RUTHFULLY YOURS

The eyes of the nation were on Wisconsin once again because of the August primary elections, principally because Paul Ryan was being challenged in the First Congressional District. The challenger, Paul Nehlen, was widely perceived as a Trumpkin, even though Trump himself had finally been coerced by the party into endorsing Ryan at a rally in Green Bay mere days before the primary. Nehlen enjoyed endorsements from the likes of Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, and Ann Coulter, but was nonetheless crushed by Ryan, who won with more than 70% of the vote.

However, there was another primary race which deserved at least as much attention.

In the Eighth Congressional District, a three-way contest developed for the chance to replace the retiring Reid Ribble. The contest was handily won (also with over 70% of the vote) by Mike Gallagher, a 32-year-old native of Green Bay with an impressive resume for his age.

After graduating from Princeton, Gallagher entered the Marine Corps and spent seven years on active duty. He served in Iraq, where he was responsible for the gathering and analysis of human intelligence (information from human sources is known as Humint, as opposed to signals intelligence, or Sigint, and electronic intelligence, or Elint). A fluent Arabic speaker, his last duty station in Iraq was the town of al-Qaim on the Syrian border. There he helped hand out school books and soccer balls to children who, just a year before, had been too terrified of al-Qaeda goons to go to school.

He was convinced at the time that his job was over, that we had won. This was before the rise of Daesh and their invasion of Iraq. The town is now controlled by Daesh.

From there, he went to work for General Petraeus at CENTCOM, where he acquired some sense of the high-level, strategic thinking behind the tactical measures he’d earlier been involved with. He also worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Agency, and other federal agencies, and eventually he was the Middle East point man for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

From there, he was tapped to become national security advisor to Scott Walker’s short-lived presidential campaign. He moved back to the Green Bay area and went to work for an energy firm when the campaign folded.

The news shows reported yesterday that the FBI discovered 14,900 emails that Hillary had not turned over to the State Department. This news again focuses attention on the July 5, 2016 report by FBI Director Comey that no criminal charges be pursued against Hillary, although he criticized her handling of the emails as “extremely careless.” In his report, Comey said there were “several thousand work-related emails” that Hillary did not turn over to the State Department. The question is, are those “several thousand” part of the 14,900, and if so, why didn’t Comey say on July 5 that there were 14,900 emails not turned over to the State Department and further explain the nature of the balance of the “several thousand emails”? It again raises the issue of Hillary’s intent in using a private server.

The relevant text of Comey’s report is as follows:

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification. Separate from those, about 2,000 additional e-mails were “up-classified” to make them Confidential; the information in those had not been classified at the time the e-mails were sent.

The FBI also discovered several thousand work-related e-mails that were not in the group of 30,000 that were returned by Secretary Clinton to State in 2014. We found those additional e-mails in a variety of ways. Some had been deleted over the years and we found traces of them on devices that supported or were connected to the private e-mail domain. Others we found by reviewing the archived government e-mail accounts of people who had been government employees at the same time as Secretary Clinton, including high-ranking officials at other agencies, people with whom a Secretary of State might naturally correspond.

This helped us recover work-related e-mails that were not among the 30,000 produced to State. Still others we recovered from the laborious review of the millions of e-mail fragments dumped into the slack space of the server decommissioned in 2013[.] …

… I should add here that we found no evidence that any of the additional work-related e-mails were intentionally deleted in an effort to conceal them. Our assessment is that, like many e-mail users, Secretary Clinton periodically deleted e-mails or e-mails were purged from the system when devices were changed. Because she was not using a government account—or even a commercial account like Gmail—there was no archiving at all of her e-mails, so it is not surprising that we discovered e-mails that were not on Secretary Clinton’s system in 2014, when she produced the 30,000 e-mails to the State Department.

The Democrat will to power is only possible if conservatives are scapegoated as sub-human compared to the wonderfulness of liberals. First they demonize fellow Americans. Then they announce they are morally compelled to suppress us. Trump is our answer.

The media can land a few punches, but they will not win this fight on their terms, because the media itself has become a central part of the problem. Their attacks are not on Trump, they are on all of us. That is why they will backfire very, very quickly. Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

… the thoughts of a 22-year-old Trump supporter … a prosperous post-collegian in the San Francisco Bay area — someone who should be backing Bernie, or Hillary, or maybe Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson. But instead he’s backing Trump, and so is his Asian fiancée. And the reason he gives is political correctness.

“For me personally, it’s resistance against what San Francisco has been, and what I see the country becoming, in the form of ultra-PC culture. That’s where it’s almost impossible to have polite or constructive political discussion. Disagreement gets you labeled fascist, racist, bigoted, etc. It can provoke a reaction so intense that you’re suddenly an unperson to an acquaintance or friend. … If Trump wins, we will have a president that overwhelmingly rejects PC rhetoric. Even better, we will show that more than half the country rejects this insane PC regime.”

Political correctness is not, as some might claim, just an effort to encourage niceness. …it’s an effort to control people. Like the Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984, the goal is to make it impossible for people to speak, or even think, unapproved thoughts.

In the 2012 book titled Stalin’s Secret Agents by M. Stanton Evans and Herbert Romerstein, there is a chapter detailing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s serious and obvious decline of health as he entered the pivotal Yalta talks at the end of World War II. FDR’s health had been an issue “from the day in 1921 when he was struck down by polio, as a result of which he would never walk again unaided.” While the Washington press corps concealed his infirmity from the public, there were,

however, other health problems of a more daunting nature in terms of his official performance. These concerned not the paralysis of his lower body or even his physical health in general, but involved instead his mental balance, judgment, and powers of comprehension.

In recent decades this information has become more publicly available. But at the time,

“…hundreds of persons, high and low, reported… that [FDR] looked bad, his mind wandered, his hands shook, his jaw sagged and he tired easily.” Notwithstanding the fact that FDR couldn’t “survive another presidential term” he went to Yalta and “seemed to have made ‘absolutely no study of the German problem'” facing the group. In fact, Labor Secretary Frances Perkins recalled the change in Roosevelt “with the oncoming of a kind of glassy eye, and an extremely drawn look around the jaw and cheeks, and even a sort of dropping of the muscles of the jaw and mouth [.]”

Nonetheless, all of these concerns about FDR’s health “were kept secret from the public.” In fact, Roosevelt’s own physician maintained that “there had been no previous signals of a [health] disaster.” Yet, Churchill’s personal physician maintained that “[w]henever FDR was called on to preside over any meeting, he failed to make any attempt to grip it or guide it, and sat generally speechless, or, if he made any intervention, it was generally completely irrelevant.” At one point, FDR made the outlandish comment that in dealing with Middle Eastern issues, there was one concession that might be made and that “was to give Saudi Arabia’s King Ibn Saud the six million Jews in the United States.” One explanation of this response was a kind of aphasia — the lack of the sort of mental filter that keeps people from blurting out impulsive statements.”

Moreover, there were times when Roosevelt “signed or agreed to things of which he later said he had no knowledge. Thus, many of the cables and memos issued in his name during the last year of Roosevelt’s life were routinely the work of others.” It appears that Roosevelt’s administration was, “in its last months, a kind of ghost ship, running on inertia.”

The latest political pile-on over alleged pharmaceutical price gouging is officially underway now that Hillary Clinton joined the scrum on Wednesday. Usually these exercises are inspired by cures or important clinical innovations that happen to be expensive. The irony this time is that the target is a monopolist created by the same government that Mrs. Clinton wants to hand far more power over drugs.

In a statement, the Democrat assailed the “outrageous” cost of EpiPen, an emergency treatment for allergic reactions known as anaphylaxis, and she demanded that drug maker Mylan “immediately reduce the price.” Federal and Senate investigations are pending into these spring-loaded syringes filled with epinephrine (adrenaline) used primarily by children with life-threatening sensitivities to food or insect stings.

Mylan has raised the price of EpiPen in semiannual 10% to 15% tranches so that a two-pack that cost about $100 in 2008 now runs $500 or more after insurance discounts and coupons. Outrage seems to be peaking now because more families are exposed to drug prices directly though insurance deductibles and co-pays, plus the political class has discovered another easy corporate villain.

Still, the steady Mylan rise is hard to read as anything other than inevitable when a billion-dollar market is cornered by one supplier. Epinephrine is a basic and super-cheap medicine, and the EpiPen auto-injector device has been around since the 1970s.

Do you ever feel like all of Washington’s regulatory, ethics, and law-enforcement agencies looked at Bill and Hillary Clinton and shrugged, “Eh, they’re the Clintons, they’re going to get away with it anyway”?

Last week, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, a close Clinton ally, caused a stir when he suggested that if Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, the Clinton Foundation — formally named the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation — would have to be disbanded.

“I know it’ll be hard for President [Bill] Clinton because he cares very deeply about what the foundation has done,” Rendell told the New York Daily News. “It’d be impossible to keep the foundation open without at least the appearance of a problem.”

The “appearance of a problem” to which Rendell refers is presumably the fact that foreign governments and foreign citizens could give unlimited amounts of money to the foundation, donations that would look like bribes to skeptical outside observers. The Clintons’ defenders quickly point out that Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea do not collect salaries from the foundation, and thus do not personally benefit from it. Except the foundation pays for the family’s travel expenses, as disclosed in the organization’s Form 990, filed with the Internal Revenue Service. That disclosure notes that the family “may require the need to travel by charter or in first class” because of “extraordinary security and other requirements.”

The Clintons get nothing from the foundation except free travel on chartered jets and first-class airline seats and hotel stays and, oh yes, control over a giant operating budget to steer to the charities and good causes that they prefer. Practically nothing!

In any case, within a few days Rendell had recanted, suggesting that a President Hillary Clinton would merely need to keep the Foundation at arm’s length during her term.

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“I think if the secretary becomes president, she obviously can have no further involvement with it, can’t ask for money for the foundation,” he said. “They may decide to let partners carry on the work for the next four to eight years.”