Former President Bill Clinton asked Democratic voters to shrug off the “awful legacy” of President Obama’s years in office in a speech Monday to support Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
“Now if you don’t believe we can all grow together again, if you don’t believe we’re ever going to grow again, if you believe it’s more important to re-litigate the past, there may be many reasons that you don’t want to support her,” Clinton told a Spokane, Wash., audience.
“But if you believe we can all rise together, if you believe we’ve finally come to the point where we can put the awful legacy of the last eight years behind us and the seven years before that where we were practicing trickle-down economics with no regulation in Washington, which is what caused the crash, then you should vote for her,” he added.
Related: If The Hill wants to complain about celebrities engaging in stunt political campaigns, here’s a flashback to 2010 when they championed the notion of “John Mellencamp for senator from Indiana:” “Indiana has many fine Democrats who would make good Senate candidates, but John Mellencamp is unique, one of a kind, a voice for the people who believes America needs a new brand of politics and new kind of leadership in the Senate.”
Make Indiana hurt so good — and give Al Franken some company in the showbiz political department!
Jack Montague, the former Yale basketball captain who was expelled for sexual misconduct, has a staunch defender in his former high school coach, Dennis King.
In a letter to the editor in his local news outlet, King defended his former star from accusations that he is a rapist. King begins by comparing the “witch-hunt” against Montague to that of Giles Corey, the only man executed for witchcraft during the Salem witch trials.
King contends that Montague, too, has been the victim of a “witch-hunt,” having his future and dreams destroyed “with the same cowardly irrational piety shown by those Puritan zealots of an earlier New England.”
On the one hand, athletes are more likely to be targeted in this sort of thing. On the other, they tend to get more support when they do. Pity the poor computer science major who finds himself in the same situation.
Apparently coordinated terrorist explosions rocked Brussels Airport and a metro station Tuesday, leaving at least 26 dead and raising fears that attackers carried out retaliatory strikes after the arrest of a key suspect in last year’s Paris massacres.
The full casualty count remained unclear hours after the attacks, but various Belgian reports and officials said it reached at least 26.
“We are talking about scores of dead,” said Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel without giving clearer estimates after blasts brought down roof panels at the airport’s departure hall and an explosion on the Maelbeek metro platform shrouded it in smoke and littered it with debris.
Recall that 60 Minutes was at the center of Richard Landes’ classic 2005 video Pallywood, exposing how that network – and numerous others in both America and Europe — blindly run Islamic propaganda pumped out on an assembly line designed to influence gullible leftists in both the media and in power.
Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, during a news conference in Washington on Monday, offered a job to a woman who said she was survivor of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Trump called the woman forward and asked her about her experience after she asked whether his new hotel in the District of Columbia would hire veterans.
“Here’s what I’m going to do, stand right over here,” he said to the woman.
“If we can make a good deal in the salary, she’s going to probably have a job.”
When asked why he decided to take the risk to promise a job to someone he did not know, Trump said that he “felt good about her.”
“I have a gut instinct. We are allowed to have that,” he said as the woman smiled and teared up.
Less than 24 hours before a highly anticipated Tuesday court session where prosecutors and Apple lawyers would have squared off here in federal court, government attorneys suddenly got a judge to vacate that hearing and stay an unprecedented court order that would have forced Apple to aid investigators’ efforts to unlock and decrypt an iPhone linked to a 2015 terrorist attack. In a court filing Monday, federal authorities cited a newly discovered “unlocking method” that it hopes won’t require Apple’s help.
The sudden and unexpected postponement essentially means an immediate victory for Apple—the company doesn’t have to comply with the government’s demands to create a customized version of iOS. But the new government filing also raises more questions than it answers, such as the reach of the government’s decryption capabilities.
Or perhaps the FBI is looking for a way to back off gracefully from a test case where the law is clearly not on the Bureau’s side.
Or, God forbid, he wins the election, and then we might really lose.
Knowing that you’re going to lose, and that therefore there are no nagging pragmatic reasons to compromise yourself, is very freeing.
I think the important thing is to begin planning ahead, and planning on what we’d like the conservative movement to look like during the Hillary Rodham presidency.
Do we want to be the party of openness to ideas, and a tolerant party, or do we want to be the mirror image of the Social Justice Warriors, with a litany of angry dogmas and lengthy Public Shaming Lists?
Read the whole thing.
IS DEMOCRAT SEN. HEIDI HEITKAMP PREPARED TO SUPPORT OBAMA’S ANTI-GUN SCOTUS NOMINEE? “Heitkamp won her North Dakota Senate race in 2012 with an 86% rating from the NRA. Not too shabby for a Democrat,” Liz Sheld writes. Is Heitkamp “interested in going on record before her fellow North Dakotans to support the appointment of an anti-Second Amendment Supreme Court justice? If you live in North Dakota and care about your gun rights, it’s time to call and ask her.”
Without much fanfare, Obama has dramatically reversed his Iraq policy — sending thousands of troops back in the country after he declared the war over, engaging in ground combat despite initially promising that his strategy “will not involve American combat troops fighting on foreign soil.” Well, they’re on foreign soil, and they’re fighting.
It would have been easier — and would have cost far fewer lives — if we had just stayed. But Obama had to have a campaign issue.
And I suppose I should repeat my Iraq War history lesson: Things were going so well as late as 2010 that the Obama Administration was bragging about Iraq as one of its big foreign policy successes.
In the interest of historical accuracy, I think I’ll repeat this post again:
[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don’t let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.
Plus:
Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but “A lot of people think he really didn’t want to keep any troops there.” Woodward agrees that Obama didn’t want to keep troops there and elaborates:
Look, Obama does not like war. But as you look back on this, the argument from the military was, let’s keep 10,000, 15,000 troops there as an insurance policy. And we all know insurance policies make sense. We have 30,000 troops or more in South Korea still 65 years or so after the war. When you are a superpower, you have to buy these insurance policies. And he didn’t in this case. I don’t think you can say everything is because of that decision, but clearly a factor.
We had some woeful laughs about the insurance policies metaphor. Everyone knows they make sense, but it’s still hard to get people to buy them. They want to think things might just work out, so why pay for the insurance? It’s the old “young invincibles” problem that underlies Obamcare.
Obama blew it in Iraq, which is in chaos, and in Syria, which is in chaos, and in Libya, which is in chaos. A little history:
As late as 2010, things were going so well in Iraq that Obama and Biden were bragging. Now, after Obama’s politically-motivated pullout and disengagement, the whole thing’s fallen apart. This is near-criminal neglect and incompetence, and an awful lot of people will pay a steep price for the Obama Administration’s fecklessness.
Yes, I keep repeating this stuff. Because it bears repeating. In Iraq, Obama took a war that we had won at a considerable expense in lives and treasure, and threw it away for the callowest of political reasons. In Syria and Libya, he involved us in wars of choice without Congressional authorization, and proceeded to hand victories to the Islamists. Obama’s policy here has been a debacle of the first order, and the press wants to talk about Bush as a way of protecting him. Whenever you see anyone in the media bringing up 2003, you will know that they are serving as palace guard, not as press.
California is filled with people who are one traffic ticket away from losing their means of independent transportation. They get a ticket for a busted tail light or a small-change moving violation. On paper, the fine is $100, but with surcharges, it’s more like $490. People who cannot pay often do not show up in court — which drives up the cost. According to the Judicial Council of California, about 612,000 Californians have suspended driver’s licenses because they didn’t pay fines. In 2013, more people — 510,811 — had their licenses suspended for not paying fines than the 150,366 who lost their licenses for drunken driving.
“For a lot of people, the car is the only asset they own in this whole damn world,” noted Mike Herald of the Western Center on Law and Poverty. “When you take their car, you’re taking the thing that helps them make money.”
Herald is an author of a report about how traffic courts drive inequality that helped prompt Gov. Jerry Brown to institute an 18-month amnesty program to deliver Californians from a “hellhole of desperation.” Under the program, Californians can get their outstanding fines reduced by 50 percent — or 80 percent, if they make less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level. The amnesty program does not apply to parking tickets, reckless driving or drunk driving.
This is one of those issues that unites activists on the left and the right.
It should unite them to tar and feathers, but whatever.
OBAMA GOES LIMP: “I take it that Obama was exploring the outer limits of his defiance of the Castro regime. It seems to represent another of the Obama administration’s great moments in diplomacy, but your guess is as good as mine,” Scott Johnson writes at Power Line.
“Your guess is as good as mine” sums up seven years of bizarre moments from Mr. Obama; the Washington Free Beacon describes this latest image of Obama as the Castros’ puppet, the Che photo and the events leading up to them as “A Pretty Humiliating Day to Be an American,” though likely, that’s the precise goal that Obama wants. Personally though, include me out of Obama’s self-degradation and faculty room Marxist psychodramas.
PETER WEHNER SAYS THAT TRUMP IS THE MAN THE FOUNDERS FEARED. But you could just as accurately say that about Obama, though Wehner probably wouldn’t for fear of being called racist. The truth is, we have the electorate, and the culture, that the Founders feared. And we’ve had that for quite a while now, with surprisingly little pushback from the powers that be.
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