Thursday, March 12, 2015

Join the Informed Minority--Read today's important political news

Update

Remember if you are blocked on getting to an article by a paywall, you can often get it by Googling the title.

66 degrees here Thursday. Definitely a milder winter than last year here in WI. Must be that all those plastic grocery bags I get are speeding up global warming. ~Bob

Why I do this blog: "Our duty is to be useful, not according to our desires, but according to our powers." --Henri Frederic Amiel

General News and Comment

Worth Reading: Why the E-Gate Epidemic? From Petraeus to Hillary, public servants have been trying to manipulate the historical record in their favor. Bt Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415267/why-e-gate-epidemic-victor-davis-hanson
Excerpt: Former CIA director David Petraeus plea-bargained to a misdemeanor count of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material after having given classified government information to his one-time mistress, Paula Broadwell. How was Petraeus’s transgression uncovered? By exposure of a non-government e-mail account that he had set up to communicate with Broadwell free of CIA scrutiny. After a series of Democratic scandals in the New York state legislature, Governor Andrew Cuomo is instituting a policy to have the e-mails of state employees automatically deleted after 90 days. Apparently, Cuomo did not want e-trails of politicians’ communications. Meanwhile, the former speaker of the New York state assembly, Sheldon Silver, faces charges of corruption and was forced by subpoena to turn over computer correspondence.


Time for a FOIA Suit: Three Top Hillary State Dept. Aides Used Private Email; Agency Has No Plans to Review
Excerpt: According to news reports, Huma Abedin, who was Clinton’s deputy chief of staff at the State Department and is her top confidante, had an account at Clintonemail.com. Two others–State Department chief of staff Cheryl Mills and spokesperson Phillippe Reines–reportedly used personal email accounts to communicate with Clinton. Whether they had emails on Clinton’s server could not be verified.

Any Reason to Think #Hillary Hasn't Destroyed Damaging Emails Relating to Benghazi or "Pay To Play" For Her Charitable Foundation?


Hillary Clinton email excuses 'laughable,' says top freedom-of-information official
Excerpt: Daniel Metcalfe doesn't buy her explanation. In fact, he calls it laughable. "What she did was contrary to both the letter and the spirit of the law," says Metcalfe, the founding director of the Justice Department's Office of Information and Privacy, which advised the rest of the administration on how to comply with the law. Metcalfe ran the office from 1981 to 2007. "There is no doubt that the scheme she established was a blatant circumvention of the Freedom of Information Act, atop the Federal Records Act."

Clinton didn't encrypt emails for three months, security firm finds
Excerpt: After scanning Clinton’s domain, clintonemail.com, the security firm Venafi found that from January to March 2009, the domain had no digital certificate issued by an authority, which shows a site is secured. “This means that during the first three months of Secretary Clinton’s term in office, web browser, smartphone and tablet communications would not have been encrypted,” said Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, in a blog post.

Hillary Clinton May Have Committed a Felony By Failing to Turn Over Emails Before Leaving State Department in 2013. By Katie Pavlich 
At this point, what difference does it make? Won't be the first or last she gets away with. ~Bob

Does the Democratic Party Have a Non-Hillary Option? By Daniel Greenfield 
Excerpt: Hillary will survive her email woes, but scandals serve as tests that show the strengths and weaknesses of politicians. What the email scandal showed is that Hillary lacks her husband’s breezy ability to weather political outrage. Instead her paranoia and resentment combine to make her scandals worse. Democrats are looking for inspiration, but Hillary couldn’t whip up inspiration on a very special episode of Oprah.

Important: Join Obama on Pacific Trade. By Kevin D. Williamson
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/415273/join-obama-pacific-trade-kevin-d-williamson
Excerpt: The dispute over TPP finds Barack Obama at odds both with congressional Democrats and with progressive activists, and making uncomfortably common cause with the most reliable partisans of free trade: most everybody who hates his guts. Some Republicans have reservations about investing the president with “fast track” authority — meaning that he would be empowered to negotiate a deal that would then get a simple yes/no vote in Congress, which turns out to have a say in international affairs after all — because they are mindful of this imperial president’s habitual infliction of violence on the Constitution and of his seething contempt of the legislative branch in which he served for approximately eleven minutes. But it is unlikely that Republicans will in the end say no to a trade deal. (I've been a Free trade advocate since my high school economics classes with Ben Mark [my only As in that institution]. Adam Smith in the 1700s said that a nation needed three things for economic progress: pursuit of self-interest, division of labor and free trade [internal as well as external] but the government often interferes, preventing prosperity. ~Bob)

Worth subscribing to: For Most Democrats, It Always Comes Back to ‘Disrespect.’ By Jim Geraghty, Morning Jolt
Excerpt: Notice how quickly the media’s narrative shifts from whatever the issue at hand is to the Obama administration’s preferred “Isn’t this a terrible insult to the president?” To judge from some voices on cable news, the central issue in American life is whether or not the opposition party is sufficiently respectful of the president. The more time you debate “Did congressional Republicans insult the president by inviting Bibi Netanyahu to address them?”, the less time you are debating “Is this deal with Iran a good idea?” or “Are we forcing our allies the Israelis to live with an unacceptable risk?” The more time you debate “Did 47 Senate Republicans undermine or disrespect the president by writing that open letter to Iran?”, the less time you are debating “Can we trust the Iranians to keep their word?” or “Shouldn’t something that looks like a treaty, sounds like a treaty, and has the impact of a treaty be ratified by the Senate like a treaty?”
Those are the questions we would prefer to debate -- both because they’re more important and because we think we have a stronger argument there. The administration’s eagerness to change the subject to perceptions of disrespect is a quiet hint that they don’t think they have a stronger argument there . . . or, alternately, that a full-throated defense of the Iranian regime’s right to enrich uranium in a non-weaponized program just doesn’t stir their base. But “the Republicans are disrespecting the president!” Well, that sort of thing gets more than 200,000 Democrats to call for arresting 47 senators on charges of treason. (By the way, things like that petition or the New York Daily News headline ‘TRAITORS’ are why we can’t have a more civil discourse in this country.)

Excerpt: With a new presidential election looming, it’s apparently urgently important for members of the media to know whether Republicans such as Scott Walker believe that President Obama is a Christian. Walker’s answer — “I don’t know” — is not one the media want to hear. But how can any man know another man’s heart — especially the heart of a person he’s never met? Who but God knows our deepest beliefs? To the extent that a president bares his soul to anyone, it won’t be to a reporter or to any person likely to speak to a reporter. Thus, any pundit or commentator who purports to declare what a president “really believes” on matters of faith should be viewed with deep suspicion. But while we can’t know the faith in a man’s heart, we can discern quite a lot about the faith he manifests. (Well, Obama says he's a Christian, ad he's never lied to us. Okay, other than to get Obamacare passed, about Keystone, about his opposition to gay marriage, about Benghazi being caused by a video, about transparency, about the IRS and Fast and Furious, about the world being safer, about... Personally, I think he's a secular humanist, like so many of the left, who uses religion as needed, but believes only in the Progressive creed. But he holds that as an article of faith, unmoved by facts or results. ~Bob)

Interesting: Ex-NBC Reporter Meyers: Journalists 'Appear to Have Chosen Sides.' By Greg Richter
Excerpt: Former NBC reporter Lisa Meyers tells The Des Moines Register the quality of television journalism is going downhill and that reporters have picked sides. Meyers is scheduled to give a talk in Des Moines on Thursday, and told the Register, "I am going to talk about the deterioration in the quality of journalism you see on TV. There is less and less interest in network television today holding the White House or any other part of government accountable." Meyers said she believes newscasts are catering to an audience thought to care less about serious news. (The article is about more than journalistic bias, although that certainly is part of the problem, as the second article mentions. But the overall picture is just of media people who are dumbing down the news, while also in bias mode anywhere from mild to deep, and clearly neglecting some parts of the news such as the significant scientific opposition to the Climate Change models while focusing obsessively on other things like racial conflicts and tensions. (Speaking of not helping things get better, now we've had a sniper shoot two Ferguson cops who were just standing in front of the police station. The DOJ report just threw some gas on a fire that had started to die down. The idea of open season on uniformed officers is horribly unfortunate.) A democracy depends on an informed electorate, and that in turn hinges on a responsible press, and we don't have very much of that anymore. --Del)

Bernard Goldberg: 3 Reasons Liberal Media Are Failing. By Greg Richter
Excerpt: Media critic Bernard Goldberg said there are three main reasons liberal media such as MSNBC can't find an audience: They are preachy, too far left and not the only liberal game in town. Appearing Thursday on Fox News Channel's "The O'Reilly Factor," Goldberg said liberal news media violate the cardinal rule of all media in that they are not entertaining. 

Hillary Clinton and My Crystal Ball. Bernard Goldberg
Excerpt: Through the cloudy haze, I can see Republicans going after Mrs. Clinton on Benghazi. And I can see (and hear) James Carville, Paul Begala, Howard Dean, Lanny Davis, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, the New York Times editorial page, and ten thousand other Clinton cronies screaming, “Sexist!” That’s what we have to look forward to. Every time someone says something the Clinton campaign doesn’t like, her detractors are going to be portrayed as women haters – Neanderthals who think women should know their place … and that place is the kitchen baking cookies for her man and their 15 children.

Some top Democrats are alarmed about Clinton’s readiness for a campaign. By Philip Rucker and Paul Kane
Excerpt: Senior Democrats are increasingly worried that Hillary Rodham Clinton is not ready to run for president, fearing that the clumsy and insular handling of the nine-day fracas over her private e-mails was a warning sign about the campaign expected to launch next month.

Veteran Honor Flight availability
Now that they are basically running short of WW2 vets for these free trips to DC, they will be opening up for Korean and Viet Nam vets. If you know people who could benefit from this nice experience, below is the link for them to apply. --Del

AAN Political Intel: New Polling in Wisconsin. B: Jim Ellis
http://americanactionnews.com/articles/aan-political-intel-new-polling-in-wisconsin
Excerpt: A new Public Policy Polling survey posts former Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold (D) to a 50-41% lead over first-term incumbent Ron Johnson (R) according to just-released data. The poll (3/6-8; 1,017 WI registered voters) may be a better indication of what happens to former politicians once they leave office for an extended period of time instead of a clear forecast of the upcoming campaign, however. Typically, former office holders are viewed more favorably the longer they have been out of office, as Feingold’s 46:35% approval ratio attests. Five years ago, the Wisconsin electorate defeated him 52-47%, preferring newcomer Johnson.

Ginsberg has since "clarified" this quote

Gaming a Russian Offensive
Excerpt: Russia's current military position in Ukraine is very exposed and has come at a great cost relative to its limited political gains. The strategic bastion of Crimea is defensible as an island but is subject to potential isolation. The position of Ukrainian separatists and their Russian backers in eastern Ukraine is essentially a large bulge that will require heavy military investment to secure, and it has not necessarily helped Moscow achieve its larger imperative of creating defensible borders. This raises the question of whether Russia will take further military action to secure its interests in Ukraine. To answer this question, Stratfor examined six basic military options that Russia might consider in addressing its security concerns in Ukraine, ranging from small harassment operations to an all-out invasion of eastern Ukraine up to the Dnieper River

Excerpt: Jeb Bush’s announcement in December launched both a fundraising juggernaut and an aggressive hiring spree, and Scott Walker’s speech in Iowa the following month lifted Walker to the top of national polls. But a little more than a month later, says the operative, “The Jeb boom is over and people are having second thoughts about Walker.” The beneficiary in terms of buzz is Marco Rubio, who now has many of the party’s top donors looking at him in a way they weren’t even a month ago. 

Gun News

New Gun Radio Show: Sunday's Armed American Radio Launches 'AAR Daily Defense' Hour April 6. By Neil McCabe 
Excerpt: The new show, Armed American Radio's Daily Defense, will be produced by the United just as the Sunday show, said Walters, who got his start in the fight for gun rights after he was forced to draw his handgun to fend off an attacker coming as him and his daughter.

Race Card News

Cry "Racism!" and let slip the dogs of war: Ferguson Officers’ Shooting Called ‘Ambush’
Excerpt: Two police officers were shot early Thursday morning outside the Ferguson, Mo., police department, in what St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar described as an “ambush.” ... The shooting occurred after midnight as a protest outside the Ferguson Police Department appeared to be winding down. Mr. Belmar said it appeared three to four shots were fired from a handgun from about 125 yards away at a line of officers. Police have some leads, but don’t have any suspects in custody, Chief Belmar said. (Notice that the DOJ, headed by Eric "Racism Under Every Bed" Holder has found that the FPD was racist, but exonerated Officer Darren Wilson and reported that the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" narrative was a lie. Will the celebs, athletes and politicians who used that meme apologize? Not likely--being a liberal means never having to say you're sorry. ~Bob)

The Farcical Ferguson Report. By Larry Elder
Excerpt: The NBA consists of 76 percent black players. But blacks are just 13 percent of the country. Clearly, the league engages in racial discrimination against whites. Silly, right? Well, this is exactly what the sleight-of-hand Department of Justice pulled off to find that the Ferguson Police Department engages in “implicit and explicit racial bias”! The report insults anybody who’s ever studied the statistics – or logic. (Black writer. ~Bob)

Madison's racial divide is Paul Soglin's problem, too. By Christian Schneider
Excerpt: On Monday of this week, Soglin stood, megaphone in handtrying to explain to a group of 1,500 largely black protesters why one of his police officers had shot Tony Robinson, an unarmed black teenager. Soglin, a progressive standard-bearer first elected Madison mayor in 1973, pathetically tried to pass the buck to Republicans in state government for cutting state school aids. He was frequently shouted down by protesters yelling, "Murder!" It was a rare time when a progressive mayor had to face the very type of racial animus he has spent a career fomenting. White liberals often think they have a monopoly on race relations in America, frequently using racial issues to drive wedges in the electorate and bolster their own standing. Yet by almost any measure, decades of pure, uncut progressivism have done nothing to mend the racial divide in a liberal playground like Madison

Undocumented Democrat News

Unbelievable: US Attorneys Didn't Prosecute Illegal Immigrants Who Used Dead Americans' Social Security Numbers to Work. By Leah Barkoukis
Excerpt: Apparently discovering that the Social Security Administration had roughly 6.5 active social security numbers for Americans aged 112 or older wasn’t the only eye-catching discovery from the office of the inspector general’s audit. Tucked away in a footnote was another “minor” detail: U.S. attorneys did not prosecute illegal immigrants who used the social security numbers of deceased Americans to work in the U.S. (Unbelievable? I'm not surprised at all. We have ceased to be a government of laws. ~Bob)

Federal Judge Orders Investigation into Obama Administration’s Illegal Amnesty
EXCERPT: On Monday, a Texas judge who temporarily blocked Barack Obama's illegal executive amnesty determined to postpone his final ruling on the matter in order to investigate how the administration was able to hide giving 100,000 illegal immigrants three-year amnesties.

"You're Greener than Gore" News

Biden says of Obama Move Against Coal – “A Lot of People are Going to Get Hurt.” By Onan Coca
Excerpt: Remember when then candidate Obama and his choice for VP, Joe Biden, travelled coal country telling all those nice people how they weren’t going to hurt their jobs or their futures? Well, they may have misspoken. At least that’s the case if we are to believe what Joe Biden is NOW saying. “Us moving away from coal because it’s such a polluter, there’s a lot of people going to get hurt, good people who worked their whole life,” Biden told VICE, a documentary series that premiered on HBO last Friday. (The "War on Coal" is actually a war on low and middle income Americans. ~Bob)

Religion of Peace News

Take off on "Bathhouse John” Coughlin , a corrupt Chicago politician of about 100 years ago.

Very Important: Saudi nuclear deal raises stakes for Iran talks
Excerpt: As U.S. and Iranian diplomats inched toward progress on Tehran’s nuclear program last week, Saudi Arabia quietly signed its own nuclear-cooperation agreement with South Korea.
That agreement, along with recent comments from Saudi officials and royals, is raising concerns on Capitol Hill and among U.S. allies that a deal with Iran, rather than stanching the spread of nuclear technologies, risks fueling it. Saudi Arabia’s former intelligence chief, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a member of the royal family, has publicly warned in recent months that Riyadh will seek to match the nuclear capabilities Iran is allowed to maintain as part of any final agreement reached with world powers. This could include the ability to enrich uranium and to harvest the weapons-grade plutonium discharged in a nuclear reactor’s spent fuel. (Flashback to 1998: "America’s War on Terror will be Long, Slow and Cruel." By Robert A. Hall http://tartanmarine.blogspot.com/2015/02/flashback-to-1998-americas-war-on.html. Excerpt: "A man with a wild look in his eye, a pipeline to his god, and a weapon in his hand has ever been a danger. But the weapons now are explosives powerful enough to destroy buildings, snuffing out hundreds of lives. Soon they will be gasses that can slaughter thousands, diseases that can kill millions. Perhaps even atomic bombs." A local Congressman called me and said he had circulated my column to the House Anti-Terrorism Caucus. For all the good it did three years later. ~Bob)

Tom Cotton’s Letter to Iran Gets the Constitution Right. By John Yoo
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/415254/tom-cottons-letter-iran-gets-constitution-right-john-yoo
Excerpt: As a description of American constitutional law, Senator Cotton has it exactly right. It was as if he were just informing Iran about the text of the Constitution. There are three types of international agreements under U.S. law: ... The Cotton letter is right, because if President Obama strikes a nuclear deal with Iran using only instrument (c), he is only committing to refrain from exercising his executive power — i.e., by not attacking Iran or by lifting sanctions under power delegated by Congress. Not only could the next president terminate the agreement; Obama himself could terminate the deal.

Kerry's Hypocritical Indignation. From The Patriot Post
Secretary of State John Kerry really wasn't happy with the 47 Senate Republicans who wrote a letter to Iran warning of the temporary nature of any deal with the Obama administration. Testifying before Congress Wednesday, Kerry said his reaction to the letter was "utter disbelief" because it "ignores more than two centuries of precedent in the conduct of American foreign policy." He added, "During my 29 years here in the Senate, I never heard of -- nor even heard of it being proposed -- anything comparable to this. ... This risks undermining the confidence that foreign governments, in thousands of important agreements, commit to between the United States and other countries." Funny that he's "never even heard of it" because an open letter to Iran restating the obvious hardly compares to Kerry's own record of going it alone on foreign policy. While he was in the Senate, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the communist Sandinistas and then returned home to shill on their behalf. And let's not forget his most infamous moment: meeting with the North Vietnamese in 1970 and 1971 while still a Navy reserve officer. Few are now willing to bring up this treasonous behavior, but it's unbelievable hypocrisy for Kerry to attack this letter now.

Anybody find it ironic that the same people who haven't let us build a nuclear power plant in years support Iran building one?

A brief modern history on Congressional “treason.” By Ed Morrissey
Excerpt: The Reagan administration wanted to block Soviet influence in the Western hemisphere by backing rebellions against Communist dictators, especially in Nicaragua. Reagan supported the contras against Daniel Ortega, a policy which Democrats opposed and for which they later passed the controversial Boland Amendment in an attempt to restrict Reagan’s options in foreign policy (and which led to the Iran-Contra scandal.) Before Boland, though, 10 Democrats in the House — including Edward Boland (D-MA) — wrote a letter to Ortega called the “Dear Commandante” letter pledging their support to his government. ("Treason doth not prosper; what's the reason? If it's done by Democrats, the media dare not call it treason." ~Bob)

Report: Dem Reps Met with Iranian Regime to Sabotage George W. Bush. By Jordan Schachtel
Excerpt: Between 2006 and 2007, at least twelve Democratic Congressmen agreed to meet with Iranian officials in the Ayatollah’s regime at the behest of National Iranian American Council (NIAC) President Trita Parsi, according to a report by Hassan Dai of the Iranian American Forum. Parsi allegedly solicited the help of current Iranian Defense Minister Javad Zarif, who was Iran’s Ambassador to the UN at the time. Zarif is now one of the lead negotiators for Iran’s nuclear program on behalf of the Islamic republic.

Obama: World is Safer. How Arab Spring Opened the Door to Terrorism’s Ugly March. By Sharyl Attkisson
Excerpt: It’s not your imagination. Global terrorism, dominated by Muslim extremist groups, is by far the worst it’s been in modern times. In the past six years, the United States has added 21 names to its list of foreign terrorist organizations: all but one of them radical Muslim groups. That’s more than the previous 10 years combined. At the same time, the number of terrorist acts has shattered previous records. Experts predict data for 2014, which is still being compiled, will likely reflect more than 15,000 terrorist attacks: a vast increase over 2013—which was already the deadliest year for global terrorism since data was first collected in 1970. (Obama tells troops: ‘The world is better, safer, more peaceful.’ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/dec/26/obama-tells-troops-world-better-safer-more-peacefu/ ~Bob)


Must Read: It’s Not Just Islam, It’s the Tribal Mentality. By Bruce Thornton 
Excerpt: Regular readers of FrontPage and Jihad Watch will not be as impressed. For years they have understood the link between jihadism and Islam. ... For all the differences among tribal peoples, the components of this mentality are consistent, from the ancient Gauls and Germans Caesar conquered and the Vikings terrorizing much of Europe, to the American Indians the U.S. Cavalry fought and the jihadist gangs rampaging in the Middle East. First, there is little notion of a common humanity that transcends ethnicity or culture. ... Ignoring the tribal mentality is as dangerous for our foreign policy as downplaying Islamic doctrine. 

Muslim accused of threatening to cut off heads of Jewish congregation denies allegations
If this was a Jew or a Christian at a Mosque, be international front page news for a week. ~Bob

US not sure how it will support Syrian rebels in battle
Excerpt: The U.S. military is training and equipping 5,000 Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, but is not yet sure if and how it could protect them in battle, according to the Pentagon's top leaders. 

*****
Robert A. Hall is a Marine Vietnam Veteran who served five terms in the Massachusetts State Senate. He is the author of The Coming Collapse of the American Republic. http://www.amazon.com/Coming-Collapse-American-Republic-prevent/dp/1461122538/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1304815980&sr=1-5 For a free PDF of Collapse, e-mail him at tartanmarine(at)gmail.com. Hall’s eleven books are listed here:

2 comments:

  1. All I can say is that it's time to get this POS what she deserves. We all need to sign this petition and pass it to everyone we know! http://investigatehillary.org

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nixon also condoned an illegal break in by assholes such as yourself.

    ReplyDelete