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One of our categories here at Legal Insurrection is “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Over at Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski provides a prime example of the malady. We noted yesterday how Mika was pushing poor Jon Meacham into drawing parallels between President Trump, the Nazis, and North Korea. Brzezinski ratcheted things up a notch this morning, suddenly blurting out that it “feels like a dictatorship developing.” Joe Scarborough tried to talk his partner off the ledge, saying “that’s an inside voice saying what you just said. You want to be like Greta. Greta pulls back before she says things like that.” View...

It’s a looping belt of tyranny that swoops from the South Pacific to Europe and all the way across the Americas. It controls three of the world’s 12 largest economies and the entire global supply of some key resources. It is, in the eyes of the world’s most important, and perhaps only relevant, demographic, a new axis of autocracy and it isn’t centred in Pyongyang, Tehran or Harare but in Canberra, Paris and, yes, Ottawa. That demographic, of course, is the American teen. And if new U.S. test results are any sign, that all important group doesn’t think highly of...

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Jonathan Cable, Reuters December 3, 2014LONDON (Reuters) - The euro zone economy may face another contraction after business activity grew less than expected in November despite heavy discounting, surveys on Wednesday showed, although Asian readings were more upbeat. Firms across the euro zone cut prices again. That, and signs that the bloc's core economies are struggling, will concern the European Central Bank which has launched a raft of measures to revive growth and drive up dangerously low inflation. In contrast, a survey covering China's services industry showed slightly faster expansion. But after data on Monday said manufacturing growth was its...

I remember our daily food always coming from a long, long line at the end of which was a loaf of bread, a liter of milk, a stick of butter, a bottle of murky cooking oil, or a kilo of bones with traces of meat and fat on them. The interminable lines looked like this bread line pictured above. We never knew what was sold at the end of a line we happened to come upon, but we knew we needed whatever people lined up to buy, so we joined the line. If we wanted to eat, we learned at...

Barack Obama gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Dolores Huerta, an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. During the ceremony today President Obama admitted he stole her slogan “Yes we can!” for his 2008 campaign. (Video at link) ---snip---...Dolores Huerta, an 82-year-old labor activist and co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. Huerta is also an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. DSA describes itself as “the largest socialist organization in the United States, and the principal U.S. affiliate of the Socialist International.” Huerta has claimed, “Republicans hate Latinos,” and has spoken fondly of Hugo...

Some people believe the bi-racial (not black) American president has a hidden agenda. That belief is based on the facts that Obama is your basic slimy sales person. Many Americans, even those voted for Obama, no longer trust him. Terms such as "shadow government" and "dictatorship" are used because trust levels are so low. Perhaps we need to review the definitions of these terms. First, online sources define dictatorship as a government that's controlled by a single person. I would further refine that definition to a single person who seeks to control and expand government's role into greater aspects of...

Cape Town - Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe is stockpiling arms and ammunition and preparing for war, the Democratic Alliance warned on Thursday.... ..."Mugabe is [also] talking to Venezuela, Cuba and Korea to fund a war-chest in preparation for the referendum and election, following the implementation of the global political agreement (GPA) brokered by former president Thabo Mbeki on behalf of SADC."... ...James said Mugabe and his Zanu-PF party appeared to be "mobilising for war against their own citizens"....

It must be comfortable over there on the wrong side of history, because President Obama seems to have settled in quite easily. Whenever he must decide between democratic forces and those of dictatorship, he invariably sides with the world's collection of "supreme leaders," whose iron-fisted, brutally oppressive, leadership-for-life approach an American president should find uncool. But Mr. Obama doesn't just find it cool. He finds it worth affirming. From 2002 to the end of his presidency, George W. Bush routinely was accused by the left of "creating chaos": chaos in Iraq, chaos in Afghanistan, chaos in the Muslim world, chaos...

IF the Obama administration really wants to improve human rights, it's taking the wrong approach in seeking a seat on the seriously flawed United Nations Human Rights Council. The best thing now, ironically, would be for the HRC to show its true colors and reject Washington's application in the vote it plans for Tuesday -- although don't count on it. The administration says it's aiming to "promote universality, transparency and objectivity" in the council, but more likely its presence simply would legitimize a body hostile to democracy and human rights. The Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to supersede...

According to opinion polls and word on the streets, if the November US presidential elections were to be decided by non-Americans, Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama would beat the Republican’s John McCain with about 90 per cent of the vote. Obama’s popularity abroad, and indeed in the US, is almost dizzying. However if the elections were left to African presidents to decide, McCain could probably beat Obama with 90 per cent of the vote. This might be surprising, given that Obama is not only an African-American, but his father was a Kenyan chap who went to the USA as a...

THE “DECLARATION OF RELIGIOUS LIBERTY” (VCII) The traditionalists have a difficult time with VCII’s teaching on religious liberty because they feel that non-Catholics do not have the right to promote their religion or creed publicly as was often the case in the past centuries under numerous Catholic monarchs. The traditionalists, as well as many past Popes, believe that only the truth (Catholic) has the right to be promoted publicly. It is interesting to note that an important American theologian, Father John Courtney Murry, was silenced by the Vatican (Cardinal Ottaviani) to write or speak publicly on this issue during the...

An Island Held Prisoner 'Castro's enduring popularity among Western leftists Shows That Many People Will Ally Themselves With Any Regime, however vile, provided it is sufficiently anti-American' Daniel Hannan NATIONAL POST Thursday, February 01, 2007 Sola mors tyrannicida est, wrote Thomas More: Death is the only way to get rid of tyrants. And so it has proved for Fidel Castro. Sixteen years ago, he looked finished. The U.S.S.R. had collapsed, and the Soviet subsidies that had propped up the Cuban economy for 30 years had been abruptly terminated. Around the world, statues of Lenin were being melted down or...

The biggest threat to American liberty is not Fascism,Communism,an Imperial Presidency, a Runaway Congress, or Dictatorial Courts. It's something MUCH closer to home !

One way the North Korean leadership has maintained control of the country, despite over a decade of famine and the world's harshest police state, is the large number of troops assigned to produce food for the armed forces. Having troops raise their own food is actually an ancient practice. But in the 20th century, the Russian and Chinese communists made food production (mainly farming, but also raising animals) a major part of military life. In this way, these communist dictatorships were able to keep their military budgets low, maintain larger peacetime armies, while keeping the troops busy (and out of...

FIVE nations seen by rights groups as among the world's worst abusers have been elected along with 39 other countries to the United Nations' new Human Rights Council in a first round of voting. Russia, China, Cuba, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, identified by New York-based Human Rights Watch as unworthy of membership on the new UN body, were among those winning seats. But two others on the group's list, Iran and Azerbaijan, failed to win membership on the first ballot. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth said it was inevitable some rights foes would win seats but "the important...

The moral case for ending assistance to dictatorships Aid to Africa remains a favorite cause for politicians and entertainers. From Geldoff to Bono to Blair, everyone wants credit for attacking poverty. Africa's dire need is undisputed, but good intentions aside, could it be that aid actually harms Africans—and that less help would do more good? Western wealth is supposed to speed African development and fight grinding poverty, but the result doesn't match the intent. In Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe has single-handedly destroyed the economy with western aid flowing. After a quarter-century of Mugabe, 80 percent of Zimbabweans live below the poverty...

When the US stumbled out of Vietnam 30 years ago, a void seemed to open up for a world which, for good or ill, had become used to a controlling American hand. The US had suffered a great defeat, in part self-inflicted, in the process betraying an ally, and American will and rationality had been drawn down to the lowest levels. Yet the consequences for the region where the war had been waged were surprisingly limited. The dominoes did not fall, or rather, when they eventually did, they fell the other way as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were to some...

One of Bush's concepts on the War on Terror is to replace those governments that harbor and grow hate with democracies. It's an important concept, one that recognizes that in order to kill the weed of murder and torture you have to pull it up by its roots. The new seeds, planted well, will flower into the type of free flowing information that'll pollinate the brains of young and old alike. I know, I know. It sounds like some fairy tale. But recent polls taken in Islamic countries show a sudden drop in support for Bin Ladin accompanied by an...

President Robert Mugabe's regime has directed national parks officials to kill animals in state-owned conservation areas to feed hungry rural peasants - a move that could wipe out what remains of Zimbabwe's impalas, kudus, giraffes, elephants and other species. The directive is a major blow to efforts by conservationists to try to rehabilitate the wildlife sector which was devastated after Mugabe ordered his supporters to invade and confiscate white-owned farms in 2000. The chaotic farm invasions saw party militants storming into conservation areas - both private and state-owned - to slaughter animals. Unscrupulous South African hunters also joined in the...