RUTHFULLY YOURS

As a resident of New York I resent a billionaire who literally bought a third term despite term limits. After 9/11 when Giuliani suggested remaining on the job for a few months to complete the cleanup after the downing of the World Trade Center-Bloomberg ungraciously reminded Rudy that New York City had term limits ….What a hypocrite….rsk
You read it here last week. As the odds rise of extreme outcomes in the presidential election, so do the chances of a serious third-party candidate getting into the race, especially Michael Bloomberg. Now word has leaked that the former three-term mayor of New York is actively exploring the possibility.

Mr. Bloomberg considered a run in 2008 and 2012, only to conclude he couldn’t win, and that may be what happens this year too. The U.S. political system is tilted against third-party candidates, which is why the last one to take the White House was Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as the nominee of the antislavery Republicans.

Third-party candidates have made other notable runs but their influence has mainly been as spoilers or to force the major-party candidates to confront issues they’d ignored. Teddy Roosevelt ruined William Howard Taft’s chances for re-election in 1912, and Ross Perot contributed to George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 though he won no electoral votes. He split the Reagan coalition by winning 19% of the vote and helped Bill Clinton win with only 43%.

CLINTON, Iowa—In her closing pitch to Iowa voters, Hillary Clinton is casting herself as the one Democrat who has the experience to make the life-or-death choices that come with the presidency.

It echoes the argument she made in 2008, when she ran an ad saying a president must be ready for a “3 a.m. phone call” warning of imminent peril. It didn’t work then and some people close to the Clintons worry it won’t succeed now.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has narrowed Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Iowa ahead of the state’s Feb. 1 caucuses. He could scramble the race should he notch a victory there and in New Hampshire. His theme is direct: He is the champion of voters who are disillusioned with Washington politics and impatient with an economy that lavishes rewards on a tiny fraction of families.

“I am angry…and the American people are angry,” Mr. Sanders said Sunday on CBS.

He is promising a political “revolution.” Even if his ideas may be difficult to achieve in a polarized, Republican-controlled Congress—a point Mrs. Clinton often makes—his message is overshadowing Mrs. Clinton’s focus on experience, some Clinton allies said. They want to see her return to an argument more central to her campaign when she entered the race nine months ago: that she will shake up the system.

On April 14, 2015, a much ballyhooed “compromise”—but in fact a constitutional capitulation—regarding S.615, the “Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act of 2015,” was unanimously agreed upon within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Independent Politico.com and Washington Post assessments of critical aspects of the lauded compromise brokered by Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker and Democrat Ben Cardin confirmed my worst fears about what had actually transpired.

Politico observed:

Though it gives Congress an avenue to reject the lifting of legislative sanctions that will be a key part of any deal with Iran, it explicitly states that Congress does not have to approve the diplomatic deal struck by Iran, the United States and other world powers… nor does it treat an Iran agreement like a treaty

This claim was substantiated on p. 32 of the updated bill, under a section titled “EFFECT OF CONGRESSIONAL ACTION WITH RESPECT TO NUCLEAR AGREEMENTS WITH IRAN,” which states in lines 16-19,

16‘‘(C) this section does not require a vote by

17 Congress for the agreement to commence;

18 ‘‘(D) this section provides for congressional

19 review,

Furthermore, as Karen DeYoung and Mike DeBonis added in their Washington Post report:

Obama retains the right to veto any action to scuttle an Iran pact. To override, a veto would require a two-thirds majority of both House and Senate.

Another day, another double-take reading the New York Times.

The latest shoe in the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s scandalous mishandling of classified information dropped heavily this week. It had already been reported that, contrary to her denials, hundreds of secret intelligence communications were transmitted over the private, unsecured e-mail system on which the former secretary of state recklessly conducted government business. It is now clear that some of these contained “top secret/SAP” information. (SAP is “special access programs.”) This indicates defense secrets of the highest order, the compromise of which can destroy vital intelligence programs, get covert agents killed, and imperil national security.

Yet, in reporting the story, the Times’ Mark Mazzetti took pains to stress: “The government has said that Mrs. Clinton is not a subject of the investigation.”

Really? Well, to put it in Clintonian terms: It all depends on what the definition of “subject” is.

Though you wouldn’t know it from the Times, “subject” is a term of art in criminal investigations. It refers to one of the three categories into which prosecutors fit every relevant actor. Subjects are people whose conduct is being scrutinized and who, depending on what evidence turns up, may or may not be charged. This distinguishes them from targets, who are suspects virtually certain to be indicted for an obvious crime; and from mere witnesses, whose interaction with a suspect suggests no criminality on their part (e.g., the teller in a bank hold-up, or the neighbor awakened by a fatal gunshot next door).

For law enforcement, targets and mere witnesses are easy to deal with. Targets usually decline to be interviewed (as is their right under the Fifth Amendment). Even if they are not guilty, it is often prudent for them to wait to see what the government alleges before they answer questions. Witnesses tend to speak freely because there is no reason not to.

It’s the political season, and I want to cut Sarah Palin some slack. She and her family have endured disgusting, unjust verbal abuse over the years, and I like her, personally.

But some things cannot be overlooked. I would not be discussing her son’s arrest this week except that, in the highest-profile way, at a Tulsa rally, she did something grotesque and disturbing: She blamed President Obama for the fact that her 26-year-old son beat up his girlfriend this week.

Allegedly, I must say, since he hasn’t yet been convicted. But Palin did not claim that her son was innocent; she instead said that, because he served in Iraq, post-traumatic stress disorder was responsible for his behavior: “I can talk personally about this. I guess it’s kind of the elephant in the room — because my own family, going through what we’re going through today with my son, a combat vet having served in a Stryker brigade fighting for you all, America, in the war zone. But my son, like so many others, they come back a bit different. They come back hardened,” Palin said.

As Politico reported her speech:

“They come back wondering if there is that respect for what their fellow soldiers and airmen and every other member of the military have given so sacrificially to this country, and that starts at the top,” she continued, touting Trump as the best choice for president. “It’s a shame that our military personnel even have to question, have to wonder if they’re respected anymore. It starts from the top. The question, though, it comes from the top, the question, though, that comes from our own president where they have to look at him and wonder, ‘Do you know what we go through? Do you know what we’re trying to do to secure America and to secure the freedoms that have been bequeathed us?’”

As a thought experiment, let us take Hillary Clinton at her word. The dismissive excuse that she has consistently offered is that, to paraphrase, the documents were not “marked” correctly such as to put her on proper legal notice that the specific information revealed therein was, in fact, “classified” at any secrecy level. By this argument, Hillary claims it was “AOK” for her to have “inadvertently” sent them over her unsecured home computer server because, after all, “how was one to know?” She cannot be faulted in any of this because she had no way of realizing at the time that she might be handling secret information — which “after all” was classified as such “retroactively.”

But isn’t this admission disqualifying for a presidential candidate? It raises automatic doubts about her level of mental acuity in reading, assessing, and (most emphatically) appreciating sensitive, high-level information, especially national security info. Whenever she and/or her aides viewed a satellite image did they assume it was from Google Maps? In effect, Hillary is saying that although she had reviewed dozens if not hundreds of emails bearing national security secrets — never once did she recognized on her own that the transmissions contained state secrets. We know this because Hillary cannot admit otherwise. For if Hillary had recognized that the emails carried unsecured state-secrets, this recognition would consequently have immediately burdened her with the duty and obligation to report the insecurity in her communications for correction.

The battle over Florida’s 25 Electoral College votes in the 2000 Presidential election will certainly come to mind when any political analyst thinks of very close, very consequential American ballot disputes.

But as Edward Foley makes clear in Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States (Oxford Press, 2016), a comprehensive and entertaining history of many such battles over more than two centuries, Florida was only the latest such example.

And in fact, there have been several such battles since the Supreme Court ruled in Bush v Gore in December 2000. These included the gubernatorial race in Washington State in 2004, and the Minnesota U.S. Senate race in 2008. The Minnesota dispute, which lasted well into 2009 before being settled, gave the Democrats the 60th seat in the U.S. Senate enabling the party to overcome a Republican filibuster and pass the Affordable Care Act (“ObamaCare”).

Foley argues, convincingly I think, that the Founding Fathers did not adequately consider the processes for settling ballot disputes, especially when partisans on the local or state level, could corrupt an honest vote count or even use force to pressure voters, and then submit the results they were seeking for certification on a state or Congressional level. Of course, at the time of the drafting of the Constitution, the plan was for U.S. senators to be elected by state legislatures, and U.S. presidents to be elected by electors chosen by these same state legislatures. The popular election of presidents did not begin for several decades with many states first adopting the practice in 1824, and the popular election of U.S. senators not until more than a century later when the 17th Amendment was passed. In any case, the direct election of senators and presidents did not bring with it much in the way of consistent or fair processes for determining the winners in ballot disputes.

Back in July, I wrote a post called “Anger is Making Us Stupid.” In it, I quoted no less authorities than Yoda and Jonah Goldberg (and have you noticed those two are never seen together?) to make the point that justifiable anger on the right was causing conservatives to follow blindly after an untrustworthy left-winger, one Donald Trump.

I’ve since adjusted that judgment somewhat. Many of the people who have gotten a) angry and therefore b) stupid were never really conservatives to begin with. They are rather working-class folks who have been sold out by both the Democrats (who despise them) and the Republicans (who have ignored them) while their jobs vanished and their wages stagnated and their mortality rate rose and their concerns went unheard. Of course they’re angry. They have every right to be.

But angry is angry and stupid is stupid and it’s now clear that Trump’s supporters, whoever they are, have been had.

Let me show you how.

Here are some typical responses to my attacks on Trump, copied from the comments section:

Anger isn’t making me stupid, it’s making me take a stand against another establishment loser like Dole, McCain, Romney. I would rather suffer more time in the wilderness than have another establishment President.

In another Fox News exclusive, Catherine Herridge reports that according to two sources, “at least one of the emails on Hillary Clinton’s private server” contained highly sensitive reporting of human intelligence sources engaged in ongoing operations, known as “HCS-O” in the intelligence community. “This is the most sensitive category,” Herridge said, “because of the jeopardy to the source.”

Both sources are familiar with the intelligence community inspector general’s January 14 letter to Congress, advising the Oversight committees that intelligence beyond Top Secret — known as Special Access Program (SAP) — was identified in the Clinton emails, as well the supporting documents from the affected agencies that owned the information and have final say on classification.

According to a December 2013 policy document released by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence: “The HSC-0 compartment (Operations) is used to protect exceptionally fragile and unique IC (intelligence community) clandestine HUMINT operations and methods that are not intended for dissemination outside of the originating agency.”

It is not publicly known whether the information contained in the Clinton emails also revealed who the human source was, their nationality or affiliation.

Dan Maguire, former Special Operations strategic planner for Africom, told Fox News the disclosure of sensitive material impacts national security and exposes U.S. sources.