THE OLD “WASTE AND FRAUD” CANARD WILL MAGICALLY PAY FOR AN OLD DEMOCRAT GOAL:
Trump aide says 6 weeks of guaranteed paid maternity leave will be paid for by eliminating fraud in unemployment insurance.
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) September 13, 2016
I’m still voting for the guy, but he doesn’t make it easy.
ALLIES: Turkey formally requests US to arrest Fethullah Gulen.
Turkey’s state-run news agency says the Justice Ministry has sent the United States its first formal request demanding the arrest of the alleged mastermind of July’s abortive coup.
Justice Ministry officials told Anadolu the written request sent to counterparts in Washington alleged the Pennsylvania-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen “gave the orders and commanded” the violent coup that killed over 270 people. Gulen denies any involvement.
Turkish officials have been informally demanding the cleric’s arrest and extradition for weeks.
It will be interesting to see just how far President Obama is willing to go to please our “friends” in Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-coup, pre-Islamist government.
And it’s going to be a very tense time around the world until at least January 20, 2017.
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Katie Couric Sued for $12 Million For Defamation In Anti-Gun Documentary.
HOW, NOW, JERRY BROWN? California Climate Change Legislation Targets Flatulent Cows.
ANNALS OF SELF-SABOTAGE: New Videos Show How Yale Betrayed Itself By Favoring Cry-Bullies. “Despite endless opportunities to do so, Yale has gone out of its way to avoid addressing the nub of the matter: how so many of its charges have been conditioned into thinking that a retort to administrative busybodies constitutes racism.” Well, that’s the party-line for administrative busybodies, of course. . . .
OLD NEWS, NOTHING TO SEE HERE, SHE’S ALREADY DISCLOSED EVERYTHING: Tech expert who set up Clinton’s server ignores subpoena.
Bryan Pagliano was scheduled to testify Tuesday before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (CHAY’-fits) of Utah is the committee’s Republican chairman. Chaffetz says there will be consequences for Pagliano’s refusal to appear and for “thumbing his nose at Congress.”
He didn’t specify what the penalties would be but says, “We’re not letting go of this.”
A letter from Pagliano’s attorney released by the committee says Pagliano will continue to assert his constitutional right not to testify.
The story notes that in 2012, Pagliano also refused to answer House questions about Benghazi.
Paul Combetta and Bill Thornton both appeared in front of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee for a hearing to examine the preservation of Clinton’s State Department emails.
Both technicians work for Platte River Networks (PRN), a Denver-based tech firm that Clinton hired in 2013 to manage her private email setup.
Combetta is one of two technicians who was granted immunity by the Justice Department in order to cooperate with the FBI’s investigation into Clinton’s server. The other is Bryan Pagliano, a former Clinton campaign official who managed Clinton’s off-the-books email server as an IT adviser at the State Department. He ignored the Oversight Committee’s subpoena to appear on Tuesday.
Combetta’s immunity agreement has angered some Republican lawmakers because he seemingly lied to the FBI during one of two interviews he attended earlier this year.
According to the FBI’s report of its Clinton email investigation, Combetta gave conflicting answers when asked about his decision to use a software program called BleachBit to delete backups of Clinton’s emails from PRN’s servers.
It seems like only yesterday that Jill Abramson was encouraging Hillary to try “radical transparency.”
IN THE MAIL: From Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Get Norton Security Deluxe for 5 Devices for $19.99.
And, also today only: Up To 70% off Calvin Klein Clothing & Accessories.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: John Kerry’s State Department Funneled MILLIONS To His Daughter’s Nonprofit.
The Department of State funded a Peace Corps program created by Dr. Vanessa Kerry and officials from both agencies, records show. The Peace Corps then awarded the money without competition to a nonprofit Kerry created for the program.
Initially, the Peace Corps awarded Kerry’s group — now called Seed Global Health — with a three-year contract worth $2 million of State Department money on Sept. 10, 2012, documents show. Her father was then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which oversees both the Department of State and the Peace Corps.
Seed secured a four-year extension in September 2015, again without competition. This time, the Peace Corps gave the nonprofit $6.4 million provided by the Department of State while John Kerry was secretary of state.
Seed also received almost $1 million from a modification to the first award, as well as from Department of State funds the group secured outside the Peace Corps.
One hand washes the other, in a solid gold sink paid for by American taxpayers.
ASIA DIVOT: China arrests 13 in rebel village.
Excerpt:
Wukan, a 13,000-strong fishing village in the southern province of Guangdong, became a symbol of resistance against corruption after a mass uprising over allegedly illegal land grabs propelled it onto global front pages in 2011. Lin Zulian, who played a key role in those protests, was detained in June, and police said that since then villagers had “continued to fabricate rumours and deploy measures such as threats, insults, force and bribes to instigate, plan and launch illegal mass gatherings”.
IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO BE ONE OF THE ‘DEPLORABLES’ WHO MADE THE POWER LINE WEEKEND IN PICTURES.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1223.
YOU DON’T SAY:
88% of the rise in US price level since 1990 has been down to 4 tightly regulated sectors https://t.co/t8Wgq2EegZ pic.twitter.com/Ee48xGcxLM
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) September 12, 2016
As Milton Friedman said, “If you put the federal government in charge of the Sahara Desert, in five years there’d be a shortage of sand.” And it would be priced like diamonds, too.
THE DENVER BRONCOS’ BRANDON MARSHALL: TAKING A KNEE…TO THE FINANCIAL GROIN.
Actions have consequences: Marshall is free to protest the National Anthem. Colorado’s Air Academy Federal Credit Union is similarly free to drop him as a spokesman in response.
GOVERNING THE DEPLORABLES: “As distasteful and even as dangerous as I find Trump, Hillary’s ‘basket of deplorables’ comment to her Manhattan contributors reminds me that she is in some ways even more distasteful and dangerous, because she speaks for the Establishment, and all its collective power,” Rod Dreher writes. “If you are any kind of social or cultural conservative, or immigration restrictionist, and you think Hillary was not talking about you, but only the rough people, you had better think twice. She speaks for those who like to think of themselves as epistocrats, but who are really cognitive-elite oligarchs.”
Read the whole thing.
SALENA ZITO: Why Democrats In Western Pennsylvania Are Voting Trump. “Democrats in these small communities want to hold on to their way of life; they feel their communities have as much value as those of their more-cosmopolitan Democratic cousins, and they cannot reconcile themselves to a national Democratic Party that they feel is working against them. . . . Every single person who walked into Lee Supply’s training room was a registered Democrat—and pledged to vote for Trump.”
JOHN SCHINDLER: We’re Losing the War Against Terrorism.
President Obama’s diffident, pseudo-war against the Islamic State is stalled, with top generals in retirement now admitting that this White House’s efforts against jihadism in its homeland are strategically deluded and militarily hopeless.
Hillary Clinton has promised more of the same failed policies, which show no sign of defeating the Islamic State, the evil ISIS, in anything faster than geologic time. For his part, Donald Trump’s aggressive talk of “crushing” the Islamic State with quick and decisive victories can be safely dismissed as just that—talk. In reality, there is no military option available short of large-scale use of nuclear weapons, which would kill tens of millions of innocents, to annihilate ISIS in the Middle East.
Even then, inflicting nuclear Armageddon on Iraq and Syria—which is something no American president seeking to avoid war crimes and genocide charges can do—would achieve little in terms of mitigating the threat of jihadism inside the West today. A high percentage of the terror plots that are uncovered across the Western world, from Europe to North America to Australia, involve homegrown jihadists, native-born citizens and residents of Western countries. Even if ISIS disappeared from the Middle East tomorrow, the West would still be facing jihadist plots at home for years to come.
Read the whole thing.
THINK OF THEM AS DEMOCRATIC OPERATIVES WITH BYLINES AND YOU WON’T GO FAR WRONG: Our Press Falls Down on the Job Again.
Libya is no closer to stability or peace than it has been since the invasion. Western plans to bring order to the country are failing yet again. . . .
We must all be grateful that we don’t have a Republican President or it would be Libya, Libya, Libya all the time, a deafening chorus of shrieks and imprecations. “How could the White House be so stupid as not to learn the lessons of Iraq?” “Who knew what, and when?” We would also be hearing much more about the consequences of our failures: the continuing flows of arms, funds, and jihadis to various groups in Africa and beyond, not to mention the damage to U.S. prestige. The responsible officials would be hounded by an enraged press corps and an aroused public. Hillary Clinton has actually been quite lucky that the GOP attack focused almost solely on Benghazi, when that tragic incident was only the tiniest piece of a major policy disaster.
Not that a return to Bush-era press inquisitions would be a good thing. There really ought to be some kind of happy medium between the no-holds-barred relentless attacks on GOP foreign policy failures and the whistle-past-the-graveyard treatment of Democratic ones. And many of America’s biggest recent foreign policy failures had strong bipartisan support at the time. A lot of Democrats backed the Iraq invasion, and a lot of Republicans backed Libya.
Nobody is ever going to get everything right in foreign policy—that’s not the way history works. But these days in the U.S., in large part thanks to the way much of the press (with some honorable exceptions) goes about its business, we have got a system that makes it hard for us to learn from our mistakes—to have the serious conversation about foreign policy and global strategy that the country badly needs.
We have the worst political class in history.
PARTYING LIKE IT’S 1939.
Shot: Andrew Sullivan, then during his stint with the Atlantic, a year away from becoming the world’s foremost uterus detective, dubs George W. Bush “The Weimar President” in August of 2007. As I wrote back then in response:
I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?
Chaser: Angry Professor Eric Alterman Calls For Andrew Sullivan to Be Put in a Concentration Camp, this past Sunday, i.e. September 11th:
HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN KILLED IN SYRIA’S WAR?: Good question. This new report says 300,000. I’ve read reports that put the toll over 400,000. In early May StrategyPage editor Jim Dunnigan thought the “over 400,000” estimates were credible. I did, too. (Here is Jim’s analysis, dated May 6.) It is all but impossible to gather accurate statistics in a war zone, but there are groups that attempt to get the truth. Medical aid organizations and refugee relief groups are decent sources. Whatever the presice figure, Syria’s death toll has surpassed that in Bosnia in the 1990s. Syria is occurring on the Obama Administration’s watch. Remember, Bosnia was a genocide. Obama’s UN ambassador Samantha Power excoriated Bush for failing to stop the genocide in Sudan’s Darfur region. Responsibility To Protect, she said. Yes, that’s what she said.
BLACK TEACHERS MATTER: America’s schools desperately need educators like Darlene Lomax. So why are we driving them away?
Why are Democrat monopoly cities and education systems such cesspits of institutional racism?
(Via Newsalert.)
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Calls grow for South Korea to consider deploying nuclear weapons.
BECAUSE IT UPSETS ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE: ‘Black Rifles Matter’ Sign Causes Controversy.
RETIRED GENERAL: Obama should not support Kaepernick’s protest.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.