MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary’s Scandals: Who Wins, Who Loses?

YEAH, THAT’S PRETTY MUCH IT: Charity watchdog: Clinton Foundation a ‘slush fund.’ “Charity Navigator, which rates nonprofits, recently refused to rate the Clinton Foundation because its ‘atypical business model . . . doesn’t meet our criteria.'” It’s a money-laundry for bribes. I hope that President Walker will order Attorney General Schlichter to investigate it thoroughly.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: George Washington University’s Swastika Problem: The Left discovers the value of fake hate crimes. I notice from Prof. John Banzhaf’s twitter feed that GWU is getting a lot of bad press in India, which they may come to regret since India is a source of many lucrative full-tuition foreign students. Which is why, contra Williamson, I don’t think that this kind of idiocy is the future. I think it’s approaching collapse.

ROGER KIMBALL: Is Ed Miliband Insane? “Let’s leave to one side the fact that Islamophobia is a fantasy tort: a “phobia,” as you dictionary will tell you, is an irrational fear or loathing of something in the noraml course of things is not fearsome or worthy of loathing. But how about Muslim extremism? . . . But here’s the question: if (heaven forfend) Ed Miliband actually moves into Number 10, will he arrest Tony Blair? For he has just gone on record saying that he wants to make “Islamophobia” a crime. Yes, that’s right. Not only does Ed Miliband want to expropriate wealth from the productive class, he wants to make an attitude a crime.”

ON TWITTER, A BUNCH OF LEFTIES ARE BLAMING BUSH FOR DESTABILIZING THE MIDDLE EAST, WHICH PROBABLY MEANS BATTLESPACE PREP FOR STILL MORE TERRIBLE NEWS. So remember, as late as 2010, the Obama Administration was bragging about how stable and successful Iraq was. And, of course, when Bush left office Syria, Yemen, Libya, Egypt were all stable. But they’ll blame Bush as long as they can get away with it, because it’s better than admitting that Obama has been an absolute disaster in foreign policy.

But, you know, the problem for them is that Obama has been an absolute disaster in foreign policy.

THE LONGER-TERM CONSEQUENCES OF MAKING “RACIST” THE EQUIVALENT OF “ENEMY OF THE REGIME” ARE LIKELY TO BE POOR: David French: Feds Play the Race Card to Crush Parents’ Revolt Against Common Core. If they keep this up, people may come to feel that racism isn’t so bad.

Of course, it wouldn’t be the Obama Administration if its reflexive accusations of racism weren’t also just a cover for its staggering ineptitude: “The federal government is flexing its muscles to protect an allegedly state-run program. Liberals are treating other liberals like they’re racist. Even the teachers’ unions are calling Common Core’s rollout ‘botched’ and walking back their ‘once-enthusiastic’ support for the program. It looks like the education technocracy is every bit as ineffective as the rest of our national technocracies.”

RUTH WEDGWOOD ON FACEBOOK: “John Kerry will run for president.”

AT AMAZON, save big on Open-Box Camera Deals.

Also, shop the Amazon Motorcycle Event.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Our Mean-Spirited President Cuts Loose.

MY THOUGHTS ON LIFE IN AMERICA.

TOO GOOD TO CHECK? Hillary Furious as Thousands of Americans Send Cigars to Her Office.

JOHN NOLTE: Gay Panic: Jenner, Rubio, Cruz Shock Parochial Mainstream Media.

IT’S NOT CHEATING WHEN THEY DO IT: Report: DHS Adding Millions of ‘New Americans’ to Vote Democrat in 2016. “Of the 20 states with the highest green card population, 14 are holding Senate races in 2016, so millions of new voters could dramatically impact the election.” This is no accident.

HOW OUR RULING CLASS THINKS: Gillibrand On Rape Hoaxes: ‘I Hope It’s Just Putting More Of A Spotlight On The Problem.’

AT AMAZON, gift cards for Mother’s Day. You can also send flowers.

Plus, take 20% off sandals, for men, women & kids. Summer is coming.

BECAUSE DIVERSITY!:  A “diversity” officer at Goldsmiths, University of London, Bahar Mustafa, sponsored a meeting recently to discuss the need for greater “diversity” in the curriculum, announcing on Facebook:

Invite loads of BME [Black and Minority Ethnic] Women and non-binary people!! Also, if you’ve been invited and you’re a man and/or white PLEASE DON’T COME just cos i invited a bunch of people and hope you will be responsible enough to respect this is a BME Women and non-binary event only.

Non-binary is a term that apparently refers to individuals who don’t identify as exclusively male or female.  Ms. Mustafa tried explain the exclusion of whites and men:

Don’t worry lads we will give you and allies things to do.

How thoughtful and inclusive of her, especially for a department that touts as its goals:

• combat discrimination, victimisation and harassment
• advance and promote equality of opportunity between different groups
• foster good relations between people from different groups

Ms. Mustafa–is it a microagression to refer to her as “Ms.”?– describes herself as follows :

I am particularly interested in looking at the gendered body in Japanese pornographic anime and horror through a Foucauldian framework in order to analyse the West’s gaze upon a world it attempts to categorize.  My politics are intersectional, queer, feminist, anti-racist . . . I am a working class, Turkish Cypriot, queer, disabled woman and activist.

Um, okay.  I cannot for the life of me translate that first sentence into English.  She is interested in Japanese anime porn’s portrayal of “gendered” bodies (is there any other kind?) because it attempts to “categorize”?  Whatever.  Yawn.

Apparently, the University was forced to back-walk its exclusionary policy, later posting “ALLIES NOW WELCOME.”   Yeah, right– about as welcome as a bleeding pig in a lion cage.

Can you imagine a University holding an event and publicizing it as “whites only, please?”  Of course you can’t.  “Diversity” is a just a politically-correct label for discrimination against whites, especially white males.  And it most certainly does not include diversity of viewpoint (i.e., conservative thought).

RELATED (kind of):  Abercrombie and Fitch decides to ditch its uber-sexual teen marketing and simultaneously announced  plans to continue to encourage “inclusion and diversity,” such as hiring more non-white “associates” (formerly called “models”).   It also announced plans to establish the A&F Global Diversity and Leadership scholarship program with the National Society of High School Scholars.

Gee, I wonder if this has anything to do with the Supreme Court case currently under consideration, Equal Employment Opportunity Comm’n v. Abercrombie & Fitch?  This is a discrimination claim by a Muslim individual who was not hired by Abercrombie.  During the interview, she wore a headscarf, though it wasn’t mentioned during the interview. She was later told by a friend that she wasn’t hired because of the headscarf.

Bottom line:  Make it very expensive not to hire anyone other than a white male.  And of course, make white men feel unwelcome as much as possible.  Because #diversity!

BECAUSE DIVERSITY!:  Johns Hopkins University student government votes to ban Chick-Fil-A from its campus.  Because, you know, tasty chicken and the whole belief in God thing is a #microaggression against the LGBTQ community.

NEWS FROM THE WISCONSIN STASI: Milwaukee DA John Chisholm Lets The Mask Slip. Again.

For guys who ordered pre-dawn raids using battering rams, the John Doe prosecutors turn out to be kind of touchy… so thin-skinned that they actually let the mask slip.

Milwaukee DA John Chisholm was apparently so unhinged by recent criticism that he actually suggested Saturday that Governor Scott Walker be criminally charged with defamation for criticizing him.

So, no, Chisholm really doesn’t get the First Amendment thing, does he?

And so much for the notion of prosecutorial restraint and Chisholm’s non-political motivations. Normally, prosecutors running a secret investigation that imposes gag orders on subjects avoid public comment. But obviously, they have been feeling the heat — legally, politically. Maybe that’s not surprising, because they’ve had a very bad week. No, make that a bad year.

Chisholm deserves to end up broke and in jail.

ED DRISCOLL: Lambert and Stamp: The Men Who Made The Who.

LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES: The Plight Of A Christian Professor At An Elite Law School. I totally disagree with Rod Dreher’s counsel of despair. I say, punch back twice as hard. For Jesus! And, yes, I’m totally serious.

WORDS OF WISDOM, FROM JOHN RINGO ON FACEBOOK: “Idiots abound to such an extent one has to pick and choose which ones to care about and which to ignore.”

A TORTUROUS WASTE OF TIME:   Apparently, banning torture — even in one’s constitution — doesn’t do much to reduce the incidence of torture.  A recent study conducted by a couple of law professors concludes that they “do not find any evidence that constitutional torture prohibitions have reduced rates of torture in a statistically significant or substantively meaningful way.”  The authors find that 84% of national constitutions prohibit torture, and yet “countries without constitutional torture bans have actually engaged in less torture” over the 1990-2010 time period studied.

The definition of “torture” itself is highly subjective.  The UN Convention on Torture, for example, defines it as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person”.  But putting that definitional problem aside, torture may well work in some situations, yielding information that could not otherwise be obtained.  Robert Jervis, examining the Senate Intelligence Committee’s controversial report on the CIA’s interrogation program, put it this way in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs:

In judging the torture’s effectiveness, the majority report looks for direct connections between the intelligence derived from the torture and its benefits to national security. But the minority and CIA rebuttals are right to urge a broader view. For one thing, analysts needed a great deal of information about al Qaeda before they could make sense of any one source. By the majority report’s standard, the torture was not effective if it merely contributed to a general understanding of al Qaeda, rather than leading directly to the foiling of a terrorist plot or the capture of an 
al Qaeda member. Yet crucial insights often result from indirect links. It might have been, as the majority report argues, that breaks in many cases came from prisoner interrogations that did not involve torture. But in some cases, interrogators asked those detainees questions because of intelligence that came from others who were tortured. And although the majority report lends little weight to information that simply confirmed other intelligence, such findings can prove invaluable, since tips from individual sources are rarely sufficient to merit action on their own. In essence, the report and the rebuttals talk past each other on this point: the Democrats dismiss evidence of a type that the Republicans and the CIA (rightfully) consider central.

This past week, Amnesty Intenational issued a new report, complaining that the Obama Administration has “done nothing” after the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, and urging DOJ to prosecute CIA and other U.S. officials involved.

Even if one agrees that what the CIA did, post 9/11 was “torture,” the truth remains that in some situations, the risk of not using such techniques may well exceed societal benefits of refraining from their use.  As liberal law professor Alan Dershowitz has put it, “No President would want to be responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent citizens if he could have prevented these deaths by authorizing the use of nonlethal torture against a guilty terrorist.”

Indeed, there is a logical reason why constitutional prohibitions on torture don’t reduce its use:  We may ban torture, to make ourselves “feel” better.  But given its amorphous definition and potential to save thousands of innocent lives, it will continue to be used in extraordinary situations.  So there is a legitimate question as to whether it is desirable, from the perspective of the rule of law, to ban something society knows (and indeed expects) will be disregarded in the most difficult situations.   And polls show Americans overwhelmingly believe torture is appropriate in such situations.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: ULA’s New Vulcan Rocket Comes Back to Earth via Helicopter. “ULA’s new Vulcan rocket will use BE-4 engines currently being developed by Blue Origin, the private aerospace company of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. They’ll be 20 percent more powerful than the engines currently powering ULA’s Atlas, and Vulcan will be able to handle six strap-on boosters for heavy lifting, as opposed to five on the Atlas. The Vulcan replacement for the Atlas should cost under $100 million, $65 million less than an Atlas launch, and competitive with the SpaceX Falcon. With 65% of the booster costs of the Vulcan wrapped up in the engines, reusability can slash launch costs dramatically. Rather than try to duplicate SpaceX’s not-yet-successful vertical landing to reuse the entire rocket, ULA is planning on reusing just the engines themselves, and to do that, they need to come up with a way of getting them back to Earth in a soft, gentle, non-crashy sort of way.”

OUCH: I Once Ate Barbecue Pork That Was Smoked in an Old Clothes Dryer: That’s how much barbecue sucks in San Francisco. Though, honestly, that wouldn’t necessarily have to be bad. And, in fact, in this case it wasn’t: “It was really, really good. In fact, it was the only edible barbecue sandwich I’ve been able to find in the entire Bay Area—and I’ve looked, I’ve looked really hard.” Which kind of undercuts the great headline.

But is this really a surprise? I mean, the place is a cultural wasteland: “People in San Francisco don’t have any idea how to make barbecue. They also don’t understand iced tea, chicken and waffles, or biscuits and gravy—but it’s the barbecue that really gets me.”

UPDATE: Reader Austin Waine emails:

I grew up in Memphis, went to UT (had several friends who were your students), lived in Nashville for 4 years, and have lived in SF for the last 3.

When I moved here, the BBQ was suspect; but there have been several spots producing good ‘cue. It’s not quite the Wasteland the author described.

http://4505meats.com/ These guys have *killer* brisket. Check out their site background photo and tell me that doesn’t look tasty.

http://sneakysbbq.blogspot.com/ This guy has an underground operation consisting of an email list and weekly pop-ups at SF area bars. He makes killer pork ribs, pulled pork, and even vegan using jackfruit. He uses high quality meat and smokes it in almond wood that doesn’t impart a lot of smoke flavor and brings out the flavor of the meat.

Well, good.

TEST-DRIVING THE 2016 Lexus ES. I don’t care for the “spindle grille.” It’s not quite as big a turnoff as the Acura beak, which I’ve always detested, but I’m not crazy about it.