NEED HELP CHOOSING THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR? VDH IS ON THE CASE! Hillary Vs. Trump: Godzilla Vs. King Kong? is the subject of Victor Davis Hanson’s latest column.
Archive for 2016
March 21, 2016
MILO YIANNOPOULOS: Jack Dorsey: You’re A Liar. Censorship Is Rampant On Twitter.
CHANGE: A Political System Fails in Brazil.
In October 2014, Dilma Rousseff was sworn in for a second term as president of Brazil. She had succeeded her mentor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who was leader of the Worker’s Party and the most popular politician in Brazil — so popular that many in the opposition were afraid to challenge him.
Seventeen months later, Dilma struggles to keep her job, support for the government is at a historic low, and Brazil watches the largest street demonstrations in its history. What has changed?
One of the reasons for the revolt is economic. Right after Dilma’s reelection, it became clear that she had lied to the nation. After more than a decade of uncontrolled spending sustained only by the temporary boom of commodities, the government — surprise! — had run out of other people’s money. Brazil’s economy shrank 3.8 percent in 2015, and the markets predict a similar decrease this year. Unemployment and inflation are running out of control.
Centralized command of the economy will work next time, I’m sure.
WHY ARE LEFTIST INSTITUTIONS SUCH HOTBEDS OF CRONYISM AND SEXUAL PREDATION? Former UC-Berkeley Dean Obtained Appointment Of Provost To Law School Faculty While Provost Was Investigating Sexual Harassment Claim Against Him.
YOU SPELLED “WHEN” WRONG: What Bernie Sanders Will Do If He Loses. The fix is in. The fix has always been in.
SALENA ZITO: A third party emerges — within the Republican Party. “Nearly 59,000 registered Pennsylvania Democrats have changed their voter registration since January. . . . This is pretty much a case of Reagan Democrats finally making it official, said Kyle Kondik, a University of Virginia political analyst.”
LOOSE CHANGE: How to Rob a Central Bank.
As brazen heists go, it was a quiet one. Over a single weekend in February, hackers managed to extract tens of millions of dollars from Bangladesh’s central bank before anyone noticed. Now the bank is in turmoil, its governor has resigned and much of the cash is missing. It’s one of the biggest holdups in history — and other central banks should be on notice.
The scheme started when intruders inserted malware into Bangladesh Bank’s system in January. With information evidently gleaned from the attack, they were able to divert funds from the bank’s account at the New York Fed using the SWIFT messaging system. Officials only wised up when the thieves tried to move an additional $850 million to suspect accounts, and a routing bank noticed a comical spelling error in one request. By then, some $81 million was long gone.
That’s nothing. Our own central bank has taken most of a trillion dollars from savers since the Great Recession.
THE HILL: The Chaos Scenario For Democrats.
OBAMA: PROMISES MADE, PROMISES KEPT: Largest US Coal Producer Considers Filing Chapter 11 Bankruptcy.
Earlier: Candidate Obama Tells SF Chronicle He Will Bankrupt Coal Industry.
Related: ‘We’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business’–Hillary Clinton.
AUDIO: PROMISE MEETS EXPIRATION DATE.
SHOCK FLASHBACK: Obama wrote that Illegal Immigration HURTS ‘Blue-Collar Americans,’ and STRAINS Welfare pic.twitter.com/bEd0GX5BzA
— NumbersUSA (@NumbersUSA) March 19, 2016
THE LAW IS FOR THE LITTLE PEOPLE: “FBI chief James Comey and his investigators are increasingly certain presidential nominee Hillary Clinton violated laws in handling classified government information.”
Some FBI staffers suggest the probe’s at a point where Comey might quit in protest if Justice ignores a recommendation to pursue a criminal case against Clinton.
Just how close Comey is to any recommendation — whether to indict or exonerate Clinton — is difficult to know. But agents believe the probe is nearing an end. A State Department staffer who set up Clinton’s e-mail server, for instance, was recently granted immunity from prosecution to provide Comey’s team with evidence.
“You don’t start granting people close to Clinton immunity unless you are seriously looking at charges against your target,” one former official told me.
We wouldn’t be talking about these doubts had the Justice Department not been ruthlessly politicized under the Obama Administration.
YA THINK? Former UN ambassador: Putin is ‘up to something.’
Russian President Vladimir Putin pulled his military out of Syria for economic reasons, former U.N. ambassador Bill Richardson said during an interview with John Catsimatidis Sunday.
“I think he’s up to something again,” Richardson said. “It could be Syria is a big burden on Russia … The Russian economy is in trouble. I think he may feel overextended.”
Earlier this week Putin unexpectedly announced that Moscow’s objectives in the country had been “generally accomplished” and Russia would begin withdrawing from Syria.
But Richardson, the U.S. Ambassador to United Nations and Energy Secretary under the Clinton administration, questioned Putin’s intentions.
Keep your eye on Ukraine, and the Baltics.
MICHAEL BARONE: Ethnic Politics: The Dutch-Cuban Alliance. “Some years ago I made the observation that the most Republican ethnic groups were Dutch- and Cuban-Americans. But, I added, it seemed unlikely that they would ever get together. Wrong. In this year’s Republican primaries and caucuses, the Cuban-American Ted Cruz has run extremely well in counties with large Dutch-American populations. You could almost say there was some kind of affinity there. You can see it in the election returns, looking at communities with high percentages of Dutch ancestry and counties where 7.6 percent or more of residents identified themselves to the Census Bureau as having Dutch ancestry.” Interesting, though I doubt you can sweep the nation with that particular mix.
TURNING JAPANESE? I REALLY THINK SO: Half of U.S. May Endure ‘Lost Decade’ of Depressed Employment.
As I said in 2009, you and I have a rendezvous with scarcity.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND: Hillary Has An NSA Problem.
What the DoJ decides to do with email-gate is ultimately a question of politics as much as justice. Ms. Clinton’s recent statement on her potential prosecution, “it’s not going to happen,” then refusing to address the question at all in a recent debate, led to speculation about a backroom deal with the White House to shield Ms. Clinton from prosecution as long as Mr. Obama is in the Oval Office. After mid-January, however, all bets would be off. In that case, winning the White House herself could be an urgent matter of avoiding prosecution for Ms. Clinton.
That said, if the DoJ declines to prosecute after the Bureau recommends doing so, a leak-fest of a kind not seen in Washington, D.C., since Watergate should be anticipated. The FBI would be angry that its exhaustive investigation was thwarted by dirty deals between Democrats. In that case, a great deal of Clintonian dirty laundry could wind up in the hands of the press, habitual mainstream media covering for the Clintons notwithstanding, perhaps having a major impact on the presidential race this year.
The FBI isn’t the only powerful federal agency that Hillary Clinton needs to worry about as she plots her path to the White House between scandals and leaks. For years, she has been on the bad side of the National Security Agency, America’s most important intelligence agency, as revealed by just-released State Department documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act. . . .
Now, over two months later, I can confirm that the contents of Sid Blumenthal’s June 8, 2011, email to Hillary Clinton, sent to her personal, unclassified account, were indeed based on highly sensitive NSA information. The agency investigated this compromise and determined that Mr. Blumenthal’s highly detailed account of Sudanese goings-on, including the retelling of high-level conversations in that country, was indeed derived from NSA intelligence.
Specifically, this information was illegally lifted from four different NSA reports, all of them classified “Top Secret / Special Intelligence.” Worse, at least one of those reports was issued under the GAMMA compartment, which is an NSA handling caveat that is applied to extraordinarily sensitive information (for instance, decrypted conversations between top foreign leadership, as this was). GAMMA is properly viewed as a SIGINT Special Access Program, or SAP, several of which from the CIA Ms. Clinton compromised in another series of her “unclassified” emails.
Currently serving NSA officials have told me they have no doubt that Mr. Blumenthal’s information came from their reports. “It’s word-for-word, verbatim copying,” one of them explained. “In one case, an entire paragraph was lifted from an NSA report” that was classified Top Secret / Special Intelligence.
How Mr. Blumenthal got his hands on this information is the key question, and there’s no firm answer yet. The fact that he was able to take four separate highly classified NSA reports—none of which he was supposed to have any access to—and pass the details of them to Hillary Clinton via email only hours after NSA released them in Top Secret / Special Intelligence channels indicates something highly unusual, as well as illegal, was going on.
But who will enforce the law against Hillary? It’s not as if we live under the rule of law here anymore.
Related: Lt. General (Ret) Mike Flynn: Why Hillary Clinton Should Suspend Her Presidential Bid.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Hillary’s Thin Blue Line. “If you can’t be sure of the inevitability of progressivism, what can you believe in? Conventional wisdom holds that Hillary can easily defeat a Republican challenger made ugly by ‘intolerance’ and ‘bigotry’. But given the miscalculations of the past months there must be some doubt whether Hillary may confidently shelter behind her Blue Wall. There may be some reason to suspect that her Left Wing will not shut the savages down. The biggest potential mistake the Democratic party can make is to imagine that ‘America’s angry year’ was created by Trump; that by stopping him they will have won their war. The RAND history survey suggests this is unlikely. It is the long term trends that will be decisive. Elites facing an insurgency often discover the need for strategic patience and solutions only long after their overconfidence has doomed them to defeat.”
THIS TOO IS SHOCKING, SHOCKING I TELL YOU: The reason the crime rate is so high in Venezuela (video.)
BUT YOU SHOULD TOTALLY TRUST THE GOVERNMENT: Lockpickers 3-D Print TSA Master Luggage Keys From Leaked Photos.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Yeah, no, not really. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg meets China propaganda chief in Beijing.
IT WILL CALL ITSELF ANTI-FASCISM: ‘The Producers,’ the Swastika, and the Tyranny of Feelings.
FEMINIST DISCOVERS REALITY: Toddlers and tiaras: The feminist upshot of playing princess.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: (don’t kill me!) 6 knife-free methods for making your junk bigger.
MEL BROOKS, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Women arrested for ‘slapping’ police horse at Trump protest in Kansas City.
Here’s an artist’s gender-neutral recreation of how the alleged incident may have gone down:
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Marine Killed at Secret Firebase in Iraq.