Archive for 2016
August 12, 2016
MY UT COLLEAGUE BEN BARTON ON lawyer earnings for solo practitioners and partners in firms.
UNDER THE RUG:
None of the broadcast newscasts last night covered FBI's urging of DOJ to investigate the Clinton Foundation or Cheryl Mills' moonlighting.
— Gabriel Malor (@gabrielmalor) August 12, 2016
THE FAILURE OF FOREIGN POLICY AS SOCIAL WORK: Just how doomed were U.S. attempts at nation-building after the Cold War?
Twenty years ago Michael Mandelbaum published a devastating critique of early Clinton Administration foreign policy. The article, which appeared in the January/February 1996 edition of Foreign Affairs, was entitled “Foreign Policy as Social Work.” It really stung because it was so perceptive, and the title so quotable. I remember that sting well because I had been intimately involved in two of the Clinton Administration’s ventures that formed the basis of Mandelbaum’s charge, the interventions in Somalia and Haiti. Mandelbaum’s new book, Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era, is an updating and extension of that article. . . .
Mission Failure provides a broad survey of U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War era, examining in some considerable detail the U.S. approaches to Russia, China, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Israeli/Palestinian relationship, the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State. All these efforts represent, in the author’s view, failures of U.S. policy. They also share several other qualities. First, they all represent some form of overstretch resulting from the emergence of the United States as the world’s only superpower, freed from the normal constraints of balance-of-power geopolitics. This overstretch in each instance took the form of promoting societal change, principally democratization, in societies unready for such a transformation. Mandelbaum also argues that the humanitarian and ideological impulses that drove policy during this quarter-century distinguished U.S. behavior sharply from that which guided the Republic through earlier epochs.
These broad generalizations bear some examination. Most but not all the cases covered in Mission Failure do deserve to be so described. Among the exceptions are Bosnia and Kosovo. “Foreign Policy as Social Work” appeared just as 60,000 NATO peacekeepers were entering Bosnia to enforce the accords reached in Dayton, Ohio. Over the next several years the United States and its allies would end the fighting in Bosnia, liberate Kosovo, nip an ethnic conflict in Macedonia in the bud, promote democratic transformations in both Serbia and Croatia, and bring a decade of Balkan wars to a definitive close.
Mandelbaum argues that Balkan nation-building failed, because Bosnia and Kosovo remain to this day corrupt, poor, and poorly governed. This seems an excessively high standard for foreign policy achievement.
Well, we’ve got two out of three of those happening right here, and the third is looking more and more likely . . . .
BREITBART/GRAVIS POLL: Virtual Tie in Georgia, Trump 45% to Clinton 44%.
This was a poll of registered voters, but the three most recent polls of likely voters show a lead for Trump, a tie, and a substantial lead for Clinton.
Mitt Romney won Georgia by eight points in 2012, John McCain by five in 2008.
BIGOTRY IS BACK: ‘People of Color’ College Students Forbid White Roommates.
“Intersectionality” is the fad radical theory that’s currently all the rage on college campuses, and this story intersects nicely at the crossroads where The Education Apocalypse, Liberal Fascism, and Redneck Nation all converge.
CRYPTOGRAPHIC CATASTROPHE: ‘Millions’ of Volkswagen cars can be unlocked via hack.
I REMEMBER WHEN CORPORATE MEDDLING IN POLITICS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BAD: Tech Companies Apple, Twitter, Google, and Instagram Collude to Defeat Trump.
Related: Could Facebook Swing An Election?
UNEXPECTEDLY! Early Returns From Seattle’s Minimum Wage Experiment. “So what did they find? People are getting paid a higher wage — and yet, earnings didn’t rise much, because people are also working less.”
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I’M BEGINNING TO THINK ALL THAT “METICULOUS FACT-CHECKING” BUSINESS WAS ALWAYS BULLSHIT: Whatever happened to The New Yorker’s pride in meticulous fact-checking?!
THERE’S A REASON WHY IT’S BEEN KNOWN AS THE CLINTON NEWS NETWORK FOR THE PAST TWENTY YEARS: Ten Minutes of CNN Cutting Off People Who Dare Criticize Hillary.
Related: The Associated Press campaigns for Hillary as well.
IT’S BEEN A LONG MONTH: From coup to purge in Turkey.
CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Top Clinton State Department aide helped Clinton Foundation.
A top aide to Hillary Clinton at the State Department traveled to New York to interview job candidates for a top job at the Clinton Foundation, a CNN investigation has found.
The fact that the aide, Cheryl Mills, was taking part in such a high level task for the Clinton foundation while also working as chief of staff for the secretary of state raises new questions about the blurred lines that have dogged the Clintons in recent years.
The lines weren’t blurred; they were non-existent.
‘AM I NOT SPEAKING ENGLISH?’ REPORTERS GRILL STATE DEPT OVER CLINTON EMAILS: As Ace writes, “I don’t know [AP journalist] Mike Lee’s politics, and I suspect he’s a liberal like the rest of them, but I do know one thing: He’s anti-bullshit, and that distinguishes him from most of the smug, careerist go-along-to-get-along in the media-governmental complex.” Video at link.
ASHE SCHOW: Rights group calls on presidential candidates to denounce ‘victim-centered investigations.’
An organization dedicated to overturning and preventing wrongful convictions is calling on presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump to denounce “victim-centered investigations.”
The Center for Prosecutor Integrity works with prosecutors, defense attorneys, law enforcement and the falsely accused to prevent wrongful convictions and over-criminalization. The group says victim-centered investigations have led and will lead to more wrongful convictions and false accusations.
“Victim-centered investigations emphasize the collection of evidence supportive of the complainant and discourage the collection of exculpatory evidence, thereby increasing the likelihood of a guilty verdict,” the group wrote in a press release. “Victim-centered investigations represent a departure from ethical standards of investigative impartiality, neutrality and objectivity.”
Both the Democratic and Republican Party platforms discussed fairness in accusations of sexual assault, specifically on college campuses. But requiring victim-centered investigations removes fairness, as investigators — whether actual law enforcement or campus bureaucrats — are told to believe accusers and pressured by the federal government to punish the accused no matter what the evidence shows.
Yes, the only time due process matters is when a Clinton is accused of something. Then it’s sacrosanct.
THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Next president faces possible ObamaCare meltdown.
The incoming administration will take office just as the latest ObamaCare enrollment tally comes in, delivering a potentially crucial verdict about the still-shaky healthcare marketplaces.
The fourth ObamaCare signup period begins about one week before Election Day, and it will end about one week before inauguration on Jan. 20. After mounting complaints from big insurers about losing money this year, the results could serve as a kind of judgment day for ObamaCare, experts say.
“The next open enrollment period is key,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president of the Kaiser Family Foundation.The Obama administration has struggled for several years to bring young, healthy people into the marketplaces, which is needed to offset the medical costs of older and sicker customers.
These problems are coming to light this year, as insurers get their first full look at ObamaCare customer data. Some, like UnitedHealth Group, say they’ve seen enough and are already vowing to leave the exchanges.
Levitt and other experts warn that if the numbers don’t improve this year, more insurers could bolt. That would deal a major blow to marketplace competition while also driving up rates and keeping even more people out of the exchanges.
HARRY REID CALLS DONALD TRUMP A BIGOT, BUT HE HAS HIS OWN TROUBLED PAST.
Flashback: From 2010, my Silicon Graffiti video on Reid’s top ten gaffes, “Harry Reid, Democratic, Bureaucratic, Gaffe-O-Matic:”
BEGUN, THE CODE WARS HAVE: Facebook rolls out code to nullify Adblock Plus’ workaround.
Adblock’s new code was in response to Facebook changing its code to make ads look like non-ads to Adblock’s old code.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
Shot: Why Did BuzzFeed & Co. Target Justine Sacco for Online Assassination?
—John Nolte, Big Journalism, December 21st, 2013.
Chaser: “A Honeypot For Assholes”: Inside Twitter’s 10-Year Failure To Stop Harassment.
— Charlie Warzel, BuzzFeed, yesterday.
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon tweeted yesterday, guess whose name is “unexpectedly” omitted from Warzel’s article.
I REMEMBER WHEN MANIPULATING INTELLIGENCE FOR POLITICAL REASONS WAS THE WORST THING EVER: GOP rep: Obama responsible for manipulated intel about ISIS.
President Obama and other senior administration officials created a political climate that led intelligence officials to create warped reports about the United States’s fight against Islamic extremists, a leader of a Republican task force studying the matter said on Thursday.
“They wanted a good news story,” Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.), one of three GOP lawmakers leading a House task force into alleged intelligence manipulation at the Pentagon’s Central Command, told The Hill.
“Is there a memo from Barack Obama saying, ‘Don’t send me bad news’? We haven’t yet found that,” he added.
“But in every organization I’ve ever been a part of … leaders set a culture and the team that works around that leader understands the expectations of that leader,” Pompeo said. “Here that led to manipulation of an intelligence product that was extremely important to keeping our kids safe.”
The comments magnify the criticism in an initial report published by the task force on Thursday that concluded that Centcom reports about the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were “consistently more optimistic” than analysts on the ground.
Centcom reports “consistently described U.S. actions in a more positive light than other assessments from the [intelligence community] and were typically more optimistic than actual events warranted,” the task force claimed.
The findings are a harsh indictment of the Pentagon’s anti-ISIS efforts and are likely to add to the chorus of criticism about the Obama administration’s approach towards the extremist group. The U.S. fight against ISIS hit its two-year mark this week, in what administration officials describe as steady progress against the group’s self-proclaimed caliphate in Iraq and Syria.
But the fight has been marred by persistent setbacks, and at times Obama and other senior leaders appeared to have underestimated ISIS’s strength, such as during a 2014 interview in which Obama referred to ISIS as the “JV team.”
I’d be happy if our own leadership team was JV. It’s more like PeeWee League.
TRUMP ON ELECTION STRATEGY: ‘I Don’t Know That We Need To Get Out The Vote’
Asked by Fox News’ Eric Bolling about the open letter by 70 Republicans asking the Republican National Committee to redirect funding from the presidential race to down-ballot campaigns, Trump said he didn’t need their assistance.
“One of the big things about he RNC is they have this whole infrastructure of data and information and contacts and email lists and mailing lists and phone numbers. That is something that is important to your campaign,” Bolling said. “That’s not at risk. Is that in jeopardy at all?”
“I don’t know. I will let you know on the ninth, on November 9th,” Trump replied.
“We are gonna have tremendous turnout from the evangelicals, from the miners, from the people that make our steel, from people that are getting killed by trade deals, from people that have been just decimated, from the military who are with Trump 100 percent,” he went on. “From our vets because I’m going to take care of the vets.”
“I don’t know that we need to get out the vote,” the Republican nominee concluded. “I think people that really want to vote, they’re gonna just get up and vote for Trump. And we’re going to make America great again.”
That attitude could prove …problematical… on Election Day.
MAKE FRANCE GREAT AGAIN: City of Cannes Bans the Burkini.