RUTHFULLY YOURS

One of the strangest transformations in the era of Obama has been the overt and often gratuitous stereotyping of so-called white people — most often the white working classes who have become constructed into veritable unthinking and unrecognizable zombies. For progressives especially these were not the sympathetic old foundation of the Democratic party, who were once romanticized as the “people” pitted against the industrialists and the bluestockings, but rather have become monstrous caricatures of all sorts of incorrect race/class/and gender behavior and speech.

Stranger still, this disparagement was concurrent to the release of a variety of recent studies that have shown that the white working class has been “losing ground” in far more dramatic terms than have other ethnic groups, especially in key areas such as health and life expectancy. Such news might once have earned liberal sympathies rather than derision. Odder still, the so-called one percenters — that includes high percentages of whites, who have benefited from globalization and changes in the U.S. economy — are often precisely those who damn the less fortunate for supposedly enjoying racially based privileges that are largely confined to themselves.

From ‘tricks’ to ‘clingers’
Obama himself had long ago made popular the idea that there are not individual white people, good and bad, lazy and industrious, but more generally a collective Borg of racist and culpable “white people.” Or, as he characterized his own “effective” tricks over clueless whites in his admittedly fictional memoir Dreams from My Father, “it was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: [White] People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves.”

The president himself repeatedly amplified this emphasis on clueless retrograde whites during his two presidential campaigns, which in toto can be fairly characterized as a refutation of his earlier admirable 2004 speech at the Democratic convention (‘There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America”).

‘How is this not classified?”

So exclaimed Hillary Clinton’s close aide and confidante, Huma Abedin. The FBI had just shown her an old e-mail exchange, over Clinton’s private account, between the then-secretary of state and a second person, whose name Abedin did not recognize. The FBI then did what the FBI is never supposed to do: The agents informed their interviewee (Abedin) of the identity of the second person. It was the president of the United States, Barack Obama, using a pseudonym to conduct communications over a non-secure e-mail system — something anyone with a high-level security clearance, such as Huma Abedin, would instantly realize was a major breach.

Abedin was sufficiently stunned that, for just a moment, the bottomless capacity of Clinton insiders to keep cool in a scandal was overcome. “How is this not classified?”

She recovered quickly enough, though. The FBI records that the next thing Abedin did, after “express[ing] her amazement at the president’s use of a pseudonym,” was to “ask if she could have a copy of the email.”

Abedin knew an insurance policy when she saw one. If Obama himself had been e-mailing over a non-government, non-secure system, then everyone else who had been doing it had a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Thanks to Friday’s FBI document dump — 189 more pages of reports from the Bureau’s year-long foray (“investigation” would not be the right word) into the Clinton e-mail scandal — we now know for certain what I predicted some eight months ago here at NRO: Any possibility of prosecuting Hillary Clinton was tanked by President Obama’s conflict of interest.

As I explained in February, when it emerged that the White House was refusing to disclose at least 22 communications Obama had exchanged with then-secretary Clinton over the latter’s private e-mail account, we knew that Obama had knowingly engaged in the same misconduct that was the focus of the Clinton probe: the reckless mishandling of classified information.

To be sure, he did so on a smaller scale. Clinton’s recklessness was systematic: She intentionally set up a non-secure, non-government communications framework, making it inevitable that classified information would be mishandled, and that federal record-keeping laws would be flouted. Obama’s recklessness, at least as far as we know, was confined to communications with Clinton — although the revelation that the man presiding over the “most transparent administration in history” set up a pseudonym to conceal his communications obviously suggests that his recklessness may have been more widespread.

Still, the difference in scale is not a difference in kind. In terms of the federal laws that criminalize mishandling of classified information, Obama not only engaged in the same type of misconduct Clinton did; he engaged in it with Clinton. It would not have been possible for the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton for her offense without its becoming painfully apparent that 1) Obama, too, had done everything necessary to commit a violation of federal law, and 2) the communications between Obama and Clinton were highly relevant evidence.

Mr. Blinder is a professor at Princeton, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution and an informal adviser to the Hillary Clinton campaign. rsk

One summer day in 1938, Douglas “Wrong Way” Corrigan took off from Brooklyn, N.Y., on a flight to Ireland—even though his flight plan called for going to California. Corrigan claimed he flew east rather than west by mistake—hence his nickname. But he was a skilled pilot, and people argue to this day whether he was a fool or a scoundrel whose request to fly to Ireland had been denied.

So it is with Donald Trump. He says so many ridiculous things that it’s hard to know when he’s displaying abysmal ignorance and when he’s deliberately lying. This ambiguity holds across the board, on virtually all issues and even on basic facts, but I’ll restrict myself to economic issues.

His signature policy remains building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, for which our southern neighbors will pay. But has anyone told him that the net migration flow across that long border has been southbound for years now? Yes, more people are crossing into Mexico than into the U.S. Wrong way, Donald.

Mr. Trump insists that the U.S. Treasury designate China a currency manipulator—meaning that Beijing is intervening in foreign-exchange markets to keep the yuan undervalued. That was probably true a few years ago, but it is pretty clear now that the yuan would depreciate if the Chinese let it float—making China an even fiercer competitor. Wrong way again, Donald.

Mr. Trump once stunned the financial world by declaring that “I would borrow, knowing that if the economy crashed, you could make a deal.” A deal? Does that mean a partial default on U.S. debt—a very bad move for the world’s premier asset? And by the way, Mr. Trump’s spending and tax-cut proposals—which keep on coming—would raise the deficit by amounts that can only be called huge. Wrong way, Donald.

Climate change used to be something to which only scientifically minded policy wonks paid attention. Now it’s so palpable that even China has ratified the Paris agreement to limit carbon emissions. Yet Mr. Trump insists that climate change is a hoax. A hoax? Perpetrated by thousands of conspiring scientists in dozens of countries? You’d think that any sentient businessman would scoff at such an idea. Yet Mr. Trump rants on, trying to push the whole world the wrong way. CONTINUE AT SITE

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. A specialist in espionage and terrorism, he’s also been a Navy officer and a War College professor. He’s published four books. http://observer.com/2016/09/the-fbi-investigation-of-emailgate-was-a-sham/

From the moment the EmailGate scandal went public more than a year ago, it was obvious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation never had much enthusiasm for prosecuting Hillary Clinton or her friends. Under President Obama, the FBI grew so politicized that it became impossible for the Bureau to do its job – at least where high-ranking Democrats are concerned.

As I observed in early July, when Director James Comey announced that the FBI would not be seeking prosecution of anyone on Team Clinton over EmailGate, the Bureau had turned its back on its own traditions of floating above partisan politics in the pursuit of justice. “Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans, regardless of their politics,” I stated, noting that it’s never a healthy turn of events in a democracy when your secret police force gets tarnished by politics.

As I observed in early July, when Director James Comey announced that the FBI would not be seeking prosecution of anyone on Team Clinton over EmailGate, the Bureau had turned its back on its own traditions of floating above partisan politics in the pursuit of justice. “Malfeasance by the FBI, its bending to political winds, is a matter that should concern all Americans, regardless of their politics,” I stated, noting that it’s never a healthy turn of events in a democracy when your secret police force gets tarnished by politics.

Just how much Comey and his Bureau punted on EmailGate has become painfully obvious since then. Redacted FBI documents from that investigation, dumped on the Friday afternoon before the long Labor Day weekend, revealed that Hillary Clinton either willfully lied to the Bureau, repeatedly, about her email habits as secretary of state, or she is far too dumb to be our commander-in-chief.

Worse, the FBI completely ignored the appearance of highly classified signals intelligence in Hillary’s email, including information lifted verbatim from above-Top Secret NSA reports back in 2011. This crime, representing the worst compromise of classified information in EmailGate – that the public knows of, at least – was somehow deemed so uninteresting that nobody at the FBI bothered to ask anybody on Team Clinton about it.

This stunning omission appears highly curious to anybody versed in counterintelligence matters, not least since during Obama’s presidency, the FBI has prosecuted Americans for compromising information far less classified than what Clinton and her staff exposed on Hillary “unclassified” email server of bathroom infamy.

May 7, 2015, was a banner day for Britain’s Conservative Party. After five years of uneasy coalition government, the Conservatives easily gained an overall majority in the UK parliament — defying the pundits’ expectations.

For the pollsters, it was an unmitigated disaster. They had predicted a dead heat, with polling averages suggesting that the Conservatives and their rival party, Labour, would each win 34% of the popular vote. Not one firm had put the Conservatives more than a single percentage point ahead. Yet when the votes were tallied, the Conservatives won 38% to Labour’s 31%.

Nine months later, a panel of political scientists and survey experts delivered a damning post-mortem on the pollsters’ performance. They considered several possible explanations: Were “shy” Conservatives lying about their voting intentions? Was Labour undermined by “lazy” supporters who couldn’t be bothered to vote? No, the report concluded, there was a more fundamental problem with the pollsters’ methods: They had polled too many Labour supporters. In other words, their polling samples simply hadn’t been representative of the real electorate.

It was an astonishing conclusion. The cardinal rule of survey research is that the sample has to be representative of the population you are interested in. How could the pollsters have screwed up so monumentally?

Quite easily, if you consider the perfect storm that has buffeted the polling industry in recent years. As the way in which we use our phones and the internet has shifted, it has become harder and more expensive to recruit representative samples — just as the media companies that commission most election polls have been hit by declining revenues.

“There’s nothing in the US that makes us immune.”

ID: 9676414

US pollsters face exactly the same pressures as their British counterparts. And while they’ve so far avoided major embarrassment, the next few years will provide a serious test of their ability to keep calling elections correctly.

“There’s nothing in the US that makes us immune,” Courtney Kennedy, director of survey research with the Pew Research Center in Washington DC, told BuzzFeed News.
Random sampling is how it used to be done.

Loretta Sanchez on the Issues

Rated +1 by AAI, indicating a mixed Arab/Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
This November, Republicans will do their best to keep the Senate in Republican hands, and that won’t be easy. Republicans currently have a Senate majority of four, but they will be fending off strong Democrat challenges in ten states they currently represent. The Democrats have only two seats at risk of turning Republican — Nevada and Colorado — and polls show that Colorado is almost out of reach.

On November , the Republicans will probably lose seats in Wisconsin and Illinois, and at the moment there’s no better than a 50–50 chance that they’ll hold Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. Even so, it’s possible that the most important Senate race is California’s. Let me explain.

California chooses Senate candidates with a “jungle primary:” Every primary candidates, no matter his party, appears on one ballot, and the top two finishers advance to the general-election ballot in November. Predictably, the top two finishers were Democrats, so no matter what happens on Election Day, the Senate seat of Barbara Boxer, who is retiring, is going to remain in Democratic hands. Consequently, the race has gotten very little attention, and next to none nationally. It should be getting attention, though — a lot of attention. Because it’s not just a race between two Democrats; it’s a race between a relatively moderate Democrat and a contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat.

The relatively moderate Democrat is Loretta Sanchez, the representative from California’s 46th congressional district, in Orange county. She has called her self a “Blue Dog Democrat”; she is somewhat fiscally conservative, more reasonable about gun rights than the average Democrat, has taken a harder line on terrorism than the average Democrat, and — representing one of the largest Vietnamese expat communities in the country — has vocally opposed closer relations with Vietnam’s Communist government.

The contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat she’s running against is Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general. After covertly shot video of Planned Parenthood employees appeared to implicate Planned Parenthood in federal crimes relating to the collection and sale of fetal tissue for research, Harris launched an investigation not into Planned Parenthood, or any of those employees, but into the journalist-activist who made the videos, David Daleiden.

Well, what would Friday be without the latest document dump from the Clinton email investigation? Yesterday afternoon, with the public in distracted anticipation of the coming weekend and Monday’s Clinton-Trump debate showdown, the FBI released another 189 pages of interview reports.

Along with this document dump comes remarkable news: The Obama Justice Department reportedly gave top Clinton aide and confidant Cheryl Mills immunity from prosecution for any incriminating information located on her personal computer.

According to House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), the limited immunity was granted in order to persuade Ms. Mills to surrender her laptop computer so the FBI could check whether classified information was stored on it.

This is very strange. There was no need to grant concessions to Mills. The Justice Department could have required the production of the computer by simply issuing a grand jury subpoena. And had there been any concern that Mills would not cooperate, would destroy the computer, or would “misplace” it (as Team Clinton claims to have misplaced so many Hillary devices), investigators could have applied for a search warrant and seized the computer.

In normal cases, the Justice Department does not grant immunity in exchange for evidence when it has lawful power to compel production of that evidence.

Mills is not alone. Apparently her subordinate, longtime Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, was given the same deal.

Unbelievably, Mills and Samuelson, who are lawyers, were also permitted to represent Hillary Clinton in the very same investigation in which, we now learn, they were personally granted immunity from prosecution. That’s apart from the fact that both of them were involved as government officials at the time they engaged in some of the conduct under investigation – a circumstance that, by itself, should have disqualified them from later serving as lawyers for other subjects in the same the investigation.

As readers may recall, I have been trying to draw attention to questions about immunity in the Clinton emails investigation since last spring (see here and here). That was when we first learned that some form of immunity had been given to Brian Pagliano. He is the Clinton family employee who serviced then-Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized private server and, astonishingly, later drew a large State Department salary while continuing to be paid on the side by the Clintons.