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Gay and transgender people—both in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank—face an extraordinary level of persecution.The Israel-Hamas war has made political allies out of some unusual bedfellows. Yet the strangest pairing on display thus far is probably "Queers for Palestine," most notably because those protesters would risk summary execution should they take their demonstration to the Gaza Strip. The movement isn't new. But following the terrorist attacks launched against Israel by Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza, it has seen a sort of reemergence at various protests. "Queer rights! Trans rights!" protesters are heard chanting in a video...

A far-left activist is shocked when he finds out that the young Muslim women he marched with at yesterday’s anti-Israel protest in London do not share his views on LGBTQ+ issues.

On today's Morning Joe, Mika Brzezinski said of Ben Carson "I want to be very careful with my words, but he just doesn't sound completely connected with everything." Judging from her halting cadence, Mika clearly seemed to realize that she was treading on some very controversial mental-health ground. The lead-in to her "connected" comment was her observation "he tried to kill his mother for God's sake! . . . we have been listening to this man talk in a flat monotone tone about taking a hammer to his mother's head." View the video here.

Iran Executes Two for ‘Perversion’ Third dealt death sentence for ‘insulting the prophet’ Iran executed two gay men on Sunday for the crime of “perversion” and has sentenced a third individual to death for “insulting the prophet,” according to human rights activists tracking the situation. The head of Iran’s judiciary department in the northern city of Rasht announced on Sunday that two homosexual men had been executed for “perversion,” which is considered a severe crime under Iran’s hardline Islamic law. The executions come less than two months after Iranian authorities publicly hanged 40 individuals in a two-week period. Iran is...

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that US Secretary of State John Kerry would meet with him on Friday, but Kerry himself told reporters Monday he would be unable to make the trip so soon. CNN says this was not a benign mix-up, and that the two countries “were unable to agree on when Kerry would next travel to Israel for talks with Netanyahu on the Iranian issue,” a fact that is “a sign of the level of disconnect” between Jerusalem and Washington. Kerry said Monday he would not be able to visit Israel over the coming weekend, despite...

Put it this way: President Obama’s Egypt policy is about as effective as his Syria policy. And for the first time Wednesday, with the number of dead and injured mounting, one could almost envision Egypt’s descent into out-and-out civil war. Obama was briefed, said nothing and went back to golf. Secretary of State John Kerry took a break from his fruitless obsession with the nonexistent “peace process” to condemn the violence, but took no questions and had no policy announcement. This, in a nutshell, is the White House’s approach to the Middle East — the absence of any policy and...

Recent polling has shown huge gaps between the Political Class and Mainstream Americans on issues ranging from immigration to health care to the virtues of free markets. The gap is just as big when it comes to the traditional right direction/wrong track polling question. A Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey shows that 67% of Political Class voters believe the United States is generally heading in the right direction. However, things look a lot different to Mainstream Americans. Among these voters, 84% say the country has gotten off on the wrong track. Twenty-four percent (24%) of Mainstream voters consider fiscal policy...

If all goes accordingly, a government shutdown will be averted yet again this week. A new stopgap measure that would cut $6 billion in spending and fund the government through April 8 is gaining bipartisan support and likely to pass by Friday when the current funding measure expires. Although a shutdown is unlikely, President Obama is growing impatient with Congress. "We can’t keep on running the government based on two-week extension," he said Friday Politico reports. "That's irresponsible.” Jeffrey Sachs, professor of economics at Columbia University, agrees, but says President Obama is part of the problem, too, because of his...

Obama going off the deep end FLOYD AND MARY BETH BROWN, COMMENTARY April 9, 2010 A recent analysis by Roger Simon of PJTV Media maintains that Obama is showing signs of mental illness. A wide variety of commentators have observed that Obama displays severe narcissism. Obama is conceited, and he is demonstrating a serious disassociation from reality. A recent case in point was Obama's bizarre and meandering 17-minute, 2,500-word answer to the simple question about how he could justify raising taxes for ObamaCare during a recession when citizens are already overtaxed. Obama's wildly inappropriate answer left the audience stunned and...

Glenn Harlan Reynolds: Consent of the governed - and the lack thereof By: Glenn Harlan Reynolds Sunday Reflections Contributor March 7, 2010 Our Declaration of Independence observes: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. -- That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, -- That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of...

America Radio, the liberal news and talk radio network headlined by the comedian Al Franken, has another week to find a buyer. A lawyer for the network, Tracy Klestadt, told a bankruptcy hearing Monday that the company was in "advanced negotiations with a few parties" about a sale, and expected to have more definitive news on a deal in a week. Under its financing agreement, the network had faced a deadline of this Wednesday to have a deal in place for a buyer, but Klestadt said the network's lender had informally agreed to extend the deadline by about a week....

N. Korea Reportedly Cuts Int'l Phone Lines1 hour, 49 minutes ago SEOUL, South Korea - North Korea has cut most of its international phone lines since late March over concerns that sensitive information about its society will flow out of the isolated country, South Korea's spy agency reportedly said Tuesday. Spy agency officials told a closed-door session of the National Assembly's Intelligence Committee that international phone connections had been cut at most of the North's trading companies and at government agencies since late March, according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Since April, even people with permits to make international...

Many liberals are beside themselves. Things were bearable when they could delude themselves into blaming their loss of power on a "stolen" election. But with this decisive defeat, they're thinking, "It's not our America anymore." As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, "But what troubled me yesterday was my feeling that this election was tipped because of an outpouring of support for George Bush by people who don't just favor different policies than I do -- they favor a whole different kind of America. We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America...

There’s no question that the U.S. economy is booming. Why isn’t this reflected in President’s Bush poll ratings? Why would Americans think that John Kerry would do anything but ruin the economy? Kerry: the King of All Waflers; the most liberal member of the Senate. He proposes increasing taxes by $700 billion over the next 10 years. Kerry plans to stifle the American economic engine. Faced with good economic times, just what are Americans thinking?Boom Times Yesterday, the Conference Board reported that U.S. consumer confidence reached its best level in two years. 248,000 new American jobs were created in May....

The Disconnect Between Hollywood and America Reprinted by permission from IMPRIMIS, the national speech digest of Hillsdale College (www.hillsdale.edu).Written by Pat Sajaak Here in this quiet, peaceful corner of Michigan, you might not have a sense of your importance in the world. I come from a community that has the opposite problem. Because it is so big and so powerful, so great and so well-known, it has an exaggerated view of its significance. That community is Hollywood. Not Hollywood, the town. Not much Show Business actually goes on there. Most of the studios are spread around other Southern California...