Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has been making a big deal about what she claims is the outrageous pay of company CEOs compared to their employees. Here’s a graph, via AEIdeas‘ Carpe Diem and Mark Perry that indicates how well she’s walking that talk.
Or is this fact just another of campaign season distraction and attack from the Hillary Truth?
Hmm….
In their minds, the murderers and accomplices of Germany, and Poland, and Hungary, and so many, many other places didn’t do something evil. They convinced themselves it was the right thing to do, the thing they had to do.
That’s what FBI Director James Comey said with an absolutely straight face at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum’s 2015 National Tribute Dinner, and he repeated them in all seriousness in his Washington Post editorial at the link. Poles as a society were accomplices in the holocaust.
This is the same FBI Director who has demanded FBI access to the encryption keys of messages that American citizens send to each other so that his FBI can snoop at will.
Hmm….
To coin a phrase, this is embarrassing, a Department like this.
Ignored claims, manipulated records, cost overruns and even one facility infested with insects and rodents are among the latest issues uncovered by a blistering VA Inspector General’s report. The auditor’s probe found that more than 31,000 inquiries placed by veterans to the Philadelphia Regional VA office call center went ignored for more than 312 days, even though they were supposed to be answered in five. Perhaps even worse, claim dates were manipulated to hide delays, $2.2 million in improper payments were made because of duplicate records, 22,000 pieces of returned mail went ignored, and some 16,600 documents involving patient records and dating back to 2011 were never scanned into the system.
This is a year after the Veterans Administration promised, to Congress and to us, that they were cleaning up their act.
Disband the Veterans Administration; it’s an affront to our veterans and an embarrassment to our nation. Use the VA budget for vouchers for vets. No more delay. Our vets can’t wait.
JCS Chairman Martin Dempsey said last week that losing Ramadi to the Daesh would be unimportant from a strategic perspective; it would have only symbolic importance.
I have a couple of thoughts about that. First, symbolism in a war has vast importance, to the morale of the defenders and to the morale of the attackers. Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo had no strategic importance whatsoever, but it was critically important: the symbolism of the raid—”we can hit you wherever we wish, whenever we wish”—had immediate impact on Japan’s strategic thinking and on American and Australian military and civilian morale, even though the raid did trivial physical damage.
So it is with Ramadi, especially for an Iraqi army that presently has no heart and little willingness to stand and fight, much less attack and fight. Tikrit, after all, was recaptured, to the extent it has been, by Iraqi militias and American bombing; the army itself played only a supporting role. Ramadi’s loss would simply add to the army’s mindset that it would only lose any encounter with Daesh. Ramadi’s loss also would add fuel to the ongoing conflict between Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq. Symbolism matters in Iraq, too, and symbolic importance is…important.
Second, Doolittle’s raid came within the framework of an actual strategic plan for wresting the Pacific and its island nations back from Japan, driving Japan from the Asian mainland, and ultimately defeating Japan. In the present case, it’s entirely possible that Ramadi has no strategic importance, but this administration has no coherent strategy against which to measure Ramadi’s importance.
President Barack Obama had some choice words about the Loretta Lynch nomination at a press conference with Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
What are we doing here? I have to say, there are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far. This is an example of it. It’s gone too far. Enough. Enough. … This is embarrassing, a process like this.
It is enough, Mr Obama, and it is embarrassing. When are you going to get your Senate Democrats out of the way and allow a vote on the anti-human tracking bill that your fellow Democrats are holding up? Your fellow Democrats are cynically blocking the bill because they demand that Federal tax dollars be available to pay for abortions, and the bill continues a decades-long prohibition against that misuse of Americans’ money. Your fellow Democrats would rather allow human trafficking to continue apace than not have public funds available for abortions.
It’s also a bill that those same Democrats of yours knew when they voted affirmatively to pass it out of committee onto the Senate floor contained that prohibition.
As soon as your Democrats allow a vote on that bill, the Lynch confirmation will come up.
Get off the dime, Mr Obama.