Monthly Archives: August 2016

Pay to Play, or Slants

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From a Kimberley Strassel column in Thursday’s Wall Street Journal comes this nugget.

…the Associated Press’s extraordinary finding this week that of the 154 outside people Mrs. Clinton met with in the first years of her tenure, more than half were Clinton Foundation donors. Clinton apologists, like Vox’s Matthew Yglesias, are claiming that statistic is overblown, because the 154 doesn’t include thousands of meetings held with foreign diplomats and U.S. officials.

Nice try. As the nation’s top diplomat, Mrs Clinton was obliged to meet with diplomats and officials—not with others. Only a blessed few outsiders scored meetings with the harried secretary of state and, surprise, most of the blessed were Clinton Foundation donors.

What she said.

And yet the NLMSM insists—brags, really—that it’s entirely appropriate to take sides against Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump, not in their opinion pieces, but in their “fact” reporting pieces, also.  Objective journalism be damned.

Here’s Ezra Klein, of JournoList infamy:

The media has felt increasingly free to cover Trump as an alien, dangerous, and dishonest phenomenon[.]

And Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

It’s made starkly clear by Jorge Ramos, of Univision:

…journalists cannot be objective when they are confronted with “racism, discrimination, corruption, public life, dictatorships or violations of human rights.”

These views of Trump, in opinion pieces, are entirely legitimate, but it’s interesting to note that none of this criticism, this assumption of nefariousness, is evident in the same press’ coverage of Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, despite her plain lawlessness and her evident conflicts of interest.

If the press feels free to be this proudly biased against one party, one candidate, it can only feel free to be similarly biased toward any other politician, any other party.  Too much of the Fourth Estate has transformed itself into a fifth column.

Democrats and Security

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First there was Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s unsecured, personal and private email server on which she conducted official State Department business and which she used for handling over 2,000 classified emails—some of which also were marked classified.

Then there was the breathtakingly easy hack of Democratic National Committee email servers.

Then there was the similarly breathtakingly easy hack of Democratic National Convention Committee email servers.

Now there’s this.

[I]n 2009, Hillary Clinton’s top aide mistakenly left potentially classified papers in the front seat of the car she was traveling in.

Huma Abedin realized the significance of her error and sent an email to a fellow Clinton staffer asking that the papers be moved to the trunk.

“I’m going to have ambassador ride on next drive,” she wrote on July 20, 2009. “There’s a bunch of burn stuff in the pocket of my front seat.”

This displays an utter lack of concern by this highly experienced Clinton Aide for the classified documents with which care she’d been entrusted, both in her abandoning them on the front seat of her car and in her request to have them stored (however temporarily) in the unsecured trunk of her unsecured car rather than have them properly taken under control.

There’s also no indication Abedin gave any thought to whether her colleague had either the clearance or the need to know (both of which are necessary before an individual can be allowed to handle classified material) before she requested him to take possession of those abandoned documents.

Nor is there any indication that the unnamed staffer ever was debriefed on his handling of the documents.

There clearly were no sanctions applied to Abedin for her extreme carelessness in her handling of these classified documents.

It seems pretty evident that Democrats, at least senior Democrats, don’t understand security, or they don’t care about security.  Either way, our nation cannot afford such as these in our government.

Is the Arabian Gulf a Safe Space for Iranian Combat Ships?

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The US seems to think so.  Four Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps light attack vessels last Tuesday

carried out a “high-speed intercept,” with two of the vessels coming within 300 yards of the USS Nitze.

The US reacted without verve or élan.  The best “a US Navy official” could say was that the incident was

“unsafe and unprofessional,” adding that the Iranian ships “created a dangerous, harassing situation that could have led to further escalation.”

And then the Nitze backed down and changed course away from the IRGC’s naval vessels.  Plainly, the decision to escalate or not was given over entirely to Iran.

This display encouraged Iran’s next-day light attack vessels to approach within 200 yards of another US vessel, the USS Squall, which finally drew a warning shot response from the Squall.

This weakness only encourages Iran to push further.  The present feinting is beginning to look an awful lot like preparation for an attack of the type carried out against the USS Cole, wherein a similar small boat, whose intention was misread, was allowed to make physical contact with the Cole, upon which the boat detonated the bomb it was carrying, disabling the Cole and killing 17 American sailors.

This is one of the inevitable outcomes of the Obama administration’s timidity toward Iran.

On an Ohio Early Voting Ruling

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The 6th Circuit has ruled on Ohio’s Golden Week of voting, which allowed an extra week of early voting together with same-day voter registration.  Ohio had withdrawn that week in 2014 legislation, leaving 29 days before November’s formal voting day for voter registration and early voting.  The appellate court, in response to Democrats’ suit and win in trial court, overturned the trial court and allowed the removal of Golden Week to stand.  As a result, Ohioans will have those 29 days, instead of 36 days, in which to register to vote and then to vote.

Democrats had challenged the procedural changes, arguing they imposed disproportionate burdens on African-Americans, who made greater use of the golden-week voting….

How blatantly disingenuous of the Democrats.  That a particular group of Americans uses a week’s early privilege more than other groups of Americans in no way burdens the particular group when they lose that week, given the vast amount of time remaining in which all groups of Americans can exercise their right to register to vote and then to vote.

How insulting of the Democrats toward a particular group of Americans to assume that members of that group are too stupid or lazy to make use of the remaining amount of time to exercise their right to register to vote and then to vote.

How utterly racist of the Democrats to assume that blacks are simply too stupid to use the remaining amount of time to exercise their right to register to vote and then to vote and so need the protection of their Betters to take care of them.

Clintons, Clinton Foundation, and Donations

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Democratic Party Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is making the claim, through her campaign staff, that the Clinton Foundation will stop taking donations from foreign countries or from corporations in the event she’s elected President.

Republican Party Presidential candidate Donald Trump and his campaign organization are pointing out a loophole in that Clinton commitment: the promised ban carefully does not include smaller Clinton-tied charities like Alliance for a Healthier Generation, Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, and Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), among others.

There’s another loophole in Clinton’s commitment, though.  The Clinton Foundation would be permitted to accept donations (only) from

US citizens and independent charities[.]

Notice that.  Foreign governments and other foreign favor-seekers would have only to make their donations to any of a number of those “independent charities,” which then would pass along the money to the Clinton Foundation.  Wall Street donors and their like, US citizens for the most part, can still buy their favors directly through the Clinton Foundation.  That’s a loophole you could drive a truck through.

“Commitment,” indeed.  How very Clinton-esque.