NEWS YOU CAN USE: No, Voting for Trump Is Not Idolatry—Speaking Truth to Christians.
Archive for 2016
October 14, 2016
THE RUSSIANS DON’T TAKE A DUMP WITHOUT A PLAN:
Are You Willing To Gamble All Life On Earth Over Hillary’s Beef With #Russia? #Syria https://t.co/1T1my7XXPW pic.twitter.com/9ftY87xmey
— Trending Russia News (@Russializer) October 14, 2016
The Kremlin’s propaganda effort isn’t exactly subtle, but to what end?
REMEMBERING JACK GREENBERG.
But note that despite his seminal role in the Brown case next to Thurgood Marshall and Charles Black, he still faced student protests because he was white: “A painful episode for Mr. Greenberg came in 1982, at Harvard Law School, when the Harvard Black Law Students Association and others objected to his teaching a civil rights course jointly, on a visiting basis, with Julius L. Chambers, a black lawyer and educator. The group called on students to boycott the course, which had previously been taught by Derrick Bell. Mr. Chambers and Mr. Greenberg taught the course anyway, and many prominent blacks came to Mr. Greenberg’s defense.” Students can be dumb.
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DEMS SET NEW TRAP FOR TRUMP AS MICHELLE OBAMA TEARS INTO HIM OVER TAPE, GROPING ACCUSATIONS.
Related: Michelle Obama Says She’s Never Heard Anything Like Trump?
STRONG HORSE: Is Turkey ditching Saudi Arabia for Iran?
Whether or not Turkey eventually “ditches” the Saudis for Iran, it’s a near-certainty that Ankara will use Tehran’s nuclear weapons program as a justification for one of their own.
Tom Lehrer, as usual, proves prescient.
LEAKED SPEECHES: Hillary Told Room Of Businessmen That More Food Stamps Will Fix The Economy.
Funny, that was essentially Jerry Brown’s argument in 1995, after he was bested in the 1992 race for the White House by a fellow Democrat with a more conservative tone — and our potential future “First Gentleman,” coincidentally enough.
SO BASICALLY EVERYONE WORKS FOR PUTIN NOW: Wikileaks Bombshell: John Podesta Owned 75,000 Shares in Putin-Connected Energy Company.
ASHE SCHOW ON A WATERSHED MOMENT: Education Department finds school violated rights of the accused.
In an extraordinary finding, the Education Department determined the rights of a student accused of sexual assault were violated at Wesley College in Dover, Del.
In all but one instance (that I know of) the Department’s Office for Civil Rights has only found schools to have violated the rights of accusers, while imposing new and conflicting rules on all schools. In its 2011 Dear Colleague Letter, which forced schools to adjudicate campus sexual assault using the barest of protections for accused students, OCR set the groundwork for a flood of civil rights violations for accused students.
But now it appears a male accused student has actually won a victory with OCR. In a letter sent to Wesley College on Wednesday, OCR concluded its investigation of the school and identified a number of troubling aspects of the so-called “investigations” conducted by Wesley against students accused of sexual assault.
Wesley was found to be punishing accused students with an “interim suspension” based solely on an accusation, before any investigation — or even interview with the accused — had been conducted. In at least one case, the accused student was not even interviewed during the investigation and was provided the wrong information about the school’s policies and procedures, making him unprepared for his hearing, as he thought it was just his first interview. This student was also not provided a copy of or the information contained in the incident report against him prior to the hearing.
In other cases, accused students were not able to provide witnesses or other evidence of their innocence at the hearing.
In addition, OCR determined that Wesley failed to retain records and information regarding the investigations, resolutions and hearings of sexual assault complaints. The school was deleting them just 10 days after the hearing. This, OCR wrote, resulted in information not being available to the federal government during its investigation.
I didn’t think the Education Department believed that the accused had rights.
THE ANCHORESS: Podesta and the Clinton camp’s unwitting compliment to Catholicism.
I remember the dark ages of America, when a person running for the White House would tell voters, “I am wholly opposed to the state being used by any religious group, Catholic or Protestant, to compel, prohibit, or persecute the free exercise of any other religion.”
Sounds like a pretty reactionary, Rethuglican sort of brute. Good thing we’ve evolved beyond that sort of backwards thinking.
WAR FOR OIL: “Take the oil” isn’t just an applause line — it’s a policy that has been discussed in Washington for decades.
The earliest discussions of a U.S. move to seize Arab oil arouse in the early 1970s, when Saudi Arabia and the other Middle Eastern oil producers nationalized fields once owned by major American oil companies and established OPEC to assert greater control over the pricing of their exports. That came to a head in late 1973 and early 1974, when Arab countries imposed an embargo on deliveries to the United States (in retaliation for American arms shipments to Israel during the Yom Kippur War) and OPEC announced a fourfold increase in oil prices — the two combining to cause a severe U.S. energy shortage and subsequent recession. In response to these perceived assaults, assorted American pundits and politicians called for military moves of one sort or another to address the problem.
These days it’s easier just to out-produce them.
THE LESS YOU KNOW, THE BETTER YOU SLEEP: The unsolved mystery behind the act of terror that brought Vladimir Putin to power.
I predict that support for this approach will prove limited.
ED MORRISSEY: Minnesota Could Be the First Obamacare Domino to Fall.
As the Star Tribune notes, all seven of the remaining insurers in the state had threatened to follow Preferred One out the door without the massive rate hikes. Even with Rothman surrendering to the realities of centrally controlled economies, Blue Cross Blue Shield will still exit Mnsure at the end of 2016. The massive price hikes, Rothman said in September, were “a stopgap for 2017.” Foreshadowing Dayton’s announcement on Wednesday, Rothman added, “It’s an emergency situation – we worked hard and avoided a collapse.”
Avoided? As Dayton made clear yesterday, all Minnesota has done is postpone a collapse – and probably for only another year. The biggest problem for insurers in these markets is the unstable utilization rates, which prevent them from accurately calculating risk to set a tenable premium price.
The reason for that instability is that higher prices are disincentivizing healthier consumers from buying expensive comprehensive insurance policies as they opt instead to pay out of pocket for their minimal utilization and pay the tax penalty for non-coverage instead. Thanks to skyrocketing premiums and deductible thresholds, the likelihood of many consumers to have benefits applied to anything but a basic wellness check is remote at best, which makes the risk worthwhile.
Leave it to Big Government to coerce a market into existence, where individuals are required to buy a product they can’t afford to use, and which producers can’t afford to sell — and then blame the free market for the inevitable collapse.
PRIORITIES: White House Breaks With Senate Democrats on Iran Sanctions. “The Democratic senators, in a letter to the Kentucky Republican last week, said that renewing the law is ‘crucial’ because ‘it remains a critical tool to deter and impede individuals and entities supporting Iran’s development of conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction.'”
WIKILEAKS: The Video Defense About Her Emails Hillary Clinton Never Gave.
The remarks — part of a large and growing WikiLeaks release of emails hacked from Clinton campaign Chairman John Podesta’s personal Gmail account — propose Clinton go to lengths, arguably unseen in the campaign from the candidate, to try and explain why she used the private server. She would do so in clearer, more complete and more personal terms than other statements she had made. She would have been apologetic, at times, taking responsibility.
“I can’t do it all again,” she was to say. “I can only tell you it was a mistake, regret it, explain it, and help State and others fix any challenges it caused.”
But she would have also been defensive, at points, noting unapologetically that she wanted her privacy: “I knew no matter what I decided to do with them, I was in for criticism. So I chose to keep a modicum of privacy. I hope you can understand that.”
Can you imagine a public figure running for higher office, in for criticism?
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Pentagon issues handbook on sex change in the ranks.
CLINTON ALLY ON OBAMACARE WEBSITE: ‘IN REAL LIFE PEOPLE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN FIRED.’
It’s nice to finally see a lefty acknowledge that working in the public sector isn’t real life. Or as legendary scientist Dr. Raymond Stantz would say:
JAYVEE: Islamic State crushes rebellion plot in Mosul as army closes in.
Islamic State (IS) executed 58 people suspected of taking part in the plot after it was uncovered last week. Residents, who spoke to Reuters from some of the few locations in the city that have phone service, said the plotters were killed by drowning and their bodies were buried in a mass grave in a wasteland on the outskirts of the city.
Among them was a local aide of IS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who led the plotters, according to matching accounts given by five residents, by Hisham al-Hashimi, an expert on IS affairs that advises the government in Baghdad and by colonel Ahmed al-Taie, from Mosul’s Nineveh province Operation Command’s military intelligence.
Reuters is not publishing the name of the plot leader to avoid increasing the safety risk for his family, nor the identities of those inside the city who spoke about the plot.
The aim of the plotters was to undermine Islamic State’s defense of Mosul in the upcoming fight, expected to be the biggest battle in Iraq since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.
Flashback: President Obama Has Ended the War in Iraq.
BUT WE SENT PLANELOADS OF CASH TO IRAN: Florida governor: We’re still waiting for Zika money.
Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) is accusing federal health officials of holding up money to fight Zika as the state combats its latest outbreak of the virus.
“It has been two weeks since federal funding to fight Zika was approved by Congress and signed by President Obama. However, Florida has not yet received a dime,” Scott said in a statement Thursday.
“We don’t need bureaucratic timelines — we need funding now,” Scott said.
Scott said his state needs the money even faster than expected after the Florida health department confirmed another outbreak of the Zika virus in Miami-Dade County on Thursday.
Priorities.
QUESTION ASKED: So both are bad actors. The question which remains is: Which bad actor will be more restrained by the political establishment of Washington DC?
Read the whole thing.