JIM TREACHER: What If Islamic Terrorists Attacked A Gay Wedding In The Name Of Allah?

IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE THESE DAYS? Has ISIS hacked the Associated Press, or are they serious?

ANDREW MORRISS IS still cheerful about the future of legal education.

BOOM! CLIMATE CHANGE A U.N. ‘RUSE’:  So says a top business advisor to Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott.  The advisor, Maurice Newman, has an oped in The Australian today, in which he states:

Figueres [executive secretary of the UN’s Framework on Climate Change] is on record saying democracy is a poor political system for fighting global warming. Communist China, she says, is the best model. This is not about facts or logic. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN. It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.

Figueres says that, unlike the Industrial Revolution, “This is a centralised transformation that is taking place.” She sees the US partisan divide on global warming as “very detrimental”. Of course. In her authoritarian world there will be no room for debate or ­disagreement.

Make no mistake, climate change is a must-win battlefield for authoritarians and fellow travellers. As Timothy Wirth, president of the UN Foundation, says: “Even if the ­(climate change) theory is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”

Having gained so much ground, eco-catastrophists won’t let up. After all, they have captured the UN and are extremely well funded. They have a hugely powerful ally in the White House. They have successfully enlisted compliant academics and an obedient and gullible mainstream media (the ABC and Fairfax in Australia) to push the scriptures regardless of evidence.

Exactly.  Read the whole thing.

OH NOES! “There’s a darker side to the DIY movement, where self-reliance meets libertarian zeal.”

UPDATE: “First you learn how to can vegetables from your garden. Next, you’re reading Hayek. Then the Kochs have your soul.”

THE “PANIC” HAS APPARENTLY NOT EXTENDED TO THEM OFFERING PROTECTION TO PAM GELLER: ABC News is running a story today about how the FBI and the rest of the homeland security apparatus is in a state of near “panic” in the aftermath of the Garland shooting.

U.K. ELECTION: How The Polls Missed The Tory Wave. “In a political culture dominated by the angry left, you can’t blame conservatives for keeping the pollsters guessing.”

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: Inching Toward Harrison Bergeron: Inequality warriors vs. the family and the individual.

BRING BACK DDT: Bed Bug Panic: The bloodsuckers are everywhere, but their shadowy threat shouldn’t rule your life.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Teacher Arrested For Sex With High School Boys Is Town’s FIFTH FEMALE RAPIST THIS YEAR. I blame our modern culture of female sexual entitlement.

WELL, GOOD: Highly educated women increasingly opting to have children.

DO TELL: Even After Exoneration, Life For The Wrongly Convicted Is No Fairy Tale. Nope. And you don’t even have to be wrongly convicted, just wrongly accused. Look at Paul Nungesser, who was falsely accused of rape by Emma Sulkowicz at Columbia. Even after being cleared by police and the university, he’s still being smeared by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY).

STATE DEP’T STICKS HEAD IN THE SAND:  . . . on high-level corruption and refuses to review the propriety of Hillary Clinton’s violation of her State Department Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) about foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation. This is ironic, since the White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters, in the following Feb. 26 exchange, to direct their questions about the violations to the State Department:

Q    Josh, are there are any regrets here on the Clinton Foundation story that the ethics deal that White House aides, administration officials negotiated with Secretary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation failed to prevent the Algerian government from contributing half a million dollars to the Clinton Foundation the very time that they were lobbying this White House, the State Department?  Wasn’t this what the President was trying to prevent?

MR. EARNEST:  Well, Ed, let’s go back to 2008.  At the end of 2008, there was a memorandum of understanding that was drafted between the then-transition team and the Clinton Foundation, and the goal of that memorandum was to ensure that the excellent work that is being done at the Clinton Foundation could continue. . . .And that memorandum of understanding went beyond the baseline ethical guidelines.  It put in place some additional requirements to ensure that we could — that the Clinton Foundation could continue its work, and that the Secretary of State could do her work without even the appearance of a conflict of interest.  And we are —

Q    But it failed then, because then a half million dollars came in from a government that was accused of human rights abuses and was lobbying this administration for relief.  How do you explain then, given these wonderful ethics rules that this mistake was made?

MR. EARNEST:  Well, again, for compliance with the memorandum of understanding, I’d refer you to the State Department.  They’re ultimately responsible for executing the agreement.  And obviously there was some responsibility at the Clinton Foundation to live up to it.

Q    — the White House’s reputation on the line.  This was a negotiation between, as I recall, very senior people like Valerie Jarrett.  This is not just the State Department, not just a foundation.  Does the President have any concerns?  You laid out all the wonderful work the foundation does.  No dispute there.  But what about the appearance of impropriety, these foreign governments trying to get access and wield influence in this President’s administration?

MR. EARNEST:  Well, it is the responsibility of the Department of State to determine how compliance was enforced when it comes to the memorandum of understanding.

Q    Or not, right?

MR. EARNEST:  Well, again, it’s their responsibility to monitor the agreement.  And so I’d refer you to them for questions about this.  But I can tell you that the President is obviously very pleased with the way that Secretary Clinton represented the United States around the globe during her tenure over in Foggy Bottom.

At a State Department Press briefing Thursday, reporters followed up, asking Acting Deputy Spokesperson Jeff Rathke if the State Department intended to investigate Clinton’s violation of itsMOU:

MR. RATHKE:  Now at this point, our role has changed. Secretary Clinton is no longer at the department, for questions about the foundation or the health access initiative or any of the offshoots and their funding, we’d refer you back to them. The State Department has not and does not intend to initiate a formal review or to make a retroactive judgment about items that were not submitted during Secretary Clinton’s tenure. The department’s actions under Secretary Clinton were taken to advance administration policy as set by the President and in the interest of American foreign policy. . . .

QUESTION: Okay, but why not? I mean, why do you not intend to —

MR RATHKE: Again, we aren’t aware of any actions taken —

QUESTION: Oh, I know you’re not aware, because you haven’t looked into them, right? (Laughter.)

MR RATHKE: Well, but again, let’s go back to what we did do during her tenure. Over the course of her tenure, we reviewed dozens of entities each year. The Clinton Foundation also is a charitable organization, so we would not have had the obligation to review their donation beyond what was committed to in the MOU.

QUESTION: Right. But the – but what they committed to in the MOU in terms of the – listing the private donors, whether or not the State Department had to review them or was supposed to review them beforehand to see if they were okay or not, it would seem to me to make sense that if they didn’t live up to their end of the MOU you would at least go back and take a look at the private donations and see whether that might raise any questions. But maybe not. I mean, I don’t – it seems like you’re not aware of anything, and there may not be anything there, but the reason that you’re not aware of anything is because you’re – not you personally, but the reason you’re not aware of anything is because the building is refusing to go back and look at it to see if there’s anything that might raise a flag.

MR RATHKE: Well, again, these private donations were – there was never any expectation that they would be reviewed.

QUESTION: Right. But there was an expectation that they would be made public and so that you could go and look and see, well, hmm, and then they weren’t made public. And so now that they are being made public, wouldn’t it make sense – and tell me if I’m wrong, maybe it doesn’t make sense – but wouldn’t it make sense to go back and take a look at them and see whether there – that there’s any – any questions raised, any red flag that might get raised? I don’t understand why you would just close your eyes to it, because they have admitted that they didn’t live up to their end of the MOU on this.

MR RATHKE: Yeah. And they’ve – but they have subsequently —

QUESTION: I know. But you’re not —

MR RATHKE: — taken steps to address that.

QUESTION: Right. But you’re not going and looking at what they’ve done to address that to see if it brought them into compliance. It’s almost as if they had an agreement that they didn’t follow through on, but since she’s no longer the secretary of state you’re saying, well, that doesn’t apply anymore and so it just doesn’t matter. But —

MR RATHKE: Look, what we have —

QUESTION: You don’t know if it doesn’t matter or not because you’re not looking into it.

MR RATHKE: I think what we’ve seen – what we’ve seen is speculation. We haven’t – we’re not aware of any actions taken that were influenced by those donations.

QUESTION: Right. But you – but you’re not aware —

QUESTION: (Off-mike.)

QUESTION: Yes. What has been put out there is – are questions. But you’re saying that the State Department doesn’t – either doesn’t have the same questions or isn’t interested in finding out what the answer to those questions is. That’s what it sounds like you’re saying because you’re saying that you’re not going to go back and look to see whether the violations of the MOU might raise questions or raise red flags about what was going on, right?

MR RATHKE: Well, again, we have – I think I don’t have anything to say beyond what I’ve said.

Okay, so let me get this right:  There was an MOU insisted upon by the State Department (and White House) to ensure that, during Hillary Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, there was full transparency of any foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, to protect against the possibility that foreign donors to the Foundation might be giving their money in exchange for favorable treatment by Secretary of State Clinton.  And that MOU was violated repeatedly.  Now, the Obama Administration is refusing to even investigate whether Clinton’s violation of the MOU may have actually caused the sort of bribery problems the MOU was designed to prevent?

Okay, so why have an MOU in the first place, if violations of it were not going to ever be investigated, or the agreement otherwise enforced?  Was it all just a dog and pony show, to allow Clinton to become Secretary of State and deflect possible criticism of her taking the post, given the potential for conflicts of interest?  The questions answer themselves, of course, but the fact that the Obama Administration is so blatantly and flippantly disregarding this nation’s interest in preventing corruption (at the highest level) is breathtaking– and telling.

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21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “So pick a city you’ve always wanted to know better and stay by yourself there for two weeks, even a month. No, your husband won’t like it, but it won’t kill him (sorry), and you’re an adult who’s entitled to a lengthy, solo vacation.” If I were this woman’s husband, I’d take the long vacation myself. And I’m not sure I’d come back.

I can’t help but feel, though, that an advice columnist would be less sympathetic to a man expressing similar desires.

THIS ISN’T GOOD: After Nearly Claiming His Life, Ebola Lurked in a Doctor’s Eye. “When Dr. Ian Crozier was released from Emory University Hospital in October after a long, brutal fight with Ebola that nearly ended his life, his medical team thought he was cured. But less than two months later, he was back at the hospital with fading sight, intense pain and soaring pressure in his left eye. Test results were chilling: The inside of Dr. Crozier’s eye was teeming with Ebola.”

A LOOK AT The 2016 BMW 340i.

A SMALL VICTORY OVER INTELLECTUAL-PROPERTY OVERREACH: Keurig says it was wrong to force users to buy single-serving pods.

SPACE: Sentinel’s Mission to Find 500,000 Near-Earth Asteroids: The privately funded space telescope will hunt for objects on a collision course with Earth. “Sentinel is the first space telescope dedicated to asteroid hunting. During six and a half years of operation, it will be able to spot more than 500,000 objects orbiting in the vicinity of Earth, dozens of times more than have been found to date. Not only could this rapid rate of detection reveal serious threats to the planet, it could also give people enough advance notice to do something about it. . . . Based on the geologic record and what we know about the NEO population, the probability of a catastrophic event is quite low. A Tunguska-scale event might occur once every few centuries. Impactors as large as the 10-km-diameter object that finished off the dinosaurs very rarely collide with Earth, just once every 100 million years or so. But of course, these are just average rates. The next asteroid with the potential to level a city might not hit Earth for hundreds of years; it could also arrive tomorrow. The only thing we can say with certainty is that there will be more collisions in our future. Given enough advance warning, though, we should be able to protect ourselves.”

CHANGE: Why Centimeter-Accurate GPS in Your Phone Is Such a Big Deal.

SARAH HOYT: OF FEET AND KNEES.

And she references Ace’s thoughts on the timorous professional class. “It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.”

DAMON LINKER: The shameful hypocrisy of our double standards on religion. “Everyone has blind spots. And some people have bigger blind spots than others. But the people with the biggest blind spots of all? It might be secular liberals, especially when it comes to thinking about conservative forms of Christianity. Their double standards are so egregious that they’d be laughed out of town on any other topic. The examples are legion. But two in The New York Times over the last week were particularly shameful.”

PETER INGEMI: Sorry Martin Roberts: Mars needs Kirk Not Hofstadter.