An extreme Leftist nut in Britain

Jeremy Corbyn is the leading contender as new leader of the British Labour Party, Britain's main party of the Left.  The Conservatives are hoping that he gets the job. Corbyn likes pigeons a lot better than people

Runaway Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn once backed a House of Commons motion welcoming the 'inevitable' end of human life on earth in an asteroid strike, it emerged today.

The veteran socialist signed the controversial motion, attacking people as 'obscene, perverted, cruel, uncivilised and lethal', after it emerged MI5 were planning to use pigeons as flying bombs in combat.

Mr Corbyn is a long-term campaigner against 'pigeon prejudice' – and has insisted the birds are 'intelligent and gentle creatures' which are cleaner than cats and dogs.

In 1996, his love of the birds moved him to attack plans to try to remove them from city centres.  The Islington MP criticised plans to force them out of Trafalgar Square and urged people to see the birds as 'friends rather than enemies'.

The rebellious backbencher, whose has never been a minister or held a shadow ministerial role, has backed a host of left-field causes including a ban on 'war toys' for boys, homeopathy in the NHS and a ban on working in hot weather.

In 2003 Mr Corbyn signed a motion attacking the 'lack of gratitude' for carrier pigeons during the Second World War.

In 1991 he campaigned for British Rail staff to be allowed to keep 'calming' beards after new rules proposed banning facial hair. Mr Corbyn joined with 14 MPs to call for the rules to be scrapped. He said: 'This House further believes that beards are healthy and create the sympathetic image necessary for staff dealing with deeply distressed passengers.'

In 1995 he called for a ban on adverts for 'war toys' for boys - like Action Man figures - where there is 'a connection between such toys and male violence'.

He has also called for the legalisation of the possession of cannabis and dismissed the Serbian massacres in Kosovo as a 'genocide that never existed'.

Mr Corbyn also backed a motion welcoming England's success in the 1996 European Championships but criticised the 'jingoism and nationalism in the pages of sections of the tabloid press'.  It added it was 'reminiscent of Hitler's use of sport to enhance his evil regime in the 1930s'.

This year Mr Corbyn launched a bid to ban work in temperatures above 30C – or just 27C for physical jobs like on building sites.

Mr Corbyn has previously attracted criticism for describing the leaders of militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah as his 'friends'.

And he was embroiled in a new controversy earlier this week, as it emerged he had defended controversial Anglican vicar Stephen Sizer, who was disciplined by the church for posting a Facebook link to an article suggesting Israel was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

It emerged that Mr Corbyn wrote a letter during the furore earlier this year, defending Reverend Sizer and claiming he was 'under attack' because he had 'dared to speak out against Zionism'.

A shock poll suggested Mr Corbyn had doubled his lead in the Labour leadership race and was on course for a 'knockout victory'.   The YouGov poll of those eligible to vote in the contest gives Mr Corbyn 53 per cent of the first preference votes – enough to win a majority in round one.

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Conservatives Vs. 'The Real World'

As she runs to hold on to her base against an openly declared socialist in the Democratic primaries, Hillary Clinton is declaring she intends to go even further than President Obama and his radical executive amnesty efforts. She continues to defend Planned Parenthood even after those horrific videos documented the ghastly sale of baby body parts for profit. She is wrapping herself in a gay agenda, viciously attacking religious freedom.

But it's the Republicans that are the extremists.

Check out The Washington Post. On the front of the August 8 Post came the headline "For GOP candidates, a rush to the right." Reporter Sean Sullivan harped on abortion and immigration as issues where it could "cause the eventual nominee problems with a more moderate electorate."

Sullivan claimed on social issues like abortion and gay marriage, "much of the Republican field has now taken positions that are at odds with mainstream American opinion. For example, three out of four Americans say a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she becomes pregnant as a result of rape."

The problem for the Post? The Republican candidates and the Republican platform haven't really changed on abortion since the last campaign. What's changed on the Abortion Extremism Meter is liberals demanding Democrats like Clinton defend Planned Parenthood removing "intact fetal cadavers" for sale to the highest bidder. Avoiding this ugliness is where the Post's yellow-dog Democrat bias comes through.

In Sunday's paper, here was another headline: "A platform for conservative views: RedState Gathering gives nine GOP presidential candidates - without Trump — room to expand on hard-right positions from Thursday's debate." Reporter David Weigel also used that "hard right" lingo in the news story.

As an example, Weigel cited Mike Huckabee deriding "paid transgender surgery for members of the military." It is somehow extremist for Huckabee to warn of the next step of left-wing extremism. Obama's Pentagon is surging toward the radicals intent on shredding the "gender binary," the military rank and file are furious — but to even discuss it is "hard right."

Doom for the GOP is all over the Post's pages. Above Weigel's story in the Post was a story headlined "A look at Donald Trump's history of flippant misogyny." On the next page was the headline "Trump's behavior may imperil GOP chance at White House."

In the world of the liberal media, everything is always "imperiling GOP chances."

Saturday's top editorial in the Post really underlined the media tendency to exile conservatives in their own minds. The headline on the Web was "Only a handful of GOP candidates are living in the real world." After the first debate, the party was divided by the "electable ones" — Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie and Lindsey Graham — and everyone else on the "GOP fringe," those who are "frighteningly out-of-touch."

So the tendentious Post classifies every conservative as incapable of "living in the real world." But in the real world, Ronald Reagan in 1980 was certainly considered "hard right" and outside the left-tilting political spectrum of the 1970s, and yet he won in a landslide ... twice.

How the Posties must recoil at the NBC poll over the weekend. The top five: Trump, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson, Carla Fiorina and Marco Rubio. Who, exactly, is "frighteningly out of touch" here?

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Jindal puts the emphasis on assimilation

by Jeff Jacoby

BOBBY JINDAL'S presidential quest may not take him all the way to the White House. But if his time on the campaign trail helps put assimilation back at the heart of the nation's immigration debate, he will have rendered his country a valuable service.

The 44-year-old governor of Louisiana was born and raised in Baton Rouge. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Punjab in northern India, and Jindal's election in 2007 made him the first Indian American chief executive of any state in US history.

But Jindal didn't run for governor as an Indian American, and he isn't running for president as an Indian American, either. Throughout his career he has championed the value and virtue of what used to be called "Americanization" — the patriotic integration of immigrants and their descendants into the American nation, so that they become Americans not just legally, but culturally and socially as well.

"We must insist on assimilation," Jindal said in the closing moments of the Republican "undercard" debate in Cleveland last week. "Immigration without assimilation is an invasion." A TV commercial aired in Iowa by Believe Again, a super PAC promoting Jindal for president, highlights the governor's emphasis on making immigrants into Americans.

"I am tired of hyphenated Americans," Jindal says in the ad, which features clips of a recent speech. "We're not Indian-Americans or African-Americans or Asian-Americans. We're all Americans." Instead of obsessing, as so many Republican candidates do, on the legal status of those who cross the border, Jindal emphasizes the importance of embracing the norms and mores of their new homeland. Immigrants, he declares, "should adopt our values, they should learn English, and they should roll up their sleeves and get to work."

For most of American history, the belief that immigration should go hand-in-hand with assimilation was all but universally shared. There were debates aplenty about the most effective means of Americanizing the foreign-born, and there have always been restrictionists who argued that immigrants from certain countries were incapable of blending into the mainstream. When the Supreme Court upheld the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1889, it accepted the government's claim that immigrants from China had "remained strangers in the land, residing apart by themselves," and that they were unlikely "to assimilate with our own people or to make any change in their habits."

Whatever one's views on the ideal number or nationality of immigrants, however, it was taken for granted until very recently that those who came to America should want to be American. What the conservative Jindal says on the subject in the 21st century is hardly different from what the liberal Louis Brandeis was saying a century ago. In a speech at Faneuil Hall in Boston in 1915, Brandeis argued that "the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here" — until he comes to "possess the national consciousness of an American."

In its 1912 platform, Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party explicitly included immigrants in promising workers "a larger share of American opportunity," even as it pledged "to promote their assimilation, education, and advancement." Americanization activities were taken up by public schools and private corporations, by nonprofit organizations and chambers of commerce. Not all assimilation programs were successful. Some relied too much on conformist pressure rather than on affectionate encouragement. But on the whole, Americans thought it only natural that immigrants should strive to become American, and immigrants of all backgrounds could feel that they were part of a single national family.

The rise of militant multiculturalism undermined this consensus. Today's "progressives" tend to regard the old ideal of patriotic assimilation as a form of cultural suppression. Instead of celebrating a common American culture, they pursue "diversity," and elevate racial, sexual, and ethnic identities over national identity. E pluribus unum has been turned on its head.

Because Jindal rejects the tribal politics that the left expects minorities to uphold, he has been attacked as an Indian Uncle Tom and mocked in a Twitter campaign linked by the hashtag #BobbyJindalIsSoWhite. "There's not much Indian left in Bobby Jindal," a University of Louisiana professor sneered to The Washington Post.

That might be a grievous shortcoming, were Jindal running for office in India. But he is running in his own country, which he makes no apology for loving. "My dad and mom told my brother and me that we came to America to be Americans," Jindal says. "If we wanted to be Indians, we would have stayed in India."

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Tide Turns in Favor of Greece’s Shipping Industry

An article in WSJ highlighted the Greek shipping industry, which it says has "emerged largely unscathed" from the nation's recent financial troubles.

The reports say that shipping companies in Greece are buying vessels from cash-strapped competitors and German banks, and are poised to grab even more market share - but bailout-related tax hikes could lead shipowners to seek cheaper waters.

Greek owners, who operate almost a fifth of the global fleet of merchant ships, are paying rock-bottom prices for competitors' vessels. Shipping employs more than 200,000 people in Greece and contributes around 7.5% of Greece's gross domestic product. The industry is dominated by a small circle of family-run companies that control almost a fifth of the world's shipping fleet-long a source of national pride.

According to Basil Karatzas, a New York-based maritime adviser, as the global financial crisis took hold and the freight market gradually collapsed, the Greeks stayed above water as they were not overly leveraged and stood on cash generated during the boom years before 2008.

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