Sunday roundup

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line exposes the flimsiness of the excuse given by the WaPo's Ruth Marcus for Hillionaire's email troubles, namely, that she was motivated by "scar tissue built up over years of politically motivated attacks." No, Ruth, it's just the way she's always rolled:

We know the explanation is false because Clinton engaged in similar behavior before she came to Washington as First Lady. I’m referring to her handling of her law firm’s billing records in the Castle Grande matter, which I discussed at length here,” in a post based mainly on the evidence developed by the Office of Independent Counsel that investigated “Whitewater.”

Clinton stole and/or caused to be destroyed the records that established her role as the attorney for participants in the fraudulent Castle Grande scheme. She did so to avoid the political price she feared would be exacted if, with candidate Bill Clinton decrying the “decade of greed” that had brought on the S&L scandals, she was exposed as having been the lawyer for a crooked S&L.

For this purpose, Clinton, working with Webster Hubbell and Vince Foster, stole hard copies of the billing records of the Rose law firm where they were partners. They erased the electronic version of these records. One set of the documents was later found in the White House, just outside Hillary’s private office, by an employee. Another set was found in Foster’s attic by his widow, some years after he committed suicide. Clinton’s time sheets (handwritten, as was the practice back in the day) were never found.

The theft of the billing records occurred on March 7, 1992. It was then that a story on Whitewater/Castle Grande by New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth “hit the wire.” That night, Rose Law Firm documents were passed to a Clinton campaign aide in the firm’s parking lot. 

The theft of these documents thus preceded the ugliness of the Clintons’ eight years in the White House. It preceded the “endless investigations” of that era. It helped fuel some of these investigations.

Hillary’s pattern of document destruction seems to have continued during the White House years.  The New York Post reports that in 1999, investigators discovered that more than 1 million subpoenaed e-mails had been mysteriously “lost” due to a “glitch” in a West Wing computer server. The hole in the White House archives covered a critical two-year period — 1996 to 1998 — when special prosecutor Ken Starr was subpoenaing White House e-mails. 

Homicides are up 52 percent over this time a year ago in Chicago.

The Clean Power Plan was never about combatting "climate change." It was about the federal leviathan usurping ever-more power that ought to belong to states and free individuals and the economic agreements into which free individuals enter.

The theme of my most recent podcast was how willingly signing on to patently untrue narratives has been elevated to a virtue in our society. I didn't include this example, but I certainly could have:

Murray Straus, a researcher in family violence at the University of New Hampshire, died last weekend at the age of 89. He was a man of fierce integrity, and since I covered the social sciences for two national publications, I can tell you that his evidence always checked out. I can also tell you that his memory will not be cherished by gender warriors.

In almost 50 years of research, Straus and the researchers who followed his lead, established beyond any doubt that domestic violence isn’t an instrument of patriarchal control as feminists claim. Nor is it a gender crime as the Violence Against Women’s Act insists it is, but a crime that troubled male and female partners commit against one another at roughly equal rates. Men do more damage than women do, but women conduct and initiate violence as often as men do, and one of three killings by partners is by women.

The frequent claim that women commit violence in self-defense is not borne out in the research. In his 2010 paper, “Thirty Years of Denying The Evidence of Gender Symmetry in Partner Violence,” Straus says the long uproar was fueled by the 1975 National Family Violence Survey, which found a perpetration rate of assault by men partners of 12% and by women partners 11.6%. The rate of severe assaults such as kicking, punching, choking, and attacks with objects was also about the same for men and women (3.8% by men and 4.6% by women). Neither of these gender differences was statistically significant. The response by those who wanted to use domestic violence  as a lever to reduce patriarchal power was furious. Reports that men and women are  equally culpable are not what many wanted to hear.

Among other things, that fury led to dishonest surveys that suppressed evidence of female violence, dropped some findings, blocked publication of some research. faked some statistics, touched off campaigns of intimidation of researchers in the field, and made it risky for graduate students to study under Straus.

Straus had to endure a lot of pressure, demonstrations and death threats. The late Suzanne Steinmetz of the University of Delaware was frequently harassed  for research similar to Straus’s, and a bomb threat was called in at her daughter’s wedding.

British sports venues, music festivals and nightclubs are on high alert in anticipation of ISIS attacks.

At NRO, the great Kevin Williamson examines the full scumbaggery of Katie Couric's role in that sleazily edited gun-policy "documentary."