[guest post by Dana]

Much is being made of this tweet complaining about an act of shameful sexual harassment when an airline pilot complimented the flight attendants on board the plane. MORE magazine editor Betsy Fischer Martin was the captive tweeter witness to the verbal abuse:

I know. Devastating. Truly awful. A compliment! From a man! Just how much leaning in do women have to do to end this national nightmare??

And so it goes. Such is the life of the accomplished, over-educated first-world cupcakes tightly wrapped up in their little cocoons of privileged upper-class existences.

But back in the real world, it’s a different story. If only it were just a perceived insult, life would be so easy. Instead, it’s brutal, ugly, and wholly devastating. Remember the rampant sexual attacks perpetrated by Middle Eastern asylum seekers that took place in Cologne, Germany earlier this year? I wrote about it here and here. Today, we learn that what is horrible can always become a whole lot worse:

At first, there was complete silence from officials. As rumors spread on social media, police had nothing to say about allegations of mass sexual assaults and other crimes carried out on New Year’s Eve in the German city of Cologne.

It was only days later that officials reported that hundreds of women were victims of assault in Cologne, Hamburg and other German cities.

But numbers that are now emerging are likely to shock a country still coming to terms with what happened in Cologne more than half a year ago. According to a leaked police document, published by Germany’s Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and broadcasters NDR and WDR, the previous estimates have to be dramatically revised — upward.

Authorities now think that on New Year’s Eve, more than 1,200 women were sexually assaulted in various German cities, including more than 600 in Cologne and about 400 in Hamburg.

More than 2,000 men were allegedly involved, and 120 suspects — about half of them foreign nationals who had only recently arrived in Germany — have been identified.

Only four have been convicted, but more trials are underway.

As a reminder, President Obama plans on welcoming at least 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States this year. Hillary Clinton upped that number to 65,000. Typical of the left, however, if you don’t identify the problem and name it in the public square, the problem doesn’t really exist, and therefore, there is no need to consider any unintended consequences.

–Dana

[guest post by Dana]

Last week, Shetamia Taylor, concerned about police officer shootings involving black men, took her four sons to the Black Lives Matter protest in Dallas. During the subsequent melee, Taylor, who is not an activist and resides in a Dallas suburb, ended up with a bullet in her leg.

Yesterday, in front of cameras, an emotional Taylor recounted the awful events as the protest turned for the worse. The Los Angeles Times reports:

After she was shot, Taylor managed to grab her 15-year-old son, Andrew Humphrey, and push him between a car and the curb, shielding him with her body.

“I was just laying on top of him,” she said. “If it was going to happen to one of my sons, it was going to happen to me first.”

She watched police stream up the block toward them — and the shooting. One of them shouted, “Is anybody hit?’”

Andrew yelled no, unaware that his mother was injured.

Taylor didn’t want to alarm him, and called out quietly to one of the officers, “Yes, sir, I’m hit in my leg!”

Police rushed over, most of them white officers, and jumped on top of Taylor and her son. “There was another one at our feet and another one over our head and several of them lying against a wall. And they just stayed there with us,” she said. “I had never seen anything like that before, the way they came around us and guarded us like that.”

It’s a gripping story of a mother’s love and strength compelling her to do what loving parents are hardwired to do. But it’s more than that. It’s yet another testament to the commitment of police officers to lay down their lives for those who are not their own children, not their loved ones, but are quite simply, the public whom they have sworn to serve and protect.

Interestingly, not included in the report by the Los Angeles Times is Shetamia Taylor’s significant pledge of support for law enforcement:

“I’ve always held police officers, at a very high place in life,” Taylor said of police officers. “My son, my youngest one, since he was six, that’s all he wants to do and I’m going to support him in that, and I’m going to continue to support my community, my police officers. I’ve never had an issue with police officers. And if anything, it’s just made my admiration for them greater, it really it has.”

When a Black Lives Matter protest runs horribly amok and a black mother, with four sons in tow, ends up getting shot in the leg by a black sniper targeting white police officers expresses her admiration and increased respect for law enforcement, you might want to mention it. Especially in light of Dallas Police Chief David Brown’s emotional statement to Jake Tapper:

We’re sworn to protect you and your right to protest, and we’ll give our lives for it,” Brown said.

“And it’s sort of like being in a relationship where you love that person, but that person can’t express or show you love back,” he said. “I don’t know if you’ve been in a relationship like that before, Jake, but that’s a tough relationship to be in, where we show our love — because there’s no greater love than to give your life for someone, and that’s what we’re continuing to be willing to do.”

“And we just need to hear from the protesters back to us, ‘We appreciate the work you do for us in our right to protest,'” Brown said. “That should be fairly easy.”

It was obviously fairly very easy for Shetamia Taylor to express her appreciation. Apparently it wasn’t so easy for the Los Angeles Times to relay her message to readers.

–Dana

The Washington Times has this hilarious headline: Mike Pence has ‘95 percent’ chance of being Donald Trump’s VP pick:

Constitutional lawyer James Bopp, an Indiana delegate to the Republican National Convention who is close the governor, told The Washington Times that Indiana House Speaker Brian C. Bosma, 58, a conservative Republican, had sought advice from him on running for governor.

“He wanted my counsel on what he needed to do to set himself up to run for governor, because he expects Pence to step down as governor in order to be Trump’s running mate,” Mr. Bopp said in an interview.

The Trump election team boosted the Pence speculation Sunday by suddenly adding a campaign rally in Indianapolis to a fundraiser planned for Tuesday featuring Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence.

Several Republicans close to the campaign and to the governor have told The Times over the last 24 hours that they are now convinced it’ll be Mr. Pence.

Mr. Bopp, also a member of the convention’s rules committee, told The Times that the “rally made it a 95 percent probability it’s Pence.”

95% sounds very convincing! The only way they could make it more convincing would be to add a decimal. Say, 95.6%. Now that’s a real likelihood!!!

I still think it’ll be Newtie.