WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS SO PRONE TO RACISM AND SEXISM? Kane’s sister received emails mocking Asians, blacks and domestic violence.

The state attorney general’s twin sister, a top prosecutor of Internet predators, received emails in the office mocking Asians and blacks, and joking about domestic violence and a small child in a cage. She forwarded with comment one email with a photo of a naked man in a sink.

Attorney General Kathleen Kane was copied on a 2009 email that poked fun at world leaders and showed a man’s genitalia.
Kane, 49, of Scranton said she released her emails and those of her deputy, Ellen Granahan, to counter statements by a Philadelphia prosecutor that gave “a false and defamatory impression” that the sisters exchanged pornographic emails through the office computer system.

“I think they’re every bit as offensive as the other emails,” said George Parry, a former federal prosecutor and Philadelphia lawyer. “… At this point, the number is irrelevant. She’s been castigating people for sending and receiving these, and now she and her sister are doing it.”

Maybe the reason lefties think that the entire world is dominated by such racist and sexist misbehavior is because, well, their world is.

SPYING: “Unauthorized code” in Juniper firewalls decrypts encrypted VPN traffic: Backdoor in NetScreen firewalls gives attackers admin access, VPN decrypt ability.

SEN. BEN SASSE: “It is absolutely outrageous how @BernieSanders is being treated by the @DNC. He should run as an independent.”

UPDATE: Sanders Sues DNC.

Plus: Bernie Sanders’ union supporter calls for him to consider independent run.

Run, Bernie, Run! You’re an Independent already, so do it!

CHANGE: Choosing Antibiotics Over Surgery for Appendicitis.

DOES THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION SCREW THIS STUFF UP ON PURPOSE? Vice-President Joe Biden was in the Ukraine recently touting that country’s anti-corruption prosecutor, Vitaliy Kasko. Also praising Kasko was U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. Sounds good, right? But wait, there’s a catch (isn’t there always?) Key leaders in the Ukrainian parliament say Kasko can’t be trusted because he is beholden to Russian corporate interests via his law firm, which represents those interests.

And there’s another wrinkle (Ukrainian politics are never simple): Biden’s son, Hunter, sits on the four-member board of directors of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings, Ltd. “Also on the board is Devon Archer, who is a close family friend of Secretary of State John Kerry. Biden and Archer are partners in the D.C.-based investment and policy advisory firm Rosemont Seneca Partners,” according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. It’s complicated, but worth following as Pollock peels the onion and sorts it all out.

THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE PLYMOUTH PROWLER.

“THE NEW YORK TIMES IS A TWO-WAY HERO,” Ace snarks, after our television-obsessed president muttered to his interviewer that he botched his response to Paris and San Bernadino because he didn’t watch sufficient news coverage on cable TV. “They not only highlighted this admission of Obama by deleting it, but they’ve now left evidence of their ridiculous partisan drive to actively destroy the news in order to serve as handmaidens of the White House Communications shop.

At the Federalist, Sean Davis notes that in addition to memory holing the passage that President Chauncey Gardner blew off TV watching during those events, “The unexplained deletion of that major passage wasn’t the only significant change made to the story since it was first published. New York Times editors also changed the story’s headline four separate times, according to Newsdiffs.org. Each headline revision either put Obama in a better light or put the GOP in a worse one.”

And as Davis adds, the Times tried to claim that their deletion of Chauncey Gardner’s lack of TV watching was removed for space requirements, not as a favor to the administration (and Hillary, its would-be successor). “The section that was removed contained 66 words. The section that was added in its place contained 116 words. If the New York Times was indeed ‘trimming for space’ in that particular revision, it will need to explain why its revision to that section added 50 words.”

Exit quote from Ace. “The only question is: What was he watching on TV instead of news about the terrorist attacks? I know he was watching TV, because this is one TV-watchin’ motherf***er.“

Indeed.™

Here’s the Google cache of how the Times originally reported the story, from our post this morning:

DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: Bernie Sanders Threatens To Sue DNC.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) campaign manager said it would take the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to federal court Friday afternoon if it does not lift the suspension to the campaign’s voter database.

“If the Democratic National Committee holds our data hostage … we will be in federal court this afternoon seeking relief,” said Jeff Weaver, the campaign manager. He added that the party had an “inappropriate reaction” to reports that a Sanders campaign staffer accessed Hillary Clinton voter data.

The DNC suspended its access to the party’s voter database, which includes the Sanders campaign’s own data, after revelations that a campaign staffer obtained private data from rival Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Weaver told reporters that the campaign alerted the DNC about this problem two months ago, when it believed that some of its data had been “lost to one of the other campaigns.”

In an interview with CNN’s “Wolf” immediately after the Sanders campaign’s press conference, DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz denied that Sanders’s voter information had been compromised two months ago, as Weaver claimed.

You know, Democrats don’t seem very good at handling data securely.

Related: DOCUMENTS REVEAL HILLARY CLINTON IGNORED STATE DEPT. SECURITY WARNING NOT TO USE BLACKBERRY.

DON’T WORRY, CORNELL IS HERE TO TEACH YOU HOW TO BE “INCLUSIVE” WITH YOUR “HOLIDAY DECORATIONS”: Just in time for the holidays, Cornell University’s Department of Environmental Health & Safety recently issued “guidelines” about holiday decorations.

Among its list of decorations “that are NOT Consistent with Either University Assembly Guidelines or the University’s Commitment to Diversity and Inclusiveness”: a bizarre variety of Christian and Jewish symbols, including “crosses” and the “Star of David,” as well as secular “holiday” items, including mistletoe and “stars at the top of trees.”

So Cornell, would you mind explaining how a Star of David is either offensive to your university’s values, or a “holiday decoration” for that matter?

Read more about it over at The Torch.

ANOTHER OBAMA EXPIRATION DATE REACHED: White House Supports Privacy Destroying CISA, Despite Past Promises It Would Not.

THIS IS A BIG DEAL, POTENTIALLY: Nitrogen Can Triple Energy Capacity of Supercapacitors.

TRANSPARENCY! NOAA hands over some e-mails for Congressman’s subpoena; E-mails were between non-scientific staff—scientists still being protected.

WHAT IT WAS LIKE to work at Penthouse in the 1980s.

THE THING IS, OBAMA BELIEVES THAT THE RIGHT SIDE WON: The Lost Revolution:

Afghanistan was not the only foreign policy disappointment of the last seven years. Barring the administration’s “historic” nuclear deal with Iran and his Climate Change accord, the foreign policy landscape is one of desolation. This week marks the 5th anniversary of another epic chance missed, a once in a century opportunity turned to ashes: the Arab Spring. Once synonymous with hope it has become shorthand for the Mother of All Screwups. . . .

Imagine a Battle of Lexington leading to a War of Independence that went horribly, horribly wrong. That wouldn’t be hard if you could conceive of a leadership that decided to ‘lead from behind’. Sohrab Ahmari, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that when the old order collapsed an Islamism waiting in the wings came out to fill the vacuum left by a distant Barack Obama. ‘Good Guys’ who were without guns found themselves abandoned by Western governments to bloodthirsty Mustache Petes in the cynical belief that it was easier to make a deal with political Islam or dictators than build a region on new democratic principles.

This was for some reason regarded as smart. Ahmari argues that by the time West found they could not negotiate with bad guys it was too late to reverse the damage.

They say never to attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. But can they really be this incompetent?

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Police: High school teacher had sex with 2 students she met at religious summer camp in Austin.

WHEN HOPE AND CHANGE IS ACTUALLY HOPE AND CHANGE: Argentina Bolts Toward Free Market Reforms. “One week into office, Argentina’s new president has slashed taxes, ripped out capital controls and restored the peso to its natural level. It takes guts, but this blaze of reforms has worked wherever it’s been tried.” It would be tried more often, but it offers insufficient opportunities for graft.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 953.

SYSTEMIC, INSTITUTIONALIZED SEXISM: Analysis: NPR Talks About Women’s Issues Five Times More Than Men’s. “Appallingly, but not surprisingly, there is also a ‘cancer gap.’ Stories about female cancers, such breast and ovarian cancer were 2.8 times more likely to appear on NPR’s website than stories about male cancers, such as prostate and testicular cancer.”

GUESS WHAT AMERICA IS GIVING WASHINGTON, D.C.’S FEDERAL BUREAUCRATS FOR CHRISTMAS? How about riding the national capital’s troubled Metro subway system to and from work every day for free! Well, free for the bureaucrats, not the taxpayers. And that’s just one of the gems found by Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson when she dug into the Omnibus Spending Bill being voted on today by the House of Representatives.

BENJAMIN HADDAD: Final Warning: The French establishment has blocked Front National in the regional elections—but it was largely responsible for the FN’s rise in the first place.

Barring the National Front’s achieving an absolute majority, a Le Pen presidency remains a distant prospect for now. But this tactical victory can’t hide the utter failure of the French political establishment to stem the National Front’s rise. That Le Pen’s first round showing could still be considered a “shock” for observers is stupefying. On the contrary, poll after poll continue to show her populist message gaining sway over a disillusioned electorate. Simply asserting that the National Front is a “threat to the Republic” or shaming those who vote for it don’t cut it, because both of the mainstream parties have failed to adapt the country to its current challenges. Besides, while the “republican front” has managed to bar the way for the National Front in the short term, the establishment’s ganging up on Le Pen will certainly play into her party’s victimization narrative. French political leaders now have to reckon with a three-party system, as well as Marine Le Pen, who seems poised to reach the second round in the coming presidential elections in 2017. . . .

Beyond ideological choices, French leaders have to address the growing gap voters perceive between political word and deed. The vote in the first round of the recent regional elections was more a result of the voters’ rejection of traditional parties than it was a sudden turn to the FN. In terms of raw number of votes, the FN actually did not advance much since 2002. As the commentator Frederic Gilli wrote in Le Monde: “The strong progress of the FN in the proportion of expressed ballots is more linked to the collapse of traditional parties than to a strong rise on its part.” Gilli shows a threefold phenomenon: an anchoring vote in favor of the National Front, a rise in abstentions, and increasing votes for independent candidates in local elections. Pointing to voter turnout is a way people often minimize the extent of a calamity; in this case, it’s the opposite: “The problem is that we prefer to be horrified by the FN results rather than confront the extent of the political disaster we face.” After all, voters ponder, if this set has failed, why not give someone else a chance?

Elected on the basis of sweeping rhetoric for change, the last two Presidents have underwhelmed in office, making grand declarations but doing little to address the structural challenges facing France: a rigid labor market, complex tax system, an uncompetitive higher education system, and a broken integration model. With a 10.5 percent unemployment rate, 23 percent for youth under 25 and anemic economic growth, a distressed electorate is losing belief in the major parties’ ability to live up to their promises. Worst of all, people have lost all faith in what their leaders say. Just after the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Casher terrorist attacks this past January, for example, Prime Minister Manuel Valls denounced a “territorial, social, and ethnic apartheid” in France. Whatever the relevance of the comparison, you would expect groundbreaking measures to follow such strong words, yet nothing happened.

Luckily, nothing like that could ever happen here.

BERNIE SANDERS, MASTER SPY? Bernie Sanders Campaign Denied Access to DNC Voter Database After Clinton Data Breach.

OBAMACARE LOSES THE BET, Charlie Martin writes:

Not long ago, I pointed out that the insurance that was available from the exchanges, for individuals, was excessively expensive and had poor coverage.

Since then, about half of the Obamacare co-ops — nonprofit insurance companies created with startup funds from the government to provide insurance on the exchanges — have failed and either have gone out of business, or are in the process of doing so. What’s killing these co-ops? Oh, there’s some fraud, and there’s some Democratic Party cronies who made some big money, but what’s really killing the co-ops is something much more unrelenting than fraud, much more insidious than cronyism.

What’s killing the co-ops? Arithmetic.

Read the whole thing.

WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SO RACIST? Are Asians the Jews of the 21st Century When It Comes to College Admissions?