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AUGUST 25,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:56 P.M. ET:  

MORE COLLEGE INSANITY – FROM WALTER WILLIAMS AT FRONTPAGEMAG.COM:  Hampshire College will offer some of its students what the school euphemistically calls "identity-based housing." That's segregated housing for students who — because of their race, culture, gender or sexual orientation — have "historically experienced oppression." I'd bet the rent money that Hampshire College will not offer Jewish, Irish, Polish, Chinese or Catholic students segregated housing. Because there is no group of people who have not faced oppression, Hampshire College is guilty of religious and ethnic discrimination in its housing segregation policy.  It's a very far-left joint.  I can't imagine them changing their segregationist policy.

PAY TO PLAY – FROM THE WASHINGTON FREE BEACON:   Drug companies that have donated to Hillary Clinton’s foundation received most of the contract money from an international tuberculosis initiative after the foundation was brought on to manage the initiative’s procurement operation, public records show.  Two of every three dollars spent acquiring anti-tuberculosis drugs through the program, which is administered by the World Bank, have gone to two companies—Swiss health care giant Novartis and Indian drug company Lupin Ltd.—that together have donated up to $130,000 to the Clinton Foundation.  And what kind of message does it send to young people if Hillary is elected, despite all the ugly revelations? 

I'D RATHER HAVE KING KONG AS A BUYER – FROM THE DAILY CALLER:  A country which housed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed for years just bought a 10% stake in the Empire State Building.  The Qatar Sovereign Wealth Fund’s investment in the Empire State building is an effort to diversify Qatar’s investment portfolio, as it continues to take a hit from from low oil prices. Qatar’s investment fund is directly connected to the Qatari Royal Family, which maintains financial ties with terrorist groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State.  U.S. officials had a plane waiting to take off to Qatar’s capital city in 1996, but Mohammed escaped after Qatari government officials tipped him off.   Nothing shocks me about New York City any longer.  If a guy wearing a swastika had the cash, they'd sell him City Hall.

August 25, 2016       Permalink

GRAND ADMIRAL KERRY IS ON THE CASE – AT 10:33 A.M. ET:  The Syrian horror continues to haunt us.  It is ghastly, and represents another Obama failure.  From AFP:

After a scathing UN investigation, the White House said Wednesday it was “impossible to deny” that Syria had launched chemical weapon attacks, while calling for President Bashar al-Assad’s regime to be held accountable.

“It is now impossible to deny that the Syrian regime has repeatedly used industrial chlorine as a weapon against its own people,” National Security Council spokesman Ned Price said.

“The United States will work with our international partners to seek accountability through appropriate diplomatic mechanisms, including through the United Nations Security Council.”

Wow, is that tough.  We're going to seek "accountability."  Does that mean traffic court?

A UN investigation has established that President Bashar al-Assad’s forces carried out at least two chemical attacks in Syria and that Islamic State jihadists used mustard gas as a weapon, according to a report seen by AFP on Wednesday.

The panel was able to identify the perpetrators of three chemical attacks carried out in 2014 and 2015, but was unable to draw any conclusions in the other six cases that it has been investigating over the past year.

Price said the findings “present yet another opportunity for all nations to speak with one voice to address these heinous crimes and to make it clear that the use of chemical weapons is intolerable.”

That is likely to be seen as a veiled message to Russian leader Vladimir Putin, among others.

COMMENT:  I'm sure Putin is quivering in his boots.  It's so pathetic, our lack of influence.  Obama really believes that going to the UN will produce results.  This is what happens when a child is elected president.

August 25, 2016        Permalink

IT MAY WORK; ON THE OTHER HAND... – AT 9:56 A.M. ET:  The emerging strategy in Hillary Clinton's camp seems to be to run out the clock, hoping that Trump will not catch up.  This used to be called "sitting on your lead."  May work.  May not.  From the Politico: 

She is not planning on sitting for another televised armchair confessional to rehash regrets about a private email server. Nor is the campaign setting up the kind of war room employed last year to discredit a book that aimed to expose a quid-pro-quo relationship between Clinton Foundation donors and State Department officials.

With 75 days until Election Day and new emails once again casting a pall over her campaign, Hillary Clinton aims to “run out the clock,” confidants say, on the latest chapters of the overlapping controversies that have dogged her campaign since the start.

According to allies and operatives close to the campaign, Clinton’s team thinks “they can ride out” any negative reaction to a set of new emails that show Clinton Foundation officials trying to set up State Department meetings for donors during her tenure as the nation's top diplomat.

“That doesn’t mean no response,” one Clinton team insider said, “but a muted one rather than a five-alarm fire.”

It's a strategy borne, in part, of a belief held deeply by Clinton herself that the email controversy is a fake scandal and that voters are as sick of it as the candidate herself — and by the profound weaknesses of Clinton's opponent.

In the campaign’s view, the emails that surfaced this week do not advance the foundation storyline; while emails obtained by the conservative group Judicial Watch shed light on the open line of communication between Clinton’s top aides and foundation officials, there is no proof positive that donors received special access or treatment from the government.

Plus, the campaign thinks Clinton’s commanding lead over Donald Trump in both national and battleground state polls gives her freedom to not comment — indeed, largely ignore — the disclosure this week that the FBI found nearly 15,000 new emails Clinton did not voluntarily hand over to the State Department last year.

COMMENT:  Sounds like a very risky strategy to me.  And how about that "commanding lead" the Clinton people feel they have?  I'm seeing more and more polls suggesting that Trump is closing the gap after some very bad weeks and some self-inflicted wounds. 

If the election were held today, Clinton would win.  But, as the political class likes to say, the election isn't being held today.  It's more than two months away. 

The Clinton strategy also does not take account of how unpopular Hillary Clinton really is.  She's been nationally famous for 25 years, about the same amount of time Franklin D. Roosevelt was famous until is death in 1945.  There's very little upside left for Hillary. 

I suspect that, underlying the Clinton strategy is the belief that Trump will go off-message again and start to drop in the numbers.  That may well happen.  But what if it doesn't?

August 25, 2016        Permalink

MAJOR ADVANCE IN FEELING GOOD – AT 9:38 A.M. ET:  We're so excited to bring you the latest push forward in making college students feel good each day as they fight the oppression of the greater society.  From the College Fix: 

Virginia Tech’s Intercultural Engagement Center is set to host a large welcome back campuswide gathering today among students, faculty and staff that will employ nametags with color-coded dots – green, yellow and red – so participants can indicate whether they are comfortable being talked to or not.

“[Y]ou’ll be creating a nametag for yourself as you join us in community,” the center states on its Fall 2016 Welcome Receptions and Community Kick-Off Facebook page. “ … Add a green, yellow, or red dot to indicate your color communication.”

Organizers then go on to explain:

GREEN – The person is actively seeking communication; they may have trouble initiating conversations, but want to be approached by people interested in talking.

YELLOW – The person only wants to talk to people they recognize, not by strangers or people they only know from the internet. The person might approach strangers to talk, and that is okay; the approached person is welcome to talk back if that is the case.

RED – The person does not want to talk to anyone, or only wants to talk to a few people. Please do not approach someone with a red sticker.

In effect, an event hosted by a campus “engagement” center is concerned some “engagement” might make students and faculty feel uncomfortable, and will use the nametags as a way to turn the intercultural gathering into something of a safe space.

Phone calls and emails by The College Fix to the campus spokesman on why this precaution was necessary were not immediately responded to late Wednesday.

COMMENT:  And to think, those colors were there all the time.  We just didn't recognize how they could be used to make us a kinder, more understanding society.  I am ashamed.

Please take this article to your child's school and demand the oppressor-class administrators inroduce those name tags immediately.  Available at Staples.

August 25,  2016     Permalink

AUGUST 24,  2016

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET: 

GREAT ADVANCE IN EDUCATION – FROM THE DAILY WIRE:   The State University of New York (SUNY) at Binghamton is now offering a course called “#StopWhitePeople2K16” as part of routine training for residential assistants.  The university’s residential assistant training schedule lists “#StopWhitePeople2016” on its roster, with the mission of giving RA’s an “overview of disabilities in Higher Education.”  The presenters of the course, Ciaran Slattery, Nicholas Pulakos, and Urenna Nwogwugwu, are all RA’s at the state-funded college, which boasts itself as New York’s highest-ranking public college. They state their purpose is to “help others take the next step in understanding diversity, privilege, and the society we function within,” presumably the “white” society they plan to bash at the event.  The three RA’s claim they will give “#StopWhitePeople2K16” course attendees the “tools” to respond to “uneducated people” with “‘good’ arguments.” You know, the people who preach mutual respect, equality under God, and constitutional freedoms. Those people.  And we the people are paying for this. 

A COMMERCIAL PASSING – FROM THE BOSTON GLOBE:    BANGOR, Maine (AP) — The closing of one of the last two Howard Johnson restaurants in a couple of weeks will mark the end of its fried clam strips, ice cream and other menu staples that nourished baby boomers and leave the once-proud restaurant chain teetering on the brink of extinction.  The slice of roadside Americana will no longer be served up in Bangor after Sept. 6.  For waitress Kathe Jewett, it’s the only job she’s held since starting work when the restaurant opened in 1966.  “It’s bittersweet, but it’s nothing to be sad about,” the 68-year-old Jewett insisted Tuesday during a break from serving customers. “I’ve been here for 50 years — and it’s time.”  The closing will leave only one Howard Johnson restaurant, in Lake George, New York.  Before falling on hard times, Howard Johnson took restaurant franchises to a new level. The orange-roofed eateries once numbered more than 800, with the New England-based restaurant chain predating the ubiquitous Howard Johnson hotels.  Terrific hot-fudge sundaes.  I remember. 

BROKEN PROMISE – FROM THE WEEKLY STANDARD:   "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor" was President Barack Obama's signature catchphrase he used to sell the Affordable Care Act to the American people. Now Obamacare's flagship website, healthcare.gov, no longer even addresses the issue.  Ironically, the section in question was the first public (if indirect) admission by the Obama administration that the president's promise was less than a "guarantee." As THE WEEKLY STANDARD first reported in July 2013, the website told consumers that they "may be able to keep your current doctor," in contrast to the president's unequivocal statement: "Here is a guarantee that I've made. If you have insurance that you like, then you will be able to keep that insurance. If you've got a doctor that you like, you will be able to keep your doctor."  The original website contained a section entitled "Can I keep my own doctor?", later revised to "How to keep your doctor."  Looks like the whole Obamacare program might collapse.  In that case the Dems will double down and demand, in effect, socialized medicine.  But they'll call it something else, like "Guaranteed immortality."

August 24,  2016     Permalink

A MUST READ – AT 10:14 A.M. ET:  Occasionally a column comes along that is an absolute must read.  This one is by Thomas Sowell, the brilliant African-American economist who dares to take on the conventional "wisdom" that is choking his own community.  He now laments the reality that facts no longer matter in our discussion about law enforcement policies.  From Creators Syndicate: 

Amid the rioting in Milwaukee, there is also a clash between two leading lawmen there — Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke and the city of Milwaukee's Chief of Police Edward Flynn. They have very different opinions about how law enforcement should be carried out.

Chief Edward Flynn expresses the view long prevalent among those who emphasize the social "root causes" of crime, such as income disparities and educational disparities, as well as the larger society's neglect of black communities.

Chief Flynn puts less emphasis on aggressive police action and more on community outreach and gun control.

Sheriff David Clarke represents an opposite tradition, in which the job of the police is to enforce the law, as forcefully as necessary, not to make excuses for law-breaking or to ease up on enforcing the law, in hopes that this will mollify rioters. Sheriff Clarke would also like to see law-abiding blacks be armed.

Differences of opinion on law enforcement are sharp and unmistakable — and have been for more than 50 years. However, as the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say, "You're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts."

Unfortunately, facts seem to play a remarkably small role in clashes over law enforcement policies. And that too has been true for more than 50 years.

In his memoirs, the Supreme Court's Chief Justice Earl Warren declared that "all of us must assume a share of the responsibility" for rising crime rates in the 1960s because "for decades we have swept under the rug" the slum conditions that breed crime.

But the hard fact is that the murder rate in the country as a whole was going down during those very decades when social problems in the slums were supposedly being neglected.

Homicide rates among black males went down by 18 percent in the 1940s and by 22 percent in the 1950s. It was in the 1960s, when the ideas of Chief Justice Warren and others triumphed, that this long decline in homicide rates among black males reversed and skyrocketed by 89 percent, wiping out all the progress of the previous 20 years.

COMMENT:  Please read the entire column.  As everything with Sowell, it is fact-based and superbly argued.  Sadly, as Sowell says, facts really don't matter much any longer.  They get in the way of leftist ideology.  You know what I mean – terrorism has nothing to do with radical Islam.  You accept that, don't you?

August 24, 2016       Permalink 

WHILE WE SLEEP – AT 9:49 A.M. ET:  It may come as a shock to our chattering classes that, while we indulge ourselves in dissecting every move and comment in our presidential campaigns, the rest of the world is attending to its own business.  In some cases, that business is planning our demise.  From Reuters: 

North Korea fired a submarine-launched missile on Wednesday that flew about 500 km (311 miles) towards Japan, a show of improving technological capability for the isolated country that has conducted a series of launches in defiance of UN sanctions.

Having the ability to fire a missile from a submarine could help North Korea evade a new anti-missile system planned for South Korea and pose a threat even if nuclear-armed North Korea's land-based arsenal was destroyed, experts said.

The ballistic missile was fired at around 5:30 a.m. (2030 GMT) from near the coastal city of Sinpo, where a submarine base is located, officials at South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defence Ministry told Reuters.

The projectile reached Japan's air defence identification zone (ADIZ) for the first time, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a briefing, referring to an area of control designated by countries to help maintain air security.

The missile was fired at a high angle, South Korea's Yonhap News Agency reported, an indication that its full range would be 1,000 km (620 miles) at an ordinary trajectory. The distance indicated the North's push to develop a submarine-launched missile system was paying off, officials and experts said.

North Korea's "SLBM (submarine-launched ballistic missile) technology appears to have progressed," a South Korean military official told Reuters.

Jeffrey Lewis of the California-based Middlebury Institute of International Studies said the test appeared to be a success.

COMMENT:  North Korea is a rogue state with a nuclear capacity.  Our negotiated "agreements" with the North Koreans are laughed at, and neither Field Marshal Obama nor Grand Admiral Kerry seem to care.

Eventually, both North Korea and Iran will have nuclear-tipped missiles that can reach the United States.  And our "diplomacy" will have enabled them.

Another Obama success story.

August 24, 2016       Permalink

IT WON'T GO AWAY – AT 9:14 A.M. ET:  Some pundits earlier in this year predicted that it wouldn't be the e-mail scandal that would threaten Hillary Clinton's election, it would be corruption involving the Clinton Foundation, something much more understandable to the average citizen.  I think they were right.  A devastating AP story is making the rounds, and it is jolting the Clinton campaign: 

WASHINGTON (AP) — More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

Donors who were granted time with Clinton included an internationally known economist who asked for her help as the Bangladesh government pressured him to resign from a nonprofit bank he ran; a Wall Street executive who sought Clinton's help with a visa problem; and Estee Lauder executives who were listed as meeting with Clinton while her department worked with the firm's corporate charity to counter gender-based violence in South Africa.

The meetings between the Democratic presidential nominee and foundation donors do not appear to violate legal agreements Clinton and former president Bill Clinton signed before she joined the State Department in 2009. But the frequency of the overlaps shows the intermingling of access and donations, and fuels perceptions that giving the foundation money was a price of admission for face time with Clinton. Her calendars and emails released as recently as this week describe scores of contacts she and her top aides had with foundation donors.

The AP's findings represent the first systematic effort to calculate the scope of the intersecting interests of Clinton Foundation donors and people who met personally with Clinton or spoke to her by phone about their needs.

COMMENT:  Bottom line – the Clintons have made tens of millions of dollars since leaving official office.  But what product have they been selling?  Why would people and institutions even give vast sums to the Clinton Foundation or pay Hillary hundreds of thousands of dollars a speech?

The answer is clear:  They were buying access.  They were putting themselves at the head of the line.  They were buying people who had power, and who are intent on returning to the White House, with even more power. 

The whole mess violates any citizen's sense of fairness.  Yes, it's easy to understand.  The Trump people are on the case, demanding the appointment of a special prosecutor, something they'll never get from Obama's Justice Department., 

But is it enough to derail Hillary's march to the presidency?  Remember, the Clintons have survived every scandal they've faced.  And Hillary is opposed by a very flawed Republican presidential candidate.

August 24,  2016     Permalink