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The group chat was labelled “XXXX Lovelies” (presumably the name of their street); it included some of the women in the Cruz family’s neighbourhood. The subject was the cold weather they were experiencing in Texas, but it quickly turned to going away, when Heidi, the wife of Republican Senator Ted Cruz, asked whether any of the families were up for a trip to Cancun. The Cruz family getaway, of course, went viral, and the Texas senator, 50, faced fierce backlash after pictures emerged of the couple and their two daughters, Caroline, 12, and Cathryn, 10, flying out of the state...

As Donald Trump attempts to distract from his campaign's myriad failures in Colorado by cynically stirring the "rigged corrupt game" pot, one of the public faces of this phony outrage is a gentleman who earned himself prime Drudge real estate when he dramatically burned his voter registration card on camera -- claiming that he was wrongfully turned away from the state party convention because he's a Trump fan. It's a disenfranchisement conspiracy cooked up by the elites, he argued, torching his Republican documentation in protest.  The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway was skeptical of the man's version of events and dug into the back story....

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday challenged the premise of Donald Trump's promise to "make America great again," and asked if Trump knows how America ever became great in his closing pitch to South Carolinians. Speaking in Myrtle Beach, Cruz launched into an extended diatribe about what he perceived as Trump's lackluster position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He followed it up with a list of Cruz's campaign promises and a stinging rebuke of Trump's singular message. "We will see the economy explode, small businesses grow, young people coming out of school with three, four, five job opportunities. Wages going up....

April 20, 2009 The President of the United States 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President, You don't speak for me. When you go to Europe and say that Americans are "arrogant, dismissive and derisive" of our allies, you don't speak for me. When you pander to foreign leaders, presuming to speak on behalf of all Americans, apologizing for the actions of President Bush, you don't speak for me. When you desperately try to surrender to the French and the Germans, the Russians and the Saudis, and even our great friends in the U.K., just for the...

Some of my leftist friends have one thing in common with the Muslims now sacking foreign embassies: a fundamental lack of understanding as to how democracy works, and how precious it is. The leftists have grown up knowing nothing but freedom and opulence, and take things like the Bill of Rights, Federalist Papers, and Constitution for granted (if they have even read these hallowed documents). The Muslim radicals (Islamists) are throwing lit jugs full of gasoline at Danish embassies because they have known nothing except Big Brother (One Newspaper, One Nation, One Religion, One World), and do not even know...

They killed Steven Vincent. Not, like Theo van Gogh - a man with loud and angry opinions who spoke against religions or people or ideas - but a journalist who only wanted to tell the truth; a journalist who, like me, spent most of his career writing about what was beautiful, about the great achievements of humanity, of civilization, the products of abstraction, of metaphor, of ideas. He wrote of those who challenged 'what is,' those who challenged beliefs, not with bombs but with paint and clay and marble. And when he himself challenged ideas, he did not use bullets....

By Abigail R. Esman World Defense Review columnist Mohammed Bouyeri begged his government for death. Instead, they did something worse: They gave him life. Bouyeri, 27, is the Dutch-born Moroccan Muslim radical who slaughtered filmmaker and columnist Theo van Gogh on the streets of Amsterdam last November 2, shooting him multiple times before slashing his throat with a machete and stabbing a five-page letter into his gut. Afterwards, shocked bystanders watched in horror and amazement as Bouyeri calmly walked away, as one eyewitness described it, "as if he were just out walking his dog." That, of course, had been the...

AMSTERDAM Paul Hiltemann had already noticed a darkening mood in the Netherlands. He runs an agency for people wanting to emigrate and his client list had surged. But he was still taken aback in November when a Dutch filmmaker was fatally shot and his throat slit on an Amsterdam street. In the weeks that followed, Hiltemann was inundated by e-mail messages and telephone calls. "There was a big panic," he said, "a flood of people saying they wanted to leave the country." In 1999, nearly 30,000 native Dutch moved elsewhere, according to the Central Bureau of Statistics. For 2004, the...

Muslims seek ban on 'Submission II' 2 December 2004 AMSTERDAM — Several Muslims in the Netherlands are seeking a court injunction to prevent MP Ayaan Hirsi Ali making a sequel to the short film "Submission". Lawyer Robert Moszkowicz said Tuesday that the group he represents also want Hirsi Ali banned from making hurtful remarks about Muslims and Islam. Moszkowicz noted Hirsi Ali recently described Islam as "deadly dangerous" without making a distinction between fundamentalist Islam and Islam in general. It is expected the case will be heard by a court in The Hague, but it is unclear when this will...

Terrific piece in the London Spectator by Anthony Browne on the slaughter of Theo Van Gogh. The whole article is a must, must read, but here’s an extract: “At least, though, the Left in the Netherlands has seen that there is a clash between liberal democracy and cultural relativism; that some cultures are simply not compatible with Western traditions of freedom and tolerance; and that the old distinction between evil right-wingers and cuddly left-wingers no longer makes sense. It is one thing to turn a Christian church into a mosque, quite another to get radical Islam to accept liberal democracy....

IF YOU WANT to know where the outrage is when Islamist thugs butcher a civilian, look to the Netherlands. There may not be much of an outcry over the slaughter of humanitarian worker Margaret Hassan in Iraq, but the Dutch are up in arms about the Nov. 2 murder of Theo van Gogh, a columnist/talk-show host/filmmaker and provocateur (also related to the famous Vincent) who was shot, almost decapitated and stabbed in the heart because of his criticism of Islam. There is one corpse, but the Nov. 2 attack on van Gogh as he pedaled his bicycle near his Amsterdam...

Editor's note: Readers may also be interested in Holland: Portent of Things to Come? and Dutch Center-Right Coalition Stands up to Islamism."Education by murder" describes the slow and painful way people wake up to the problem of radical Islam. It took 3,000 deaths to wake up Americans, or at least to wake up the half of them who are conservative. Likewise, it took hundreds of deaths in the Bali explosion to semi-wake up Australians; it took the Madrid assault for Spaniards, and the Beslan atrocity for Russians. Twelve workers beheaded in Iraq awoke the Nepalese.But it took just one death...

Can it be that the socially liberal Dutch have had it? Perhaps so. Therefore, they are not taking any more chances on anarchists destroying culture. So deportation centers have been created. That’s right. Illegal immigrants will be put there, according to DrudgeReport’s November 10 release. Those detained could be expelled from the country. Civility must reign. A people who do not want slicers and dicers are going to get rid of the potentials. Of course, some innocents will be caught in the crush, but that’s the price of living in an imperfect world where people want to survive the anarchists,...

The Limits Of Tolerance After an outspoken filmmaker is murdered on an Amsterdam street and a Muslim arrested for his killing, the Dutch question their liberal tradition By ANDREA GERLIN VAN ASSENDELFT FOTOGRAFIE/AP PASSIONS ENFLAMED: A fire rages at an Islamic school in Uden Sunday, Nov. 14, 2004 A filmmaker is shot and stabbed to death in broad daylight on the edge of a city park. Streets fill with tens of thousands of angry protesters. Police storm an apartment, are attacked with a grenade, and arrest two accused terrorists. One Islamic school is bombed, another burned to the ground, and...

THE HAGUE, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Selami Aydin's words will comfort many Dutch people if opinion polls are to be believed. "I'm thinking of going back to Turkey. Seriously," the 39-year-old Muslim said just a few hundred metres (yards) from the apartment police stormed last Wednesday after a 14-hour siege with suspected Islamic militants. "We're all frightened." The Netherlands' image as the land of tolerance has been shattered in the two weeks since outspoken filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered and a Muslim suspect arrested in the crime. Since Van Gogh's death on Nov. 2 there have been at...

THE HAGUE (AFP) - Two suspected Islamic extremists arrested this week are suspected of plotting to assassinate two Dutch lawmakers known for their critical stance towards Islam, the Dutch press reported. One of the deputies targeted was Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a liberal lawmaker of Somali origin who co-wrote a film about the place of women in Islam along with Theo van Gogh, the outspoken filmmaker who was murdered by a suspected Muslim radical on November 2, the NRC Handelsblad reported. The suspects, who were arrested Wednesday in a police raid in The Hague, also intended to kill Geert Wilders, a...

by RN Security and Defence editor Hans de Vreij, 12 November 2004 The Dutch parliament has adopted a wide-ranging package of new counter-terrorism measures, prompted by the killing of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a radical young Muslim early this month. The size and mandate of the General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) will be expanded and measures will be taken against radical imams and mosques. In addition, efforts will be made to reduce unemployment among young men and women of Muslim origin and strengthen their assimilation into Dutch society...... http://www.rnw.nl/hotspots/html/ned041112.html

The Netherlands parliament has asked the government to draft legislation compelling Dutch mosques to employ only imams who have studied Islamic religion in the Netherlands. The proposal, supported by the government and the opposition, came after a debate in which Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's government was accused of underestimating Islamic terrorism and failing to protect a filmmaker killed by a suspected Muslim radical on November 2. Theo van Gogh's killing has triggered a cycle of retaliatory attacks on Islamic buildings and Christian churches that shocked this traditionally peaceful and tolerant nation. In a sometimes testy debate over the slaying,...

The Hague - As details of the investigation into the murder of controversial filmmaker Theo van Gogh emerge, everything seems to point to the fact that the alleged killer was part of a Dutch network of suspected Islamic terrorists with international connections. Shortly after the November 2 murder of Van Gogh, police arrested Mohammed Bouyeri, 26, who is suspected of committing the murder because of his radical Islamic beliefs. As details of the investigation into the slaying emerge it became clear that instead of being a lone actor, Bouyeri seems to have been a key figure in a suspected terror...

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born member of the Dutch Parliament, collaborated with Theo van Gogh on the film "Submission," which deals with Muslim women who suffer abuse. Van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam on Nov. 2, and the son of a Moroccan immigrant has been charged. Hirsi Ali is in hiding under police protection. My initial reaction of shock and disbelief has given way to a feeling of intense grief. I'm grieving over Theo's death. Grieving because now he can't move to America with his son. Because he had to die to focus attention on the presence of individuals whose...