ROGER SIMON: Watergate Redux? Will Sid ‘Vicious’ Upend Hillary?

Emails have surfaced from long-time Clinton bag man Sid Blumenthal indicating the whole Libya debacle was instigated by a cast of sleazy lowlife profiteers out of an Elmore Leonard novel. Smarmy Sid was pumping info from this dramatis personae to Hillary (at more than one email address) about goings on in that benighted country and our then secretary of state believed him — at least most of the time — passing his “knowledge” on to her underlings.

And this is a woman who wants to be president?

We know the results of this insider information: Gaddafi gone, four Americans killed in Benghazi, including an ambassador, with Libya a massively failed state overrun by ISIS goons who lop the heads off Christians by the seaside for sport. Good work, Hillary. Good work, Sid.

Ouch.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: WaPo: Stephanopoulos was also involved with offshoot of Clinton Foundation.

IT SANK A LONG TIME AGO: Howard Kurtz: George Stephanopoulos, Brian Williams and the media’s sinking reputation.

When these episodes erupt, critics carp about how this or that organization has suffered a grievous blow. What’s often missed is that all of us who practice journalism suffer as well, that it reinforces public doubts about whether the business is riddled with bias and conflicts of interest.

Mainstream media has died.  RIP.  All that’s left now is a bunch of progressive/liberal zombies out for ideological flesh. Most people know better than to listen to them anymore.

ASHE SCHOW: Ambassador Samantha Power highlights discredited rape accuser in commencement speech.

Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, used her platform as Barnard College’s commencement speaker on Sunday to discuss campus sexual assault. She cited a familiar story. The problem was, the story she referred to has recently been called into question.

Power spoke of a “mattress” being carried around to bring attention to “victims” who are treated unfairly by their college or university.

“And yet, even as we are aware of the seriousness of this problem, it takes a woman picking up a mattress and carrying it around her campus to make people really see it,” Power said to applause. “A mattress that a good number of the women in this graduating class have helped carry. And men from Columbia, too.”

The mattress carrier Power was alluding to is Emma Sulkowicz, who made international headlines last year when she claimed that she had been raped by a fellow student, and that Columbia University (Barnard’s affiliate) failed to hold her alleged rapist accountable. In reality, neither the university nor the police found evidence to support her rape claim. After that, she started an art project for college credit in an attempt to shame the man off campus or force Columbia to overturn its “not responsible” finding.

But Power either did not know or chose to ignore Facebook messages between Sulkowicz and the man she accused of rape, Paul Nungesser. They tell a very different story than that of a woman brutally attacked and overwrought with pain. Sulkowicz sent Nungesser multiple Facebook messages in the days, weeks and months after the allegedly brutal assault (which supposedly included choking and punching) that professed her love and admiration for the man she would eventually accuse of rape. Nungesser is now suing Columbia for its role in facilitating Sulkowicz’s smear campaign against him.

On Twitter, Power seemed to analogize Sulkowicz’s situation to that of women in Afghanistan.

Given that Power has played a major role in our national security policy for the last six years, and that it’s been a debacle, this all makes sense.

FLASHBACK: Wall Street deregulation pushed by Clinton advisers, documents reveal.

ROLL CALL: GOP Wants Review of Internet Governance Handover. “The Obama administration’s plan to relinquish U.S. control of the Internet’s architecture to a group of international stakeholders isn’t going over well on Capitol Hill.”

YA THINK? The Hill: Obama’s ISIS strategy takes hit.

Related: WH: Fall of Ramadi to ISIS a ‘setback.’

Plus, what could go wrong? Pentagon to accept help from Shia militias in Iraq. “We still believe the strategy is working.”

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO ABUSE MEN: Kennesaw State adviser placed on leave after confrontation with student.

A Kennesaw State University has placed an academic adviser on administrative leave while the school investigates a student’s viral 30-second video of his interaction with her.

In the video, Abby Dawson, the school’s director of advising and internships in the Department of Exercise Science and Sport Management, accused the student of “harassment” for apparently sitting in the room and waiting to speak with his academic adviser. . . .

Dawson threatened to call security and told Bruce that he could fill out a form “just like everyone else does.”

Bruce responded that he was just waiting to talk to someone.

“Sitting here until someone is available is harassing them,” Dawson said.

In his tweet, Bruce called the adviser “rude.”

In a statement, the University said that Dawson was placed on administrative leave pending “comprehensive” investigation into the matter, which could take two weeks.

“Kennesaw State is dedicated to providing a positive academic experience for all students,” said Ken Harmon, KSU’s provost and vice president for academic affairs said in a statement. “We also have a responsibility to provide all students, faculty and staff with a fair and thorough review process.”

In an interview with Atlanta’s Fox affiliate WAGA, Bruce explained that he was trying to ask his exercise science department adviser a question and was told to come back in an hour when she would be available.

Women and police seem to be hurt the most by the spread of pervasive video cameras.

HINT: DON’T BE ASIAN. What Ivy League Affirmative Action Really Looks Like — from the Inside. “Ivy League admissions are one part meritocracy — the students are quite bright — and one part ideological engineering. And if Americans broadly understood how the process works, support for affirmative action would diminish even further. First, few people understand how dramatic the boost is for favored minority groups. If students were black or the ‘right’ kind of Latino, they would often receive admissions offers with test scores 20 or 30 percentile points lower than those of white or Asian students. When I expressed concern about an admissions offer to a black student with test scores in the 70th percentile — after we’d passed over white and Asian students with scores in the 98th percentile and far higher grades — I was told that we had to offer admission or we’d surely lose him to our Ivy League rivals. Second, these dramatic breaks rarely go to poor kids who are overcoming the challenges of ghetto schools.”

LOVELY PEOPLE, JUST LOVELY: Staff quit Clinton Foundation over Chelsea.

Chelsea Clinton is so unpleasant to colleagues, she’s causing high turnover at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, sources say.

Several top staffers have left the foundation since Chelsea came onBoard as vice chairman in 2011.

“A lot of people left because she was there. A lot of people left because she didn’t want them there,” an insider told me. “She is very difficult.”

Onetime CEO Bruce Lindsey was pushed upstairs to the position of chairman of the board two years ago, so that Chelsea could bring in her McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman.

“He [Braverman] was her boy, but he tried to hire his own communications professional and actually tried to run the place. He didn’t understand that that wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing,” said my source. “He was pushed out.”

Matt McKenna was Chelsea’s spokesman, and then he wasn’t. Now he works for Uber. Ginny Ehrlich, the founding CEO of the Clinton Health Matters Initiative, now works for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Chelsea has embraced all the trappings of a corporate CEO, with a personal staff almost as big as her father’s. “He has six. She has five,” said my source.

None of this would surprise her former co-workers at McKinsey and NBC News. At both the management consulting firm and the network, co-workers allegedly were told they couldn’t approach Chelsea.

A source at NBC, where Chelsea was paid $600,000 a year, said, “If someone wanted to talk to Chelsea about something, they had to go through a producer.”

Princess Chelsea. That’s the problem with dynasties. They breed entitled descendants.

BUT HILLARY AND BARACK KNEW AND DID NOTHING: U.S. Intel Knew Weapons Were Being Moved From Benghazi To Syria, Predicted The Rise Of ISIS.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Obama’s Middle East Policy Is In a State of Collapse. “You know it’s bad when even the Associated Press notices. . . . The ‘sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq’ that Barack Obama and Joe Biden hailed as one of Obama’s “great achievements” in 2014 has regressed into chaos as a result of Obama’s premature withdrawal of American troops. But it isn’t just Iraq. Syria is the closest thing to Hell on Earth. Iran is working away on nuclear weapons and delivery systems. Yemen has fallen to Iran’s proxies. Saudi Arabia is looking for nuclear weapons to counter Iran’s. ISIS occupies an area the size of Great Britain. Libya, its dictator having been gratuitously overthrown by feckless Western governments that had no plan for what would follow, is a failed state and terrorist playground.”

ROGER SIMON: Why Hillary Clinton Should Never Be President: She trusts someone like Sidney Blumenthal.

NOW THE NEW YORK TIMES IS IN ON THE CLINTON ACT: Clinton Friend’s Memos on Libya Draw Scrutiny to Politics and Business.

While advising Mrs. Clinton on Libya, Mr. Blumenthal, who had been barred from a State Department job by aides to President Obama, was also employed by her family’s philanthropy, the Clinton Foundation, to help with research, “message guidance” and the planning of commemorative events, according to foundation officials. During the same period, he also worked on and off as a paid consultant to Media Matters and American Bridge, organizations that helped lay the groundwork for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

Much of the Libya intelligence that Mr. Blumenthal passed on to Mrs. Clinton appears to have come from a group of business associates he was advising as they sought to win contracts from the Libyan transitional government. The venture, which was ultimately unsuccessful, involved other Clinton friends, a private military contractor and one former C.I.A. spy seeking to get in on the ground floor of the new Libyan economy.

It’s corruption all the way down.

DRIP, DRIP: New docs reveal administration knew about Benghazi 10 days before attack.

ANOTHER WIN FOR ALAN GURA: Big 2A Win – Court strikes DC requirement of “good reason” for concealed carry permit.

RELATED: Did U.S. Policy Allow Ramadi to Fall? Stubborn D.C. advisers won’t accept why Iraqi security forces fail and the jihadis keep advancing.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: As Ramadi Falls to ISIS, POTUS Goes Golfing, Gets New Twitter Account. “I’m not really interested in Obama’s answer because I already know that it will be about 5,000 words long, won’t answer the question, and would put me to sleep. I just want to hear someone from the MSM ask him the question.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Hillary Clinton was paid millions by tech industry for speeches.

Related: Clinton Foundation officials refused to respond to questions of whether the elder Blumenthal is currently on a Clinton payroll.

Also: Washington Post: You won’t believe Hillary Clinton’s spin on avoiding the press. You’re right, I won’t.

FREE SPEECH UPDATE: Appeals court says anti-Muslim YouTube video doesn’t have to come down: “A weak copyright claim cannot justify censorship in the guise of authorship.”

IMPORTANT QUESTION: Is It Ordinary Memory Loss, or Alzheimer’s Disease?

HOW TO COLONIZE MARS: Send First Humans For Robot Maintenance. “Here’s the real kicker: we should not send our first humans to Mars until we’ve accumulated enough robots on Mars to justify a trip by robot repair techs and heavy equipment maintenance specialists. Yes, mechanics and repair techs should be the first humans to visit Mars.”

AT AMAZON, deals on Bosch Cordless Tools.

Plus, up to 75% off on fine and designer jewelry.

NO ONE’S JOB IS SAFE FROM THE ROBOTS: ‘We are convinced the machine can do better than human anesthesiologists.’

Anesthesia is tricky. It’s often compared to flying a plane – keeping a patient hovering in just the right plane of consciousness. It’s called depth of hypnosis. Surgeons don’t want patients writhing on the table. And patients don’t want to be aware of the operation. Of course, no one wants patients to die, a distinct possibility if too much of an anesthesia drug is delivered.

The iControl-RP aims to thread that needle by using an EEG to scan a patient’s brain waves to make sure the sedation is adequate. And it looks at heart and breathing rates and blood oxygen levels to make sure the patient is not slipping too deeply into sleep. The machine’s algorithm makes all the medical decisions that a doctor usually does.

I really won’t be happy until they have Larry Niven style autodocs.