CLINTON FEEDS OFF MEGYN KELLY’S “WAR ON WOMEN” QUESTION: Hillary Clinton has unsurprisingly begun to capitalize on the “war on women” narrative amplified by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly during the GOP presidential debate. Kelly reignited the narrative with the following question posed to Donald Trump:

Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women.

You’ve called women you don’t like “fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.” . . .

Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?

Afterwards, Trump amped up the rhetoric and made matters worse when he told a CNN host,”You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”

It was utterly predictable that Clinton would eventually capitalize on this #waronwomen opening, and today she did so, according to the Daily Caller:

At a campaign stop in New Hampshire on Monday Hillary Clinton slammed Donald Trump’s recent remarks about Fox News host Megyn Kelly as “outrageous” but said that other Republican men running for president have made equally “offensive” remarks. . . .

“But I think if we focus on that we are making a mistake,” Clinton said of Trump’s remarks. “What a lot of the men on that stage and that debate said was offensive.”

“When one of their major candidates, a much younger man, a senator from Florida, says there should be no exceptions for rape and incest, that is as offensive and as troubling a comment as you can hear from a major candidate running for the presidency.”

So Clinton is equating Trump’s crude comment directed at a woman with Rubio’s substantive position on abortion? Nice move. Because, you know, those Republican men “offend” women by supporting human life. And while a recent Gallup poll shows that a slim majority of women presently self-identify as “pro-choice,” longitudinal polling has shown that women’s views shift, with pro-choice versus pro-life majorities altering from year to year. Presumably, according to Clinton, women who hold a pro-life position are “offending” women?

I’m no fan of Trump’s post-debate comments about Kelly. It wasn’t “presidential,” and it was unnecessary. But his initial response to Kelly’s debate query was fundamentally correct, that he (and the country) doesn’t “have time for total political correctness.” And Kelly is a professional woman in a high profile position, and she can certainly handle some insults. She has appropriately said that she is a “big girl” and can “take it.”

The thing that bothers me most about the Kelly-Trump exchange is that Hillary Clinton is now going to accept the invitation–issued by Kelly–to reopen and amplify the “Republicans hate women” narrative. In an overt attempt to bring down Trump a notch or two, Kelly’s query has reignited Hillary Clinton’s key campaign issue.

THE FLAWED ‘MISSING MEN’ THEORY: Kay Hymowitz has an oped in the Wall Street Journal today debunking the “missing men” theory of black family disintegration:

What extensive data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and National Vital Statistics Reports show is that the black family was in deep disarray well before America’s prison-population increase. As the 1960s began, 20% of all black births were to single mothers. By 1965 black “illegitimacy”—in the parlance of the time—had reached 24% and become the subject of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s prophetic but ill-fated report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.”

Yet the figure that so worried future Sen. Moynihan turned out to be the ground floor of a steep 30-year climb. By 1980 more than half of black children were born to unmarried mothers. The number peaked at 72.5% in 2010 and is now just below 72%. . . .

As the family unraveled, crime increased—the homicide rate doubled between the early 1960s and late ’70s, with more than half of the convicted being black—leading to calls for tougher sentencing to place more bad guys behind bars. In other words, family breakdown was followed by increased crime and more-crowded prisons. . . .

None of this means that incarceration policies aren’t ready for an overhaul. The country needs a vigorous examination of mandatory-sentencing laws, the war on drugs, and racial disparities in arrests and sentencing. But that debate shouldn’t be used to evade the realities of family life in neighborhoods like Ferguson and Baltimore’s Sandtown. Evasion has been the preferred modus vivendi over the past 50 years, ever since Moynihan’s warning of rising fatherlessness drew sharp condemnation. Look where it has gotten us.

There is much reform needed on sentencing and drug laws, to be sure. But Hymowitz is right that the breakdown of the black family predated the war on drugs and its concomitant higher rates of black incarceration. “Missing men” exacerbate, but do not solely cause, the breakdown of the black family.

Even assuming sentencing or drug law reforms could keep some black men from going “missing,” how do you convince black men to marry the women whom they impregnate (or conversely. convince the women to marry their children’s father), or alternatively, increase the use of contraception to prevent the pregnancies in the first place? How can you instill “family values” in a culture that seems to now have an unusually female/mother/grandmother-centric vision of what constitutes a “family”? It would be great to see a #BlackFamiliesMatter movement.

ET TU, FOX NEWS’?: GOP presidential contender Lindsay Graham calls Fox News’ questions of Donald Trump “more of an inquisition than it was a debate.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) is criticizing Fox News, saying the moderators of Thursday night’s debate were too harsh with GOP rival Donald Trump.

“This was more of an inquisition than it was a debate,” Graham said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Friday morning. “It was a missed opportunity to talk about things that really mattered.”

Graham charged that the debate moderators, Bret Baier, Chris Wallace and Megyn Kelly, were particularly unfair in their questioning of Trump, the outspoken billionaire who is leading many GOP polls.

“At the end of the day, ask the man a question that explains his position and his solutions rather than a ten-minute question that describes him as the biggest bastard on the planet,” Graham quipped.

The South Carolina lawmaker said that Thursday night’s contest resulted in a lost chance at addressing crucial issues like immigration reform.

“Did you really understand our position on immigration after this debate?” Graham asked.

Graham is right. It wasn’t that the Fox moderators–mostly Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace, and to a lesser extent, Brett Baier–asked “tough” questions. I’m all for tough questions. But there’s a difference between “tough” and “snarky,” and I felt there was far more of the latter than the former.

Kelly and Wallace in particular spent precious air time framing their questions as ad hominem attacks rather than a quest to probe serious issues. Indeed, virtually every major question posed by the Fox moderators began with an insult to each candidate. For example, Kelly’s opening question of Donald Trump was this silliness:

“One of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter,” Kelly said to Trump in the opening minutes. “However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals.”

“Only Rosie O’Donnell,” Trump interjected to laughter.

“For the record, it was well beyond Rosie,” Kelly shot back, noting that Trump had told one contestant on “Celebrity Apprentice” that it would be a pretty picture to “see her on her knees.” “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?” Kelly asked.

Was anyone really clamoring for clarification about Trump’s disparaging remarks about women he has opposed through the years, including his remarks on a reality TV show? I, for one, had many more important issues that I wanted to hear about, and Kelly’s decision to highlight this “women’s” issue seemed more designed to feed Democrats’ “war on women” impression of the GOP than anything else.

Or consider this Kelly’s put down of Dr. Ben Carson:

You are a successful neurosurgeon, but you admit that you have had to study up on foreign policy, saying there’s a lot to learn.

Your critics say that your inexperience shows. You’ve suggested that the Baltic States are not a part of NATO, just months ago you were unfamiliar with the major political parties and government in Israel, and domestically, you thought Alan Greenspan had been treasury secretary instead of federal reserve chair.

Aren’t these basic mistakes, and don’t they raise legitimate questions about whether you are ready to be president?

Did Kelly really need to catalog Carson’s misstatements? Would it not have been more efficient to simply ask him the legitimate question of whether he has the necessary foreign policy experience? If such misstatements are relevant (and I don’t think they are, as they happen all the time, by all candidates), should not similar misstatements by other candidates have been highlighted?

And why did the Fox moderators incessantly try to pit one GOP candidate against another? Were they simply trying to spark further ad hominem attacks? Chris Wallace, for example, asked this of Sen. Marco Rubio:

Senator Rubio, when Jeb Bush announced his candidacy for presidency, he said this: “There’s no passing off responsibility when you’re a governor, no blending into the legislative crowd.”

Could you please address Governor Bush across the stage here, and explain to him why you, someone who has never held executive office, are better prepared to be president than he is, a man who you say did a great job running your state of Florida for eight years.

Would it not have been more productive to simply ask Rubio why he has the necessary experience to be president, given his lack of executive experience? Why did Wallace think it would “add” to the debate to make a direct comparison to Bush, and not Walker, Christie, Perry, Kasich, Jindal or others with executive experience?

And then there was Wallace’s query of Sen. Ted Cruz:

Senator Cruz, your colleague, Senator Paul, right there next to you, said a few months ago he agrees with you on a number of issues, but he says you do nothing to grow the party. He says you feed red meat to the base, but you don’t reach out to minorities. You have a toxic relationship with GOP leaders in Congress. You even called the Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell a liar recently.

How can you win in 2016 when you’re such a divisive figure?

Why did Wallace think it was good form to focus Cruz on a statement made by Sen. Paul, rather than simply ask Cruz whether he could be sufficiently inclusive to attract a wide range of GOP and independent voters? If Wallace really wanted to know more about Sen. Paul’s statement and what Paul meant, should not the question have been directed at Sen. Paul? Again, there is a kernel of a relevant inquiry here, but the manner in which it was posed strikes me as unnecessarily argumentative, particularly at a first GOP debate, when voters simply want to hear from the candidates on their basic views about big issues.

And a final example, which was this zinger hurled by Wallace at Trump:

Mr. Trump, it has not escaped anybody’s notice that you say that the Mexican government, the Mexican government is sending criminals — rapists, drug dealers, across the border.

Governor Bush has called those remarks, quote, “extraordinarily ugly.”

I’d like you — you’re right next to him — tell us — talk to him directly and say how you respond to that and — and you have repeatedly said that you have evidence that the Mexican government is doing this, but you have evidence you have refused or declined to share.

Why not use this first Republican presidential debate to share your proof with the American people?

Why did Wallace need to highlight that Jeb Bush had called Trump’s remarks “extraordinarily ugly.” Why not simply say that, correctly, that Trump’s remarks have proven highly controversial, even within his own party? And then for Wallace to instruct Trump to “talk to him directly and say how you respond to that” was simply inane.

Wallace couldn’t stop himself, though. He then posed a question to Gov. Kasich, trying to lure Kasich into attacking Trump:

Governor Kasich, I know you don’t like to talk about Donald Trump. But I do want to ask you about the merit of what he just said. When you say that the American government is stupid, that the Mexican government is sending criminals, that we’re being bamboozled, is that an adequate response to the question of illegal immigration?

But Kasich wisely refused to take Wallace’s bait, and one could almost feel Wallace’s disappointment.

This wasn’t an opportunity for Fox moderators to play favorites, attack the GOP field, regurgitate Democrats’ talking points, reiterate Democrats’ stereotypes about the GOP, and try to pit one candidate specifically against another. It wasn’t an opportunity for Fox moderators to “shine,” to show how smart they are, or to one-up specific candidates. I don’t care one whit which GOP candidates the moderators preferred personally. All I wanted was tough questions, sticking to the big issues of the day, and a “fair and balanced” opportunity to hear from each candidate. What I got instead was snarky, unprofessional, unnecessarily ad hominem questions that seemed more designed to embarrass than inform. I could have gotten that from CNN. 

Et tu, Fox News?

GOP PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE LOSER? FOX NEWS: I was particularly disappointed with the ridiculous “gotcha!” questions posed by Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace. Can Fox News please focus on the issues and not try to play favorites?

After this debate, my opinion changed the MOST about @foxnews, @megynkelly, @BretBaier & Chris Wallace! Utterly Disappointed…#GOPDebate

— Amy Mek (@AmyMek) August 7, 2015

Uhhh..@brithume most of us didn’t like @megynkelly questioning of everyone..very ungentlewomenly! #GOPDebate

— Janie Johnson (@jjauthor) August 7, 2015

The biggest losers in the debate were the Fox moderators who attacked instead of moderating #GOPDebate

— Ed Wrather (@edwrather) August 7, 2015

JAMES TARANTO: Obama goes “Full Orwell.” He’s been full Orwell for many years now, but Taranto’s right that Obama’s speech yesterday on the Iran nuclear deal was especially rich with patent falsehoods.

Rather than enumerate every flaw of Barack Obama’s defense of his Iran deal yesterday, we’d like to look deeply at the most glaring one, namely this passage:

Just because Iranian hard-liners chant “Death to America” does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe. In fact, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo. It’s those hard-liners chanting “Death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal. They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus. . . .

Obama’s “common cause” argument rests on several factual premises that seem to us obviously false, and that certainly are not obviously true—among them, that Republicans desire war, that there is a meaningful distinction between “Iranian hard-liners” and the Iranian regime, and that those hard-liners would prefer American military action to American appeasement.

But there is an even more basic objection to Obama’s statement. Assume for the sake of argument that the “Iranian hard-liners” and the Republicans really do want an all-out military confrontation. Now, consider an example from history when such a result actually obtained. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. On Dec. 8, Congress declared war on Japan. Would it make any sense to say that the Japanese and the U.S. Congress had made “common cause”?

Obama is equating mutual antagonism with its opposite, “common cause.” Again, Orwell put it more pithily: War is peace.

If Republicans who oppose the deal are “making common cause” with “Iranian hard-liners,” does it not follow that so are the Israelis—as well as those Democratic lawmakers who’ve announced opposition to the deal (seven so far, all in the House, according to the Hill), and 57% of the American public (including 55% of independents and 32% of Democrats), according to the latest Quinnipiac poll?

Lame duck Obama no longer cares about even the appearance of civility with Republicans, or any Democrat who dares to oppose him. His gloves are now off, it’s all personal to him (and his worshippers), and his radical ideological agenda is on full display. It’s full Orwell, replete with blatant lies, rewriting of history, and assault on the fabric of society itself. Obama is a bully, with a bully pulpit, and he doesn’t give a damn about the Constitution or its founding principles, which he thinks is deeply flawed. He has done more to damage the Constitution, the economy, and societal unity than all prior presidents combined.

January 2017 cannot come fast enough.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ: “Mr. Obama, your Iran deal will fall apart.”

The Framers of our constitution probably would have regarded the nuclear deal with Iran as a “treaty,” subject to a two thirds ratification by the Senate. At the very least they would have required Congress to approve the agreement by a majority vote. It is unlikely that it would have allowed the President alone to make so important and enduring an international agreement.

If President Obama doesn’t treat the Iran agreement with more respect, all his arguments today are beside the point. The agreement won’t have the force of law. . . .

In the two and a quarter centuries since the ratification of the Constitution, the power of the executive has expanded considerably, but the Framers would be shocked by the current situation in which the president alone gets to make an important and enduring international agreement that can be overridden only by two thirds plus one of both the senate and the house.  At the very least, this important and enduring deal should have required a majority vote of Congress. . . .

While a majority of the House and the Senate voted for this exceptional set of rules for approving the Iran agreement, it was only to assure themselves that they would have any say at all in the matter. President Obama’s position was that he could make the “executive” agreement without Congressional approval. . . .

With regard to the deal with Iran, the stakes are so high, and the deal so central to the  continuing security of the free world, that it should — as a matter of democratic governance — require more than a presidential agreement and one third plus one of both houses of Congress.  This is especially true where there is no clear consensus in favor of the deal among the American people.  Though we do not govern by polls, it seems fairly clear that a majority of Americans now oppose the deal.

Let us never forget that America is a democracy where the people ultimately rule, and if the majority of Americans continue to oppose the deal, it will ultimately be rejected, if not by this administration, than by the next. An agreement, as distinguished from a treaty does not have the force of law. It can simply be abrogated by any future president.

Exactly. David Rivkin and Lee Casey made similar arguments last month in the Wall Street Journal. But of course Rivkin and Casey are conservative lawyers, so their concerns about bypassing the Constitution’s treaty provisions may not carry much weight with anyone who is politically left-of-center. Because Dershowitz is a well-known political leftist (and former professor of Obama at Harvard), his opinion may garner more attention. It’s nice to see some liberal/progressives growing a pair, especially those who know a little something about the Constitution (and still care about it). Dershowitz’s Harvard Law colleague, Laurence Tribe, has recently spoken out about the constitutional infirmity of Obama’s Clean Power Plan, and he has been excoriated by Obama worshippers. Dershowitz will presumably now join Tribe on the Obama Administration’s blacklist.

BECAUSE “DEATH TO AMERICA” IS JUST HYPERBOLE: Iranian-born Sohrab Amari writes in Commentary about “The 36-year project to whitewash Iran.”

The metamorphosis of Iran, in elite American opinion, from terrorist state into U.S. partner is a long-brewing triumph for a certain set of ideas about the Islamic Republic and its relation to the nation it has called the “Great Satan” since its birth. Over time, the argument has been advanced by journalists, academics, Washington lobbies, and government officials. Its basic purpose has always been to sell the Iranian regime as moderate, amenable to reason, even decent and democratic, relative to its neighbors. The various arms of this campaign didn’t always work in concert. It wasn’t always a conscious effort. Frequently, it was advanced by well-intentioned but credulous journalists. The rebranding campaign was not a dark conspiracy; it was, for the most part, carried out openly. Nor, finally, did it always progress smoothly, but rather in fits and starts, with numerous setbacks along the way.

Nevertheless, Iran’s American apologists have now scored an unprecedented coup: making the U.S. friendly toward a regime whose motto is “Death to America.” . . .

But hey, I’m sure the whole “death to America” and “Great Satan” thing is just hyperbole. They’re really just a bunch of peace loving moderates who want to live in peace and embrace western values of democracy and equality, right?

Besides, as Obama said today, “The choice we face is ultimately between diplomacy or some form of war. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not three months from now, but soon.”  So in Obama’s worldview, the choice is between: (1) near-term, conventional war with Iran; or (2) kicking the can down the road (until after Obama leaves office), and accepting the possibility of Iranian nuclear aggression against Israel or the U.S.

The fact that President Obama cannot even envision a middle ground between these two extremes–such as the possibility that continued or enhanced sanctions could leverage greater limitations on Iran’s nuclear program or even create pressure for meaningful, democratic regime change–is what strikes me as most disturbing. A president who sees major foreign policy issues in such stark “you’re either with me, or you’re a war monger” terms is a dangerous, divisive leader.

In President Obama’s narcissistic quest to achieve a legacy of “diplomacy” with America’s enemies abroad, he is remarkably incapable of evincing any diplomacy at all domestically, with fellow Americans who dare to criticize him.

I LOVE THE SMELL OF DEMOCRATS’ PANIC IN THE MORNING: The chorus of liberal/progressive chants of “Run, Joe, Run!” grows daily. A subtle piece is this one by Washington Post writer Ruth Marcus, “Biden can’t defeat Clinton; she can do that herself.”

One troubling snapshot from a new Wall St. Journal-NBC poll: More women now view Clinton negatively than positively.

Biden has a quality of genuineness, of humanity, that seems to elude the public Clinton. My most enduring — and endearing — vision of Biden is seeing the grinning vice president at the annual summer party for the media, chasing a group of children with a Super Soaker water gun, and allowing himself to be thoroughly drenched by the tiny mob. Biden is the ultimate extrovert.

Clinton, by contrast, is self-contained and guarded, if not by nature then after years of public pounding. One person who knows her well told me that the key to understanding Clinton was to read Susan Cain’s book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking.” One of Cain’s examples is Eleanor Roosevelt, a heroine of Clinton’s and, like Clinton, married to the ultimate extrovert.

Marcus makes her preference for Clinton clear in this piece, painting Clinton as a misunderstood introvert in the shadow of an extroverted husband. Yawn. Clinton isn’t introverted; she’s prickly, arrogant and dismissive. As a piece in the Boston Herald put it this morning:

If Vice President Joe Biden decides to take on Hillary Clinton in a run for the White House, his best bet may be beating her on the personality front, a political strategist said this morning on Boston Herald Radio.

“It comes down to a character issue and he is different than Hillary,” said Gretchen Hamel, president and founder of Highline Strategies. “You have seen her campaign make some missteps. It’s Hillary being Hillary, she is very guarded. Biden is a more approachable, likable guy that you would want to have a beer with.”

Yeah, I’d have a beer with Uncle Joe, so long as he kept his hands to himself. In the battle of personalities, Biden wins, hands down.

Clinton is only the front-runner because she bears her husband’s name and is seen by many as carrying his legacy into a third term. Heck, my own mother insists that, if Hillary is elected, “it will really be Bill who is running things” (and she says this in a positive tone, believe it or not). Hillary’s chief accomplishment is her husband, as sad as that may be. She is hardly the kind of woman that women should want to carry the mantle of “first female president.”

We can do much better than Hillary. Carly Fiorina deserves more attention, for example, but because she’s in the wrong political party, the mainstream media is doing everything it can to ignore her.

RIGHT CONCLUSION, UTTERLY WRONG ANALYSIS: A member of the “ruling class” himself, liberal Robert Reich, opines that “A revolt is taking place against the ‘ruling class.’ “

Political insiders don’t see that the biggest political phenomenon in America today is a revolt against the “ruling class” of insiders that have dominated Washington for more than three decades.

In two very different ways, Trump and Sanders are agents of this revolt. . . .

On the right are the wreckers. The Tea Party, which emerged soon after the Wall Street bailout, has been intent on stopping government in its tracks and overthrowing a ruling class it sees as rotten to the core. . . Donald Trump is their human wrecking ball. The more outrageous his rants and putdowns of other politicians, the more popular he becomes among this segment of the public that’s thrilled by a bombastic, racist, billionaire who sticks it to the ruling class.

On the left are the rebuilders. The Occupy movement, which also emerged from the Wall Street bailout, was intent on displacing the ruling class and rebuilding our political-economic system from the ground up. . . .

Bernie Sanders personifies them. The more he advocates a fundamental retooling of our economy and democracy in favor of average working people, the more popular he becomes among those who no longer trust the ruling class to bring about necessary change.  

Yet despite the growing revolt against the ruling class, it seems likely that the nominees in 2016 will be Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. After all, the ruling class still controls America.

Reich is correct that many Americans are angry at the “ruling class” in Washington, D.C. But he’s wrong about the constituencies that Trump and Sanders represent, and why they are proving popular.

Notice that leftist Reich characterizes the tea party as “wreckers” and the occupy movement as “rebuilders.” He then proceeds to proclaim Trump as a “bombastic, racist” wrecking ball that represents the tea party. Sanders, by contrast is merely advocating a “fundamental retooling of our economy in favor of average working people” and representing the “rebuilders” of the occupy movement.

Reich’s overt leftist bias aside, his analysis is all wrong. Trump is no more a champion of the tea party than any of several other GOP presidential candidates, including most notably Ted Cruz, Rick Perry, Cary Fiorina or Rand Paul. Likewise, Bernie Sanders isn’t popular because of the occupy movement, which has been long moribund, and he certainly isn’t a political outsider, having served in Congress for almost 25 years (since 1991).

Trump and Sanders are popular for different reasons. Trump appeals to the conservative base of the GOP because he is willing to talk tough and defy a stifling and overwhelming atmosphere of political correctness.  Sanders appeals to the progressive base of the Democrats because he is willing to overtly and unapologetically push a progressive/Socialist agenda. Sanders has also gained attention simply because so many Democrats are looking for an alternative to scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton.

Do Americans–of all political stripes–distrust the D.C. “ruling class”? Yes, undoubtedly. And presidential candidates who can tap into this widespread frustration will do well. But neither Trump’s nor Sanders’ popularity is based on this sentiment. And Reich should check his #liberalbias.

OBAMACARE PREMIUMS SOAR: In response, the Obama Administration once again sticks its fingers in its ears and pretends to hear no evil. As revealed in this New York Times piece, “Obama Administration urges States to cut health insurers’ requests for big premium increases.”

After finding that new customers were sicker than expected, some health plans have sought increases of 10 percent to 40 percent or more. . . .

Kevin J. Counihan, the chief executive of the federal insurance marketplace, is urging states to consider a range of factors before making their decisions.

“Recent claims data show healthier consumers,” Mr. Counihan said in a letter to state insurance commissioners. The federal tax penalty for going without insurance will increase in 2016, he said, and this “should motivate a new segment of uninsured who may not have a high need for health care to enroll for coverage.”

In addition, federal officials said, much of the pent-up demand for health care has been met because consumers who enrolled last year have received treatments they could not obtain when they were uninsured. . . .

But Scott Keefer, a vice president of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota, which requested rate increases averaging about 50 percent for 2016, said his company had not seen an improvement in the health status of new customers.

“Our claims experience has not slowed at all,” Mr. Keefer said. “The trend has gotten a little worse than we expected.” . . .

President Obama, on a recent trip to Tennessee, said the final rates for 2016 would “come in significantly lower than what’s being requested.”

Moreover, consumers can avoid large rate increases by switching to lower-cost health plans next year, administration officials said. In any event, they said, the federal government pays most of the premium for most people who buy insurance on the exchanges, so consumers will be largely shielded from higher premiums.

The politics of Obamacare work so well for the Democrats who supported it precisely because Obamacare beneficiaries are shielded from premium increases. They continue to get their “free stuff”–or heavily subsidized stuff–and any increases they experience are blamed on “greedy insurers.” I predict more and more insurers will become insolvent, and concomitantly fewer and fewer choices will become available on the exchanges. After another decade or so–if Congress can’t muster the political willpower to repeal–there will be calls for amendments that will further subsidize the few, but large, insurance companies that remain to serve this population, likely through the mechanism of taxpayer-funded reinsurance. They will be “too big to fail.”

If you like Obamacare’s vision of government-run “competition,” you’re really going to love the Clean Power Plan, which will do for the energy sector (beginning with coal-fired electricity) what Obamacare has done for the health care sector–i.e., slowly asphyxiate it, leaving only large, heavily-taxpayer subsidized “private” crony-companies.  Hold onto your wallets and start hoarding bright lightbulbs, because prices are going to go up dramatically, and choices will decline. 

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION “CRITICAL MASS” THEORY DOESN’T APPLY TO MEN: A Washington Post op-ed argues for extending Title IX to college admissions.

[O]ne of academia’s little-known secrets is that private college admissions are exempt from Title IX’s ban on sex discrimination—a shameful loophole that allows some of the most supposedly progressive campuses in the nation to discriminate against female applicants.

Consider my own alma mater, Brown University. In 2014, 11 percent of men were accepted at Brown versus 7 percent of women, according to U.S. Department of Education data.

Brown is hardly the only, or the worst, offender. At Vassar College, the 34 percent acceptance rate for men was almost twice as high as the 19 percent rate for women. At Columbia University, the acceptance rate was 8 percent for men versus 6 percent for women. At Vanderbilt University, it was 15 percent versus 11 percent. Pomona College: 15 percent versus 10 percent. Williams College: 21 percent versus 18 percent. This bias in private-college admissions is blatant enough that it can’t be long before “gender-blind admissions” becomes the new campus rallying cry.

Colleges won’t say it, but this is happening because elite schools field applications from many more qualified women than men and thus are trying to hold the line against a 60:40 ratio of women to men. Were Brown to accept women and men at the same rate, its undergraduate population would be almost 60 percent women instead of 52 percent—three women for every two men. . . .

Today’s [admissions] officials . . . fear though that if enrollments reach 60 percent women, it will scare off the most sought-after applicants, who generally want gender balance for social reasons. “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive,” Kenyon College’s dean of admissions, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, wrote in The New York Times in 2006.

So suddenly liberals/progressives are in love with merit-based admissions? That’s mighty funny.  

This argument for admitting more women to elite colleges–based on their higher objective academic credentials (GPA, SAT/ACT score) is more than a little ironic, given the liberal/progressive argument for race-based affirmative action is exactly the opposite. In race-based admissions, the liberal/progressives assert that white and Asian applicants’ objective academic credentials, although higher than Hispanic or black applicants, should not earn white applicants any admissions preferences. When it comes to race, in other words, academic merit shouldn’t drive admissions.

Instead, the liberal/progressive argument–that has been constitutionally legitimated by the Supreme Court–is that there is a compelling government interest in achieving the goal of racial “diversity” in college admissions, and this goal requires admission of a “critical mass” of black and Hispanic students with lower academic credentials. 

Apparently, according to the liberal/progressive view of the world, there is no need for a “critical mass” of men, at least not white men.  We don’t need to hear their “views” for purposes of “diversity,” and having gender balance– as opposed to a racial balance–is not a worthy institutional goal. Indeed, in the liberal/progressive mindset, we don’t really need men anyway.

What a mess we’ve created with the Equal Protection Clause. To paraphrase George Orwell’s Animal Farm, “Some people are more equal than others,” I guess.

HUMA ABEDIN’S “SPECIAL EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIP”: The Washington Post reports that longtime Clinton confidant and aide, Huma Abedin (also wife of disgraced Democratic congressman Anthony Weiner) was overpaid by the State Department and may have violated the State Department’s conflict-of-interest rules due to her “special employment relationship” with the Clintons:

In letters sent Thursday to Abedin, Kerry and the Office of Inspector General, [Senator Chuck] Grassley wrote that staff of the inspector general had found “at least a reasonable suspicion of a violation” of the law concerning the “theft of public money through time and attendance fraud” as well as “conflicts of interest connected to her overlapping employment.”

Grassley also raised the possibility that efforts to investigate Abedin’s actions were thwarted because many of her exchanges were sent through Clinton’s private e-mail server. . . .

Since 2013, Grassley has been inquiring about Abedin’s “special government employee” status, which during her final six months at the State Department allowed her to take outside employment with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo, a firm led by longtime Bill Clinton aide Douglas Band.

 Paul Mirengoff over at PowerLine notes:

By allowing it, Clinton wasn’t just helping a friend boost her income. She was increasing the potential leverage of the Clinton machine, and in ways that could, and maybe did, benefit the Clinton Foundation.

The Abedin scandal is thus related to the “Clinton cash” scandal.

It is also related to Hillary’s email scandal. According to Grassley, the State Department investigators have “reason to believe that email evidence relevant to [its] inquiry was contained in emails sent and received from her account on Secretary Clinton’s non-government server, making them unavailable to [the investigators’ office] through its normal statutory right of access to records.”

It’s all just another thread in Clinton’s intertwined, rotten ball of corruption. The fact that her closest aide-de-camp has received special favors and status is par for the course.

WELL, TO BE FAIR, IT’S NOT THE ONLY ONE: The College that Hates “Americans.”

The administrator who added a confusing, tin-eared Bias-Free Language Guide—a 4,500-word assault on the English language—to the University of New Hampshire’s website as a resource for students and faculty must have been crazy. . . .

The Bias-Free Language Guide is a massive wall of text that explains why common word choices, phrases, and modifiers are unwelcome in polite discourse. Its purpose is to assist in the creation of “an inclusive learning community” by raising awareness of trivial slights in everyday language that, “for some, feels like a form of violence.”

Its authors, UNH Coordinator of Community Equity and Diversity Sylvia Foster among them, intended the guide as tool for molding a more feelings-conscious campus. But if their advice had ever been followed by a significant number of students and faculty members, everyone would have soon found themselves walking on eggshells 100 percent of the time.

Some examples are in order.

Instead of referring to the elderly as senior citizens (or even as the elderly), members of the UNH community are encouraged to embrace the most up-to-date politically-correct terminology: “people of advanced age” in this case, according to the guide. This is supposed to be somehow less derogatory than “senior citizen”, which of course was once the politically correct of saying “old”.

A poor person is not a poor person; he or she (or ze! At least according to the section on gender-queer pronouns) is a “person living at or below the poverty line.” Ok, fine. But by the same token, one should say that the rich are “persons of material wealth,” since persons living at or below the poverty line may be rich in character, or spirit, or any number of other things.

Fat people are not fat, overweight, or obese; they are “people of size,” a decidedly abstract description. Are all of us not people of size, in some sense?

Midgets are “someone(s) of short stature.” Illegal aliens are “persons seeking asylum.” (Then again, what if they’re not seeking asylum?) A blind person is a “person who is blind.” . . .

It’s good that these public universities aren’t explicitly requiring the use of inoffensive language, because that would be both illegal and impossible. It would violate the First Amendment rights of students and faculty while failing to protect everyone’s delicate ears from words that hurt them. Everything is offensive to someone, and some things that are offensive to some people aren’t offensive to others. One man’s “fat” is another man’s “person of size.” The great war on hurt-feelings at American university campuses is unwinnable, and the causalities are significant.

Yeah, well, liberals/progressives aren’t very fond of the First Amendment anymore. I’m confident they would ban “offensive” speech if they could get away with it. Oh, wait–maybe I shouldn’t call them liberals/progressives. Probably the more politically correct term–as a literal matter– is totalitarians. There, that’s better.

DEMOCRATS BEGIN TRYING TO DRAFT UNCLE JOE: With Hillary Clinton’s candidacy appearing ever weaker, Democrats are beginning not-so-subtly to draft Joe Biden into running for President. A recent example is today’s piece in the National Journal by Josh Kraushaar, “Joe Biden’s Political Moment”:

But a funny thing happened on the way to the coronation. Throughout the summer, Clinton has been hammered over using a secret, personal email server as secretary of State—one that government officials believe may have compromised the country’s national security and allowed her to conceal (and delete) email correspondence. Meanwhile, as she faces energetic opposition from her party’s progressive base, she’s decided to tack to the left, offering little to disaffected swing voters dissatisfied with Obama. Her campaign operatives believe it’s worth mobilizing the Democratic Party’s ascendant constituencies without offering much to the (shrinking) number of voters in the middle.

In the process, however, her favorable ratings have hit all-time lows, with clear majorities of Americans saying they don’t like her and have trouble believing she’s trustworthy. . . .

Suddenly, if you’re Joe Biden, running for president makes a lot more political sense.

If Obama’s former campaign strategists truly believe that a Democratic candidate only needs to mobilize and microtarget the base to win the presidency, who better to do that than Obama’s unfailingly loyal No. 2? Biden, after all, pushed the president to come out for gay marriage against his best political instincts. He led the administration’s uphill fight for gun control in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, heading its task force on the subject. He’s helped with the administration’s lobbying effort for its Iran deal, pitched wary Democrats on the benefits of fast-track trade, and stood by the president’s side when he praised the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding Obamacare subsidies.

And at a time when authenticity is a highly valued asset—for betteror worse—Biden boasts the natural political skill set that Clinton clearly lacks. He’s a happy warrior who enjoys campaigning and isn’t constrained by talking points or rope lines. He’s able to ham it up with union rank-and-file, while also giving a stem-winding speech blasting Republicans in Congress. His all-too-frequent malapropisms are endearing at a time when voters are cynical about scripted politicians.

A “happy warrior.” Yeah, well, it’s easy to be happy when you’re ignorant. Biden’s rather long history of plagiarism–in law school, and as a public servant–is a telltale sign that he lacks the intellectual chops to serve as President. Democrats’ attempt to draft Biden–despite his intellectual deficit– is an amusing indicator of their growing panic over Clinton’s candidacy.

RELATED: Clinton campaign said to be growing edgy over possible Biden run.

IT’S MORE THAN JUST A SPOT: Ruth Wisse in the Wall Street Journal on “Obama’s Racial Blind Spot” and how the Iran deal will fuel racism toward Jews:

Barack Obama’s election to the presidency represented to many Americans this country’s final triumph over racism. Reversing the record of slavery and institutionalized discrimination, his victory was hailed as a redemptive moment for America and potentially for humankind. How grotesque that the president should now douse that hope by fueling racism on a global scale.

Iranian regime is currently the world’s leading exponent of anti-Jewish racism. . . . Whereas Adolf Hitler and Reinhard Heydrich had to plot the “Final Solution” in secrecy, using euphemisms for their intended annihilation of the Jews of Europe, Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei tweets that Israel “has no cure but to be annihilated.” Iran’s leaders, relishing how small Israel is, call it a “one bomb state,” and until the time arrives to deliver that bomb, they sponsor anti-Israel terrorism through Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militias. . . .

Perhaps Mr. Obama is oblivious to what the scholar Robert Wistrich (who died in May) called “the longest hatred” because it has been so much a part of his world as he moved through life. Muslim Indonesia, where he lived from age 6 to 10, trails only Pakistan and Iran in its hostility to Jews. An animus against Jews and Israel was a hallmark of the Rev.Jeremiah Wright’s church in Chicago that Mr. Obama attended for two decades. And before he ran for office, Mr. Obama carried the standard of the international left that invented the stigma of Zionism-as-imperialism. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama felt obliged to repudiate his pastor (who had famously cursed America from the pulpit), and muted his far-left credentials. Mr. Obama was voted into office by an electorate enamored of the idea that he would oppose all forms of racism. He has not met that expectation.

Some Jewish critics of Mr. Obama may be tempted to put his derelictions in a line of neglect by other presidents, but there is a difference. Thus one may argue that President Roosevelt should have bombed the approach routes to Auschwitz or allowed the Jewish-refugee ship St. Louis to dock in the U.S. during World War II, but those were at worst sins of omission. In sharpest contrast, President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran is an act of commission. This is the first time the U.S. will have deliberately entered into a pact with a country committed to annihilating another people—a pact that doesn’t even require formal repudiation of the country’s genocidal aims.

Exactly. Why most American Jews are standing silently by, like sheeple, in the face of these facts is a utter mystery to me. Why did American Jews not demand, at a minimum, Iran’s repudiation of its genocidal aims against Israel? Admittedly, such a repudiation would not have changed the hearts and minds of the Iranians, but it would have at least forced the Administration to publicly recognize and discuss Iran’s genocidal intentions.

As it stands, however, the genocidal aims of Iran toward Israel have been swept under the rug, not even worthy of discussion, which is exactly what the Obama Administration wanted. The Administration’s failure to even discuss the inhumanity of Iran’s racist/ethnic hatred is both shameful and telling, particularly given that Obama is our first black president whose entire presidency has focused incessantly on issues of race and ethnicity. The Obama Administration’s indifference to Iran’s hatred of Jews will further fan the flames such hatred across the globe.

The only explanation I can fathom for American Jews’ acquiescence to the Iran deal is that most are liberals/progressives first, Jews second. How tragic that this attitude has emerged only one generation removed from the Holocaust.

GEORGE WILL: Iran deal shows disdain for Congress.

The best reason for rejecting the agreement is to rebuke Obama’s long record of aggressive disdain for Congress — recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess, rewriting and circumventing statutes, etc. Obama’s intellectual pedigree runs to Woodrow Wilson, the first presidential disparager of the separation of powers. Like Wilson, Obama ignores the constitutional etiquette of respecting even rivalrous institutions.

The Iran agreement should be a treaty; it should not have been submitted first to the U.N. as a studied insult to Congress. Wilson said that rejecting the Versailles Treaty would “break the heart of the world.” The Senate, no member of which had been invited to accompany Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference, proceeded to break his heart. Obama deserves a lesson in the cost of Wilsonian arrogance. Knowing little history, Obama makes bad history.

Obama’s legacy is his palpable distaste for the other branches of government, particularly Congress. While Obama’s other actions disregarding Congress have been frustrating, annoying, and worrisome, his disregard of Congress–and hence, the American people–on the Iran nuclear deal is dangerously meglomaniacal.

RELATED: Nicholas Kristof summons the energy to defend the Iran deal in the New York Times. His only real point comes at the very end:

If the U.S. rejects this landmark deal, then we get the worst of both worlds: an erosion of sanctions and also an immediate revival of the Iran nuclear program.

We have a glimpse of what might happen. In 2003, Iran seemingly offered a comprehensive “grand bargain” to resolve relations with the United States, but George W. Bush’s administration dismissed it. Since then, Iran has gone from a tiny number of centrifuges to 19,000, getting within two months of “breakout” to a nuclear weapon. The point: Fulmination is not a substitute for policy, and a multilateral international agreement achieves far more protection than finger-wagging.

Diplomacy is rarely about optimal outcomes; it is about muddling along in the dark, dodging bullets, struggling to defer war and catastrophe for the time being, nurturing opportunities for a better tomorrow. By that standard, the Iran deal succeeds. Sure, it is flawed, and yes, it makes us safer.

Translation: If we back out of the Iran deal now–after Obama has already diplomatically agreed to it, without seeking congressional approval–the other nations will still lift sanctions, but Iran won’t honor its agreement, and will indeed ramp up its nuclear efforts. Why Kristof assumes the former (that there will be an “erosion of sanctions,” in his words) if the US backs out, he never explains. Likewise, Kristof never addresses the key question that is troubling most of America: How can Iran be trusted to hold up its end of this “bargain” anyway, when it has not agreed to “anytime, anywhere” inspections (and in fact, the U.S. never sought them) and there are at least two secret “side deals” with the IAEA?

Yet somehow, in a biblical leap of faith, Kristof concludes that the Iran deal will make us safer, because we are muddling along in the dark, dodging bullets and struggling to defer war and catastrophe. In other words, the very most Kristof can muster in support of the Iran deal is that it might keep us ignorant about Iran’s nuclear ambitions a little longer and allow the Obama Administration to kick this apocalyptic can down the road to a future (likely Republican) Administration. And of course that is darn-near perfect, isn’t it?

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION FOR HOUSING MOVES FORWARD: Michael Patrick Leahy at Breitbart reports on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, the Obama Administration’s latest affirmative action pet project that will withhold federal funds to localities that fail to have an as-yet-undefined acceptable percentage of minority residents:

The AFFH rule “gives the federal government a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood — imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education,” as National Review’s Stanley Kurtz put it last week.

When then-Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan first proposed the AFFH rule in 2013, Paul Compton, a housing law expert and partner at the law firm Bradly Arant Boult Cummings told the Weekly Standard it is “a real shift in emphasis from ensuring that the private sector and participants in federal programs don’t unlawfully discriminate to defining the existence of racially and ethnically ‘segregated’ neighborhoods to be in themselves a violation of fair housing.”

Under this new rule, Compton said, “if a neighborhood is not integrated in some vaguely defined ratio, then that in itself is a fair housing issue.”

The Supreme Court has long recognized an important distinction between de jure (by law) versus de facto (by fact) racial segregation, with the former being forbidden by the Equal Protection Clause and the latter being, well, just the result of private conduct and human nature/preferences, and thus beyond the reach of the Fourteenth Amendment (which limits only “state”–government–action). Congress, however, has increasingly endorsed, via statutes–including the Fair Housing Act–that the notion that mere statistical differences in racial representation in private activities such as housing, mortgages, and employment, can constitute “racial discrimination” due to a theory called “disparate impact.”

The AFFH rule is the Obama Administration’s radical vision of how to implement disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act. Congress could stop it immediately, if it so desired, by an explicit amendment to the Fair Housing Act that disapproves of the AFFH rule. But as is all too common these days, Congress seems unable to exercise its constitutional authority, instead preferring to roll over and show its beta belly in response to President Obama’s extreme transformation of the country.

I hope the moderators of the upcoming GOP presidential debates will be sure to ask all the candidates whether they will make it a priority to reverse the AFFH and similar disparate impact rules enacted by the Obama Administration.

BECAUSE THEY HAVE CONTEMPT FOR ANYONE WHO TRIES TO STOP THEM: Obama Administration lawyers have (once again) been threatened with contempt. This time, it’s federal district judge Emmet Sullivan, who threatened today to hold the IRS Commissioner and DOJ attorneys in contempt because the the IRS has failed to produce status reports and newly recovered emails of Lois Lerner, as Sullivan had ordered on July 1, 2015.

According to Judicial Watch, the group initiating the lawsuit against the IRS for its failure to comply with a FOIA request:

During the a status hearing today, Sullivan warned that the failure to follow his order was serious and the IRS and Justice Department’s excuses for not following his July 1 order were “indefensible, ridiculous, and absurd.”  He asked the IRS’ Justice Department lawyer Geoffrey Klimas, “Why didn’t the IRS comply” with his court order and “why shouldn’t the Court hold the Commissioner of the IRS in contempt.”  Judge Sullivan referenced his contempt findings against Justice Department prosecutors in the prosecution of late Senator Ted Stevens (R-AK) and reminded the Justice Department attorney he had the ability to detain him for contempt.  Warning he would tolerate no further disregard of his orders, Judge Sullivan said, “I will haul into court the IRS Commissioner to hold him personally into contempt.”

I don’t recall any prior Administration being threatened with contempt as often as the Obama Administration. It seems that, in multiple major cases, they are being threatened with contempt. DOJ lawyers are starting to get a bad reputation, when they used to be widely respected. DOJ lawyers in previous Administrations certainly did not so brazenly defy the orders of federal judges and Congress. The Obama Administration’s disrespect for the rule of law is permeating virtually everything it does.

THE ATTEMPTED COUP BEGINS: Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) files a motion to oust House Speaker John Boehner.

Mr. Meadows, North Carolina Republican, filed a motion to “vacate the chair,” which could force a no-confidence vote by the full chamber and result in the removal of Mr. Boehner as speaker.

In the resolution, Mr. Meadows says Mr. Boehner, Ohio Republican, “has endeavored to consolidate power and centralize decision-making, bypassing the majority of the 435 Members of Congress and the people they represent.”

He also says the speaker has limited debate, pushed legislation to the brink to compel votes in a state of crisis and moved to “punish Members who vote according to their conscience” instead of how he wants.

According to a report in Politico:

Meadows, however, didn’t go as far as he could have. A motion to vacate the chair — last attempted roughly a century ago — is typically considered a privileged resolution. In that format, the House would hold a vote within two legislative days. Meadows, however, chose not to offer it in that form, which he said was a sign that he wanted a discussion. . . .

“It’s really more about trying to have a conversation about making this place work,” Meadows said.

Meadows and the House Freedom Caucus he co-founded has been at loggerheads with House leadership over numerous issues for months now. The GOP leadership has never been very welcoming of the party’s tea party members, preferring instead to vilify them and treat them as enemies. The question going forward is rather simple: Does the GOP leadership prefer to play in insider’s political game of D.C. business-as-usual (with a few skirmishes for show), or is it willing to listen to the outside-the-beltway voters, who are demanding bolder, genuine change? Has the GOP leadership heard, and does it even respect, its own base anymore?

BECAUSE, YOU KNOW, DIVERSITY!: Lawsuit claims white male DC public works supervisor Christopher Lyons was fired because of his race.

Lyons claims in an explosive but little noticed federal lawsuit that he was fired as a District of Columbia Department of Public Works supervisor because black employees did not want to work for a “honkey,” as they repeatedly called him. . . . Lyons finally got the boot after just eight months on the job without explanation. But one employee certainly wished him a bon voyage. The day he was fired somebody posted a sign on Lyons’ door that said, “Get out white boy.” . . .

He was the only white supervisor at the DPW and apparently the first one ever at the Fleet division. . . .

Indeed, all the other workers in the fleet division were black, and if the allegations are correct, they almost immediately resented their new “honkey” boss.

When Smith addressed black workers at his first Fleet staff meeting in March 2012, garage mechanics called him a “cracker,”  “white boy,” and “honkey,” the lawsuit says.

Yeah, the thing I love most about the Obama Administration is all the racial healing this country has experienced.  The liberal/progressive emphasis on “diversity” sure is paying off.

ROGER SIMON: Donald Trump and the high priests of the press.

“It came slightly ahead of schedule,” The Wall Street Journal gleefully wrote last week, “but Donald Trump’s inevitable self-immolation arrived on the weekend when he assailed John McCain’s war record.”

Uh. Hold the fire extinguishers. Because Trump did not burst into flame. His poll numbers actually went up after he attacked McCain, a man whose political base is largely made up of Sunday TV show bookers.

The Huffington Post was also in a snit. It declared it was not going to report on Trump’s campaign in its political section, but rather in its entertainment section. . . .

But The Des Moines Register nearly came down with the vapors. . . .The paper went so far as to demand that Trump drop out of the race, a decision, I always thought, the American people should make at the ballot box rather than a newspaper on its editorial page.

But what is the real problem? The rodeo clown or the people coming to the rodeo in order to see the clown? And if the people are gathering, should the press keep that a secret?

The mainstream media is also making a clown of itself by its indignant tone regarding Trump, emanating from both the political left and right. Has anyone watched MSNBC lately (to ask the question is to answer it, I know)? The level of discourse there is no more dignified than one would hear in an insane asylum. The editorial page of the New York Times is little better, and its opinion editorials offer virtually no balance.

So why is the mainstream media on both the left and right in such a tizzy over Trump? Because he is winning, and they hate that. The political left hates it because they are insanely afraid that Trump has awakened the silent majority, and they aren’t going to take the progressive agenda anymore. The establishment political right hates it because they are insanely afraid that Trump will beat their preferred “insider” candidates, and they consequently won’t have as much power and influence anymore. Others on the political right are simply not convinced that Trump is truly a conservative.

Whatever the reason for the apoplexy, as I’ve remarked before, it’s fun to watch. And I think it’s actually healthy for the country.

UPDATE [From Glenn]: This is the other Roger Simon, not the PJ Media one.

DANGEROUS SECRETS: Mark Thiessen: “Obama’s Secret Iran Deals Exposed.”

The agreements were uncovered, completely by chance, by two members of Congress — Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) — who were in Vienna meeting with the U.N.-releated agency.

In an interview, Pompeo told me that he and Cotton were meeting with the deputy director of the IAEA and the agency’s two top Iran negotiators just days after the nuclear accord was announced, when they asked how the agency will carry out verification at the Iranian military complex at Parchin. IAEA officials told them, quite casually, that the details were all covered in agreements negotiated between the IAEA and the Iranian government. It was the first they had heard of the side deals.

Pompeo says they asked whether they could see those agreements. He says IAEA officials replied, “ ‘Oh no, of course not, no, you’re not going to get to see those.’ And so everybody on our side of the table asked, ‘Has Secretary Kerry seen these?’ ‘No, Secretary Kerry hasn’t seen them. No American is ever going to get to see them.’ ”

It turns out that only the two parties — the IAEA and Iran — get to see the actual agreements (though you can see a picture of Iranian and IAEA officials holding up what appear to be the secret accords here).

In other words, Obama is gambling our national security and handing over $150 billion in sanctions relief to Iran, based on secret agreements negotiated between the IAEA and Iran that no U.S. official has seen.

Cutting a nuclear deal with Iran, the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism, without either realizing or revealing that there are “side deals” with the IAEA is treasonous. Members of Congress who now vote to support it without knowing the full terms of these side deals are likewise traitors.

FREE THE CHILDREN!: Lenore Skenazy in the New York Post, “Give Parents Back Their Rights to Let Their Kids Walk Free.”

I’m so old that when I was growing up, my stay-at-home mom stayed at home.

She didn’t take me to school. She just waved goodbye and off I walked, starting at age 5. When I got to the one suburban street I had to cross, who was there to ensure my safety?

A 10-year-old in an orange sash. The crossing guard.

No one witnessing this adult-unsupervised scene called 911 because — well, first of all, no one had a cellphone, and second, no one thought it was weird or wrong.

But today, we fear for kids any time they’re on their own. So even though crime is at a 50-year low — lower than when most of us parents were kids — only about 13 percent of American children walk to school. . . .

But in part it’s also because it has become downright unusual — and sometimes illegal — to let kids go outside unsupervised.

Illegal?

Well, you’ve probably heard about the Meitiv family in suburban Maryland. Parents Danielle and Alexander let their kids, 10 and 6, walk home from the local park and were investigated not once but twice for child neglect.

Eventually they were cleared of all charges.

But that wasn’t before one incident when the cops picked up the kids and held them for five hours without letting them call home.

Or how about the case just last month of Nicole Jensen in Westbrook, Maine? Her 7-year-old daughter was playing for an hour in the playground down the block — you can see it from the family’s porch. But someone called 911 to report an unsupervised child, and the cops swooped in.

I confess that I would never have allowed my child to walk to school, even though we live in a very safe community with sidewalks. But it would also never occur to me that allowing a child to do so should warrant an investigation by protective services.

I’ve written about this before.  In a zeal to “protect” the children, some adults are becoming super-nannies, swooping down to call protective services anytime they spy your child alone in a playground, saying the wrong words, with dirty clothes, living without modern amenities, or getting the “wrong” medical care.  They think they know how to raise your kids better than you, so your children become “the State’s children” until you can wrestle them back. We are punishing parents, too often, for being poor or bucking cultural norms rather than being physically or emotionally abusive.  The constitutional “right” to raise our children is being eroded–a goal political leftists have long sought.

“LAWLESS” PRETTY MUCH SUMS IT UP: David Rivkin and Lee Casey in the Wall Street Journal, “The Lawless Underpinnings of the Iran Nuclear Deal.”

The Iranian nuclear agreement announced on July 14 is unconstitutional, violates international law and features commitments that President Obama could not lawfully make. However, because of the way the deal was pushed through, the states may be able to derail it by enacting their own Iran sanctions legislation. . . .

The Constitution’s division of the treaty-making power between the president and Senate ensured that all major U.S. international undertakings enjoyed broad domestic support. It also enabled the states to make their voices heard through senators when considering treaties—which are constitutionally the “supreme law of the land” and pre-empt state laws.

The Obama administration had help in its end-run around the Constitution. Instead of insisting on compliance with the Senate’s treaty-making prerogatives, Congress enacted the Iran Nuclear Agreement Act of 2015. Known as Corker-Cardin, it surrenders on the constitutional requirement that the president obtain a Senate supermajority to go forward with a major international agreement. Instead, the act effectively requires a veto-proof majority in both houses of Congress to block elements of the Iran deal related to U.S. sanctions relief. The act doesn’t require congressional approval for the agreement as a whole.

Last week the U.N. Security Council endorsed the Iran deal. The resolution, adopted under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter, legally binds all member states, including the U.S. Given the possibility that Congress could summon a veto-proof majority to block the president’s ability to effect sanctions relief, the administration might be unable to comply with the very international obligations it has created. This is beyond reckless. . . .

The administration faces another serious problem because the deal requires the removal of state and local Iran-related sanctions. That would have been all right if Mr. Obama had pursued a treaty with Iran, which would have bound the states, but his executive-agreement approach cannot pre-empt the authority of the states.

That leaves the states free to impose their own Iran-related sanctions, as they have done in the past against South Africa and Burma. The Constitution’s Commerce Clause prevents states from imposing sanctions as broadly as Congress can. Yet states can establish sanctions regimes—like banning state-controlled pension funds from investing in companies doing business with Iran—powerful enough to set off a legal clash over American domestic law and the country’s international obligations. The fallout could prompt the deal to unravel.

Rivkin and Casey are right about the Constitution’s treaty power being circumvented, with the unfortunate blessing of a cowardly Congress. They’re also right that the Administration’s decision to obtain a speedy U.N. Security Council resolution prior to the Corker-Cardin congressional vote is a blatant and reckless end-run around U.S. sovereignty, bypassing our national legislature in favor of a multi-lateral, extra-sovereign body. Any future President wishing to unravel the Iranian nuclear deal–which Secretary of State has assured us repeatedly is “not legally binding“– will now be branded by the U.N. as an international “law breaker,” a point I made back in April.

I hope States do, indeed, continue to refuse to do business with companies doing business with Iran. The financial impact probably won’t be enough to trigger an Iranian accusation that the Obama Administration isn’t enforcing the deal, however, and consequently the Administration is unlikely to march into court claiming that the Supremacy Clause trumps States’ actions.  So I doubt States’ doing this will “prompt the [nuclear] deal to unravel.”  Nonetheless, this is one interesting and creative way that States can constitutionally push back.

THIS SEEMS FAKE, BUT IT’S REAL: At Anti-Bullying Conference, Iowa Middle Schoolers Learn About Lesbian Strap-On Anal Sex, Fake Testicles.

In rural, small-town Iowa, a group of parents and community leaders is seeking to prevent students from the local taxpayer-funded middle school and high school from attending future versions of an anti–bullying conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender teens.

The last one — in April — left many of the denizens of Humboldt, Iowa up in arms, reports Des Moines NBC affiliate WHO-TV.

Iowa Safe Schools, an activist group out of Des Moines, hosted the conference.

It was quite something.

Among the nearly two dozen speakers, “only two” addressed bullying, one attendee estimated, according to EAGnews.org.

The rest of the sessions involved issues such as “how to pleasure their gay partners.”

Middle school girls from Humboldt (pop.: 4,690) had the opportunity to learn “how to sew fake testicles into their underwear in order to pass themselves off as boys.”

One speaker wore a dress made out of condoms to which could be “used as needed.” . . .

Nate Monson, executive director of Iowa Safe Schools, said parents who worry about middle school kids hearing about anal sex with strap-ons and analingus are “disgusting.”

“It’s incredibly frustrating that adults are being the problem and being the bully,” Monson told the Des Moines NBC affiliate. “

If I were a parent in this district, I would not stop until heads rolled. I looked up Iowa Safe Schools, the organization that sponsored this “event,” and discovered that, despite a moniker suggesting that it’s aimed at reducing bullying, it’s actually a LGBT promotion organization, with its mission statement as follows:

The mission of Iowa Safe Schools is to: a) improve school climate in order to increase the personal safety, mental health, and student learning of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and allied (LGBTA) and all other students; b) increase awareness and understanding among current and future educators, school administrators, and key community agents of inequities regarding the safety of LGBTA students and their family member(s) in schools and communities throughout Iowa.  Iowa Safe Schools also seeks to empower these key actors with effective, research-based tools and strategies to combat intolerance and safety inequities.

No one wants LGBT–or any other kids–to be bullied at school. But there is a huge difference between promoting LGBT tolerance and promoting LGBT sex, and the event in Humboldt crossed the line. And the line-crossing doesn’t seem to be limited to the Humboldt event. Back in April, at an event in Des Moines called “The Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth”–also sponsored by Iowa Safe Schools–students were similarly shocked to find that an event billed as “anti-bullying” turned out to be LGBT promotion:

What one student thought was going to be a day to support anti-bullying at the Governor’s Conference on LGBTQ Youth, turned out to be much more graphic.

A metro high school student who attended the conference says she was overwhelmed by a sexually explicit question and answer forum at one of the workshops. She was so shocked that she recorded a portion of the Q&A, where someone anonymously asked if anal sex was painful.

The conference hosted by Iowa Safe Schools. Executive Director Nate Monson defends the open forum and says it’s the only chance many LGBTQ teens have to get answers.

Since when does a teen’s desire to “get answers” mean that all fellow students must hear a graphic answer, down to specifics about sexual toys and positions?  When did sexual education turn into sexual proselytizing?

Iowa Safe Schools and other similar LGBT “safe schools” efforts aren’t about preventing bullying or even sexual education, but about promotion of LGBT sex.  Yes, students need to learn the specifics about body parts, how they work, and how babies are made. Such education became integral, after all, to help prevent unwanted pregnancies. But unwanted pregnancy is not possible with LGBT sex. So teaching about specific LGBT sexual techniques and practices isn’t sexual education, it’s sexual promotion. And many parents are, understandably, not comfortable with the public school system being used for such promotion. Those parents who are comfortable with teaching sexual promotion–learning the means of sexual pleasure–are of course free to discuss these matters with their children.

Iowa Governor Terry Branstad (a Republican) and the Iowa legislature should immediately ban all “safe school” efforts sponsored by Iowa Safe Schools.