraqi government under Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi can be trusted not to siphon, also.

Even better, there are a number of NGOs who would do better at handling directly the task of rebuilding Ramadi, and other Daesh-shattered cities (the current list includes Sinjar, Beiji, and Tikrit; there are some 15 smaller ones, too) when those times come. The shorter the chain, even with honest and well-meaning entities, the more the originally donated or loaned funds make it to the originally intended end users.