90 Miles From Tyranny

Tuesday, November 8, 2022

Italy Demands That Countries Whose Flag Is Flown By Rescue Boats Bear The Responsibility Of Migrants Aboard

Elections Can Have Good Consequences...

ROME (Reuters) – A row escalated on Friday over who should take care of migrants rescued by charity groups off the Italian coast, with Italy insisting that countries whose flag was flown by the boats should bear some of the responsibility and Norway disagreeing.

Three charity vessels holding almost 1,000 migrants have been at sea off Italy for more than a week waiting for permission from the new rightist government in Rome to dock. All their requests have so far been rejected, they say. Two are flying the Norwegian flag and one is flying the German flag.

Italy last week sent letters to the embassies of Germany and Norway, saying ships by non-governmental organizations flying their flags were not following European security rules and were undermining the fight against illegal immigration.

But Norway replied that it could not intervene.

“Norway has no responsibility under human rights conventions or the law of the sea for persons taken on board private Norwegian-flagged vessels in the Mediterranean,” Ambassador Johan Vibe said in an emailed statement to Reuters on Friday.

The German embassy on Wednesday urged Italy to provide help swiftly, saying the NGO ships made an important contribution to saving lives at sea.

Italian Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi told a news conference on Friday that the German-flagged Humanity 1 with 179 people aboard, including more than 100 unaccompanied minors, was heading towards the Sicilian city of Catania.

He said the boat would be allowed to stop close to the port and Italy would take charge of those facing health emergencies and the minors. But the boat and the rest of those onboard would then be sent out of...

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Quick Hits Of Wisdom, Knowledge And Snark #759

The Pathetic Democratic Pantheon

Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi are of no use to the Left in the midterms because it is their radical ideology that was finally enacted and wrecked the country.

Over the last few months the four icons of the Democratic Party—Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Nancy Pelosi—have hit the campaign trail.

They’ve weighed in on everything from “right-wing violence” and “election denialists” to the now tired “un-American” semi-fascist MAGA voter—and had nothing much to say about inflation, the border, crime, energy, or the Afghanistan debacle. In this, they remind us just how impoverished and calcified is this left-wing pantheon.

So why should we take anything they say seriously, given their own records—and especially given their mastery of projecting their own shortcomings upon others as some sort of private exculpation or preemptive political strategy?
Still Hopin’ and Changin’?

Barack Obama this past week has assumed the role of surrogate president. He is storming the country, while Joe Biden mopes at home or visits shrinking blue enclaves so he can claim post facto, “At least I was out there stumping.”

Over the last six years, we have become accustomed to Obama’s periodic getaways from one of his three estates. It is always the same. From time to time, he reenters politics to remind us that he did not just cash in on his presidency to become a multi-millionaire. Instead, he is still the Chicago “community activist” of his youth. And so, Obama will not be overshadowed by the Biden crew that is enacting all the crazy things he as president had warned were a bit much even for him.

At the funeral of the late John Lewis, Obama turned his eulogy into a political rant. He weighed in on the “racist” filibuster, the “Jim Crow relic” that he desperately sought in vain to use to stop the appointment of Justice Samuel Alito.

At campaign stops, he deplores “divisions” that he, more than any modern figure, helped create. The entire left-wing vocabulary of disparagement for the white lower-working classes (e.g., deplorables, dregs, chumps, irredeemables, etc.) got its start with Obama’s putdown of Pennsylvania voters who rejected him in the 2008 primaries as “clingers.”

In interviews, Obama suddenly now blasts harsh rhetoric—this from the wannabe tough guy who stole the “The Untouchables” line about bringing a knife to a gun fight. Well before crazy Maxine Waters’ calls to arms, Obama advised his supporters “get in their faces.”

Still, on the campaign trail, Obama appears not so much animated as stale. It is as if he has been suddenly stirred from a long coma that commenced in 2008. It’s the same old, same old—sleeves rolled up. He still resorts to the scripted outbursts of mock anger. And the nerdy prep school graduate still amateurishly modulates his patois—now policy wonk, now breaking into the Southern African-American pastor accent when an audience needs more preachy authenticity.

He still tries to rev up his crowds with the familiar attacks: Republican demons will cut Social Security, the MAGA semi-fascists are captives of Donald Trump (as if the Democrats have not ceded their souls to woke hysterics), the Republican fanatics will all but kill women by denying abortions, and extremists unlike himself are dividing the country.

On and on, Obama shouts about social justice. And then he wraps up and must decide to which of his mansions he will fly home (via private jet)—Kalorama, Martha’s Vineyard, Hyde Park, or soon the Waimanalo estate.

Obama offers no solutions much less hints at his own culpability in his sermons. There is nothing about the open border he helped birth. Nothing about Biden’s failed energy policies now bankrupting the middle class that were simply a reification of his energy secretary Steven Chu’s perverse wishes for European-priced gas (“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”).

There is nothing about Obama’s old boasts about shutting down coal plants and skyrocketing electricity (“Under my plan . . . electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”).

Nothing is said about the Skip Gates psychodrama and his blanket stereotyped attack on police, the tossing of his own grandmother under the racial bus, the Trayvon Martin racial editorialization, the Ferguson mythologies, and all his efforts to create a binary nation of oppressors and oppressed, as Obama himself determined who is the victim, who the...