ACTING AS IRAN’S LAWYERS? Four ways the Obama administration defends Iran. “Even with your enemies, even with your adversaries, I do think that you have to have the capacity to put yourself occasionally in their shoes,” the president insisted to Thomas Friedman last month.
If only Mr. Obama demonstrated that same empathy towards America, as well.
READER BOOK PLUG: From Reader Mark Kalina, Armored Tears.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Wolves, Resurgent and Protected, Vex Swedish Farmers.
THE STORY BEHIND Sweet Home Alabama.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why Markets Work, And Bureaucrats Don’t.
IN THE MAIL: From James P. Hogan, Prisoners of Tomorrow.
Plus, today only at Amazon, $30 Off the Fire HD 6.
And, also today only: Sony MDRV6 Studio Monitor Headphones, $54.99 (50% off).
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 830.
GOOD EXAMPLE: Buffalo woman thanks blood donors for saving her life.
A Buffalo woman wants to thank the people who donated the blood that saved her life and she encourages others to give blood.
“If it weren’t for the blood transfusions I really would not be here today,” said Nataka Morris, from Buffalo.
News 4 is teaming up with the American Red Cross for the 100 Days of Summer, 100 Days of Hope Blood Drive this week.
Morris told News 4 that eight months ago she had to take a medical leave of absence from Buffalo State College.
“I couldn’t eat, I could hardly sleep,” said Morris.”I wasn’t any mood to move around or go anywhere.”
Her stomach pains quickly became worse and she was admitted to Sister’s Hospital in November. Tests showed she has Crohn’s Disease.
“I was continuously hemorrhaging, which is why I needed the blood transfusions,” she said.
Morris had 20 blood transfusions in six weeks as doctors tried to save her life. She was in and out of the ICU three times but the transfusions kept her alive.
“I thank whoever donated blood because if it weren’t for the donated blood, my child wouldn’t be here today,” said Janice Tigg, Morris’ mother.
It’s good to donate if you can.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: Pardon Hillary Now.
Clinton maintains she followed the rules. But she’s been proven wrong before. Who knows what the FBI and intelligence community might find—or how it might affect her campaign.
What Clinton needs most of all is a way out, a means of escape. Before she can recover politically, the legal uncertainty must end. And the only way to end it is a presidential pardon. Clinton’s future isn’t only tied to President Obama’s job approval and economic performance. It’s also tied to his compassion. Obama alone can resuscitate Hillary’s campaign. . . .
The most famous preemptive pardon in American history was of Richard Nixon. President Ford absolved his predecessor of all crimes he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in” between inauguration day 1969 and resignation day 1974. Obama could do better than Ford by absolving Clinton of all crimes she “has committed or may have committed or taken part in” between, say, January 20, 2009 and January 20, 2025. That would give her some wiggle room. And why not pardon Huma, too. She’s suffered enough. . . .
Not only would a pardon have legal consequences. It would have political ones. It would be a tacit endorsement of Clinton, a message to Biden not to run. Scrutiny of Clinton would fade. A few news outlets might continue to dig around—we at the Washington Free Beacon will never, ever stop—but most reporters, who’d rather not be writing about this scandal anyway, would turn elsewhere.
Obama would look magnanimous. The country would be spared years of Clinton drama it doesn’t want. A pardon would be a final display of Obama’s moral superiority to the woman he defeated long ago—exactly the sort of self-righteous gesture that most appeals to him.
Continetti is being mischievously playful, of course. Obama could, indeed, pardon Clinton prophylactically and given the mainstream media’s bias, any crimes she has committed would be immediately relegated to their “yesterday’s news” pile and forgotten. But we all know Obama viscerally hates Hillary about as much, or more than, a conservative, Southern white male, so no one will be holding their breath waiting for this to happen. It would be fun–just for kicks and giggles–for someone in the press to to inquire about the possibility.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Why Markets Work, And Bureaucrats Don’t.
MEMO TO VOX: YOU KNOW HOW THIS PROSPERITY WAS ACHIEVED? WE LET IT HAPPEN. “Readers of this blog will likely have seen this before (though it may well be new to Vox readers). Here is the amazing thing about the Vox article: It never once mentions capitalism, trade, economic freedom, or any synonym.”
Unexpectedly. (OK, to be fair, it’s rather “expectedly,” given Young Ezra’s views on the toxic brew that is nationalism combined with socialism.)
PLANNED PARENTHOOD AND THE EUGENICS MOVEMENT: With a chilling cameo from Margaret Sanger, whom Hillary Clinton has gushed that she’s admires “enormously,” based on Sanger’s “courage, her tenacity, her vision . . . And when I think about what she did all those years ago in Brooklyn, taking on archetypes, taking on attitudes and accusations flowing from all directions, I am really in awe of her.”
UPDATE: Broken first link now fixed.
EMAIL SCANDAL UPDATE: Former CIA spy on Clinton emails: ‘You and I would get fired and possibly jailed’ for this.
If Hillary Clinton allowed classified information onto her private server or personal phone, she should be disqualified from becoming president, former CIA spy Bob Baer said Saturday.
Baer, a former CIA officer and commentator on national security issues, said that sending or receiving top secret information is a “transgression that I don’t think the president of the United States should be allowed to have committed.”
In an interview with CNN International, Baer claimed that the markings on emails believed to have crossed the private server Clinton maintained as secretary of state represented the highest levels of secrecy in the government.
“You don’t get any more secret than that,” he said.
“Even Snowden didn’t get into that,” Baer said. “If this in fact was on a private server, you and I would get fired and possibly jailed. This could be a felony.”
Baer said that when he was on assignment, he wasn’t allowed to receive messages at that level of classification, and that putting it on a private server or handheld device was a major mistake.
“If this was on her server and it got into her smartphone, there’s a big problem there,” he claimed. “Seriously, if I had sent a document like this over the open Internet, I’d get fired the same day — escorted to the door, and gone for good, and probably charged with mishandling classified information.”
Laws are for the little people.
ROGER KIMBALL: Some thoughts on Michael Walsh’s The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. “Subversion is Michael Walsh’s primary focus and the battle he describes is nothing less than a battle between good and evil.” (Bumped).
OUCH: Chart: The age gap between the Democratic and Republican presidential fields.
One of the asymmetries in the races for the two parties’ presidential nominations is generational. The Democratic field of candidates tends to be relatively old, the Republican field relatively young. The following table shows the names of the candidates born in each year from 1941 to 1971.
The average birth year for the Democrats is 1950, just four years later than the 1946 birth years of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and 11 years earlier than the 1961 birth year (in Hawaii) of Barack Obama. Three men currently mentioned as possible additional candidates — Joe Biden (1942), John Kerry (1943), Al Gore (1948) — have birth years even earlier than that average. The average birth year for the Republican candidates is 1957. But only one, Rick Santorum, was born about that time. Otherwise you have a Republican generation gap, between 10 candidates born between 1945 and 1955 and six candidates born between 1962 and 1971.
Does all of this have any political significance? Primarily, I think, it shows that the Democratic party hasn’t been generating many plausible national candidates in recent years.
You have to see the chart.
SO WE CAN EXPECT A LOT MORE “WAR ON WOMEN” AGITPROP AS LONG AS HILLARY IS IN THE RACE: Independent groups allied with Hillary Clinton launching effort to mobilize female voters. One of Hillary’s top surrogates in this venture? Failed Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm.
THE TRAGIC AND COMPLETE COLLAPSE OF RACIAL RELATIONS: Victor Davis Hanson asks, “Why do polls show that racial relations have gotten much worse under Barack Obama, who won the White House with over 95% of the black — and 45% of the white — vote?”
REMEMBERING ROBERT CONQUEST: The man who told us so. What the West, and the Soviet Union’s victims, owe to Robert Conquest.
THE intellectual history of the West in the 20th century was dominated by arguments over totalitarianism: its causes, effects—and possible justification. Even after flag-waving supporters of the Soviet Union had dwindled to irrelevance, the conviction that communism was a good idea poorly executed persisted in certain quarters. Others still thought the communist threat overstated, or drew equivalences between crimes committed in the name of socialism and those of Western anti-communism. The position that communism was a monstrously evil system responsible for unprecedented atrocities was held by only a minority of scholars. Robert Conquest, who died on August 3rd, was one of the most eloquent and implacable members of that camp. To the chagrin of his opponents, he turned out to be right.
He did not start out as a scourge of the left. He emerged from a brainy ancient British school as an ardent socialist and a crack shot, and fought for the Republican side in the Spanish civil war (albeit for one day, firing a single round). While at Oxford he joined the Communist Party. But he soon left, disgusted by a party hack who claimed that Britain’s bourgeois leaders could never declare war on Hitler.
Witnessing the lies and terror of the Soviet takeover in Bulgaria in 1947 showed him what Stalinism was like in practice.
So many in the West refused to see, even when it slapped them in the face.
HERE’S AN IDEA: TRY LISTENING TO POLICE DURING STOPS: It’s an idea so crazy, it just might work — and it usually does; just ask Chris Rock:
WEIMAR? BECAUSE WE REICH YOU! “I don’t know what happens with Mr. Trump, but Trumpism? That’s here now—outlandish candidates backed by indignant, enraptured people who’ve lost their judgment. Congratulations to the leaders of both parties: The past 20 years you’ve taken us far. We’re entering Weimar, baby. The swamp figure is up from the depths,” Peggy Noonan writes on The Donald.
If past performance is any indicator though, I’m not sure if Noonan is really the best qualified person to judge “outlandish candidates backed by indignant, enraptured people who’ve lost their judgment.”
(And yes, I’ve used that headline before to explain how we got here.)
ROGER SIMON: Fear And Lothing On Martha’s Vineyard. “And you thought the Medici were bad. This lot’s even scummier and they’re not even patrons of the arts, unless you count Beyonce, who’s okay but no Aretha.”
HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): Obama & the Left downsizing the American Dream.
Barack Obama has always wanted to be a transformational president, and in this, at least, he has been true to his word. The question is what kind of America is being created, and what future does it offer the next generation.
President Obama’s great accomplishment, arguably, has been to spur the evolution of a society that formerly rested on individual and familial aspiration, and turn it into a more regulated and centralized regime focused on broader social and environmental concerns. This tendency has been made much stronger as the number of Americans, according to Gallup, who feel there is “plenty of opportunity ahead” has dropped precipitously – from 80 percent in 1997 to barely 52 percent today.
The shift away from the entrepreneurial model can also be seen in the constriction of loans to the small-business sector. Rates of business start-ups have fallen well below historical levels, and, for young people in particular, have hit the lowest levels in a quarter century. At the same time, the welfare state has expanded dramatically, to the point that nearly half of all Americans now get payments from the federal government.
In sharp contrast to the Bill Clinton White House, which accepted limits on government largesse, the newly emboldened progressives, citing inequality, are calling for more wealth transfers to the poorer parts of society, often eschewing the notion that the recipients work to actually improve their lives. The ever-expanding regulatory state has powerful backing in the media, on campuses and among some corporations. There is even a role model: to become like Europe. As the New York Times’ Roger Cohen suggests, we reject our traditional individualist “excess” and embrace, instead, Continental levels of material modesty, social control and, of course, ever-higher taxes.
It’s all about control, and opportunities for graft. Everything else is just the sell-job.
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