MILLIONAIRES AND BILLIONAIRES UNITED: How Democrats Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Big Donor Money

The flow of money, documented in Federal Election Commission reports, shows Democrats expanding their fund-raising advantage in the final phase of the presidential race, defying expectations at the beginning of the campaign that Republicans would dominate the money chase.

The shift has allowed the national Democratic Party to overcome a cash shortage and provide Democrats in key states like Virginia and North Carolina with money for early voting drives, additional staff and canvassing aimed up and down the ticket.

The Democratic National Committee — in debt and underfinanced a year ago — has poured nearly $30 million into these key states through the beginning of September. The funding was powered by a surge of six-figure contributions raised by Mrs. Clinton from the likes of James Cameron, the Hollywood director, and George Soros, the retired hedge fund manager, as well as several members of the billionaire Pritzker family.

As the man accused of accepting tainting money for his charity is supposed to have said, “The only thing tainted about it is there taint enough of it.”

ROGER SIMON: Hillary and the Democrats Continue Their War on Blacks.

Read the whole thing.

INTEGRATION? White On Black Crime vs. Black On White Crime: New Statistics Show More Killings Between Races.

One more time…

My favorite part about the Obama era is all the racial healing.

— jon gabriel (@exjon) November 24, 2014

DO YOU HAFF YOUR PAPERS? Trump Foundation reportedly doesn’t have proper paperwork to solicit money.

The Washington Post reported Thursday that the Trump Foundation didn’t obtain registration that’s needed to ask for donations, according to a spokesman for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

New York law states that any charity that asks for more than $25,000 per year needs to obtain a special registration before soliciting offers. The Trump Foundation, a fairly large charity, must also undergo an audit that asks whether the charity spent any money for personal gain of its top officials. The paper noted that it’s unclear whether the $25,000 was solicited or whether the solicitation occurred in New York.

Schneiderman could order the charity to stop raising money immediately if the allegations turn out to be true. The Democratic attorney general could also make Trump return any money that had been raised.

Yes, of course the Clinton Foundation does far worse than skip out on paperwork, but this has been a week of largely unforced errors for the Trump campaign, starting about 40 minutes into Monday night’s debate.

And hopefully it ended with this morning’s bizarre oh-dark-thirty tweetstorm about Alicia Machado and her non-existent sex tape.

FINALLY: HOLLYWOOD TO MASHUP STARSHIP TROOPERS AND THE GWOT:

Fox has landed Operation Prince Of Freedom, a spec script package for a comedy that will be helmed by Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates director Jake Szymanski. Chernin Entertainment will produce with Gary Sanchez. The script is by Michael Kvamme and Jordan Dunn, and Gary Sanchez’s Adam McKay, Will Ferrell, Kevin Messick and Andrew Steele will produce with Chernin. Fox has had success with the hard R comedy in Deadpool and Kingsman: The Secret Service and this movie fits that ratings mold. The comedy follows a group of ragtag Marines who are attacked by a Taliban insurgency while escorting a politically incorrect C&W star across Afghanistan. Things take an unexpected turn when the Marines and Taliban alike are forced to unite against an invasion of alien bugs.

It’s a comedy with our newfound buddies, those crazy, kooky limb-chopping Taliban! Shades of the line in Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus about Bob Crane landing the starring role on Hogan’s Heroes, the sitcom with “the funny Nazis.” I wonder if it will be set in the mid-2000s to allow for plenty of stale Bush-bashing riffs, just as Saturday Night Live was still making Nixon jokes six years after he left office.

TAKING THE PRUDENCE OUT OF JURISPRUDENCE: Oregon Judge to Convicted Murderer: ‘If I Could, I Would Take All the Guns in America’

JONATHAN MACEY: Insider Trading And The Supreme Court.

THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE ENDORSES GARY JOHNSON: “This year neither major party presents a good option.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1240.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The Clintons’ big fat Greek bond wedding.

State Department attorneys admitted Wednesday that they had lost copies of a 2012 email between Jake Sullivan, a top former aide to Hillary Clinton, and an employee of the Clinton Foundation.

The email contained an attachment memo about Greek bonds — a significant detail given the heavy investments Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, was making in the Greek economic recovery during that same period.

Chelsea Clinton, Mezvinsky’s wife, is a board member at the Clinton Foundation. The fact that one of Clinton’s closest aides shared insider information about the economic climate in Greece with the foundation — just one year after Mezvinsky and fellow Goldman Sachs alum founded a hedge fund that operated primarily by placing bets on international economic trends — raises questions about the many potential conflicts of interest that could have arisen from the Clintons’ web of connections.

Read the whole thing.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: FBI Director Comey Said Syrian ISIS Fighters Welcome Back To US in 2014, Now Warns of ‘Terrorist Diaspora.’

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Chicago Schools Plunge Further Into the Abyss.

The weight of decades of unfunded pension promises made to Chicago’s teachers’ unions is coming crashing down on the city’s public schools, which are subsisting on junk-bond debt even as students flee the district. . . .

While blue model decay is more advanced in Chicago than any other American city, the problems underlying the crisis in the school district—recalcitrant public sector unions, pliant lawmakers, fiscal incompetence, and an acute drought of ideas—are weighing on municipal governments from coast to coast.

In the short run, we are likely to see more pension-induced crises of governance in big blue cities and states. In the long run, this dynamic has the potential to create tectonic political shifts. Democrats in places like Chicago have historically been able to depend on both the unionized producers of government services (strike-happy teachers unions demanding ever-more generous pension contributions) as well as the people who depend most on high-quality service (the parents of low-income students in Chicago public schools). As the cost of bureaucracy continues to increase and the quality continues to deteriorate, the interests of these two constituencies will increasingly diverge. The Blue Civil War has the potential to scramble our political coalitions in big and unpredictable ways.

Indeed.

THIS DEAL KEEPS GETTING WORSE ALL THE TIME: U.S. Signed Secret Document to Lift U.N. Sanctions on Iranian Banks.

The Obama administration agreed to back the lifting of United Nations sanctions on two Iranian state banks blacklisted for financing Iran’s ballistic-missile program on the same day in January that Tehran released four American citizens from prison, according to U.S. officials and congressional staff briefed on the deliberations.

The U.N. sanctions on the two banks weren’t initially to be lifted until 2023, under a landmark nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers that went into effect on Jan. 16.

The U.N. Security Council’s delisting of the two banks, Bank Sepah and Bank Sepah International, was part of a package of tightly scripted agreements—the others were a controversial prisoner swap and transfer of $1.7 billion in cash to Iran—that were finalized between the U.S. and Iran on Jan. 17, the day the Americans were freed.

Well, at least now we’ll be able to make our next ransom payment by direct deposit.

NEW YORK TIMES: Ohio, Long a Bellwether, Is Fading on the Electoral Map.

Hillary Clinton has not been to the state since Labor Day, and her aides said Thursday that she would not be back until next week, after a monthlong absence, effectively acknowledging how difficult they think it will be to defeat Donald J. Trump here. Ohio has not fallen into step with the demographic changes transforming the United States, growing older, whiter and less educated than the nation at large.

And the two parties have made strikingly different wagers about how to win the White House in this election: Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee, is relying on a demographic coalition that, while well tailored for Ohio even in the state’s Democratic strongholds, leaves him vulnerable in the more diverse parts of the country where Mrs. Clinton is spending most of her time.

I wonder if the NYT would publish such a disparaging piece about Ohio if Clinton were doing better there.

[Bad link — fixed now!]

THIS SEEMS LIKE A POOR CHOICE, GIVEN THE YEAR MERKEL’S HAD: In swipe at Trump, Clinton names Merkel as her favorite world leader. I suspect, however, that it’s a pretty good sign of what Hillary governance would look like: Heavy-handed, divisive, moralistic, and tone-deaf.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED:

Discharged for making Marines sing the Marines' Hymn. AYFKM? pic.twitter.com/EKpqM2LjBC

— Mr. ✘ (@GlomarResponder) September 29, 2016

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Rick Hills: Is Berkeley Sacrificing Due Process to Appease an Angry Mob? The Sexual Harassment Case Against Sujit Choudhry?

State AGs sue to stop Obama’s internet transition.

The lawsuit — filed Wednesday in a Texas federal court — threatens to throw up a new roadblock to one of the White House’s top tech priorities, just days before the scheduled Oct. 1 transfer of the internet’s address system is set to take place.

In their lawsuit, the attorneys general for Arizona, Oklahoma, Nevada and Texas contend that the transition, lacking congressional approval, amounts to an illegal giveaway of U.S. government property. They also express fear that the proposed new steward of the system, a nonprofit known as ICANN, would be so unchecked that it could “effectively enable or prohibit speech on the Internet.”

The four states further contend that ICANN could revoke the U.S. government’s exclusive use of .gov and .mil, the domains used by states, federal agencies and the U.S. military for their websites. And the four attorneys general argue that ICANN’s “current practices often foster a lack of transparency that, in turn, allows illegal activity to occur.”

“Trusting authoritarian regimes to ensure the continued freedom of the internet is lunacy,” said Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in a statement.

Crazy like a fox.

“DO NOT EXPECT THIS TO BE CARRIED BY ANY MAINSTREAM MEDIA OUTLET:” Horror as Leftist Mob Beats, Kicks, Pummels Trump Supporter for Wearing #MAGA Hat – Saved by Police (Video).

JONATHAN TURLEY: FBI’s Tanked Clinton Email Probe ‘a Legitimate Matter of Congressional Concern and Investigation’

Well, yes.

NEW YORK MAGAZINE GETS THE VAPORS: What It’s Like to Be a Female Reporter Covering Donald Trump:

Trump may not be overtly sexist at his rallies, but his supporters often fill in the gaps he leaves for them. And they’re particularly virulent when it comes to his opponent. Bumper stickers that read, “Trump that bitch,” and T-shirts that say, “Hillary sucks, but not like Monica,” are available outside his rallies, and when Jezebel’s Anna Merlan told one vendor she wasn’t comfortable with women being called bitches, he replied, “This one it’s alright; she’s done more dirty than any normal woman.”

“I think you don’t realize the emotional cost of every single day, twice a day, being in rooms where the norm has become people shouting out, ‘Hang the bitch,’ ‘Kill her,’ ‘Cunt,’” the second reporter said. “You shouldn’t be at the point where you hear ‘Cunt’ and you think, Oh, they’re angry at Hillary, or you hear ‘Bitch,’ and you’re like, Oh, they’re talking about our former secretary of State.”

Yes, how dare everyday GOP voters talk about Hillary Clinton the same way that Democrats talked about Sarah Palin in 2008! Not to mention, how Democrats talked about Hillary herself in 2008! (Not least of which, in Obama’s former church.) How dare they use language that can be found in massive amounts of Hollywood movies, cable TV series and rap records. The left spent a half century coarsening the culture, and now wonders why the peasants are so revolting – but they chose the form of their destructor quite a long time ago.

PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: Judge rules in favor of Brown University student suspended for sexual assault.

Brown University will have to re-adjudicate a years-old campus sexual assault accusation after a judge determined the school suspended him after improperly investigating the accusations against him. . . .

His accuser waited a year to accuse Doe of sexual assault, and during that time, Brown’s policy on what constitutes sexual assault changed. Doe was adjudicated under the new, more restrictive, policy, which didn’t exist when the encounter took place. During the investigation, his accuser provided the investigator with text messages between her and Doe that occurred before the encounter. When Doe was questioned, he provided text messages that occurred after the encounter — in which his accuser claimed she was “more excited to see you finally! Haha” — and some texts that the accuser had not provided from before the encounter.

Doe was suspended and subsequently sued. Judge William E. Smith, in his 84-page decision, vacated Brown’s ruling. He did not adjudicate the accusation himself, and did not give any indication whether he felt the accusation was baseless. He merely stated that Brown’s decision to try Doe under a policy that didn’t exist when the alleged sexual assault occurred was improper.

“When combined with other errors set forth herein, it is clear that Doe’s contract rights were violated,” Smith wrote.

Smith was concerned about a lot of the decisions Brown made during the investigation, including not asking for more texts between the accuser and one of her friends, whom Doe believed she conspired with to fabricate accusations against him. A Brown administrator initially included Doe’s claim, but abandoned it and failed to ask for additional text messages that might have proven Doe correct. This, Smith wrote, was a violation of Doe’s rights under Brown policy.

Smith was also concerned that a Brown administrator “did not consider any of the post-encounter evidence in reaching her determination that Doe was responsible.” The accuser had made additional sexual comments to Doe and had said she was “excited” to see him again. The Brown administrator said the training she received from Brown precluded her from including potentially exculpatory evidence, like those texts, because they occurred after the encounter.

Related: Lawyer takes down unfair campus sexual assault processes. It’s about Robert Shibley’s book, Twisting Title IX.

SHE POKED THE BEAR: Alaska Reporter Who Quit On Air in Support of Marijuana Legalization Facing 24 Years in Prison.

Charlo Greene went viral two years ago when she quit her reporting job on-air after advocating the legalization of marijuana. “Fuck it, I quit” she said, signing off for the last time.

Greene, an Alaska native, moved from journalism to marijuana legalization advocacy. Voters approved a ballot measure that year to legalize marijuana, but now Greene is being criminally prosecuted for her marijuana-related work, The Guardian reports.

After her resignation, the Alaska Cannabis Club, which she revealed to be the founder of in her last on-air segment, appeared to become a primary target for law enforcement authorities in Alaska, who conducted six undercover purchases and two raids of the club, which gave members marijuana in exchange for donations, and two raids in a five month period after her resignation. Marijuana legalization went into effect in February 2015. Greene, who spoke with The Guardian, faces eight drug-related charges that could cost her up to 24 years in prison, and described her experience as a “modern day lynching.”

As our drug laws move towards decriminalization and legalization, there ought to be pardons for nonviolent offenders like Greene.