NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: “Obama Is Pressed to Open Military Front Against ISIS in Libya”

That country seemed so much more peaceful before Obama and Clinton initiated an illegal and unnecessary war of choice there.

OBAMA LIED, THE DEBT CEILING DIED: Veronique de Rugy reports for National Review.

Well, as it turns out, documents subpoenaed by the House Financial Services Committee reveal that during the 2013 debt ceiling debate, ”the Obama Administration is not only capable of prioritizing payments in case the nation’s borrowing authority is not raised, it has run ‘tabletop exercises’ to prepare for such a contingency – contradicting earlier public statements from Treasury officials.”

Here are some tidbits from the committee’s press release:

Made public for the first time, records turned over to the Committee in response to the subpoena show the Federal Reserve Bank of New York previously made plans to prioritize Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and principal and interest payments on the debt over other government obligations.

The Administration, however, directed the New York Fed to withhold this information from the Committee because “Treasury wants to maximize pressure on Congress by limiting communications about contingency planning,” according to a previously undisclosed internal email of the New York Fed….

Efforts by the Obama Administration to keep its contingency planning a secret were met with objections from officials at the Federal Reserve and the New York Fed, who described the approach in an email as “crazy, counter-productive, and add[ing] risk to an already risky situation.”

The next time someone accuses the GOP Congress of playing chicken with the economy, show them this link.

RESET: NATO reports Russian submarine activity “equalling or even surpassing Cold War levels.”

The North Atlantic was again and area “of concern” for the alliance, Vice Admiral Clive Johnstone, Commander of NATO’s Maritime Command, said, with the commanders of his submarine cells currently reporting “more activity from Russian submarines than we’ve seen since the days of the Cold War”.

Not only are Russian submarines returning to Cold War levels of operational activity, but Russian submarines have made a major jump in technological performance, Vice Adm Johnstone said, with NATO seeing “a level of Russian capability that we haven’t seen before”.

Russia, he said, “through an extraordinary investment path not mirrored by the West” has made “technology leaps that [are] remarkable, and credit to them.” Russian submarines now “have longer ranges, they have better systems, they’re freer to operate”, he said. The alliance has also “seen a rise in professionalism and ability to operate their boats that we haven’t seen before”, noted Vice Adm Johnstone, adding, “that is a concern”.

The US however still leads in deployments of sick burns.

CHANGE: “A Golden Age for Pentagon Waste — Ridiculous Pentagon spending may be reaching historic levels.”

PRIVACY UPDATE: Germany considers ban on all cash transactions greater than $5,450.

Deputy finance minister Michael Meister said Wednesday that Germany would like to see a European solution, but could introduce a national limit if none is achieved, news agency dpa reported. He said “we can imagine a level of 5,000 euros.”

Meister said there’s “the risk of terror financing and we also have the problem of how to clear up money-laundering offenses properly” when large transactions are conducted anonymously.

Germans tend to use cash more than many other Europeans.

People already engaging in under-the-counter cash transaction don’t seem likely to go along with this.

MAN BITES DOG: “Woman stops Florida cop for speeding.”

“The reason I pulled you over today, and I’m asking you to come over and have a conversation, is because I saw you since Miller Drive, when you were first jumping onto the Palmetto, and you were pushing 90 miles an hour,” the woman told the officer after he poked his head into her open car window.

“Really?” the officer said. “Okay.”

There’s video at the link.

The story also cites a Pulitzer Prize-winning Sun-Sentinel investigation into off-duty official driving habits, which revealed “that nearly 800 officers from several departments and agencies were reaching excessive speeds, sometimes hitting 130 mph.”

Even traffic laws are just for the little people.

DECIMATED AND ON THE RUN: al Qaeda seizes town in southern Yemen.

Azzan is a major commercial hub of about 70,000 people in an arid and mountainous region and was controlled by al Qaeda for around a year until the group was ejected in 2012 by an alliance of tribesmen and armed residents loyal to Yemen’s since ousted central government.

“Dozens of al Qaeda gunmen arrived in the early hours of the morning and set up checkpoints at the entrances to the town and in its streets. They planted their black flag on government buildings,” one resident who declined to be named told Reuters by telephone.

“They faced no resistance or clashes,” the resident said, adding that tribal militia forces quit the area as it was being taken over.

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has expanded during Yemen’s civil war, which triggered a military intervention by a Gulf Arab coalition last March, and also controls the major port of Mukalla in a neighboring province.

The Saudi-led coalition had been making headway against al Qaeda, but currently finds itself battling the UN over its airstrikes in Yemen.

SHOULD PLANNED PARENTHOOD TAMPERING CHARGES CHILL JOURNALISTS? Law professors Sherry F. Colb & Michael C. Dorf write for CNN:

The Planned Parenthood case reveals that activists — and journalists — might also have to go to prison for undercover reporting if they violate any laws to gain access to the targets of their investigation.

Consequently, the public fails to learn about some important matters. Whistleblower statutes provide a modicum of protection for insiders who expose wrongdoing, but the risks to career and reputation frequently prevent those in the know from coming forward.
…
Thus, the law can legitimately circumscribe undercover investigations. For example, the Center for Medical Progress could possibly be held civilly liable for misleading editing of the Planned Parenthood videos. But the criminal prosecution of Daleiden and Merritt, even if they did break the law, could chill undercover journalists and activists everywhere.

Those charges ought to scare journalists, sure. Democratic operatives with bylines, not so much.

FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Heritage reports that “the United States, once again, finds itself outside the top 10 free economies of the world — tying its all-time low score.”

RCP POLL AVERAGE: Big losers in Iowa from last week’s Trumpless GOP debate were Trump and Cruz. Only Rubio moved up, if that’s worth anything at this late date.

(Hat tip, Megan McArdle via Will Collier through Twitter.)

CONTAINED: ISIS affiliate Boko Haram razes Nigerian village, burns children alive.

Nigerian radical Islamist group Boko Haram burnt children alive in its razing of the northwestern village of Dalori, officials said on Monday as the death toll rose to 86.

The group’s militants attacked the village, situated approximately five kilometers (three miles) from Boko Haram’s birthplace, the city of Maiduguri, on Saturday in an arson, shooting and suicide bomb attack.

Three female suicide bombers detonated explosives. The militants also attempted to storm a nearby refugee camp that is home to more than 25,000 people.

The first Nigerian soldiers to show up were unable to dislodge the killers because the Boko Haram “militants” were better armed.

HILLARY CLINTON’S HANDLING OF CLASSIFIED MATERIAL ISN’T AS BAD AS YOU THINK — it’s as bad as it’s possible for you to think:

EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has now deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails “too damaging” to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.

The decision to withhold the documents in full, and not provide even a partial release with redactions, further undercuts claims by the State Department and the Clinton campaign that none of the intelligence in the emails was classified when it hit Clinton’s personal server.

Hillary Clinton, as I’ve been telling VodkaPundit readers since last summer, belongs in jail.

DEPARTMENT OF THINGS YOU NEVER THOUGHT YOU’D SAY: I agree fully with the action taken today by French President Francois Hollande.

A lunch between the French and Iranian presidents in Paris was scrapped today because France refused to remove wine from the menu.

Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has been on a tour of Europe, signing billions of pounds worth of business deals with different nations, after economic sanctions against the country were lifted.

He was due to dine with President Francois Hollande at an upmarket restaurant in the French capital.

More like this, please.

JOHN SCHINDLER EXPLAINS JUST HOW MUCH DAMAGE Hillary Clinton’s email problem did to our national security:

To take just the Russians: their plus-sized embassy in Washington, D.C. is conveniently located on a hill overlooking the city, with an impressive antenna field on its roof aimed downtown. That is where Ms. Clinton’s “unclassified” emails went. The Russians care so much about State Department information they’ve been caught planting bugs inside a conference room just down the hall from the Secretary of State’s office. “Of course the SVR got it all,” explained a high-ranking former KGB officer to me about EmailGate (the SVR is the post-Soviet successor to the KGB’s foreign intelligence arm). “I don’t know if we’re as good as we were in my time,” he added, “but even half-drunk the SVR could get those emails, they probably couldn’t believe how easy Hillary made it for them.”

Any foreign intelligence service reading Ms. Clinton’s emails would know a great deal they’re not supposed to about American diplomacy, including classified information: readouts from sensitive meetings, secret U.S. positions on high-stakes negotiations, details of interaction between the State Department and other U.S. agencies including the White House. This would be a veritable intelligence goldmine to our enemies. Worse, access to Ms. Clinton’s personal email likely gave foreign spy agencies hints on how to crack into more sensitive information systems. Not to mention that if Clinton Inc. was engaged in any sort of illegal pay-for-play schemes, our adversaries know all about that, as well as anything else shady that Ms. Clinton and her staff were putting in those unencrypted emails.

Read the whole thing.

VIDEO: MSNBC Relentlessly Mocks Hillary Clinton For Leaving Iowa To Fundraise

[jwplayer mediaid=”225207″]

Et tu, MSNBC?

FRANCE AND IRAN COZYING UP ECONOMICALLY now that sanctions are lifted.

France and Iran hailed a set of business tie-ups and export deals on Thursday including the sale of dozens of Airbus planes and a car factory revamp that re-ignites a decades-old relationship between Tehran and carmaker Peugeot.

The deals, some of which were not yet finalised, were announced at a Franco-Iranian business forum attended by Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and a host of ministers and business leaders.

The visit follows a deal between Iran and the west on the middle-eastern country’s nuclear program that resulted in the lifting earlier this month of trade sanctions.

Now that everybody is getting a taste of Iran’s oil money, those sanctions aren’t going to “snap back” no matter how flagrantly Iran violates the “treaty” which they never signed and which our Senate never ratified.

CLINTON CAMPAIGN CASH QUERY QUASHED: MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell asks about fundraising, gets the runaround.

Mitchell asked Brian Fallon why Clinton is doing a fundraiser in Philadelphia in the critical final days before the Iowa causes on Feb. 1. Clinton was originally slated to also have one in New York, but The Intercept reported that had been postponed until Feb. 16.

Mitchell noted Clinton trails Sanders in a Quinnipiac Iowa poll, suggesting Clinton might be “cutting it a little close.”

“Does she need the money because it’s now going to be a longer race than she had anticipated?” Mitchell asked.

“Oh, we’ve always planned for a long race, Andrea, and I don’t think we’re going to have any problem raising the resources we need to contest this nomination as far as it goes, but there’s also going to be other meetings that will probably be read out later in the day that she’s doing today,” Fallon said. “But, so, it’s not all fundraising, Andrea. But yeah, the realities of fundraising are what they are, but we’re ready for a long nomination fight, if necessary, but she’s still in Iowa every day this week.”

Clinton ran an expensive and top-heavy campaign in 2008, and nearly went broke in the early running, trying unsuccessfully to fend off the challenge from Senator Barack Obama. She’s running another expensive and top-heavy campaign in 2016, only this time the challenge comes from an elderly and almost-unknown self-avowed “Democratic Socialist” from tiny Vermont.

Given her political experience and proven fundraising skills, the way Clinton lurches from one unnecessary crisis to another should give voters pause about how she’d govern the country.

CULTURAL SUICIDE UPDATE: Danish girl fends off attacker with pepper spray, faces fine.

The teenager told police that she was attacked in central Sønderborg on Wednesday at around 10pm by a dark-skinned English-speaking man. She said the man knocked her to the ground and then unbuttoned her pants and attempted to undress her.

The girl was able to save herself from further assault by using pepper spray on the attacker, but now she may be the one who ends up in legal trouble.

“It is illegal to possess and use pepper spray, so she will likely be charged for that,” local police spokesman Knud Kirsten told TV Syd.

Numerous readers wrote in the comments section on TV Syd’s story about the incident that they would be willing to pay the girl’s fine, which will most likely be 500 kroner.

The man who attacked the 17-year-old fled from the scene and has not been charged.

Had the girl not broken the law by purchasing and using pepper spray, she likely would have been raped — or worse.

The story goes on to note that “Sønderborg is now barring guests from entering if they cannot speak Danish, English or German.”

CONNECTICUT POLICE MORE LIKELY TO TASE BLACKS AND LATINOS:

— Police reported 641 incidents involving stun guns last year, including 437 actual firings and 204 threats of use.

— Thirty percent of the people involved in the overall incidents were black and 21 percent were Hispanic.

— Within the overall number of stun gun incidents, officers fired at them 60 percent of the time in cases involving whites, 80 percent of the time in cases involving blacks and 69 percent of the time in cases involving Hispanics.

— Officers warned about firing but did not do so at white suspects 40 percent of the time, black suspects 20 percent of the time and Hispanic suspects 31 percent of the time.

— When state and municipal officers fired their stun guns in 2015, 43 percent of the suspects were white, 35 percent were black and 21 percent were Hispanic. But when officers only threatened to use stun guns and did not fire them, 61 percent of the subjects were white, 19 percent were black and 20 percent were Hispanic.

Why are Democrat-run states such hellholes of racism, violence, and corruption?

SUPPOSE THEY GAVE A DEBATE AND NOBODY BUT MARTIN O’MALLEY CAME?

COMMON CORE WILL COST FOUR TIMES MORE THAN PROJECTED: And as is so often the case, California is getting the worst of it.

A California commission has just decided the technology costs for Common Core tests are an unfunded mandate, which will require state taxpayers to cough up approximately $4 billion more to local school districts, Californian and former U.S. Department of Education official Ze’ev Wurman tells The Federalist.

This adds to the extra $3.5 billion the legislature gave schools for Common Core in spring 2015 and a separate infusion of $1.7 billion Gov. Jerry Brown snagged for Common Core spread across fiscal years 2014 and 2015. That makes a total of approximately $9.2 billion above and beyond existing tax expenditures Californians will pay to have Common Core injected into their state.

This even though both vested and independent analyses found that California’s pre-Common Core curriculum mandates were of higher quality than the Common Core that replaced it. You read that right: Californians got their kids worse instruction, and are paying $9.2 billion extra for it.

I have a fourth grader subject to Common Core math, and I can tell you there’s also a huge hidden cost in having to re-teach my child the right way to do his homework.

HACKERS HIT ISRAELI POWER AUTHORITY:

“The virus was already identified and the right software was already prepared to neutralize it,” Israeli Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz told attendees of a computer security conference in Tel Aviv, according to this article published Tuesday by The Times of Israel. “We had to paralyze many of the computers of the Israeli Electricity Authority. We are handling the situation and I hope that soon, this very serious event will be over … but as of now, computer systems are still not working as they should.”

The “severe” attack was detected on Monday as temperatures in Jerusalem dipped to below freezing, creating two days of record-breaking electricity consumption, according to The Jerusalem Post. Steinitz said it was one of the biggest computer-based attacks Israel’s power authority has experienced, and that it was responded to by members of his ministry and the country’s National Cyber Bureau. The response included shutting down portions of Israel’s electricity grid. The energy minister didn’t identify any suspects behind the attack or provide details about how it was carried out.

Also in Reason, a look at how long the U.S. could go without electricity.

JOSH KRAUSHAAR: “Playing with Fire, Republican Bigwigs Want to Take Out Cruz.”

To many out­side ob­serv­ers, the wave of seasoned Re­pub­lic­an of­fi­cials and strategists sound­ing in­creas­ingly com­fort­able with Don­ald Trump as the GOP’s pres­id­en­tial nom­in­ee is a sign of sur­render. Wheth­er it’s Iowa Gov. Terry Bran­stad root­ing for Ted Cruz to lose the Iowa caucuses or Or­rin Hatch “com­ing around a little bit” on Trump’s can­did­acy or the paucity of money spent at­tack­ing Trump on the air­waves, it feels like of­fi­cial Wash­ing­ton has sided with Trump over Cruz.

In real­ity, many are try­ing to sal­vage the cam­paign of Sen. Marco Ru­bio (or any oth­er more-main­stream al­tern­at­ive), and are bet­ting that it’s easi­er to de­feat Trump in a one-on-one show­down than Cruz em­boldened by a strong show­ing in Iowa. To di­min­ish Trump at this point, Re­pub­lic­an strategist Alex Cas­tel­lanos wrote in an email Monday, “per­versely helps both Cruz and Trump, which is not what many con­ser­vat­ives in­tend.”

Read the whole thing.

The Establishment has moved from denial, to panic, to denial and panic barely disguised by a veneer of accommodation. Voters are sick of the denial, can smell the panic, and see through the veneer.

I don’t know who the Republican nominee will be, but it’s easy to predict that this won’t be the Year of the Insider.

FORBES: CLINTON AND SANDERS PROPOSE HIGHEST CAPITAL GAINS TAX RATE IN HISTORY.

If there was a prize for the most complex capital gains tax platform, it would assuredly be awarded to Hillary Clinton. She proposes many new capital gains rates than today, based on the duration one owns an asset sold and one’s income the year of the sale.

By contrast, the Sanders plan on capital gains is pretty simple. All households above a small exemption have to pay a 2.2% tax to help pay for his “Medicare for All” single payer socialized healthcare system. This effectively makes the 3.8% surtax a 6% surtax for families making at least $250,000 per year.

If a household makes more than $250,000 per year (where most gains occur), it pays ordinary income tax on its capital gains, plus the 6% surtax. Sanders raises the top statutory income tax rate to 54%. Add in the surtax, and you’re at a 60% top capital gains rate.

Each plan would result in a very large increase in the capital gains top rate. According to the Tax Policy Center, the highest this rate ever got was just under 40% in the late 1970s, which precipitated the supply side revolution and the Reagan tax cuts.

Glenn likes to say that Atlas Shrugged has been a how-to manual for the Obama Administration, but Clinton and Sanders are looking to the Malaise Era for their inspiration.

So where’s our Reagan?

ABE VIGODA, RIP.