The glaringly implicit proviso in the military-aid package for Israel

Yes, it looks like the Most Equal Comrade swallowed hard and looked past his personal animosity toward Benjamin Netanyahu, but there's more to the picture:

. . . before we applaud the Obama administration for helping to strengthen Israeli security, we must first look at the president’s key caveat. 

“It is because of this same commitment to Israel and its long-term security that we will also continue to press for a two-state solution to the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite the deeply troubling trends on the ground that undermine this goal,” Mr. Obama said. “As I have emphasized previously, the only way for Israel to endure and thrive as a Jewish and democratic state is through the realization of an independent and viable Palestine.”

While National Security Advisor Susan Rice insists the aid deal is separate from the issue of a two-state solution, others consider Obama’s statement a not-so-subtle message. Aaron David Miller, a Middle East scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said Obama’s remarks prove he needs to “justify” the White House’s assistance to Israel. 

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict stretches back years and has been one of the many sources of contention between Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. 

The other disagreement, of course, is the nuclear deal, which Netanyahu warned would pave Iran’s path to a nuclear deal. He even made his case directly to Congress last year. Obama ignored him and now the administration is admitting the deal may indeed have boosted Iran’s confidence in harassing the U.S.

Materially, it's a good thing for one of post-America's five best allies. (Who are the other four? What a great parlor game! I'll get it started: the UK, Japan, Australia, Poland. Other contenders: Canada, South Korea, Italy, Taiwan.) But the West-Hater pressure to legitimize the Palestinian Authority is clearly still there.

To say that Squirrel-Hair is no conservative is to utter an understatement of vast proportions

It will be interesting to see if Rush calls this one a "political home run."

I'd like to bring two pieces on S-H's proposal to expand Medicaid to your attention.

Philip Klein at the Washington Examiner:

Appearing on "The Dr. Oz Show," Trump said that if Obamacare were repealed, there would be a "fairly large" percentage of people who would still fall through the cracks and couldn't afford private health insurance. For those people, he said, "We have to go and we have to help them through the Medicaid system."

That's the same Medicaid system that was created as part of President Johnson's "Great Society," that was expanded by Obamacare, that has been crippling state and federal budgets, and that has been failing patients with limited choices of doctors and poor medical outcomes.

Of all government healthcare programs (save the Veterans Health Administration), Medicaid comes the closest to a single-payer, or socialized, system.

Again, Trump tried to touch up his statement with free-market rhetoric about instilling more competition by getting rid of state-based insurance monopolies. "Every state has a line wrapped around it," he said.

It's true that before Obamacare came about, a number of free-market proposals called for removing the restrictions on insurance carriers selling policies across state lines.

The purpose of this was to get around the onerous local benefit mandates (such as requiring that every plan in a state covered acupuncture) that could make insurance cost double in one state what it cost in neighboring states.
But the actual plan Trump released includes an important caveat — that insurers could offer plans in any state, "as long as the plan purchased complies with state requirements."

In other words, all plans would still have to meet local mandates, thus defeating the whole purpose of a proposal to get rid of state barriers — and giving no reason to believe he'd actually be ushering in more competition or driving down prices. 

Klein then puts this move in the context of the broader picture: S-H's enthusiasm for the minimum wage, his hands-off position regarding any serious reform of Social Security and Medicare, and his Most-Equal-Comrade-esque preoccupation with the infrastructure.

Ben Shapiro at the Daily Wire points out that Medicaid is already huge and economically teetering:

I’m old enough to remember when Republicans opposed expanding Medicaid. As of 2013, Medicaid already covered nearly 60 million Americans and cost the feds $265 billion and the states another $192 billion. As Chris Jacobs of Conservative Review has written, “Both Medicaid’s size—currently 2.7 percent of gross domestic product, and growing—and its structure present fiscal difficulties.” Some studies show that Medicaid patients have worse outcomes than people without insurance altogether, Jacobs writes.

Shapiro further points out that S-H is overtly moving left because he knows his "conservative" shills will make excuses for him.

Bots, behold what you have wrought.

The hollow soul of the Freedom-Hater party

Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ on the latest hacked Democrat emails and the cronyism and rank cynicism they make plain:

The latest hack of the DNC—courtesy of WikiLeaks via Guccifer 2.0—shows that Mrs. Clinton wasn’t alone in steering favors to big donors. Among the documents leaked is one that lists the party’s largest fundraisers/donors as of 2008. Of the top 57 cash cows 18 ended up with ambassadorships. The largest fundraiser listed, Matthew Barzun, who drummed up $3.5 million for Mr. Obama’s first campaign, was named ambassador to Sweden and then ambassador to the United Kingdom. The second-largest, Julius Genachowski, was named the head of the Federal Communications Commission. The third largest, Frank Sanchez, was named undersecretary of commerce. 

Keep in mind what an earlier leak revealed: a May 18, 2016, email from an outside lawyer to DNC staffers in which the attorney suggests a call to “go over our process for handling donations from donors who have given us pay to play letters.” Add this to what the Clinton and Abedin emails have shown to be a massive pay-to-play operation at the Clinton Foundation, in which megadonors like the crown prince of Bahrain got special access to the secretary of state. 

And there are also all those Clinton speeches, for which they were paid millions. News comes this week that despite the Clintons’ promises to distance themselves from their foundation, they will first be holding what sounds like one last fire sale on future presidential access: a belated birthday bash for Bill Clinton, with a glitzy party at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. A donation of $250,000 gets you listed as “chair” of the party, while “co-chair” costs $100,000. Foundation officials are refusing to say who has donated, or how much.

So which political party is all about money, influence and special access? The Republican Party held a true, democratic primary. Seventeen candidates battled it out, and the voters choose a nominee that much of the party establishment disliked. 

Leaked emails show that the Democratic Party hierarchy retreated to a backroom to anoint Hillary Clinton and then exercised its considerable power to subvert the primary process and kill off the Bernie Sanders campaign. In one email, Chief Financial Officer Brad Marshall suggested sliming Mr. Sanders on religion: “Can we get someone to ask his belief. Does he believe in a God. He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference with my peeps. My Southern Baptist peeps would draw a big difference between a Jew and an atheist.” How’s that for deplorable?

Perhaps most revealing are Mr. Powell’s emails, which show, undisguised, how Clinton supporters think. Specifically, the emails demonstrate that this crowd recognizes the Clintons as a menace—and yet they are willing to excuse away anything. “I would rather not have to vote for her,” Mr. Powell wrote to a friend. “A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still [sleeping with] bimbos at home.” 

Unpack that. Mr. Powell is saying that Hillary is old; that she is a scandal factory; that she will cut any corner to win and do anything for a buck; that she won’t help the country; and that her husband remains a liability. And yet other emails suggest Mr. Powell nonetheless was (is?) debating giving her a boost with a well-timed endorsement in the fall. 

This is the modern Democratic Party. The more it has struggled to sell its ideas to the public, the more it has turned to rigging the system to its political benefit. Don’t take Republicans’ word for it. Just read the emails.

Post-America, take a long, unflinching look at what this is.

The failure of yet another of Secretary Global-Test's "agreements"

The latest accord attempting to calm the situation is Syria is not going well:

US President Barack Obama will huddle with top national security aides -- including his secretaries of state and defense -- Friday, amid deep unease over a tenuous Syria ceasefire deal.

Barely a week since the United States and Russia agreed to halt bombing and let humanitarian aid into Aleppo, shaky implementation looks set to dominate a meeting ostensibly about countering the Islamic State group.

The deal has somewhat quieted the bombs over Syria's second city, but aid convoys have not been allowed to reach the roughly 250,000 civilians besieged by government forces.

Washington and Moscow are already trading blame over who is responsible.

"Right now, the trucks that could bring them lifesaving assistance are idling on the wrong side of the border," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said Thursday.

"That's the direct responsibility of the Assad regime and their benefactors in Moscow."

A Russian military spokesman earlier slammed the United States for what he called "rhetorical fog" intended "to hide the fact that it is not fulfilling its part of the obligations."

Only the Syrian army is observing the ceasefire, he said, pointing the finger at US-backed rebel groups.

Since US Secretary of State John Kerry agreed the deal with his Russian counterpart Sergei Lavrov after marathon talks in Geneva, Obama has increasingly been forced to referee disputes within his own administration about the agreement.

Some within the Pentagon have expressed deep skepticism that Russia will live up to its side of the bargain and believe Kerry is being led down an alley.

Russia, critics say, has repeatedly used talks to blunt criticism of its support of Assad, sow doubt among US allies on the ground and buy time for Syrian forces to improve their position.

The post-American State Department is utterly worthless.

Former Benghazi station chief: hell, yeah, Madame BleachBit is a liar and criminal

In both Congressional testimony and remarks on Fox News, he makes clear that the Freedom-Haters'  candidate for dictator of post-America president is telling a big falsehood about the jihadist attack on 9/11/12:

Hicks, a 25-year Foreign Service Office and former chief of station in Libya at the time of the Benghazi attack, gave riveting and damning testimony before Congress on Hillary’s lies and criminal negligence in the matter. The last man to speak to Ambassador Christopher Stevens, he has exposed the video lie, documented how he told Hillary’s State Department what was happening in real time that fateful night, and how her State Department ignored warnings from Stevens and others about the gathering terrorist storm and the woeful lack of security.

Now retired, private citizen Hicks goes farther, telling Fox News that Hillary Clinton broke laws while condemning four Americans to death at the hands of terrorists:

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs "to provide for the security… of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”
This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.
The Benghazi Committee’s report graphically illustrates the magnitude of her failure. It states that during August 2012, the State Department reduced the number of U.S. security personnel assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli from 34 (1.5 security officers per diplomat) to 6 (1 security officer per 4.5 diplomats), despite a rapidly deteriorating security situation in both Tripoli and Benghazi. Thus, according to the Report, “there were no surplus security agents” to travel to Benghazi with Amb. Stevens “without leaving the Embassy in Tripoli at severe risk.”
Had Ambassador Stevens’ July 2012 request for 13 additional American security personnel (either military or State Department) been approved rather than rejected by Clinton appointee Under Secretary of State for Management Pat Kennedy, they would have traveled to Benghazi with the ambassador, and the Sept. 11 attack might have been thwarted.

Hicks also addressed the claim by Hillary that security at Benghazi was not her responsibility and that she had delegated that task to “experts”:

U.S. law also requires the secretary of state to ensure that all U.S. government personnel assigned to a diplomatic post abroad be located at one site. If not, the secretary -- and only the secretary -- with the concurrence of the agency head whose personnel will be located at a different location, must issue a waiver. The law, which states specifically that the waiver decision cannot be delegated, was passed after the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa, when deficient security was blamed for that debacle under Bill Clinton's presidency.
When asked about security at Benghazi on Sept. 11, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly asserted her lack of responsibility. Initially, she said that she never read any of the reporting on security conditions or any of the requests for additional security, claiming that “she delegated security to the professionals.” More recently, she stated that “[I]t was not my ball to carry.” But the law says otherwise. Sound familiar?

It was Hillary’s responsibility to guarantee the security of U.S. diplomatic personnel abroad, a responsibility that cannot be delegated. She failed miserably on both counts and has lied about it ever since. Hillary Clinton that night knew that the video in question had nothing to do with Benghazi. Gregory Hicks told the truth before Congress and was rewarded with a demotion:

We have the testimony of Gregory Hicks, deputy chief of mission in Libya and a foreign service officer for 22 years. He was demoted to desk officer for telling the truth that those in Libya knew it was a terrorist attack from the "get-go," that there was no "protest" or mention of one from anyone on the ground, and that the infamous YouTube video was "a non-event" in Libya

Yet that is what she told the Benghazi parents on the tarmac. Hillary and her State Department has warning, including from Ambassador Stevens himself, that Benghazi was an insecure trap in the face of a growing terrorist threat.

It was widely known prior to 9/11/12 that the Libyan city of Benghazi was a city in which a jihadist attack was waiting to happen. The post-American Secretary of State at the time had some other kind of other weird priorities besides keeping those at the diplomatic and CIA compounds safe.

You knew Squirrel-Hair would waste no time going all protectionist on Ford

Yeah, a 35 percent tariff. That will bring down the price of the car and keep Ford jobs in post-America:

Today Ford announced that it is moving all of it’s small car production to Mexico and Trump doesn’t like it one bit.

Here’s the announcement by Ford:

DETROIT FREE PRESS – Ford plans to eventually shift all North American small-car production from the U.S. to Mexico, CEO Mark Fields told investors Tuesday, even though the company’s production investments in Mexico have become a lightning rod for controversy in the presidential election.

“Over the next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small-car production to Mexico and out of the United States,” Fields said at a daylong investor conference in Dearborn.

Squirrel-Hair "can't believe their brazenness."

Why the hell do you think they are doing it, you economic genius?

I know Trump has said this before, but the fact that he’s declaring it again on the day Ford announces they are moving small car production to Mexico is troubling. He just doesn’t get it.
Companies move jobs to other countries because doing business here is too expensive. What he should be saying is that he will work hard to make America more competitive with other countries so that companies like Ford can move their operations back.
But no, just like an angry dictator, Trump wants to punish them for doing something he doesn’t agree with.

---

UPDATE: Trump just called Ford a ‘disgrace’ for making the move and said it’s also disgraceful that politicians allow companies like Ford to get away with it! 

Memo to Stephen Moore and Larry Kudlow: You're wasting your time trying to advise this clown.

Squirrel-Hair's child-care policy: using the state's coercive power for social engineering

Logan Albright at Conservative Review gets to the essence of what is objectionable about it:

There is always a cost to accepting government benefits, even when those benefits allow you to keep more of your own money for specific, government-designated purposes.

For evidence of this, we need look no further than federal education policy. Through Race to the Top Grants and No Child Left Behind waivers, the Department of Education induced states to accept the wildly unpopular Common Core standards. Since states accepted federal money, they had to abide by certain conditions — to the detriment of children everywhere.

A similar thing is likely to happen with child care. Credits, subsidies, and private accounts for child care all require the government to define what constitutes child care. This means that some products and services will be deemed “appropriate” and given special tax treatment, while others will be deemed “inappropriate” and taxed normally. It’s easy to imagine a scenario in which the government is deciding what sort of food you should feed your kids, what sort of books you should read them, and to what sort of day care you should send them. Adopt the government’s preferred choice, and be rewarded with a tasty tax treat. Make a different choice, and pay through the nose.
This is all part of the continuing usurpation of parental rights and responsibilities of parents by government agents. It is bad enough that the state has assumed more or less complete control of the education system; it now proposes to insert itself into the very business of child rearing.

This is raw Big Brother-ism.  This is it-takes-a-village-ism.

Calling it a political home run  is to declare that the statist horse is out of the barn and is not coming back.

Even if no one is left to embrace them, the principles endure

With the sidelining of conservatism in the current election cycle, there has appeared a number of pieces reviewing the history of this body of thought - "movement," if you will, although it has existed as the former characterization longer than the as the latter. As we know, its development can be traced at least to the age and works of Montesquieu, Locke, Burke, Smith and Madison. In the nineteenth century, it was further fleshed out by the likes of Bastiat, Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Then came the great works of the early-to-mid-twentieth century: Ideas Have Consequences by Richard Weaver, The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk. And then, of course, came the founding in 1955 of conservatism's flagship magazine, National Review.
Over the sixty years since that historic occurrence, it's become more apparent that the most important contributions NR's founding editors made were to establish standards for what they termed a "responsible Right," serving notice to Birchers and Objectivists that they were not welcome, and bringing together what have come to be known as the three pillars.

The three pillars have been articulated a number of ways. Herewith is a reiteration of how LITD chooses to depict them:

1.) Free-market economics, beginning with the precept that a good or service is worth what buyer and seller agree that it is worth, period. No other entity has any business being involved in coming to that agreement - certainly not government.

2.) An understanding that Western civilization has been a unique blessing to humankind. History has distilled Western thought into two great contributions: Judeo-Christian morality, and Greco-Roman notions about organizing society according to a representative-democracy model.

3.) A foreign policy based what history tells us about human nature, that is, based on one's country's allies knowing that one's country has their back, its adversaries respecting it, and its enemies fearing it.

I suppose it's mainly because celebrity worship has so strongly characterized the last several decades of our popular culture, but in any case, those who either vaguely or explicitly embrace these three pillars have, in recent years, tended to make heroes out of conservative icons, beginning with Reagan and Thatcher, but extending to pundits and talk-show hosts, and, more recently, bloggers.  Products of our age like to gather in large venues and pump our fists at the sight of those whom we have made stars.

We are now reaping the disappointment that was sure to result from placing ourselves in the position of fans:

I’m torn between crediting him for acknowledging a painful truth and criticizing him for having apparently thrown in the towel on what should be the entire point of his show, trying to convince people that smaller government is better. “Do you think the argument over big versus small government’s still going on, or do you think it’s over?” Rush wonders. “And if you think it’s over, who won?” He doesn’t answer the question but the answer is clear. Big government won, or else the Republican nominee for president wouldn’t have spent his evening yesterday proposing a new health care entitlement. More to the point, if big government hadn’t won, we wouldn’t have Trump as the Republican nominee in the first place. Rush is admitting a simple truth here in so many words: Most Republican voters don’t view through the world through a sharp ideological lens, especially when it comes to economic policy. If you doubt that, go find a poll measuring GOP support for protecting Medicare or raising the minimum wage. There’s no getting around this. Big government won, even on the right, and Trump is the ultimate proof.

What do you do, if you’re America’s most famous conservative talk radio host and you’re staring down the barrel of the fact that even your own party doesn’t much care about conservatism? You can rail against it and try to persuade them to reconsider small government — but you’ve spent 30 years doing that and it hasn’t worked, and if you double down now you’re going to alienate listeners, especially if it leads you to attack their new leader, Trump. You go that route and you’re gambling your status as an influential right-winger on it. The other move you can make is to go along to get along, noting in passing that you might personally prefer smaller government but most Americans don’t and, well, under the circumstances maybe we shouldn’t get so hung up on that anymore. The debate’s over. We lost. All that’s left now is to salvage what we can by supporting the candidate who’s a bit closer to conservatism than the other is. What this is, in other words, is a sort of apologia for the last 16 months of Rush’s show. If you’re annoyed that he insists on “analyzing” the election every day instead of calling Trump out sternly for his left-wing tendencies, well, that’s because you’re still under a delusion that conservatism is viable in America. It isn’t, so let’s deal with reality as it is. This is Rush waving the white flag. And he’s not necessarily wrong to do so. I just don’t know what the point of his show is now.

It appears Rush is going to cast his lot with the "analysis" schtick:

You can read the transcript of his whole monologue here, but let me highlight this part. If you want to know what most, not all, of conservative talk radio might sound like during a Trump presidency, this is a fine example. A new government entitlement? Well, people like that stuff. At least it’s better than Hillary’s plan. If Republican voters prefer this sort of thing to conservatism, why dwell on it? Most of conservative media will do nothing whatsoever to hold President Trump in check. Rush is telling you that, in his own way, up front.

RUSH: Look, bottom line: I am the last person on earth who wants any expansion of the government. But I am also the first person on earth to understand that we have a mess in child care because of government and because of the left. We have a mess. As I read through Ivanka’s piece, it seems to me that there’s more weight given to lowering taxes — tax deductions for child and elderly care. It seems like that’s every bit as important in her plan, Trump’s plan, as is the expansion of government. 

There’s another way of looking at this, too, folks. In looking at Trump’s plan for child care and maternity leave and elderly care, conservatives can lament that it’s not the Ted Cruz plan. “Oh, my God! If this was Cruz, we’d have 10% flat tax and be done and there wouldn’t be any of this mess.” You can look at it that way as, “Oh, what if,” or you can look at the Trump plan and describe what it does and compare it to Hillary’s, assuming she presents one after recovering from what may be the mildest case of pneumonia in history. 

That, it seems to me, is what the comparison needs to be. Other than an intellectual exercise, you can’t say, “Oh, what could have been! Oh, how bad! Oh, I told you!” I know there’s a whole bunch of I told you so’s out there, but I think politically… You wait. I think just for people that are not ideological — which is a hell of a lot of people in this country. I think they’re gonna respond so positively to this, and it’s gonna disappoint a lot of people. “Oh, my God, do people not even understand the whole concept of Big Government destroying the country?” They don’t, folks. They don’t look at it the way you and I do in that regard.

Is this what Rush wants to do with his time for the next four years? Reassuring his not-very-conservative listeners that Trump’s latest proposal may be a complete betrayal of what Rush himself believes but that, politically, it’s a “home run”?

But at least Rush tried to maintain this objective-analyst stance. Those talk-show hosts who were positively giddy about Trump from the moment he announced are now obligated to those whom they have whipped into a frenzy to be overtly supportive of this child care plan Ivanka has pushed her father into.

Then there are those such as Mark Levin, who have with supreme reluctance moved from a #NeverTrump stance to declaring that they will vote for him, but are going to continue to call him out for these decidedly un-conservative policy pronouncements.

My position is most nearly aligned with that of Guy Benson:

Given today's state of play, I continue to criticize Trump, occasionally harshly, when it's warranted.  But I'm currently using much more of my time and energyleveraging my various platforms to point out the disqualifying flaws of the Democratic nominee.  I also do not expend almost any of my efforts trying to dissuade people from voting for Trump.  In many cases, I understand and respect the calculation they've made.  I will, however, defend my choice to cast my one little vote as a firm "none of the above" statement.  My partisanship has its limits.  And I will also continue to push back hard against faulty accusations that all or most 'Never Trump' conservatives are driven by ulterior motives, or that our refusal to embrace this man means we are in favor of Hillary Clinton.  If Trump loses in less than two months, I will fight against the inevitable cries that people like me are responsible for his failure -- as opposed to the many, many factors that led me to discern that he is unelectablelong ago.  A Trump loss would rest squarely on the shoulders of the candidate, his campaign, and the people who thought it was a good idea to nominate him.  I'd spend the ensuing four years adamantly opposing much of (::shudder::) President Clinton's agenda, and praying for the health of conservative judges across the country.  

If he should win, I'll admit that I was wrong about his viability (I've consistently pegged his chances of prevailing at about 20 percent, largely because his opponent is so terrible), celebrate America's delicious rejection of Mrs. Clinton, relish the brutal affront to Obamaism, and set about supporting and opposing Trump's actions in office, as necessary. I appreciate that many will disagree with this approach, but it's the best I've got under the circumstances.  My job, as I see it, is to offer political reporting, analysis, and commentary rooted in reason and prudential judgment, and guided by a moral compass -- and to do so with intellectual honesty and transparency.  In that spirit, I offer this explanation of where I stand, where I don't stand, and why.

Which gets us back to the clarification of just what conservatism is that began this post. If it's about anything, it's about immutability.

I have yet to hear an excuse from an "objective analyst" like Rush, let alone a Trump-bot like Laura Ingraham for the rudderlessness that Trump routinely demonstrates. Yes, a huge swath of the electorate is fed up, not only with the arrogance of the statist overlords, their squish enablers across the aisle and the mass media which don't even bother with the pretense of credibility anymore, but with the ineffectiveness of actual conservatives of the past thirty years. I get it. They have not been able to stop the "A"CA, transgender bathrooms, the perpetuation of lies about cops and race, illegal immigration, solar-energy subsidies or North Korean nuclear tests.

But the immutable principles remain.

And they remain the only hope for escaping the doom into which we're plunging headlong.

That's why outlets such as this blog maintain the position they do regarding Donald Trump.

There is no doubt that we are a tipping point, but let's be clear about the nature of that tipping point. It's not just about keeping the hands of the Clinton machine and the Democrat party off the levers of power.

It's about continuing to make available to humankind a blessed possibility that had not even been considered until 240 years ago, and is about to be removed from humankind's array of possibilities again.

Maybe I'm talking about faith. Maybe I'm talking about refusing to acquiesce to the argument that "here is where we are, and the way forward leaves no room for might-have-beens."

The last of the candidates who might have championed the immutable principles may be gone, but the principles still remain.

Those of us who hold this position are not morally preening. We are refusing to let loose of truth.

Without that life preserver, drowning is a certainty.

Today's House Committee on Government Oversight & Reform hearing was an eye-opener

Store the name Justin Cooper away in your election-cycle memory files:

The real news, in my opinion, comes from the testimony of a guy named Justin Cooper. Cooper was paid by both the Clinton Foundation and the Clinton family to assist a State Department employee, Brian Pagliano, in managing Clinton's server. Why no one has focused on the blatant illegality of using a federal employee for personal chores is one of those decisions that I really don't understand. But up until July I was always under the misapprehension that failing to safeguard Top Secret documents was a punishable offense.

First, he admits he does not have a security clearance. Of any kind. Whatsoever. Second, he had unfettered access to Hillary Clinton's email. This email included a lot of classified information because virtually all of her official communications would be classified at least at the lowest levels. This is demonstrated by the amount of redacted and declassified information that has been released. He was also responsible for destroying Hillary Clinton's discarded cell phones. We know that there was no accounting for those cell phones, no evidence that they were actually destroyed and not simply resold, and we also know those phones contained classified information.

I don't think a low paid contract employee would have been tempted to assist in attempts to breach Hillary Clinton's email server. There is no reason to think that a low paid contract employee would sell discarded cell phones. There is no reason to think Cooper was compromised by a foreign intelligence service. But we don't know that because he never underwent any kind of security investigation before he was entrusted with Top Secret and above information. But the fact that a server that contains classified information and services the email accounts of the secretary of state and her cronies and accomplices would have been totally exposed to tampering by the people handling it speaks to the complete disdain Clinton held for safeguarding classified information.

Madame BleachBit is not only not transparent, she's positively Nixonian in her style of keeping her cards to her vest.

 

Bots, you would not give any other Pub candidate a pass for this kind of lapse in principle

The Persimmon Messiah placates his thoroughly modern daughter by putting forth a plan for paid family leave that is nothing but the same old tyranny and redistribution that the Freedom-Haters have been much more overt about for decades:

When Ivanka Trump pushed for more government regulation on businesses for family leave at the Republican convention, some wondered whether Donald Trump took it seriously. The answer, according to the Washington Post’s Robert Costa, is apparently yes. Trump will propose six paid weeks of maternity leave, along with child-care tax credits aimed at families earning $500,000 a year or less:

A campaign memo shared early Tuesday with The Washington Post shows that Trump’s plan “will rewrite the tax code to allow working parents to deduct from their income taxes child-care expenses for up to four children and elderly dependents.”

That deduction would be capped at the “average cost of care” in the state of residence, and it would not be available to individuals earning more than $250,000 or a couple earning more than $500,000. …

Another policy proposal will be guaranteeing “six weeks of paid maternity leave” through an amendment of current unemployment insurance policies.

Currently, employers are required to give twelve weeks of unpaid maternity leave, allowing new mothers to return to the same position (or one of similar rank and equal pay). That creates a burden on employers already to fill positions temporarily, and the costs are not a wash. If employers have to pay six weeks of salary on top of that, the costs will be enormous.

Costa’s description of this proposal sounds like it won’t be a mandate on employers, at least not directly. Trump may propose to pay benefits through the unemployment insurance system, even though the mothers will still be employed. All that does is shuffle the costs around, because employers already pay unemployment insurance tax on every employee to both the state and federal governments in order to fund unemployment payments. Adding maternity to the conditions that trigger payment will force those taxes upward, and probably sharply.

Let’s do the math. In 2014, the latest period for which the CDC has birth data, the US had 3,988,076 births — 40% of which were to single women, by the way. Using the current labor force participation rate for women (56.8%), we can estimate that women who are employed had roughly 2.27 million of these births but that figure may really be higher than that, especially given the high percentage of births outside of marriage. The average per-capita income in the US is $28,555 (2014 figures, Census Bureau), which would amount to $549 per week, or about $3300 for six weeks. The cost of this program would be another $7.5 billion in payouts from the unemployment system each year, on top of the payments already being made for actual unemployment.

Now consider the current status of budgets, not just at the federal level but also in each of the states. Almost every state has a looming pension crisis, and the federal budget operates on 40% borrowed money — on top of having an entitlement-program crisis looming. The system does not have room for another entitlement program, and businesses are already struggling with costs. This program would have to burden employers because it has nowhere else to go, and it’s going to hurt smaller businesses more because of the realities of the economies of scale. It will be yet another reason for businesses to refrain from hiring as a way to limit their exposure to higher taxes, along with the other employer mandate that came from ObamaCare.

When Ivanka highlighted the “wage gap” in her speech at the Republican convention, I warned this might be coming:

What made this stand out even more was that it was the only issue in which Ivanka went into detail. The other political points raised in her introduction were at the level of my father will fight for you on this. Ivanka spent three of the 22 paragraphs of her speech on this point alone. Clearly, Team Trump understands that they have a steep gender gap to bridge in the general election, and they may have wanted to pre-empt (or “triangulate”) the issue ahead of next week’s Democratic convention, when Hillary Clinton will ride it hard. To conservatives who already worry about Trump’s propensity toward top-down governance, it sounded like a signal for the kind of government intervention in marketplace decisions that they usually fight Democrats to stop rather than Republicans.

This is more than triangulation — it’s a surrender on the principle of limited government. The tax credits may or may not be wisely configured, but guaranteeing pay will require precisely the government intervention at which Ivanka’s speech hinted. We’re still giving away fantasy money, spending cash that even our grandchildren’s grandchildren haven’t yet earned, and now Republicans want to indulge that same Democratic fantasy.

Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Wayne Allen Root, call your offices.

At a moment so late in the day, where is light to be found?

One of the last sticking points for me regarding any kind of structured approach to a spiritual quest was my difficulty in finding one that didn't strike me as escapist. Certainly, that was true of the general spiritual-but-not-religious, personal-happiness-is-the-highest-good, vaguely-or-even-specifically-New-Age approach embraced by an ever-growing number of post-Americans, but much of the way I saw Christian faith practiced around me struck me the same way. The emphasis seemed so heavy on work on oneself and one's immediate relationships that it looked like the donning of blinders to me.

What spurred me to ever-so-tentatively extend a toe over the starting line?

Dread. My immersion in the concerns of the larger world brought me to a tipping point. Any last iota of intention that the name of this blog be cleverly hyperbolic, wry, or ironic was wrung from my purpose in so naming it.

I looked at the landscape of the three levels that preoccupy my observations - cultural, economic, and foreign-policy - and the word "demonic" kept arising in my thoughts.

And that was two-plus years ago.

Consider the current state of our "civilization":

Ours is a society in which high-school football coaches allow their teams to take a knee during the national anthem, in order to coddle their players' utterly uninformed view that our society is fundamentally racially unjust.

Ours is a society in which the Supreme Court creates from whole cloth a "right" to something that is impossible by definition.

Ours is a society in which major corporations, sports leagues and the biggest stars of the music world grandstand against a state because its legislature refuses to open school restrooms to individuals suffering profound mental disturbances about their basic identities.

Ours is a society that has narrowed its viable presidential choices to the two most unpopular candidates in anyone's lifetime.

Ours is a culture the art forms of which are devoid of beauty, romance, dignity or humor above a juvenile level.

Ours is a nation the "president" of which has baldly lied to the citizenry about the results of a massive governmental intrusion into the way people care for their health.

Ours is a society the government of which wages war on the least expensive and most reliable forms of energy, forms that gave the human species a quantum leap in its standard of living over a two-century period, in favor of forms that cannot pay their own way in the marketplace, all in service of a "scientific" fiction.

Ours is a government the diplomatic arm of which spent years getting publicly humiliated by a mortal enemy in order to reach a meaningless "agreement" about that enemy's nuclear ambitions. Since reaching that "agreement," that enemy has conducted three missile tests, held a crew from our Navy hostage (on the night of the State of the Union address), and routinely harassed our ships in international waters.

Ours is a world in which Russia has troops and tanks amassed at eight staging areas on the Ukraine border.

Ours is a world in which China makes artificial islands in international waters and outfits them with landing strips for its fighter jets.

Ours is a world in which North Korea conducts missile tests and even nuclear-weapon tests with increasing frequency.

Ours is a world in which the parties influencing events in the hellhole that is Syria are Russia, Iran, Turkey and ISIS. Post-America is not among them, having given up any capacity for influence when its "red line" concerning chemical weapons proved to be meaningless.

I was faced with an existential question: In such a world, where is one to look for basic sense, basic wisdom, a love of truth, basic dignity, actual love?

As much as I'd bristled at the notion of a devil, the world came to appear as being in the grip of a dark force. I was forced to confront what C.S. Lewis had to say about that force:

 I know someone will ask me, "Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil - horns and hoofs and all?" Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns. But in other respects my answer is "Yes, I do." I do not claim to know anything about his personal appearance. If anybody really wants to know him better I would say to that person, 'Don't worry. If you really want to, you will. Whether you'll like it when you do is another question.'

Last Sunday, my minister's sermon was about how to get past worry. I'll confess he was nearly to his wrapping-up point and still about to lose me. It looked like that escapism that had been sticking in my craw, an exhortation to shut out the pressing issues of the day and focus on one's own attitudes. But then he said this: "Trust me, this world is not going to conform to your standards for a satisfactory place to live. It hasn't ever done so, and it won't start now."

And that's the crux of it. About the time some light comes into this realm, darkness once again encroaches.

If there is any escape route, it's to be found in another realm entirely.

And how to learn about that realm, that route?

There is a compilation of sixty-six books that spans a three-thousand-plus-year history of a particular region of the world where that route was revealed to particular people, who then made it available to all.

The key, as stressed over and over throughout those books, is a one-on-one conversation with the author of the light.

Prayer.

It's essential if one is not to be devoured by the Father of Lies.

James Comey must decide what kind of man he is

In his column today at the New York Observer, Austin Bay employs the rhetoric device of addressing a particular person. The person is FBI director James Comey. He basically lets Comey know that he's looking at his last chance to demonstrate character and salvage his reputation. Bay says it's abundantly clear that Comey has, and has had, the goods on Madame BleachBit.

He comes right out and says that it's on Comey if a known criminal becomes president.

Bay's focus is on Part IV of the report issued by the House Select Committee on Benghazi:

Part IV is tedious reading. As a government worker, you ought to be able to handle that. Part IV provides the deep and documented background for the obstruction of justice charge.

For that matter, the entire report is a tedious read. That’s why I doubt the quick study artists in the mainstream media who already know everything didn’t bother to read the proposed report—much less the updated version.

Failure to slog through the brutal details didn’t stop the usual geniuses from immediately dismissing the  proposed report. We heard the lines, like “nothing new here” and “nothing interesting, move along.” Such dismissals slander a remarkably professional investigative effort led by Rep. Trey Gowdy. Gowdy knew the Benghazi massacre mattered and he wanted to produce a thorough report. We had an ambassador killed in an attack by a radical Islamist terror group sharing the same murderous goals as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. Think about it, Jim. The Benghazi attack occurred on 9/11, an iconic date. That’s no coincidence.

15 years after 9/11 we are still at war with these religious totalitarians because they wage war on us. Your FBI Counter-intel guys are the domestic front line in the Global War on Terror. These agents—your Bureau’s outstanding line agents—know we’re at war. I’ve talked with several of them. So a thorough and responsible investigation of the Benghazi atrocity was justified… you do agree, don’t you, Jim?

I’ve read Part IV of the Committee’s report—the entire tedious all of it—even the footnotes. It has moments of drama, but Part IV is basically a lesson in fortitude. The Committee continued to hang tough despite the obnoxious bureaucratic foot-dragging, the calculated failure to provide requested documents and the ultimately illegal obstruction of justice.

I say the Committee. It’s really the majority, the Republicans, who faced the obstruction of justice. 

he Democrats on the Committee often appeared to act hand-in-glove with Team Hillary. They complained the Committee was wasting money, taking too long to investigate. You have to wonder if the Democrats on the Committee read Part IV.

My assertion of connivance isn’t too outlandish. Democrats did connive with Team Hillary when Ms. Clinton testified before the then Democrat-controlled Senate Benghazi committee in 2013.

Political obstruction. That’s bad when we’re investigating a war time massacre.

*  * *

Political obstruction segues into criminal obstruction and The BleachBit Timeline. March 2, 2015 is a critical BleachBit date. That’s when The New York Times reported Hillary had a private email system.

Sharyl Atkinson has kept a running Benghazi timeline that is quite thorough and admirable. I recommend her timeline as a reliable reference. (Atkinson has character and grit. She has the courage to take on powerful crooks. Between you and me, Jim, you’d do well to follow her example.)

However, Zerohedge’s September 3 timeline directly addresses the obstruction of justice. Here are some critical dates, courtesy Zerohedge. PRN means Platte River Networks, the outfit who Hillary hired to handle her rogue server system. The Apple MacBook mentioned in the timeline contained backup copies of Hillary’s emails.

• Early 2014—Monica Hanley advises Undisclosed PRN Staff Member to wipe the Apple MacBook clean after uploading Hillary’s emails to the new PRN server but he forgets to do it
• Early 2014—Undisclosed PRN Staff Member mails Apple MacBook back to Clinton and it is promptly lost
• Dec 2014—Hillary delivers 55,000 emails to State Department
• Dec 2014/Jan 2015—Heather Samuelson and Cheryl Mills request emails be deleted from their computer using BleachBit
• Dec 2014/Jan 2015—“Unknown Clinton staff member” instructs PRN to remove archives of Clinton emails from PRN server
• Mar 2, 2015—NYT releases an article showing that Hillary used a personal email server in violation of State Department rules
• Mar 4, 2015—Hillary receives subpoena from House Select Committee on Benghazi instructing her to preserve and deliver all emails from her personal servers
• Mar 25, 2015—Undisclosed PRN Staff Member has a conference call with “President Clinton’s Staff”
• Mar 25-31, 2015—Undisclosed PRN Staff Member has “oh shit” moment and realizes he forgot to wipe Hillary’s email archive from the PRN server back in December…which he promptly does using BleachBit despite later admitting he “was aware of the existence of the preservation request and the fact that it meant he should not disturb Clinton’s e-mail data on the PRN server”
• Jun 2016—FBI discovers that Undisclosed PRN Staff Member forgot to erase 940 emails from the gmail account he created to help with the PRN server upload

Zerohedge’s discussion of the March 4 subpoena includes a long quote from the House Select Committee’s report. March 4 is a particularly important date because that’s the date the committee requests the “preservation and retention of all documents and media” related to Hillary’s two rogue email addresses on her rogue email server operating (safely, she thought) beyond the reach of federal record retention regulations.

Then comes what Zerohedge calls a difficult “moment”:

“On March 25, 2015, the Undisclosed PRN Staff Member had a ‘conference call with President Clinton’s staff.’ Apparently, in the days following that call, the Undisclosed PRN Staff Member had an ‘oh shit moment’ when he realized he had forgotten to wipe the PRN server clean as he had been instructed to do back in December by Cheryl Mills.

Therefore, sometime within the 6 days after a call with ‘President Clinton’s Staff,’ that PRN server was wiped clean using BleachBit despite the subpoena from the House Select Committee on Benghazi received weeks earlier on March 4, 2016.”

BleachBit, Jim. Software for a thorough scrub of a server. To remove evidence.
Now tell me, Comey. Do you really think (as Zerohedge says, tongue in cheek) “Mills, Hillary, President Clinton’s Office were all blissfully unaware of the actions of their rogue IT guy”? You and your agency know Hillary failed to turn over work-related emails to the Committee. You think these curiouser and curiouser shenanigans were all accidental? Are you and Alice living happily together in Wonderland?
In a letter sent to Platte River Networks on September 6 (the day before your protesteth too much memo), Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), now head of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, gave the FBI credit for confirming that Hillary failed to turn over work related emails despite repeated requests and subpoenas to do so.
I employ italics, Jim, to get your attention, because, dammit, Chafetz is doing your job. He’s going after the little fish to get to the shark. That’s how you Feebs operate when you’re doing your job. How come you didn’t indict this anonymous Platte River Networks employee for knowingly destroying subpoenaed evidence? I’m not the first to ask this question. Jonathan Turley asked it on September 6.
Turley even quotes 2 U.S. Code § 192. He just didn’t put the question to you as personally as I have.
Jim, I see you as a man in a responsibility-heavy government security position who has acted irresponsibly. Obstruction of justice is an indictable crime—that’s the crime Richard Nixon and his aides committed in the Watergate Scandal. You remember Watergate, don’t you? The scandal that made The Washington Postfamous? Turns out the Deep Throat source on whom WaPo reporters relied was the FBI’s Number Two Boss. Back in 1974 our country couldn’t stomach a criminal in the White House. So, Comey, why the hell in 2016 should you help get a criminal elected?
Mr. Director, it’s time for you to admit you erred in early July. You’ve got the evidence. Call a press conference. Recommend Hillary Clinton be indicted and, this time, let Attorney General Loretta Lynch make the decision. She’s the prosecutor—not you.

Recommend indictment for three reasons, Mr. Director. First and foremost recommend she face legal consequences because her actions were criminal.   

This is a classic example of a basic lesson: When Democrats say it's time to move on from something regarding the Clinton machine, it's time to look at it more deeply.

The Kim Dynasty may be nutty in a lot of ways, but it thinks strategically

North Korea isn't just strutting its stuff with all these tests. It has at least five strategic aims:

Between 1994 and 2008, North Korea conducted 16 missile tests and one nuclear test. Between 2009 and 2016, it has, despite heavy sanctions, conducted 58 missile tests and four nuclear tests, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

“While the THAAD system works well against short and medium-range ballistic missiles, it is not a foolproof defense against North Korea’s capabilities, particularly if Pyongyang continues taking steps to diversify its missile systems and increase reliability. There are several measures that Pyongyang could take to overwhelm or evade ballistic missile defenses,” Kelsey Davenport, director of Nonproliferation Policy at the Arms Control Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.

One of North Korea’s ambitions appears to be the ability to launch multiple ballistic missiles simultaneously. The latest missile tests make this goal abundantly clear. The following is a video released by Korean Central Television (KCTV) of Monday’s ballistic missile tests.

The video shows the three ballistic missiles fired during the test were launched one after the other in rapid succession. “Enough simultaneous launches could overwhelm the THAAD system and increase the risk of a nuclear-armed ballistic missile reaching its target in South Korea,” said Davenport.

North Korea also wants sea-based strike capabilities. The sub-launched KN-11 ballistic missile North Korea successfully tested in late August poses a legitimate threat. “THAAD has a forward-looking radar with a 120-degree field of view. In the case of a single THAAD battery, North Korea’s submarines would not have to travel very far out to sea to attack the THAAD system from behind the field of view of its radar,” explained Jeffrey Lewis, director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the Center for Proliferation Studies, in a recent article for Arms Control Wonk.

Another North Korean goal is the development of effective intermediate-range missiles. “THAAD has not been tested against intermediate-range systems. North Korea conducted several tests of its intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Musudan, this past spring. Deployment of the Musudan could challenge the THAAD system,” Davenport told TheDCNF.

North Korea has an interest in missiles with separating warheads. The ballistic missiles tested Monday, which were Extended Range Scud missiles, may have been equipped with separating warheads. “A separating warhead would pose additional challenges for missile defense systems such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system,” Lewis explained in a Nuclear Threat Initiative article.

Finally, North Korea desires a nuclear deterrent, not a bargaining chip. Kim Jong Un’s aspirations vary greatly from those of his father. “[North Korea’s latest test] is not a cry for negotiations,” CSIS North Korea expert Victor Cha told The New York Times. “This is very clearly a serious effort at amassing real nuclear capabilities that they can use to deter the U.S. and others.”

North Korea’s fifth nuclear test was not a temper tantrum or political statement, Lewis pointed out in a Foreign Policy article. “It has technical purpose. And that purpose is demonstrating the reliability of the ‘standardized’ nuclear warhead to arm the missile force.”

And does anybody think that EMP capability isn't discussed in the upper echelons of the Hermit Kingdom's power structure?

Sunday morning roundup

Tony Schwartz was the ghostwriter for The Art of the Deal, which the Bots regard as sacred scripture.  On CNN's New Day, he expressed remorse for his part in presenting an image of a far more savvy businessman than exists in reality, and also his alarm at Squirrel-Hair's current admiration for Putin. S-H, true to form, has taken to Twitter to let loose a barrage of seventh-grade-level swipes at Schwartz. There's never too much on the guy's plate for him to take time for some vindictive payback on social media.

Andrew Ferguson at The Weekly Standard says that the upcoming government (as in funded by your taxes) "Conversation on Women's Rights and Gender Equality" is going to employ the same definition of "conversation" as all such previous pow-wows: you privileged types are going sit down and listen to us rant explain why you are guilty of overtly dominating all other demographics. Need proof? Look at the lineup:

The press release lists the conversationalists: the founder of Feminism.com, a lawyer from the Center for Reproductive Rights, an editor from Ms. magazine, the executive director of Equal Rights Advocates, and a poet with the improbable name of Aja Monet. Oh, and Soledad O'Brien. Not a Republican in the bunch. I'm guessing.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO reflects on the utter lack of progress against jihad since September 11, 2001. The principle reason is that the overlords still won't identify the actual enemy.

How sick and spiritually rotten is post-America? High school football players around the country are following Kaepernick's example, taking the knee during the national anthem - with the support of their coaches:

• At Waggener High in Louisville, a player took a knee as his teammates stood alongside him. A number of players had taken a knee as the team line up but eventually rose as the music starting playing. Coach Jordan Johnson said the team will take steps before next week’s game to “to ensure our young men can make a stand for social injustice, while at the same time not showing, what is perceived as, disrespect.” (Click here for more of Waggener’s response.)

Staff name tags at Vanderbilt University now sport the wearer's "preferred gender pronouns."