NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT: Hillary Paid Herself $250,000 From Campaign Funds.
I started to wonder if her big donors knew where there money was going, but they probably understand exactly what they’re paying for.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
March 4, 2016
March 3, 2016
HERE WE GO AGAIN: House ‘Flipping’ Skyrockets, Sparks Concern Over a Housing Bubble.
March 2, 2016
DOG BITES MAN: Illinois Obamacare plan crippled by losses.
NATO COMMANDER: Terrorists “a daily part” of refugee flow into Europe.
[U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip] Breedlove said Russia’s actions in Syria have “wildly exacerbated the problem.” Despite its public pronouncements, Russia has done little to counter ISIS, but instead has bolstered Syrian President Bashar Assad.
Russia and Assad, Breedlove said, are using mass migration as a weapon to overwhelm European support structures and break European resolve. He cited the use of barrel bombs, which are unguided weapons and have no military value, against civilians in Syria. The only purpose of these indiscriminate attacks is to terrorize Syrian citizens and “get them on the road” and make them problems for other countries, Breedlove said.
Didn’t John Kerry negotiate a ceasefire in Syria?
HOPE: Food Stamp Users Near Record High Despite Low Unemployment Rate.
Perhaps Bernie Sanders is onto something about the “real unemployment rate.”
RUSSIAN PROSECUTORS: Woman Who Decapitated Child Didn’t Act Alone.
Before a Moscow court approved Gulchekhra Bobokulova’s arrest for two months, prosecutors told the court they believe there are individuals who “incited” her to carry out the slaying and they are still at large. The suspect is expected to be charged with murder later this week.
Investigators, however, said earlier that the suspect, who is married, appeared to be mentally unstable.
The motive for the slaying is not known.
They might try looking into that alleged “Allahu akbar!” thing.
Although my paranoid side wonders if the murder wasn’t a false flag operation involving Russian intelligence. There’s been speculation dating back to 1999 that former KGB officer Vladimir Putin is fond of those.
REAL CLEAR POLITICS HAS THE UPDATED DELEGATE COUNT, and as of this morning non-Trump trails Trump by four.
February 29, 2016
THESE AREN’T THE DRONES YOU’RE LOOKING FOR: Outdoor sets of next year’s Star Wars Episode VIII may be protected by anti-drone drones.
Some of the scenes for the movie are being filmed in Croatia in the tourist town of Dubrovnik, according to the tech site Blastr. They relay a report from the Croatian Star Wars site MosCroatia that the sets for Star Wars; Episode VIII could be protected by as many as 600 guards, and there may be guard drones as well to counter anyone who might be trying to get some illicit footage with a drone of their own.
The notice of the security measures, translated from Croatian, indicate there will be “a special team with drones that will remove the uninvited drones so that no recording can be conducted by the public.”
Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good UAV-killing UAV at your side, kid.
NANCY PELOSI TO DONORS IN 2010: “I feel like I’m dealing with the junior senator from Illinois.”
California Rep. Nancy Pelosi disparagingly referred to President Obama as “the junior senator from Illinois” during a meeting with wealthy Democratic donors just after the party was trounced in 2010’s mid-term elections, according to an email that Sidney Blumenthal sent to then Sec. of State Hillary Clinton.
“When I go to the White House I feel like I’m dealing with the junior senator from Illinois,” is what Blumenthal claimed Pelosi told a group of people gathered at the Democracy Alliance’s annual meeting, held in mid-Nov. 2010.
The email was contained in the batch of records released by the State Department on Friday.
I wonder what Pelosi thinks of a former Secretary of State who lets juicy items like this one slip from her formerly private email server.
FLASHBACK — REVIEWING TRUMP STEAKS: “It should be noted that ‘Never again’ is a phrase usually reserved for the Holocaust.”
The promotional photos don’t even look appetizing.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Airstrikes Resume Amid Shaky Syria Truce
The Syrian regime and its Russian allies stepped up airstrikes on opposition-held territory Sunday on the second day of an internationally backed cease-fire after a lull in violence a day earlier, according to antigovernment activists.
The areas struck Sunday are largely controlled by rebels who have agreed to the partial cease-fire, the activists and residents said. Extremists who are excluded from the cease-fire are also active in some of the same areas.
Rebels backed by backed by Western and Arab states fear the airstrikes will be used to attack them under the guise of striking the extremists; the Syrian regime considers all antigovernment fighters terrorists. Rebels have said such continued attacks could torpedo an already shaky truce.
All is proceeding exactly as I have foreseen.
THE CHINA SYNDROME: China cuts reserve requirement ratio for fifth time since Feb. 2015.
China is drowning in cheap money, bad loans, and industrial overcapacity. And contrary to claims by Donald Trump and others, the country’s central bank is burning through its foreign reserves in an attempt to prop up the yuan and avoid a balance-of-payments crisis.
“Socialism with Chinese characteristics” looks an awful lot like any other crony-based system right before the bottom drops out.
YOU DON’T SAY: Divisions within GOP over Trump’s candidacy are growing.
A campaign full of racial overtones and petty, R-rated put-downs grew even uglier Sunday after Trump declined repeatedly in a CNN interview to repudiate the endorsement of him by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Trump had disavowed Duke at a news conference on Friday, but he stammered when asked about Duke on Sunday.
Marco Rubio, who has been savaging Trump as a “con man” for three days, responded by saying that Trump’s defiance made him “unelectable.” The senator from Florida said at a rally in Northern Virginia, “We cannot be the party that nominates someone who refuses to condemn white supremacists.”
The GOP race began as embarrassment of riches, and now it’s just an embarrassment.
MRS. CLINTON’S WAR, AS DESCRIBED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES: A New Libya, With “Very Little Time Left”
Mrs. Clinton would be mostly a bystander as the country dissolved into chaos, leading to a civil war that would destabilize the region, fueling the refugee crisis in Europe and allowing the Islamic State to establish a Libyan haven that the United States is now desperately trying to contain.
“Nobody will say it’s too late. No one wants to say it,” said Mahmud Shammam, who served as chief spokesman for the interim government. “But I’m afraid there is very little time left for Libya.”
Media reports referred to Mrs. Clinton’s one brief visit to Libya in October 2011 as a “victory lap,” but the declaration was decidedly premature.
Read the whole thing.
February 26, 2016
For years, we’ve been told that over prescribing antibiotics would eventually lead to the evolution of super bugs that couldn’t be killed. Well, it’s happened, and over two million people a year are infected with drug-resistant forms of tuberculosis, gonorrhea, and staph. In the past few months, we’ve seen another bug become super powered, lice. Over the years, the strongest lice have defeated over-the-counter treatments and bred to create all-powerful and uber-disgusting super lice.
2015 and ‘16 has seen an outbreak of these super-powered critters take over 25 states and they can’t be killed with traditional medications. “The lice themselves have sort of built up a resistance to conventional over-the-counter treatments that most patients use for the treatments,” said Pediatrician Daniel McCrimons.
Prevention tips include teaching your kids “If it touches hair, we don’t share,” not over-washing your child’s hair, and using a lice-preventative spray.
DID GLOBAL WARMING PAUSE OR NOT? Yes, no, maybe.
The debate between researchers and doubters reached a crescendo last summer, when scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration updated their temperature records and concluded that global warming has not slowed down in the 2000s (ClimateWire, June 5, 2015).
Now, a group of prominent climate scientists are challenging NOAA’s conclusion in a commentary published this week in Nature Climate Change.
“The interpretation [the NOAA group] made was not valid,” said John Fyfe, a climate scientist at Environment and Climate Change Canada and lead author of the commentary. “The slowdown is there, even in this new updated data set.”
Don’t you remember the science being settled?
WHAT PASSES FOR GOOD NEWS DURING THE OBAMA RECOVERY: The U.S. economy’s slowdown in the final three months of 2015 wasn’t quite as bad as initially thought.
Let the good times roll.
UM: Oil Must Fall to $0 to Meet Current Inflation Expectations.
American frackers are good, but they aren’t that good.
CHANGE: Voting underway in Iran elections with moderates forced to the sidelines.
I had been assured by no less than the U.S. President and the Secretary of State that signing a deal with Iran concerning that country’s nuclear program would empower the moderates there.
The Libyan branch of ISIS staged a gruesome attack Wednesday on government-security headquarters in the western city of Sabratha. According to the AP, the group beheaded 12 officers before taking control of the complex.
“A second security official said that the militants used the headless bodies of the officers they killed to block the roads leading to the security headquarters—which they occupied for about three hours,” the report added.
The attack came less than a week after American airstrikes hit an ISIS training camp in the city, killing about 40 people, including two Serbian hostages. The renascent U.S. efforts in Libya speak to a growing concern shared by a number of countries about ISIS’s increasing ability to flourish in the North African country.
Hillary Clinton has some ‘splainin to do.
February 24, 2016
NEVER TELL ME THE ODDS: Earth May Be a 1-in-700-Quintillion Kind of Place.
Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson from Uppsala University in Sweden arrived at this staggering figure — a 7 followed by 20 zeros — with the aid of a computer model that simulated the universe’s evolution following the Big Bang. Zackrisson’s model combined information about known exoplanets with our understanding of the early universe and the laws of physics to recreate the past 13.8 billion years.
I’m skeptical. It’s a big universe, and our biggest telescopes have only seen the smallest fraction of it up close.
UPDATE [FROM GLENN]: So you’re telling me there’s a chance!
ASIA PIVOT: China sends fighter jets to contested island in South China Sea.
In a move likely to further increase already volatile tensions in the region, China has deployed fighter jets to a contested island in the South China Sea, the same island where China deployed surface-to-air missiles last week, two U.S. officials tell Fox News.
The dramatic escalation came as Secretary of State John Kerry hosted his Chinese counterpart, Foreign Minister Wang Yi, at the State Department.
Ouch.