On Friday I checked in with New England radio colossus Howie Carr to survey the political scene on the eve of the New Hampshire primary - with a brief detour into the strange wraith-like quality of Bill Clinton in his Iowa stage appearance, which led Howie and me to speculate on the increasing similarities between Bill and deposed CBS honcho Sumner Redstone (see right).
To hear the full interview with Howie, click here.
~I said yesterday that, if Iowa were a Third World banana republic, Jimmy Carter and the UN observers would decline to certify the results. From The Guardian:
In Grinnell Ward 1, the precinct where elite liberal arts college Grinnell College is located, 19 delegates were awarded to Bernie Sanders and seven were awarded to Hillary Clinton on caucus night. However, the Iowa Democratic party decided to shift one delegate from Sanders to Clinton on the night and did not notify precinct secretary J Pablo Silva that they had done so. Silva only discovered that this happened the next day, when checking the precinct results in other parts of the county.
So one of Bernie's Grinnell delegates got mysteriously "shifted" to Hillary. In the Democrat Party, shift happens.
~It's not just Donald Trump who's talking tough about deporting illegal aliens, so are the Europeans:
Six in 10 migrants arriving in Europe are economic migrants with no right to asylum, one of the EU's most senior officials has disclosed.
Frans Timmermans, the first vice president of the European Commission, said that the majority of those coming to the EU are not fleeing war or persecution.
Many are Tunisians or Moroccans who were joining the migrant trail through Turkey, he said, and they must be deported if the public is to consent to aiding asylum seekers.
"They must be deported": That sounds pretty butch. The Spectator's Douglas Murray is not impressed:
Does anybody honestly believe that the Swedish authorities are currently preparing to deport 80,000 fake asylum seekers from their country?
Or let us assume that the 60pc figure is correct for Germany and that 60pc of the people who have arrived in Germany in the past year alone should not be there. Given that it has taken in more than a million people in the last twelve months, is Germany now going to deport as many as three quarters of a million fake asylum seekers from its territory? Of course not. They will not even attempt it. Everybody in Europe knows that. And everybody following events and weighing up their chances from outside Europe knows that.
For one thing, the Germans have managed to misplace 50 per cent of their "refugees":
The German government has lost track of the whereabouts of hundreds of thousands of migrants who entered the country in 2015. N24 television has reported that up to 50% of "asylum seekers" have gone into hiding; their whereabouts are unknown. They presumably include economic migrants and others who are trying to avoid deportation if or when their asylum applications are rejected. The Saarbrücker Zeitung reported that up to 30% of the migrants being sheltered in the eastern German states of Brandenburg, Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt have "simply vanished." Separately, German authorities estimate that hundreds of thousands of migrants have entered the country without being registered and whose whereabouts are unknown.
Fortunately, some of them do occasionally emerge from hiding to blow things up:
BERLIN — An Algerian couple, suspected of planning a terrorist attack in Berlin and arrested on suspicion of belonging to the Islamic State, entered Germany late last year and applied for asylum as Syrian refugees — part of a pattern of terrorism suspects entering Europe under the guise of fleeing war, the German authorities said Friday.
~With my Australian tour all but totally sold out, Kiwi readers are demanding to know why I'm not zipping across the Tasman for a date in New Zealand. Well, I'm very fond of the country, and would love to see all those spectacular locations where Sir Peter Jackson filmed his boffo Tolkien movies. Alas, these days it's less Bilbo and more dildo:
A New Zealand MP got smacked across the face with a dildo at a press conference in Waitangi.
Economic Development Minister Steven Joyce got the sex toy right in the mouth as a protestor shouted 'that's for raping our sovereignty'.
The MP appears shocked (as you would be), then lets out a cheeky grin when he realises what he's been struck with.
It was pretty big.
After the seven crappy mailers a day I get from Jeb, I do feel the New Hampshire primary would be enlivened by the occasional flying dildo. Given that Jeb must have some of that 100 million bucks left to blow through before Tuesday, maybe Mike Murphy could order up a monogrammed fleet.
