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September 2016

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Of Course Hillary’s Health Is Relevant Why shouldn’t she face the same scrutiny as every other presidential nominee? By Kevin D. Williamson

By on September 8th, 2016

Of course Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health is a legitimate issue for the 2016 election.

So is Donald Trump’s. So is Gary Johnson’s. So is that of any presidential candidate.

Mrs. Clinton’s media allies (which is to say, the media, more or less) are circling the wagons on this issue, and it is curious.

The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza made an unpersuasive attempt to explain why it was legitimate to treat John McCain’s health as a campaign issue in 2008 but illegitimate to do the same with Herself in 2016. McCain, he points out, would have been 72 years old at the time of his election, the oldest person ever elected to the office; Herself will, if elected in November, be a sprightly . . . 69 years of age. McCain bore the scars of Vietnam and Arizona: He was grievously wounded — and tortured — by the Vietnamese, and he suffers from a recurring melanoma, which necessitates occasional trips to the doctor to have a patch of dodgy skin removed. Skin cancer is no joke, but millions of Americans live with melanoma of the sort McCain has with very little effect on their lives other than inconvenience.

Mrs. Clinton, in spite of her probably fictitious attempt to join the military, was never a prisoner of war, nor does she, so far as any record made public shows, suffer from cancer or any other chronic condition.

Still, she is not exactly the picture of health. As Cillizza notes, she suffered a concussion as a result of an unfortunate tendency to fall down, purportedly stemming from an upset stomach. There is at least one thing that leaps to mind that causes both digestive revolt and falling on one’s ass, and it is whispered that Mrs. Clinton drinks immoderately, though there is no evidence that this is in fact the case. She sometimes requires a helper step to get into the SUVs that whisk her hither and yon in her pursuit of the presidency.

RELATED: My Brain Injury Made Me Forget, but My Health Is Not an Issue!

Mrs. Clinton is also remarkably forgetful: During a midsummer interview with FBI agents investigating her furtive and illegal e-mail practices, Mrs. Clinton used the words “I cannot recall” or similar formulations more than 40 times. Doctor Johnson once remarked that the prospect of being hanged “concentrates the mind wonderfully,” and perhaps it is the case that the prospect of being brought up on federal charges related to the handling of classified material has the opposite effect, producing a kind of special-purpose dementia.

Mrs. Clinton of course inspires the conspiracy kooks, an effect that is very much amplified by the fact that her opponent in 2016 is a big-league conspiracy kook leading a team of minor-league conspiracy kooks. Louis Brandeis was absolutely correct about sunlight’s being the best disinfectant, but Mrs. Clinton is a creature of the shade. Given her history of rampant, craven, deep, broad, sustained, overarching, continuous, relentless dishonesty about practically every aspect of her personal and public lives, is it really so implausible that she’d lie about her health? No. She’d lie about her health even if there were nothing to lie about, just to keep in practice.

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Trump Up, Hillary Down, Obama Out Without traditional battle lines to fight over, Hillary Clinton is lying low while a frenetic Donald Trump talks nonstop. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on September 8th, 2016

In most presidential elections, the two candidates spar over issues. The president campaigns for his party’s nominee in hopes of continuing his legacy.

Democrats champion liberalism, Republicans conservatism. In numerous press conferences, journalists try to force newsworthy and embarrassing admissions from the two candidates.

Not this year.

Barack Obama, who less than two years ago dipped to 40 percent in approval rating, is nowhere to be seen. He seems to know that the more he is absent and quiet, the more the public likes the idea rather than the reality of him as president — and his approval rating has risen to 51 percent.

In his self-imposed retreat, Obama makes no effort to defend the Affordable Care Act, which is all but disintegrating, as major insurers pull out and costs skyrocket.

Ditto the Iran deal. Obama is learning that it is better to be quiet about Iranian violations, ransom for hostages, and provocations than to explain them away.

Obama months ago gave up mentioning how the crushing national debt has almost doubled to nearly $20 trillion under his watch. No one seems to be defending the Obama administration’s lax immigration and border-enforcement policies.

He is also silent on his foreign policy — “reset” with Russia, the abrupt pullout from Iraq, the intervention in Libya, the growth of the Islamic State, the disintegration of Syria, and the decision not to associate global terrorism with radical Islamism.

Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton has kept a relatively low profile for someone who’s running for president. She has not held a press conference in more than nine months, counting on a compliant press to keep giving her a pass on her e-mail scandals.

Her campaign strategy is to agree to occasional one-on-one interviews with pre-selected friendly journalists, and to engage in chitchat on frivolous morning and late-evening TV talk shows. Clinton avoids large rallies, where she often grates rather than enthuses.

The Clinton strategy is to sit on her small lead in the last two months of the race, expecting that the mercurial Donald J. Trump will finally destroy his campaign with another outburst. She apparently assumes that nonstop fundraising, attack ads, and an army of staffers will bury the amateurish Trump campaign.

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Send Lawyers, BleachBit, and Money The very curious timeline of Clinton’s document deletions: subpoena issued → her lawyers talk to Clinton’s IT team → e-mails destroyed By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on September 8th, 2016

Imagine a mafia don who wants to have some evidence destroyed, maybe even have a witness “disappear.” Does he have a sit-down with his trusted capos, who will then give the job to a reliable button-man? Not if he’s taken the Clinton Family course in advanced criminology — known around the campus as “(C).” If the don is a graduate, he knows the new way to get away with murder is to have all your orders communicated by your lawyers.

At the Washington Examiner Wednesday, Byron York had a very interesting report about the destruction of thousands of Clinton e-mails after Congress had issued a subpoena for them. (Obstruction of a congressional investigation is a felony under federal law.) The report is based on the FBI’s heavily redacted summary report of its Clinton e-mails investigation.

The e-mails were destroyed by a technician at Platte River Network (PRN), which had been retained by Clinton to handle her server. The tech is clearly a man (referred to as “he” several times), but his name is redacted from the FBI report. Evidence strongly suggests that this PRN technician initially lied to the FBI, then changed his story and clammed up about any instructions he might have been given.

A bit of background: In December 2014, Cheryl Mills instructed the PRN tech to implement a change in Clinton’s e-mail-retention policy: Any e-mails older than 60 days (translation: any remaining e-mails from Clinton’s time as secretary of state) were to be purged from the server. Purging in this context did not just mean deletion, it meant destruction: The Clinton team was using the BleachBit program to ensure that the purged e-mails could never be retrieved or reassembled. This was a conscious scorched-earth operation, headed up by Mills, the Clinton Family’s Tom Hayden — longtime consigliere and Clinton’s chief-of-staff at the State Department.

But there’s a Fredo in every good crime story, right? In this case, it is the PRN tech, who apparently did not follow instructions. According to his original story to the FBI, about three months went by when, out of the blue, in what he described as an “Oh sh**!” moment, he remembered that he had forgotten to purge the e-mails. So . . . he of course took it on himself to do it.

You’ll be shocked to learn, though, that that’s not quite how it happened.

On March 3, 2015, the New York Times broke the story that, while secretary of state, Mrs. Clinton had systematically used an unauthorized homebrew server system for all her e-mail communications, including the tens of thousands related to government business. This finally roused the House Benghazi Committee from its slumbers. (As I noted at the time, the Benghazi Committee had curiously failed to issue a subpoena for Clinton’s private e-mails, despite knowing of her use of private e-mail addresses for government business even before the Times report revealed them publicly.) The same day the Times report was published, the committee zipped a letter to David Kendall, Clinton’s lawyer at the prestigious Williams & Connolly in Washington, D.C. (Clinton has a legion of lawyers, but W&C’s Kendall is her main outside-the-government attorney.) The committee’s letter demanded that the e-mails be preserved and produced. The next day, March 4, the committee issued a subpoena directing Clinton to produce e-mails from her private e-mail addresses.

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The American Military and the Specter of an Untrustworthy Commander-In-Chief A track record of failure and fabrication puts military voters on edge. Ari Lieberman

By on September 8th, 2016

In August 1993, Hillary Clinton’s husband Bill dispatched a force of U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos to war-torn Somalia in an effort to seize the Somali warlord, Mohammed Farrah Aidid. Military commanders had assessed the need for armor and air cover to carry out the dangerous mission. They requested M-1 Abrams tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, as well as AC-130 gunships but the Clinton administration obscenely denied the request placing U.S. forces in a very vulnerable situation.

On October 3, a taskforce of lightly armed U.S. forces seized a good portion of Aidid’s political and military echelon in Mogadishu as they assembled for a meeting in the capital but the operation stirred a hornet’s nest and the troops began engaging Somali militiamen in urban combat. Two Black Hawk helicopters were subsequently shot down with rocket propelled grenades. The nature and dynamic of the mission rapidly changed from a lightening operation involving quick seizure and extraction to one of protracted urban combat pitting outnumbered and outgunned U.S. forces against thousands of Somali militiamen armed to the teeth with machine guns, RPGs, mortars and recoilless rifles.

Though the Rangers and Delta Force commandos ultimately prevailed, 18 soldiers were killed (some of the bodies were mutilated), 73 were wounded and a helicopter pilot was captured. Had the request for armor and air cover been granted, there is no question that the outcome of the Battle of Mogadishu would have been vastly different and U.S. casualties would have been minimal. Adding insult to injury, Aidid’s aides, captured at great cost and sacrifice, were quickly released on orders from the political echelon.

Bill Clinton should have resigned but instead passed the buck to his loyal secretary of defense, Les Aspin, who resigned in disgrace a few months later. Bill Clinton never served in the military, never went to military school and had no concept of what it means to be a soldier and send men to battle to fight and die. Clinton was and still is a power hungry, political opportunist and nothing more. His inexcusable actions, in denying our service members the best equipment, cost lives.

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The Invasion of Buffalo Destroying America city by city. Daniel Greenfield

By on September 8th, 2016

Millard Fillmore was born in a log cabin in upstate New York. Fifty years later, he took office as the thirteenth president of the United States. Around that time he sold off a piece of land. That land became the neighborhood of Lovejoy in the city of Buffalo.

Lovejoy was named after Sarah Lovejoy who had been killed defending her home during the War of 1812. British forces had assaulted American towns once again by using their Indian allies as a terror weapon. Buffalo, now a major city, was burned to the ground with only four buildings left standing.

Mrs. Lovejoy told her son Henry, a 12-year-old boy who shouldered a musket too heavy for him to bear, to flee into the woods. She stayed behind. When the savages invaded her home, she tried to defend herself. The invaders killed her with a tomahawk and scalped her body. A neighbor described how her “long Black hair reached to the Floor clotted with Blood.” Other families fled on sleds into the snow.

When the locals returned a few days later, the only living thing in Buffalo was a cat. There were no other survivors. Only corpses.

But within a week they began to rebuild. By the time Fillmore sold his land, it was a city of 40,000. By the time Lovejoy was a neighborhood, it had surpassed 100,000. German, Polish, Jewish and Italian immigrants quickly filled Lovejoy and clung to it with the same tenacity that Sarah had.

And then another savage invasion began.

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Far Left-Wing Hypocrites by Michel Danby

By on September 8th, 2016

Michael David Danby is an Australian politician who has been an Australian Labor Party member of the Australian House of Representatives since October 1998, representing the Division of Melbourne Ports, Victoria.

Nearly half a million people have been killed in Syria in the last four years.300,000 civilians are trapped in Aleppo – surrounded by Iranians and Hezbollah and being carpet bombed by the Russian and Syrian governments – yet hypocritical far-Left unionists like Paul Elliot remain completely silent on the slaughter in Syria.
Michael Danby

Michael Danby

Displaying their entrenched hypocrisy, Elliot’s far-Left unionists show there are no limits to their attacks on the only liberal democracy in the Middle East, by adopting a ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ (BDS) policy against Israel.

The medical scientists, pharmacists and phycologists who pay their union subscriptions to the ultra-left HSU No 4 branch will need to ask whether the union’s discriminatory BDS policy instructions mean they will have to rip out the Israeli-made computer chips from their computers and cease prescribing medications which were developed or produced in Israel.

Member for Melbourne Ports – Michael Danby MP – lambasted Paul Elliott and other participating members of the HSU saying; “they (the union) should be more concerned with the fact that the general public think they are a union of crooks, rather than taking up the insignia position of the Nazis and boycotting Israeli and Jewish businesses.”

Mr Danby said that the motivations of the people who run the international BDS campaigns are very clear; what they are on about is the elimination of Israel, not some critiquing of its internal politics. [1]

“I call on those responsible to reconsider and immediately withdraw this discriminatory policy” Mr Danby said.

The Victorian branch of the Health Services Union (HSU) were singled out for praise however, having distinguished themselves from their extremist colleagues.

The internal pushback within the union has been led by Dianna Asmar who represents hundreds of aged-care workers who work in Jewish aged-care services in Melbourne Ports.

Ms Asmar has expressed her outright opposition to the anti-Israel boycott.

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ISIS Magazine to Jihadists: Target ‘Young Adults Engaged in Sports Activities in the Park’ By Bridget Johnson

By on September 8th, 2016

A new ISIS magazine released by its propaganda wing in charge of foreign-language outreach advises jihadists to target teens playing sports after school or even flower sellers hawking blooms on the street.

The first edition of the new magazine — Rumiyah, meaning Rome — was published in English, Turkish, German, French, Indonesian, Russian, Pashto and Uyghur. The name, of course, is symbolic of ISIS’ apocalyptic goal of the conquest of Rome.

The design of the magazine is more simple than English-language Dabiq. It’s also much shorter: 38 pages compared to the 82 pages in the last issue of Dabiq.

The new effort by ISIS’ Al-Hayat Media Center is likely an effort to reach broader audiences on a more frequent basis. The articles are similar to other ISIS material: heavily on Quranic verse yet not so much in a Western tone, like al-Qaeda’s Inspire magazine.

In one article on the Muslim’s responsibility to shed the blood of the kafir [disbelievers], the writers stress that “Allah did not only command the ‘fighting’ of disbelievers, as if to say He only wants us to conduct frontline operations against them. Rather, He has also ordered that they be slain wherever they may be – on or off the battlefield.”

“…All of this becomes all the more apparent for those who have realized that the blood of a kafir is cheap, filthy, and permissible to shed.”

The article heavily quotes scholars citing the Quran to justify targeting civilians. “None of this should be surprising to any Muslim who has studied his religion, as this matter of a kafir’s blood being halal to shed is something upon which scholars have recorded consensus,” the author concludes.

“Muslims currently living in Dar al-Kufr [land of the disbelievers] must be reminded that the blood of the disbelievers is halal, and killing them is a form of worship to Allah, the Lord, King, and God of mankind,” readers are told. “This includes the businessman riding to work in a taxicab, the young adults (post-pubescent ‘children’) engaged in sports activities in the park, and the old man waiting in line to buy a sandwich.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Small Business Administration Picks Losers Over Winners Adam Andrzejewski ,

By on September 8th, 2016

The mission of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is to provide lending to “Mom and Pop” businesses on Main Street. The recipients are supposed to be entrepreneurs with great ideas who just can’t find financing in the private marketplace. The public image is one of apple pie, baseball and the American Dream.

But the reality is that the SBA is economically costly for taxpayers, and it creates a painful human cost for the workers it dislocates.

In 2014, we documented at Forbes, SBA lending to the wealthy lifestyle: Lamborghini auto dealerships, Rolex jewelers, world-class golf courses, private country clubs and even $142 million lent to businesses in ZIP code 90210, Beverly Hills, CA.

Now, we’ve published our OpenTheBooks Snapshot Oversight Report – Truth in Lending: The U.S. Small Business Administration’s $24.2 Billion Bad Loan Portfolio. Analyzing the SBA portfolio since 2000, we discovered 160,000 failed loans were charged-off to the tune of $17.5 billion. In other words, taxpayers absorbed those costs. Meanwhile, 1.4 million workers were dislocated when they lost their jobs within these failed companies. A few highlights:

• In some years, such as 2007, one of every three SBA loans was “charged-off” against taxpayers.

• We found that the Big Six Wheel ‘house odds’ at a Las Vegas casino are a better bet than large tranches of the SBA loan portfolio.

• The $24.2 billion bad loan portfolio at the SBA (2000-2015) is larger than the annual budgets of 26 states.

We mapped the bad loans by ZIP code across America. Just zoom-in, click a pin, and review the search results in your neighborhood or across the country rendered in the chart below the map.

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Professors Tell Students: Disagree With Climate Change? Shut Up, Get Out By Tom Knighton

By on September 8th, 2016

“Climate change” is a controversial subject. Some people believe that humans have been doing just about everything wrong and are causing the Earth to heat up to such a degree that we will wipe out civilization. Other people actually examine the evidence and think for themselves.

But the first group includes three professors from the University of Colorado, who have declared that on the subject of climate change, their students aren’t allowed to dissent with their views:

Three professors co-teaching an online course called “Medical Humanities in the Digital Age” at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs recently told their students via email that man-made climate change is not open for debate, and those who think otherwise have no place in their course.

“The point of departure for this course is based on the scientific premise that human induced climate change is valid and occurring. We will not, at any time, debate the science of climate change, nor will the ‘other side’ of the climate change debate be taught or discussed in this course,” states the email, a copy of which was provided to The College Fix by a student in the course.

Signed by the course’s professors Rebecca Laroche, Wendy Haggren and Eileen Skahill, it was sent after several students expressed concern for their success in the course after watching the first online lecture about the impacts of climate change.

“Opening up a debate that 98% of climate scientists unequivocally agree to be a non-debate would detract from the central concerns of environment and health addressed in this course,” the professors’ email continued.

The email also banned discussion on class message boards, and told students who have a problem with that to drop the class.

First, why is a Humanities course talking about climate change?

Oh, right: Everything must be used to advance the narrative, even if it has no place in the discussion.

While you might expect better from college professors, they either don’t know or don’t care that their “98 percent of climate scientists” argument has been debunked, junked, and ridiculed for a long time now, and not just by fly-by-night blogs no one has heard of, either.

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I’m Northwestern’s president. Here’s why safe spaces for students are important.

By on September 8th, 2016

Morton Schapiro is president of Northwestern University.

College presidents have always received a lot of mail. But these days we get more than ever. Much of it relates to student unrest, and most of the messages are unpleasant.

Our usual practice is to thank the sender for writing and leave it at that. The combination of receiving more than 100 emails and letters a day and recognizing that the purpose of many writers is to rebuke, rather than discuss, leaves us little choice about how to respond.

But that certainly doesn’t mean we don’t think long and hard about the issues being raised. Some writers ask why our campus is so focused on how “black lives matter.” Others express a mixture of curiosity and rage about microaggressions and trigger warnings. And finally, what about those oft-criticized “safe spaces”? On this last topic, here are two stories. The first was told to me privately by another institution’s president, and the second takes place at my institution, Northwestern University.

A group of black students were having lunch together in a campus dining hall. There were a couple of empty seats, and two white students asked if they could join them. One of the black students asked why, in light of empty tables nearby. The reply was that these students wanted to stretch themselves by engaging in the kind of uncomfortable learning the college encourages. The black students politely said no. Is this really so scandalous?

I find two aspects of this story to be of particular interest.

First, the familiar question is “Why do the black students eat together in the cafeteria?” I think I have some insight on this based on 16 years of living on or near a college campus: Many groups eat together in the cafeteria, but people seem to notice only when the students are black. Athletes often eat with athletes; fraternity and sorority members with their Greek brothers and sisters; a cappella group members with fellow singers; actors with actors; marching band members with marching band members; and so on.

And that brings me to the second aspect: We all deserve safe spaces. Those black students had every right to enjoy their lunches in peace. There are plenty of times and places to engage in uncomfortable learning, but that wasn’t one of them. The white students, while well-meaning, didn’t have the right to unilaterally decide when uncomfortable learning would take place.

Now for the story from Northwestern. For more than four decades, we have had a building on campus called the Black House, a space specifically meant to be a center for black student life. This summer some well-intentioned staff members suggested that we place one of our multicultural offices there. The pushback from students, and especially alumni, was immediate and powerful. It wasn’t until I attended a listening session that I fully understood why. One black alumna from the 1980s said that she and her peers had fought to keep a house of their own on campus. While the black community should always have an important voice in multicultural activities on campus, she said, we should put that office elsewhere, leaving a small house with a proud history as a safe space exclusively for blacks.

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