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July 2016

Loretta Lynch & Bill Clinton Meet Secretly, but Swear They’re Totally Trustworthy Their tarmac ‘golf’ chat shows that high-level Democrats aren’t even pretending to follow the rule of law. By Ian Tuttle

Hillary Clinton is currently the subject of the highest-profile national-security investigation in recent memory. She is also the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. She is also the wife of a former president (a Democrat). She is also a former member of the (Democratic) presidential cabinet whose attorney general, Loretta Lynch (a Democrat), is conducting the investigation and will determine whether to prosecute.

Someone who doesn’t know any better might wonder about a conflict — or conflicts — of interest.

Now it emerges that on Monday evening Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch spent a half-hour chatting aboard Lynch’s private plane on the tarmac at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Rest assured, though: “There was no discussion of any matter pending for the department or any matter pending for any other body,” Lynch told reporters afterward. She and the former president mainly discussed Clinton’s “grandchildren,” their travels, and “golf.”

If it was not already clear, it most certainly is now: It’s not simply that our highest officials are above the law. It’s that they know they are, and they can’t even be bothered to hide it.

For more than a year, we’ve known that Hillary Clinton broke the law. The Federal Records Act explicitly requires “the head of each Federal agency” — including the secretary of state — to preserve any “records,” including e-mails, related to the agency’s essential operations; and federal criminal law punishes as a felony anyone who “willfully and unlawfully conceals, removes, mutilates, obliterates, falsifies, or destroys” an official government record.” Furthermore, at least 2,000 of the e-mails on Clinton’s private server contained classified, or even “top secret,” information — in direct contradiction of her assurances, and the law. Finally, it became public knowledge in October that Clinton forwarded the real name of a confidential CIA source over her unsecured private server; shortly after, the State Department refused to release three-dozen pages of e-mails on the grounds that the intelligence contained in them could potentially damage national security.

Yet, despite the overwhelming evidence, Loretta Lynch is almost certainly not going to prosecute the former secretary of state. The Democrats’ hold on power is at stake. Failure to prosecute would be a grievous blow to the rule of law, but it seems that Democratic higher-ups don’t much care.

A Triumph for Disinterested Justice The unjustified Baltimore police prosecutions run aground in the courtroom of a fair-minded judge.Heather Mac Donald

The ill-fated prosecution of six Baltimore police officers for the accidental death of Freddie Gray in April 2015 was the spawn of the Black Lives Matter movement. The preposterously unjustified charges against the officers grew out of the BLM conceit that cops are racist murderers. On May 1, 2015, state’s attorney Marilyn Mosby invoked Al Sharpton’s extortionist chant of “No Justice, No Peace” as a motivation for her charging decisions, after rioters had destroyed the livelihoods of dozens of Baltimore’s workers and small businessmen.

It is therefore fitting that Mosby’s vendetta is collapsing all around her, based as it is on an ideology composed of demonstrable lies about law enforcement. Judge Barry Williams handed Mosby her third and most devastating defeat on June 23, acquitting Officer Caesar Goodson of all seven counts against him, including the ludicrous second-degree murder charge.

Gray, a 25-year-old drug dealer with a long criminal record, had been arrested for possession of an illegal knife on April 1, 2015, after running from a bike patrol officer who had made eye contact with him. During transport in a police van driven by Officer Goodson, Gray suffered a spinal cord injury that led to his death a week later. The exact timing and cause of that injury are still in dispute.

A hostile crowd was forming at the site of Gray’s arrest, so the arresting officers put Gray in Goodson’s van and instructed Goodson to drive to another location where they could complete the paperwork without interference. Goodson would make five more stops thereafter; he never spoke to Gray. Gray’s injury occurred at some still unknown point during that journey. At stop two, the three arresting officers removed Gray from the wagon, placed leg shackles and flexicuffs on him, documented the arrest, put him back in the wagon on his stomach, and left. Gray had been going limp and passively resisting the officers during that second stop; once they left him in the van he began screaming, kicking, and throwing himself around so violently that outside observers saw the van rocking. At stop three, Goodson went to the back of the van for less than 11 seconds, and then called for assistance. Judge Williams found that there was not enough time at stop three for Goodson to actually check and assess Gray. Officer William Porter answered Goodson’s call for assistance at stop four. Porter asked Gray, who was on the floor on his stomach as at stop two, how he was doing; Gray answered: “Help.” Porter asked him what he wanted help with, and Gray responded: “Help me up,” according to Porter’s testimony. Porter helped Gray get on the bench inside the van. Porter asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray answered yes. Porter did not believe that Gray was in need of medical treatment, but told Goodson after stop four that he did not think that Gray would be admitted to Central Booking, and that for purely administrative reasons they should take him to the hospital instead. Goodson did not call for medical assistance but proceeded to stop five to pick up another arrestee, Donta Allen. At stop five, Porter saw Gray kneeling on the floor and leaning on the bench. Porter again asked Gray if he wanted to go to the hospital; Gray again answered yes. Gray seemed lethargic but was otherwise breathing normally and showed no other signs of distress. By the final, sixth stop, Gray was unconscious, not breathing, and in visible need of urgent medical care. Goodson called for help and took him to the hospital.

The Stunning Collapse of Boris Johnson Once thought the front-runner for the U.K.’s prime minister, he has suddenly withdrawn. By Noah Daponte-Smith

Just when you thought this week couldn’t get any stranger, it did.

Boris Johnson, an architect of the Leave campaign, has long been considered one of the frontrunners for the leadership of the Tory party, even before Prime Minister David Cameron announced his eventual resignation last week. Johnson is the most popular politician in the country, a goofy and accessible man of the people, well placed to continue the Tories’ domination of the United Kingdom’s politics.

Until this morning, that is. When Johnson stood behind a podium, journalists viewed it as a speech to declare his entry into the leadership race against home secretary and Remain campaigner Theresa May. But it wasn’t. Instead, after ten minutes spent discussing the necessary policies of the next prime minister, and how and why Cameron’s successor must extricate the U.K. from the clutches of the European Union, Johnson announced that he would not stand – that he would not mount a challenge for the leadership.

The shock was palpable. After Johnson uttered the decisive line — “I have concluded that person cannot be me” — the cameramen in the room went into overdrive, clicking rapid-fire to document the moment of defeat in the face of the man once destined for 10 Downing Street. Johnson stumbled over his next line. For the following minute, he vowed to support a “moderate, conservative, one-nation approach” for his party and his country; it sounded more like an affirmation of David Cameron than anything else. Soon after, Johnson exited the stage, to applause and general clamor. The Guardian’s liveblog of the speech had begun with the headline “Boris Johnson launches his leadership bid.” Ten minutes later: “Johnson pulls out of Tory leadership contest.”

Various theories have circulated around the journosphere in the week following Britain’s vote to leave the E.U. The triggering of Article 50 is considered a “poisoned chalice,” political quicksand destined to doom the career of whichever politician is foolish — or hubristic — enough to tread down that path. The process of actually leaving the E.U. would be so destructive, would embroil the country in so much turmoil, that only a political ignoramus would do it. Johnson knows this, the theory goes, as encapsulated in this well-circulated but analytically flawed Guardian comment. Johnson, valuing himself above all else and (it is thought) only tenuously committed to the Brexit cause in the first place, sought to wash his hands of the mess he had created. Johnson appears as a cynical, unethical mastermind, always looking out for himself and ignoring any obligation to the situation he had done so much to engender.

That’s a compelling read of the situation. It plays to what so many already suspect about Johnson: that he cares only for himself and is willing to ruin the economy and his friends’ careers for the sake of advancing his own. For many in the press corps who already detest the man, it fits nicely with the image they hold of Johnson in their preconceptions.

After Boris By Andrew Stuttaford

As Noah Daponte-Smith has explained over on the home page, Boris Johnson has, as The Sun put it, been ‘Brexecuted’, his bid for the Conservative leadership destroyed just before lift-off by the announcement that Justice Minister Michael Gove, his ally in the battle of Brexit, had, well, decided to put in for the job for himself.

Anyone who enjoys House of Cards will enjoy the instant take by Iain Martin, writing for the splendidly named Reaction.

Here’s an extract:

At 9am this morning, Boris Johnson was pretty sure that he was going to become Prime Minister, or at least make the final two in the leadership contest and be in with a 50-50 chance. Then, at 9.02am an email landed that signalled he was done for, ruined. Johnson and his team had no warning – no call, no text – from Michael Gove that he was about to declare Boris unfit to be Prime Minister and run himself. The explosive email went to reporters direct….

Almost instantly around forty Tory MPs switched straight to Gove. It was almost as though it had been planned…

Almost. As you will see if you read the rest of the article, Martin is good with the stiletto.

And so Johnson abandoned his bid for the leadership, a mistake: Going down with all flags flying would, over the longer term, have been seen as a more dignified exit, but there we are.

We could discuss how Johnson had left himself so vulnerable. Part of the problem was that, never the most organized of characters (although less chaotic than he pretends), Johnson had, in the confused aftermath of the unexpected win for the Brexit team, forgotten that in politics, like real estate, it’s necessary to always be closing.

Amongst Johnson’s errors was his decision to use his column in the Daily Telegraph as the venue for his first considered (too kind an adjective) comment on the referendum triumph he clearly had not expected, a column that was widely seen as a disaster. Gove, a journalist himself, apparently added a few editing touches to help his pal out. How kind.

The favorite to become the next Tory leader (and thus prime minister) now becomes Theresa May, the Home Secretary (interior minister). The Guardian’s Martin Kettle (no fan of Johnson, as you can see if you read the full piece) approves:

Johnson’s eclipse makes a May versus Gove contest in the final round likely. In the past, May’s chances tended to be dismissed because, in Westminster terms, she is like Kipling’s cat that walks by itself. She rarely works the room or the studios. She frequently does her own thing, which made Cameron suspicious. Though her leadership ambitions have never really been in doubt, she does not have much of a machine. The result is that she had relatively few committed supporters until now.

Trump and the Rust Belt’s Revenge Dark clouds ahead for Clinton as party members switch sides. Ari Lieberman

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Donald Trump. The campaign was temporarily sidetracked with ancillary issues involving the ethnicity of a judge presiding over an obscure case that no one really cares about. After scoring significant momentum following his clinching of the GOP nomination, his polling numbers dipped markedly with some polls giving Hillary Clinton a double digit lead. And this week, Nate Silver, who accurately predicted the 2008 and 2012 electoral outcomes, gave Clinton an 80% chance of winning the general election.

But Clinton acolytes should temper their excitement. Those who underestimate Trump’s chances of securing the White House may be in for a rude awakening. Trump is perhaps one of the most resilient personalities in modern American politics who has demonstrated an uncanny ability to overcome insurmountable odds. Time and again he has defied the professional pundits — Nate Silver included — and has accomplished the seemingly impossible. He is anything but conventional and the normal rules of politics do not apply to him and that is precisely why this election cycle is still anyone’s game.

Buttressing this view, a new Quinnipiac University survey released on Wednesday suggests that Trump and Clinton are in a statistical dead heat, with 40 percent supporting Trump and 42 percent backing Clinton. That minor differential is well within the margin of error. Those surveyed saw Trump as being better equipped to deal with the economy and tackle terrorism. He also beat Clinton on leadership and honesty.

Clinton has been struggling with gaining the trust of voters, who overwhelmingly view her as untrustworthy. The recently released Benghazi report, which highlights Clinton’s role in advancing a fraud, will further tarnish voter’s perceptions of her. The FBI probe of her use of an unsecured bathroom server to send and receive classified emails and the prospect of being charged for related offenses still clouds her campaign and looms over her like an anvil swinging precariously above her head.

But Clinton’s campaign troubles go far beyond trustworthiness and FBI probes. As highlighted by a fascinating piece in Politico, life-long, card-carrying, blue collar Democrats are leaving the party in droves and switching sides. The situation is particularly acute in the Rust Belt where bad trade deals, including NAFTA and eight years of Obama have laid waste to industry and displaced or otherwise negatively impacted hundreds of thousands middle class, union workers, the bread and butter of the Democratic Party.

Shut Up, Elizabeth Warren America doesn’t need two Hillary Clintons. Daniel Greenfield

Elizabeth Warren has been coddled ever since Fordham Law Review insisted on believing that the blonde blue eyed woman was Harvard Law School’s “first woman of color”.

She has as much “color” in her pale face as she does principles, ideas, wit, ethics and speaking skills.

Warren isn’t a good speaker. Her speeches are inept, her cadence is uneven and she ends sentences on a squeak. She stumbles breathily through prepared texts, seemingly confused to be up on stage as if she’s waiting for everyone to realize that there was a mistake and replace her with someone competent.

Sadly that never happens. All this might be excusable if she had something to say, she doesn’t.

If Elizabeth Warren ever had a single original thought in her head, it long ago died of starvation. She achieved national fame by claiming that no one got rich on their own because the police protect factories. That was probably a more compelling argument back when the stereotypical millionaire got rich from factories. But Warren was cribbing from the twenties because she has no new ideas.

Either that or she imagines that Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg and Mark Zuckerberg became billionaires by having a lot of factories in Lowell.

These days she tours as Hillary Clinton’s attack Chihuahua lobbing piercing insults at Trump. Like the time she accused Trump of being “greedy”. Then she charged him with having a “goofy hat”.

But the media cheers every squeaky insult from the former Republican turned Democrat and class warrior turned millionaire as if she were the anemic half-assed second coming of Don Rickles.

Hillary Must Come Clean about Huma Abedin The disturbing new revelations about the top Clinton aide’s past ties to terrorist-supporting organizations. Joseph Klein

Saudi Arabia’s Islamic Affairs Department website contained a passage extolling jihad: “The Muslims are required to raise the banner of Jihad in order to make the Word of Allah supreme in this world…” (As published by The Middle East Media Research Institute) The Saudi government and some of its influential radical Islamic citizens and groups are pursuing the export of jihad in two ways. The first is through what has been referred to as “civilization jihad.” Saudi Arabia has spent billions of dollars in funding Sunni mosques, madrasas, and Sunni cultural centers all over the world, which spread the Saudis’ radical Islamic Wahhabi ideology. However, Saudi Arabia’s jihad also includes the support of terrorism. A cable released by WikiLeaks under then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s name stated: “Donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”

The Muslim World League is an organization with ties to jihadist terrorist groups, including Hamas and al Qaeda. The Muslim World League was founded by members of the Saudi government. Abdullah Omar Naseef exemplifies the connection between the Saudi government and this terrorist-supporting organization. He served as Secretary-General of the Muslim World League from 1983 to 1993. He also served as Vice-President of the Kingdom’s Shura Council. In addition, he founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which, according to former Assistant United States Attorney Andrew McCarthy, seeks to “grow an unassimilated, aggressive population of Islamic supremacists who will gradually but dramatically alter the character of the West,” and to “infiltrate Sharia principles in our law, our institutions, and our public policy.”

The Muslim World League escaped being placed on the list of terror groups sanctioned by the United States shortly after the 9/11 attack, reportedly due to concern by President George W. Bush’s administration about embarrassing the Saudi government. Nearly thirteen years later, the Saudi government is still getting a free pass. The American people have still been denied access to the portion of the 9/11 Commission report relating to any Saudi Arabian government ties to the 9/11 hijackers.

Into this morass steps Huma Abedin, the co-chair of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and a person likely to have significant influence in a Hillary Clinton White House. Huma Abedin has had murky associations in the past with the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, which not only is a radical Islamist group in its own right but, as Breitbart has reported, was “located in the offices of Saudi Arabia’s Muslim World League.”

Huma grew up in Saudi Arabia, where she was exposed to the Wahhabi ideology during her formative years. The Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, founded by Abdullah Omar Naseef, has been an Abedin family affair. Huma herself served as the assistant editor of the institute’s journal for a dozen years until she joined Hillary’s State Department. Abdul lah Omar Naseef was on the board of advisers of the journal while Huma was its assistant editor.

The Political Blame Game: Pulling Tricks to Deny the Obvious by Douglas Murray

Immediately after the massacre in Orlando, the gay press was full of articles that adamantly refused to admit the reality of Islamic homophobia.

The same organisations that obsess over which bakeries in the U.S. and Europe will or will not bake wedding cakes for gay couples, and rightly have no trouble berating homophobic Christian pastors, seemed wholly uninterested in the motivations of the Pulse nightclub killer. Instead, these papers and websites were filled with articles, petitions and joint letters, enjoining people not to notice the Islamic element.

These gay activists have a vision of the world where only “patriarchal” white males of Jewish or Christian heritage can cause the world’s problems.

A small minority of very vocal “far-left” activists are now using their LGBT status as a smokescreen not to advance gay rights but to advance “far-left” politics.

The recent shootings at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Florida have already begun to be submerged by the news cycle. Shock at the worst mass-shooting in American history — which saw the death of forty-nine people and the wounding of even more, fifty-three — has been further dulled by various distractions in the debate. This time, these have included a debate on America’s gun laws and speculation around the sexuality of the gunman.

All of these matters have been fought backwards and forwards and should certainly be components of any argument. But the part of the debate that has been the most important and — as usual — the most covered over, has been the religious motivation of the gunman. This, and the response it has entailed, is worth dwelling on: it reveals a concerted effort not to learn from events.

Just as it is inevitable that those obsessed with gun legislation should wish to make the debate about gun legislation, so it is inevitable that those with any other over-riding political agenda should wish to pin responsibility for the shooting on whatever is their particular obsession. It seems inevitable, for instance, that “Black Lives Matter” would blame the shooting on “the four threats of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism.”

Peter Smith Brexit Ain’t Necessarily Exit

Expect the Labour Party under a new leader to oppose Brexit, despite the popular vote. At question is whether the new leader of the Conservative Party will manage to unite Conservative MPs into ratifying the popular vote. Now that Boris Johnson is out of the race.
I see markets rebounded from their funk at the temerity of the British people to vote for Brexit. There is no deep explanation required. The people and institutions involved in swinging markets on a daily basis are complete know-nothings, like the rest of us. They had overbought on an expectation of a market bounce once the UK had voted to stay in the EU. They then had to square their positions by selling once reality hit. And, as is the way with markets, selling begets selling. Overshooting on both the up and downsides is commonplace. It can be explained by human psychology or be the setting of computer trading programs. Take your pick; both are right.

What I find interesting is the way reactions to irrelevant market perturbations or the pronouncement of self-interested corporate leaders are taken to be instructive commentaries on world affairs. The decision taken by the British people is about the character of the life of a nation as it evolves. What happens in the next five minutes or the next few years is largely by the way.

Netanyahu put it well when speaking at the UN about the nuclear deal with Iran, in which most restrictions on Iran are lifted after ten years. “A decade may seem like a long time in political life, but it’s the blink of an eye in the life of a nation.” It would be unfortunate if the worst happened and the UK experienced a recession because of Brexit, but exactly what effect would that have on life in the UK in 2030? None is the answer.

I like to think that those who voted to leave the EU had in their mind what kind of country they wanted to their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to live in. Certainly, as someone who was English-born, my support for Brexit was about the very long run. I do not hold any lower expectations for the mindsets of the vast majority of those who voted to leave. I don’t think it was about a migrant taking their particular job or taking their particular place in a hospital queue. I think it was borne of patriotism. Patriotism is essentially about the long run; not what is good for the next five minutes.

This brings me to the young and old. The young predominantly voted to stay, the old to leave. I have noticed something about the young now that I am in the older category. They tend to put greater emphasis on the present than on the past or future. I suppose this is because the present is the key to their future. As you get older and have less and less personal future to worry about you develop, I think, a broader perspective on time both backwards and forwards.

Some young people who voted to stay have accused older people of being selfish in voting to leave. This seems to me to be the kind of naïve reaction that the old expect the young to come up with. They didn’t disappoint. In fact, the only evident selfishness on display was on the part of those people who were prepared to put their country’s interests behind their own personal aspirations, which they felt would be adversely affected by the UK’s exit from the EU. I am not delegitimizing this rationale for voting to stay, but nor should it be lauded. At the same time, laudable or not, perceived self-interest should never be underestimated.

Tony Thomas: Green $cience’s Ugly Growth

They certainly are a smart bunch at the Australian Academy of Science, where great minds can hold two contradictory opinions at the same time. Two years ago the goal was an end to planet-wrecking growth. Now they want more taxpayer dollars to promote it
The federal electoral urgings of the Australian Academy of Science are pretty much what you’d expect. It wants more funding for science, technology and engineering. This will ‘drive innovation and growth into the future’, it says.

The Academy is oh-so-keen on economic growth. It says, “More than three decades of exponential growth in Australia’s per-capita GDP is tapering, and if nothing changes Australia will fall out of the G20 within 15 years.”

But wait! Wasn’t this same Academy sponsoring a Green anti-growth agenda as it cranked up its Fenner Conference on the Environment less than two years ago? The conference, at the University of NSW, was titled, “Addicted to Growth? How to move to a Steady State Economy in Australia.” The Academy approves, brands and seed-funds these annual Fenner gigs at up to $10,000 a time.

The conference flier reads: “Novelist Edward Abbey once noted that ‘Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell’. Our economy is meant to be a ‘servant of society’, not its master, yet is this true today? On a finite planet nothing physical can keep on growing forever – yet that is the ideology of the ‘endless growth’ neoclassical economics that now dominates the thinking of most governments and business. This has led to a rapidly worsening environmental crisis that degrades the nature on which we all depend. We cannot keep avoiding talking about this issue – hence the need for such a conference…”

The Academy has no economics expertise. But it promotes the eco-catastrophism of the global warming religion, having failed to notice that there has been negligible warming for two decades,[i], contrary to all the scary stuff from the IPCC computer modelling.

When common-sense flew out the Academy windows, the leadership became suckers for any variety of green ideology, such as divestment last year of its fossil fuel shares (but continued unprincipled use of fossil-fuel-powered electricity).