Monday, October 31, 2016

The Parallels

Richard Nixon’s 1972 campaign for president involved trying to conceal the truth about Watergate until after voters went to the polls. “The early part of the Watergate cover-up was actually successful,” noted a report from the National Constitution Center. Running against a gaffe-ridden, disorganized challenger whom he was able to vastly outspend, Nixon pulled out a victory, but the cover-up unraveled and the country went through two years of turmoil. If Hillary wins, will her cover-up unravel and leave her a weakened president hounded by critics? No one is suggesting that Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal is exactly like Watergate, but the parallels are certainly there.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441590/hillary-clinton-richard-nixon-cover-ups-lying-enemies-list

Clinton = Farce

Hillary Clinton was resting, running out the clock, sitting on a supposed large lead, and hoping that the election was sooner than later. Now after the latest Weiner disclosures, she is crisscrossing the country, terrified of collapsing polls, and wishing that she had three more weeks rather than just one. With the Clintons, farce is the desert to scandal: the profiteering Clinton Foundation as a humanitarian treasure; Hillary the former corporate attorney as child and little-guy crusader; Bill Clinton, both sexual predator and feminist hero.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/clintons-farce-14823.html

A great read.

Changing Norms - Like Expecting To Get Away With Felonies

The rules in politics haven’t changed that much in recent years. What has changed is adherence to norms, in an increasingly destructive way.

I made that case, using examples different from the ones I’m about to present here, nearly two years ago. The shift in norms is also a central part of Thomas Mann’s and Norman Ornstein’s prescient It’s Even Worse Than It Looks and Mike Lofgren’s The Party Is Over, plus of course Jonathan Rauch’s “How American Politics Went Insane,” our very widely read cover story (subscribe!) this summer.
https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/10/trump-time-capsule-james-comey/505904/

Funny write up wherein the author pretends not to notice the Clinonesqe assumption that scrutiny can be avoided by committing felony, but then isn't smart enough to know all email is going to be hacked. 

Friday, October 28, 2016

Immunity? We Know Why She Wanted It

Remember, FBI Director James Comey, who blessed Mills’ immunity deal before ever cracking open her laptop, assured us during congressional testimony that Mills was cooperating with the investigation. Was she?

In the FBI’s summary statement, Mills alleged she didn’t know anything about Hillary’s email server until after the secretary of State’s tenure was over. In leaked emails we learned that this was untrue. Now we have emails in which Mills explicitly discusses concealing illegal activity in an effort to protect the president. Did she tell the FBI about her attempts to “clean up” emails? If so, why was she given immunity?
http://thefederalist.com/2016/10/25/we-need-to-clean-this-up-new-e-mail-from-top-hillary-aide-proves-criminal-conspiracy/#.WBCiOSXayeY.twitter

Obamastupidplan

Now reality is confirming what the critics predicted. ObamaCare’s regulatory mix—benefit mandates, requiring insurers to sell coverage to all comers, and narrow ratings bands that limit how much premiums can vary by health status—was tried by several states in the 1980s and ’90s. Every one saw the same results that are now unspooling nationally: high and rising costs, low and declining enrollment, and less insurer and provider competition.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to solve these predictable disruptions with subsidies and a mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty. But most people don’t think ObamaCare plans provide value for the money, especially if they are non-subsidized.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/accountability-for-obamacare-1477435661

Thursday, October 27, 2016

Tends to Metastasize

The Attorney General of New York, Eric Schneiderman, is presently using securities law
to do an end run around the First Amendment and sue Exxon for not holding the same views on
climate change as the more pliable oil companies have been forced to adopt in public.
Recently, a group of scientists mainly from George Mason University wrote to the
President to demand that climate dissenters be prosecuted under the RICO laws. RICO, as you
know, is supposed to be used against racketeers and mobsters and, granted the unfortunate
tendency of sloppily drawn federal laws to metastasize under opportunist US Attorneys, one
marvels nevertheless that such an absurd and ideological expansion of this legislation could ever
be seriously entertained. 
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/steyn-testimony.pdf

The First Battle of Tyranny Starts in the Mind

First, some background. Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado since 2001, holds degrees in mathematics, public policy, and political science. He has authored or co-authored seven books. He has won several awards for his academic work. For about two decades, he was a prolific writer and speaker on climate issues. In 2013, he testified before Congress and declared that there is “exceedingly little scientific support for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.” During that same testimony, he said that global weather-related losses have not increased since 1990 as a proportion of GDP. He went on, saying that there were also no observable increases in floods, tornadoes, or droughts. Pielke’s work was backed up by data and, in many cases, by the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But that didn’t matter to Podesta’s attack dogs at ThinkProgress. Long before his congressional testimony, Pielke had been the subject of a years-long smear campaign led by ThinkProgress’s Joe Romm. In fact, Romm had what can only be described as an obsession with Pielke. In a recent Twitter posting, Pielke wrote: “Propaganda works: I count more than 160 articles at the Center for American Progress trashing me over the years.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/441438/wikileaks-john-podesta-silenced-climate-change-dissent?utm_source=nr&utm_medium=twitter&utm_content=bryce&utm_campaign=podesta-wikileaks

Wednesday, October 26, 2016

Is It Warming When It Is Colder? Yes

In other words, “winter”. But, there’s no such thing as natural winter in Warmist World

That’s the finding of a new study published yesterday in the journal Nature that finds that as the Arctic warms, it is shifting the polar vortex to Europe. That in turn will bring more bursts of frigid cold to North America.

Those temperature drops could lead to miserable days in February and March, the research finds. Conversely, those drops in temperature could offset some of global warming’s effect in those regions, said Martyn Chipperfield, professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of Leeds and a co-author of the paper.

“Climate change can lead to extremes; it’s not like a regular change, everyone to the same extent at all times and places,” he said. “Despite the overall warming, you can get in places like the Northeastern U.S. extreme cold events. That’s consistent with climate change and global warming.”
http://rightwingnews.com/climate-change/polar-vortex-going-get-worse-fault-driving-fossil-fueled-vehicle/?utm_source=co2hog

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Probably Just Coincidence

QUITO, Ecuador -- Ecuador’s government acknowledged on Tuesday that it had “temporarily restricted” WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s internet access at its embassy in London after the whistleblowing site published documents from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 

A foreign ministry statement said that while it stands by its decision in 2012 to grant Assange asylum, it doesn’t interfere in foreign elections. Leftist President Rafael Correa’s government said it was acting on its own and not ceding to foreign pressures.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ecuador-acknowledges-restricting-assanges-internet-amid-clinton-leaks/

It Is the Big Question

Mrs. Clinton, like Nixon in 1972, may not get a honeymoon no matter how big her win. The debate we aren’t having in the campaign, we will continue not to have: how to foster a modern state that doesn’t metastasize corruption, cronyism, elites helping themselves. There will be no bipartisan action on things that ail the American economy and hold back its growth. All of Washington will be enmeshed in a replay of the Watergate era, inward-looking, destructive, consumed with investigations and score-settling.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/rigged-was-hillary-clintons-fbi-case-1476831990

Answer - less government is less reason to corrupt government.

Tuesday, October 11, 2016

Well Written, Bravo

But I hate even more the even grosser culture of The Lie where someone like Hillary Clinton or people like the editorialists at the Washington Post and the Formerly Grey Lady get to point their fingers and pretend they didn’t create and celebrate the culture in which Trump merely partakes.

These people who celebrate porn and abortion and make heroic figures out of small-souled, sex-deluded creatures such as Bill Maher and Lena Dunham and Sandra Fluke and lionize sick predator men like the Kennedys and Bill Clinton are not merely being hypocrites or playing politics when they denounce Trump. They are deliberately engaging in The Lie: the corruption of meaning itself. They aren’t outraged because they’re decent. They’re using our decency as a pawn in their quest for political power.

I don’t even have an expletive strong enough to express my contempt for what we’re witnessing this news cycle. All I know is I deeply resent being put in a position where denouncing the grossness of Trump’s remarks becomes playing into a larger Lie and everyone’s rightful disgust becomes a mere political tool.

This is the problem of the corruption of culture, as Harriet Beecher Stowe illustrated brilliantly in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There, the good guys who defend human dignity are forced by the culture itself to become outlaws—to lie to hide runaway slaves, or break the law to participate in the Underground Railroad. They are forced to defend what they ordinarily would find indefensible in order to defend the greater goods of human liberty, human dignity, and equality before the law. In a corrupt culture, no matter what you do, no one escapes with his purity intact.
http://amgreatness.com/2016/10/08/lewdness-donald-trump/

This is bad if Trump does, we look the other way for our candidate's husband ...

Just read it - there are no standards but they'll act like there are some when that's politically expedient.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/trumped-outrage-14777.html

Old News

Of course, it was the late, great columnist Bill Safire who caused a stir back in 1996 when he chronicled then-First Lady Clinton’s manifold falsehoods over the years, from how she gamed the commodities markets by miraculously earning $100,000 in cattle futures by, she claimed, simply reading the newspaper (and not because she had a well-connected broker), or her involvement in questionable land deals as a Little Rock, Ark., lawyer while hubby Bill was governor.

Back then, Safire called her “a congenital liar,” something that brought howls of protest from the left as a wild overreach. It certainly didn’t stop Hillary from becoming a US senator, secretary of state and now likely president.
http://nypost.com/2016/10/10/wall-street-speeches-reveal-the-real-hillary/

Duplicitous? Naturally

Worse still, is an email purportedly from Hillary outlining her true beliefs about immigration. "The main reason behind successful immigration should be painfully obvious to even the most dimwitted of observers: Some groups of people are almost always highly successful given only half a chance (Jews, Hindus/Sikhs and Chinese people, for example), while others (Muslims, blacks and Roma, for instance) fare badly almost irrespective of circumstances."

It goes without saying, this shocking racial and ethnic stereotyping if it indeed reflects Hillary's thinking would doom a Republican candidate. The media so far haven't even really reported it.

That points to one other major issue: The emails show that Clinton has what can been described as a "cozy" relationship with the mainstream lapdog media bordering on sycophancy.

As Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning left-leaning activist, blogger and author noted, the Clinton campaign went to extraordinary lengths to shape and control stories done by the chummy Big Media. "At times," Greenwald wrote, "Clinton's campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted 'on background' and what should be described as 'on the record.' "
http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/clinton-email-scandal-hillarys-hypocrisy-and-medias-bias-revealed/


Clinton A Worse Version of Trump

“We were not willing participants,” Broaddrick said. “These were crimes.” In a separate interview, Broaddrick shared her own story of brutal sexual assault which she says Bill Clinton perpetrated against her.

Willey called out NBC News’ Andrea Mitchell and CNN’s Jake Tapper by name, challenging them: “These are not infidelities. A rape is not an infidelity. These are crimes. Any other people would be in jail…

“This is no longer about infidelities, indiscretions, girlfriends, sex, interns — none of those. This is about a serial rapist, a predator, and his wife who has enabled his behavior all of these years.”

Later in this interview, Jones, Willey, and Broaddrick expressed fear at how a potential President Hillary Clinton would use the power of her office.
http://www.breitbart.com/2016-presidential-race/2016/10/09/juanita-broaddrick-kathleen-willey-paula-jones-bill-clinton-sexual-assault/

Perspective

We judge Columbus harshly because the same power that enabled the Europeans to conquer the world also allowed them to impose their views on the world. And the views they imposed are now our views.
Even as the conquest was reaching its zenith in the 19th century, the Europeans were bringing to the world the then-novel idea that one group of people didn’t have the right to impose its will on another group.
This revolution in thinking, which ultimately undermined European imperialism, was announced by the Declaration of Independence and its assertion of the self-evident truth of human equality. It was carried further by the British who suppressed the slave trade with their all-powerful navy, commercial might and insistent diplomacy, and who led the campaign for the abolition of slavery. It was completed by American insistence after the world wars of the 20th century on the right of self-determination, the right of people to self-government.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/straight-talk-about-christopher-columbus-1476050242

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Double Standards for All My (Political Insider) Friends


We know all too well what that kind of investigation looks like, as two of the lawyers who defended a recent target: former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell. That story had a happy ending for the governor and his wife. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in their favor this summer and all charges were dropped in September. But their victory certainly wasn’t due to lack of investigatory zeal on the part of the FBI and Justice Department.

Below are only a few of the heavy-handed tactics federal investigators used to build their case against the McDonnells. See how they compare to how Mrs. Clinton was treated.

Conduct ambush interviews. The first contact between law enforcement and the McDonnells was an ambush interview of the governor’s wife. The agents lied to her about the topic of the meeting, forbade Gov. McDonnell’s staff from attending, and then grilled her on their suspicions about potential public corruption. Statements from that interview later took center stage in the trial of her and her husband.

In Mrs. Clinton’s case, no ambush interviews were conducted, and witnesses were generously accommodated. The FBI and Justice Department even allowed a fact witness and potential target— Cheryl Mills, formerly the State Department’s chief of staff—to simultaneously represent Mrs. Clinton as her counsel.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fbi-treated-clinton-with-kid-gloves-1475709394

Immunity. Why?

The Clintons dirty?  No one will be surprised, no one will be outraged.  If you need the devil to save you from something worse, you can get your head to focus on the devil's virtues.

We already knew that Justice offered immunity to at least five central figures in the private email probe, including Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, the aides in charge of deciding which of the former Secretary of State’s emails on her private server would be turned over to the State Department. FBI Director James Comey struggled to explain to Congress last week why immunity was necessary to obtain the laptops the two had used for sorting the emails.

Now we learn that Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson also obtained guarantees that investigators would not search these laptops after Jan. 31, 2015. More amazing, Justice agreed to destroy both laptops after examining them. Think about that: Before the authorities knew what was on the laptops, they agreed to destroy potential evidence in their investigation. The evidence was also under a congressional subpoena and preservation order.

The “no-look” date beyond Jan. 31, 2015 means the FBI couldn’t see what the two aides said or did after the news of Mrs. Clinton’s private server became public in March 2015. Investigators would be unable to determine if Ms. Mills or Ms. Samuelson had engaged, as Mr. Goodlatte put it in his letter, in “destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server.” Why else would time limits be necessary given that the two women already had immunity?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cheryl-millss-legal-privileges-1475708726

Death Spiral, Meltdown, Obamacare's Flaws Make Themselves Known

Man, such a surprise, no one could have seen this coming.

Tennessee is ground zero for ObamaCare’s nationwide implosion. Late last month the state insurance commissioner, Julie Mix McPeak, approved premium increases of up to 62% in a bid to save the exchange set up under the Affordable Care Act. “I would characterize the exchange market in Tennessee as very near collapse,” she said.

Then last week BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it would leave three of the state’s largest exchange markets—Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville. “We have experienced losses approaching $500 million over the course of three years on ACA plans,” the company said, “which is unsustainable.” As a result, more than 100,000 Tennesseans will be forced to seek out new coverage for 2017.

BlueCross is only the latest insurer to head for the exits. Community Health Alliance, the insurance co-op established under ObamaCare, is winding down due to financial failure, leaving 30,000 people without coverage. UnitedHealthcare said in April it is departing Tennessee’s exchange after significant losses. That’s another 41,000 people needing new plans.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/obamacares-meltdown-has-arrived-1475709560

Monday, October 3, 2016

Bravo, Central Planners - Well Done

Most will miss the primary lesson - central planning never works.

Minnesota will let the health insurers in its Obamacare market raise rates by at least 50 percent next year, after the individual market there came to the brink of collapse, the state’s commerce commissioner said Friday.
The increases range from 50 percent to 67 percent, Commissioner Mike Rothman’s office said in a statement. Rothman, who regulates the state’s insurers, is an appointee under Governor Mark Dayton, a Democrat. The rate hike follows increases for this year of 14 percent to 49 percent.
“It’s in an emergency situation -- we worked hard and avoided a collapse.” Rothman said in a telephone interview. “It’s a stopgap for 2017.”
On average, rates in the state will rise by about 60 percent, said Shane Delaney, a spokesman for MNSure, the state’s marketplace for Obamacare plans. About 250,000 people, or 5 percent of the state’s population, were covered under plans bought on the individual market, including plans bought on the Affordable Care Act markets as well as outside it.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-30/near-collapse-minnesota-insurers-up-obamacare-rates-by-half