RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it”

George Santayana

One of my favorite quotations – it underscores why we endure many of the unnecessary political follies of contemporary society. We as a society don’t know a lot about our history, and/or don’t see the significance of trying to remedy that.

Here is a good “history” example – what is the significance of August 26th, 1920?

Clearly anyone knowing the answer likely indicates an individual who understands something about the Constitution, how the division of labor between the states and federal government come together concerning amendments, and perhaps a bit about our history as a society.

Sadly most people I have asked about the 19th Amendment, if they have any clue at all about the purpose of an Amendment in terms of the Constitution, think it was the law that overturned Prohibition, granting college students the right to play beer pong on campus.

History is poorly taught in the US, as multiple studies by various groups have revealed in the last 10 years. The Nation’s Report Card (1) 2014 study on 8th grader knowledge of US history, geography and civics revealed 29% of the students possessed below basic knowledge in US History. Only 18% were proficient. Let me repeat that….only 18% of 8th graders in the study were proficient about the history of their own country. This isn’t quantum physics talking about the building blocks of the universe, but US history is the building block of our foundation as good citizens. Geography and Civics did somewhat better, but not by much. The increase from 2010 wasn’t inspiring either. In addition, when history is taught, not surprisingly it is increasingly revisionist, and leaning more towards indoctrination than education.

After reading the study results, I became convinced Watter’s World was real, and that is a scary place. The folks he interviews get to vote. OMGosh maybe the Framers were right to be afraid, very afraid of the masses, especially the uneducated. Moreover, Dickens, not missing a beat warned Scrooge about the danger of ignorance.

Against this backdrop, sometimes I am surprised books about history, and great historic figures continue to make the NY Times bestseller list – examples include Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates, Hamilton, The Bully Pulpit, Killing Lincoln, George Washington’s Secret Six, The Quartet, and others.

However, before we take comfort that book sales translate to a knowledgeable public, prepared to spend judiciously and wisely the most precious resource at our disposal – the vote, walk with me through a quick civics experience.

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton dismissed questions about conflicts of interest between the Clinton Foundation and her work as secretary of state, saying she made decisions based on the merits.

“My work as secretary of state was not influenced by any outside forces,” she told CNN’s Anderson Cooper Wednesday evening. “I made policy decisions based on what I thought was right, to keep Americans safe and protect U.S. interests abroad.”

In recent days, she has been under fire for meeting with foundation donors during her time in office, with Republican Donald Trump accusing her of creating a pay-to-play culture.

The foundation said last week it would not accept contributions from foreign or corporate donors if she is elected president. Asked why that set-up was acceptable when she headed the State Department, but not if she is president, Mrs. Clinton said, “Obviously if I am president there will be some unique circumstances and that’s why the foundation has laid out additional, unprecedented steps.”

She also dismissed a report from the Associated Press that found a large share of the meetings she had with non-governmental, non-foreign officials were with foundation donors.

“There’s a lot of smoke and there’s no fire,” she said. She said the AP analysis excluded nearly 2,000 meetings with world leaders and others with government officials. The private citizens she did meet with, Mrs. Clinton said, included leading figures such as the late Elie Wiesel and philanthropist Melinda Gates. She said it’s “absurd” to think that those meetings were “somehow due to connections with the foundation instead of their status as highly respected global leaders.”

“These are people I was proud to meet with, who any secretary of state would have been proud to meet with and hear about their work and their insight,” she said.

On a separate controversy, Mrs. Clinton declined to discuss a New York Times report that she told the FBI that she had been advised by former Secretary of State Colin Powell to use a personal email account. Mr. Powell replied that she was already using private email when he told her about his practices.

She said she appreciated Mr. Powell’s help but would not “litigate in public” their private conversations. CONTINUE AT SITE

This is the week that the steady drip, drip, drip of details about Hillary Clinton’s server turned into a waterfall. This is the week that we finally learned why Mrs. Clinton used a private communications setup, and what it hid. This is the week, in short, that we found out that the infamous server was designed to hide that Mrs. Clinton for three years served as the U.S. Secretary of the Clinton Foundation.

In March this column argued that while Mrs. Clinton’s mishandling of classified information was important, it missed the bigger point. The Democratic nominee obviously didn’t set up her server with the express purpose of exposing national secrets—that was incidental. She set up the server to keep secret the details of the Clintons’ private life—a life built around an elaborate and sweeping money-raising and self-promoting entity known as the Clinton Foundation.

Had Secretary Clinton kept the foundation at arm’s length while in office—as obvious ethical standards would have dictated—there would never have been any need for a private server, or even private email. The vast majority of her electronic communications would have related to her job at the State Department, with maybe that occasional yoga schedule. And those Freedom of Information Act officers would have had little difficulty—when later going through a state.gov email—screening out the clearly “personal” before making her records public. This is how it works for everybody else.

Mrs. Clinton’s problem—as we now know from this week’s release of emails from Huma Abedin’s private Clinton-server account—was that there was no divide between public and private. Mrs. Clinton’s State Department and her family foundation were one seamless entity—employing the same people, comparing schedules, mixing foundation donors with State supplicants. This is why she maintained a secret server, and why she deleted 15,000 emails that should have been turned over to the government.

Most of the focus on this week’s Abedin emails has centered on the disturbing examples of Clinton Foundation executive Doug Band negotiating State favors for foundation donors. But equally instructive in the 725 pages released by Judicial Watch is the frequency and banality of most of the email interaction. Mr. Band asks if Hillary’s doing this conference, or having that meeting, and when she’s going to Brazil. Ms. Abedin responds that she’s working on it, or will get this or that answer. These aren’t the emails of mere casual acquaintances; they don’t even bother with salutations or signoffs. These are the emails of two people engaged in the same purpose—serving the State-Clinton Foundation nexus.

The other undernoted but important revelation is that the media has been looking in the wrong place. The focus is on Mrs. Clinton’s missing emails, and no doubt those 15,000 FBI-recovered texts contain nuggets. Then again, Mrs. Clinton was a busy woman, and most of the details of her daily State/foundation life would have been handled by trusted aides. This is why they, too, had private email. Top marks to Judicial Watch for pursuing Ms. Abedin’s file from the start. A new urgency needs to go into seeing similar emails of former Clinton Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Michael Cutler Moment with Michael Cutler, a former Senior INS Special Agent.

Michael discussed How Hillary Hurts Black People and Minorities,unveiling how figures don’t lie but how liars can figure. http://jamieglazov.com/2016/08/25/how-hillary-hurts-black-people-and-minorities-a-michael-cutler-moment/

Don’t miss it!

Back in 2009, as a conservative student, and thus a walking trigger warning in a pre-trigger warning era at Columbia University, I heard that Andrew Breitbart was coming to New York to speak about his mission to “diversify Hollywood.”

With glee, I signed up for a ticket and listened to Andrew speak, frenetic as ever, about the importance of culture and how all of us starry-eyed students should come to Hollywood and train to become movie moguls.

His ultimate vision was for the next generation of young conservatives to eschew politics — which he viewed as largely a lost cause consisting of people only focused on the next election — and instead build a sustainable conservative base by infiltrating Hollywood agencies and studios, and building our own.

The goal was to get conservatives into positions of power in the culture, who could produce compelling content with an alternative narrative, and thus challenge progressivism’s chokehold on society.

For as Andrew rightly advocated, “Politics is downstream from culture.” He saw that it was in popular culture where the field was cleared for elections to be won, and a country to be fundamentally transformed. He knew that the Left’s dominance in the space, and the conservatives’ lack of resistance, let alone interest in it, meant we would always be fighting uphill battles while losing the war.

Andrew evidently felt that his highest and best use was to go about delegitimizing and destroying the Left’s sacred cows in culture by exposing their rank hypocrisy and corruption. But he knew that when the Left’s cultural house of cards came tumbling down, there needed to be a credible alternative.

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.