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IT’S POTEMKIN MEDIA ALL THE WAY DOWN: The Hill: Leaked memo shows Clinton was provided questions ahead of interview.
LOOKING FOR PEACE IN ALL THE WRONG PLACES:
Shot: “Once lauded as a peacemaker, Obama’s tenure fraught with war.”*
—Headline, AP today.
Chaser: “A giant poster of Russian President Vladimir Putin was draped along the side of the Manhattan Bridge on Thursday afternoon. The massive banner featured the Russian leader in a suit and tie against the backdrop of the country’s flag along with the word ‘peacemaker’ emblazoned at the bottom.”
—The New York Post, today.
* “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.”
LIFE IN THE AGE OF MASS HYSTERIA: Student Confused For Creepy Clown Says He Could Have Been Killed By Cops.
Note to cops, and everyone else: Being a “Creepy Clown” isn’t actually a crime. But it gets worse: “UIC senior Oscar Chavez was handcuffed and detained by police Tuesday afternoon after other students reported a suspicious clown on campus. The interaction with police — who approached him with guns drawn — scared him. ‘I wasn’t even dressed as a clown.'”
UNPOSSIBLE! I’VE BEEN ASSURED THAT VOTER FRAUD IS A MYTH. Indiana State Police said on Thursday that they have expanded an investigation of possible voter registration fraud to 57 of the state’s 92 counties.
UPDATE: Report: Democrats And Unions Paying People To Vote In Illinois.
TENNESSEE CONSIDERS PRE-EMPTING AirBnB Ordinances.
The Beacon Center of Tennessee, a libertarian public-interest law firm, is also suing.
MICHAEL ISIKOFF: Watchdog group accuses Clinton campaign of election law violations.
HILLARY HAS GOOD LUCK WITH THINGS LIKE THIS: Hacked: Website crashes after publishing Clinton associate files.
UPDATE:
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INDICATIONS TEAM HILLARY DESTROYED EVIDENCE: A Fox News report. Missing boxes with emails. 14 boxes — and then there were 12. The real chill? It appears the FBI let Team Hillary get away with it. The FBI’s been compromised.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to make a Manhattan cocktail popsicle.
WELL, I’M HAPPIER SEEING TENNESSEE ON THE COLLEGE FOOTBALL TOP TEN RANKING: FrontPage: The Top Ten Schools Supporting Terrorism. All the stuff at Tennessee, though, is basically just free speech by students, except maybe for the event-disruption. Not that I’m proud of it. . . .
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student loan defaults are down. Here’s why that’s a bad thing. I’m not sure I agree that students who quit without graduating shouldn’t be counted in the default rate.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Why Bury Grandpa Underground When You Could Launch Him Into Space?
THIS ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE: The Rise Of The “Bromosexual” Friendship.
WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE IOWAHAWK:
A business model based on content from illiterate celebrities & passive-aggressive media dorks might fail? Who knew https://t.co/zSUiG0FxIU
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) October 6, 2016
SULTAN RECIP I: Turkey Builds 9,000 Mosques, Bans Orthodox Christian Liturgy.
OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: It’s time for the first post-debate edition of Wargaming the Electoral College.
I GOT THE BLUES: Rolling Stones Announce New Blues Cover Album ‘Blue & Lonesome’
The 12 tracks, recorded in three days at London’s British Grove Studios, all cover songs by classic bluesmen, including Howlin’ Wolf (“Commit a Crime”), Little Walter (“I Gotta Go”) and Jimmy Reed (“Little Rain”). Eric Clapton guests on the group’s cover of Little Johnny Taylor’s “Everybody Knows About My Good Thing” and Otis Rush’s “I Can’t Quit You Baby.” The album doubles as a nod to the band’s formative years, when the band would play covers by their favorite blues artists.
Keith Richards told Rolling Stone in September that the group had been recording in London, cutting several songs in a rapid period. “It was fun – always is,” he said. At the time, he claimed the album would contain “a lot of Chicago blues.”
The band’s last studio album, 2005’s A Bigger Bang, was a big disappointment, but I’m looking forward to this one.
BYLINES OF BRUTALITY: Steve’s link to “Toronto’s ‘beer thrower’ ID’d as award-winning journalist” dovetails perfectly with Iowahawk’s classic post, “Bylines of Brutality.”
Between January of 2008, when the Bard of Des Moines wrote his citizens warning to be ever vigilant for journalistic freakouts, and Steve’s post below, I suspect you could find numerous additional examples of MSM meltdowns. Or as the subhead of Iowahawk’s post reads, “As Casualties Mount, Some Question The Emotional Stability of Media Vets.”
BUT NO PANAMERA COUPE: Porsche Confirms It Will Build a High-Performance Panamera Hybrid. So I like the looks of the Panamera, but every woman I’ve ever heard express an opinion thinks its ugly.
JUST NBC THE MAGICAL THINKING! MSNBC reporter Ron Allen under fire for claiming Obama’s Paris climate change agreement is designed to STOP storms like Matthew.
Of course, when it comes to magical thinking, it’s a something of a folie à deux. Why do we even need further “climate change agreements,” when Obama promised us that his mere nomination as Democrat nominee for POTUS in 2008 was “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal?”
OUT: WI-FI. IN: BOD-FI. Sending Passwords Through Your Body Could Be More Secure Than Transmitting Them Over The Air.
UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT: Toronto’s ‘beer thrower’ ID’d as award-winning journalist.
VIDEO: Weather Channel Reporter Says Haitian Kids are Eating Trees and Causing Deforestation.
Can we get a factcheck on this, please?
THE WASTE LAND: It’s National Poetry Day, but these days, The Noble Art Is Not So Noble, David Solway writes, discussing that artform’s long slow painful slide into PC irrelevance.
It certainly would be interesting to be a fly on the wall if T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou actually were talking shop and comparing the state of the art during their heydays.
WE SURE ARE HEARING A LOT ABOUT THIS ALL OF A SUDDEN: How Hackers Could Send Your Polling Station into Chaos.
If only we had some sort of voting system that was immune to foreign hackers.
BUT OF COURSE: Huma Abedin Email Attacked Jewish Group.
Huma Abedin, Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s closest aide, urged former President Bill Clinton in 2009 to reject a speaking invitation before the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC), asking his assistant in an email, do “u really want to consider sending him into that crowd?”
Abedin’s comment about “that crowd” has sparked anger and consternation among Jewish and non-Jewish leaders who consider it hostile to Jews and to the State of Israel. Her comments are raising uncomfortable questions about Abedin’s past and her family’s ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
“Appalling” is how Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, described the email, adding that it, “shows hostility toward Jews and Israel in light of the fact that ‘that crowd’ gives huge ovations to White House speakers.”
Klein pointed to the Abedin family’s ties to a radical Islamic group, saying, “it makes me think about the allegations about her parents and other family members who were associated with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
In tonight’s performance of The Wilson Administration, the role of Edith Bolling Galt Wilson will be played by Huma Abedin.
A MILLENNIAL SPEAKS: Yes Hillary, Some Of Us Live In Our Parents’ Basements – Because Of Your Failed Policies.
Hillary said “Some are new to politics completely. They’re children of the Great Recession. And they are living in their parents’ basement. They feel they got their education and the jobs that are available to them are not at all what they envisioned for themselves. And they don’t see much of a future.”
Hillary wants to make this election about anything other than the future. Tax returns from decades ago, beauty pageants, or an old appearance on the Howard Stern show are all topics she’d rather focus our attention on instead of promoting solutions to the issues we face every day.
The real issue of this election is not whether Donald Trump has always said friendly things. He hasn’t. Nor is the real issue of this election whether Hillary Clinton has been friendly with the truth. She isn’t. But this is what we continue to hear day in and day out.
What else does Clinton have to run on? Her seat-warming years in the Senate? The Russian reset? Libya?
Anything?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Start A Fire With A Pencil And Jumper Cables.
THIS WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME: Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly Are Publicly Fighting Over Trump Now.
FROM MY COLLEAGUE MAURICE STUCKE, AND OXFORD’S ARIEL EZRACHI: The Rise of the Machines – How Automated Digital Assistants Can Reduce Competition (and the Cash in Your Wallet).
STRANGERS IN OUR OWN LAND: The non-citizen voter fraud disaster.
Daniel Horowitz writes:
According to Pew, there were over 1 million immigrants in Virginia as of 2014. In 2013, according to the Census, the number of non-citizens in the state was 427,535, but given the fast pace of new immigration to the region, that number has likely grown. If a random sampling from just eight counties showed over 1,000 non-citizens registered to vote, one can easily speculate that thousands more are registered statewide.
This random sampling on non-citizens voting dovetails well with a 2014 study from three prominent political scientists who found that up to 6.4% of all non-citizens participated in the 2008 elections and up to 14.7% voted. Given the population of non-citizens in the state, that is potentially a very impactful number for any close election.
It’s probably nothing. I keep reading that voter fraud is a myth.
EVACUATE: Hurricane Matthew intensifies to Category 4 as it approaches Florida. It’s good that all the predictions of nonstop monster hurricanes post-Katrina didn’t come true, but the paucity of big storms hitting land in that era means that there are a lot of people in the impact zone with no experience.
STEVEN COHEN: Why Colombia Said No to Peace.
When he first arrived in the Putumayo Department in the early 1990s, Hesmar could still appreciate what the FARC seemed to stand for. “The state didn’t exist here, so they were the ones who served that function,” he says. “They would meet with the communities to share their ideals. Who’s not going to agree with schools and roads and health care?” But then the rebels got deeper and deeper into the drug trade, then deeper and deeper into extortion. Their justice became harsher and less discerning. One afternoon, his wife’s teenage daughter brought a police officer to their house without Hesmar’s knowledge, and the rebels tied him to a tree for two weeks—only sparing his life after his friends came to beg for it. To punish an uncooperative businessman, the guerrillas set fire to his gas station, blowing up an entire neighborhood, along with Hesmar’s cart. Hesmar’s wife was pregnant at the time, and for a while, he wasn’t sure what he would do to sustain his family. “They pretend to be for the people, but it’s always the poor who end up suffering,” he says.
Colombians didn’t say no to peace; they said no to a bad deal with narco-communists.
DON’T SUGARCOAT IT, TELLS US HOW YOU REALLY FEEL, MICHAEL: Michael Walsh on “Obersturmbannführer Kaine: Little Eichmann, Catholic Heretic.”
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER WEEK: This Week in Clinton Corruption for October 6, 2016.
IN THE MAIL: From Kenneth L Bennight Jr, Nacho Perez, Private Eye.
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REMEMBERING THE BLEACHBIT TIMELINE: On September 7 FBI Director Jim Comey had the temerity to write a “memo to staff” where he touted the Bureau’s honesty and competence. A month has passed and it’s confirmed that the FBI’s investigation of Hillary’s crimes was not simply incompetent, it was rigged. Comey ought to be impeached.
LET’S HOPE SO! SpaceX, Boeing Starting New Space Race?
Boeing Chief Executive Officer Dennis Muilenburg sketched out a Jetsons-like future at a conference Tuesday, envisioning a commercial space-travel market with dozens of destinations orbiting the Earth and hypersonic aircraft shuttling travelers between continents in two hours or less. And Boeing intends to be a key player in the initial push to send humans to Mars, maybe even beating Musk to his long-time goal.
“I’m convinced the first person to step foot on Mars will arrive there riding a Boeing rocket,” Muilenburg said at the Chicago event on innovation, which was sponsored by the Atlantic magazine.
It might seem presumptuous to say “Faster, please” when we already have two private American firms competing to see who can put humans on Mars first, but…
Faster, please.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1246.
WHEN ISIS ATTACKED IN KURDISTAN: A former Australian MP visits the war zone. His trip to Iraqi Kurdistan included a visit to the Yazidi town of Sinjar.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Shot: “Is America’s Tax System Fair?”, asks Amity Shlaes, the author of the best-selling history of FDR’s Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, in a new video at Prager U:
Chaser: “IRS subjects tea party groups to new round of scrutiny, publicizes tax return data,” the Washington Times reported on Monday.
Flashback: Obama “joked” about auditing his enemies in 2009.
WASHINGTON POST: How Rob Portman Pulled Away In Ohio.
ANDREW KLAVAN: How the Leftist Media Beat The Right.
THE COUP AND PURGE DAMAGE TURKEY’S AIR FORCE: Jim Dunnigan analyzes the post-coup deterioration of Turkey’s F-16 fleet. The ratio of pilots-to-aircraft has dropped.
THE WAGES OF SOCIALISM: Starving Oil Workers Sell Clothes for Food in Venezuela.
The latest horrifying example of the depths of Venezuela’s economic crisis comes courtesy of the country’s struggling oil industry, where hungry roughnecks are being forced to literally sell the clothes off their back to feed themselves and their families. . . .
There’s a nasty cyclical effect to all of this, too: runaway inflation is making oil workers’ salaries insufficient for necessary purchases, which is leading to “worker disillusionment, absenteeism, and a brain drain” in the oil industry, which is leading to a drop in the country’s oil production, which is dragging down the entire Venezuelan economy, which in turn is hurting oil workers…etc., etc.
Oil exports make up 95 percent of Venezuela’s export revenues, and a fall in output isn’t the only thing rocking the petrostate—there’s also the collapse in crude prices over the past two years from more than $110 per barrel down to around $50 today. Current prices are a very far cry from the reported $120 per barrel Caracas needs to balance its budget.
Nothing is going right in Venezuela right now. It’s producing less oil and earning less cash for what it is capable of drilling, its workforce is going hungry, and its economy is locked in a death spiral, exacerbating all of these problems. And, for Caracas, things are going to get even worse before they get better.
Bad luck.
PUTIN’S UNILATERAL COLD WAR: Remember, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton “re-set” relations with Russia. They are the American leaders who permitted the Kremlin’s imperial revival.
…JUST THE SAME AS THE OLD BOSS: For Next UN Secretary-General, A Managerially Incompetent Socialist, as analyzed by Claudia Rosett.
Clinton and her team said the country’s gradual shift to democracy — Burma had just held an election, won by Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi’s party — meant it had earned the U.S. investment. Other economic powerhouses, including Australia and the EU, were also moving to loosen their own rules for investment in Burma. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, as the Washington Post reported at the time, said the United States needed to keep up.
But, as the Post also noted, human rights leaders predicted Clinton’s decision would set back their cause. At the time, as Foreign Policy reported, Suu Kyi supported a partial easing of the U.S. investment ban, but didn’t want American companies to be able to invest in the country’s energy sector. They argued opening investment to the energy market would fuel economic inequality and only strengthen the country’s repressive military. And they thought it gave the country’s government too much too soon, giving up leverage to push for more reform in the future.
But the Obama administration broke with Suu Kyi and human rights leaders, letting American companies invest in all sectors—including oil and gas.
I’m so old I can remember when Democrats loved Suu Kyi and hated Big Oil.
“AIRBRUSH” IS THE NEW “LIE:” WaPo: Clinton, Kaine airbrush out inconvenient details about U.S. troop departure from Iraq.
“Good Beer, No Censorship”: New episode of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast explores the brew ha-ha behind Flying Dog Brewery’s First Amendment dog fight with the state of Michigan over the censorship of its “Raging Bitch” beer label.
NEW EMAILS REVEAL CROOKED STATE DEPT–CLINTON FOUNDATION INTERACTIONS: Yes, Hillary’s State Dept. and the Clinton Foundation “intersected.” Note the Keystone pipeline connection.
SERFS ON THE UNIVERSITY’S FEUDAL MANOR: Why the ‘Safe-Space’ Debate Is a Problem for Adjuncts. “Very often, in cases involving speech regulations as related to employment, it can come down to a case of individual targeting, and that is an area where context matters.”
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FRAUD AND WASTE: EpiPen maker overcharged taxpayers for years, officials say.
Democratic lawmakers released a letter on Wednesday from Andy Slavitt, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), confirming that EpiPen maker Mylan had misclassified the device — in effect, overcharging taxpayers for its product.
The revelation is the latest turn involving Mylan, which has recently faced outrage from both parties over its 400 percent-plus increase in the price of EpiPens in the past few years.
The letter from Slavitt, released by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), confirms that Mylan has misclassified the EpiPen as a generic drug, as opposed to a brand drug, since 1997. That means Mylan was only giving Medicaid a 13 percent discount on its product, instead of a 23.1 percent discount.
The CMS even noted it had specifically told Mylan that its product was misclassified.
“The Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services in CMS has, on multiple occasions, provided guidance to the industry and Mylan on the proper classification of drugs and has expressly told Mylan that the product is incorrectly classified,” Slavitt wrote.
Wouldn’t it be something if the FDA didn’t keep competitors off the market and Medicaid (and consumers) had multiple vendors to choose from?
2016, MAN: Performers organize ‘Clown Lives Matter’ march in hopes to quench fears. “This is a peaceful way to show clowns are not psycho killers.”
WAIT, I THOUGHT THIS WAS A MYTH: State Police Raid Indy Office In Growing Voter Fraud Case.
FLASHBACK TO DECEMBER, 2001: The Clinton Team’s Betrayal:
Newspaper readers have been treated in recent days to an orgy of gut-spilling by Clinton administration officials rather painfully eager to show that when they were in office they, too, exerted themselves mightily to get rid of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network.
The fact that they didn’t succeed is just the beginning of the problem. The Washington Post articles on the Clinton officials also reveal the officials’ unsavory willingness – for the sake of self-promotion – to compromise the intelligence community by betraying secret ways the community tracked bin Laden. Most of all, though, the Clinton articles are a roadmap of failure, a textbook on how not to conduct an anti-terrorist campaign.
From a reporter’s perspective, new details on how the U.S. went after bin Laden are a goldmine, and more power to the newspaper that can dig them up. The trouble is that the details are potentially harmful. Consider the Clinton-era leak that U.S. intelligence was tracking bin Laden’s telephone calls. Former CIA director James Woolsey has said the leak tipped off bin Laden and led him to stop communicating by phone. Given such consequences, ex-administration officials are duty-bound to resist the temptation to brag about U.S. capabilities.
The new leaks involve, among other things, planned Pakistani and Uzbek commando raids, sensors for caves inside Afghanistan, a person close to the Taliban leadership spying for the U.S., and possible U.S. landing sites in Afghanistan. These leaks risk tipping off future foes about U.S. methods, harming some foreigners who have cooperated with the U.S. or shaking the resolve of others who fear being exposed in the U.S. media, and ratcheting up the vigilance of U.S. foes. We may never learn whether any of these negative consequences are triggered by the Clinton officials’ efforts to cast themselves in a good light.
What’s more, the officials don’t come out looking good at all. Instead their efforts add up to a long list on what not to do in a campaign against terrorism.
Read the whole thing.
SHOT: Gary Johnson says he will focus on attacking Hillary Clinton.
CHASER: Gary Johnson’s own VP pick pretty much just endorsed Hillary Clinton.
Say what you will about Gary Johnson or the Libertarian ticket, but if you compare the two-way race poll numbers with the four-way numbers, you’ll see that Johnson-Weld has put serious hurt on Clinton-Kaine.
WAIT, WHAT? Obama: Thank God I’m a country boy.
President Obama invoked his Kansas roots Tuesday in a statement praising America’s rural areas and suggesting that coal and farm towns are fast shifting to the digital economy under his leadership.
“I’ve spent most of my life living in big cities. But the truth is, a lot of what’s shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas,” he said in a statement issued by the Agriculture Department.
“They taught me the kind of values that don’t always make headlines, let alone the daily back-and-forth in Washington. Honesty and responsibility. Hard work and toughness against adversity. Keeping your word, and giving back to your community. And treating folks with respect, even if you disagree with them,” he added.
The statement appears to be part of the administration’s legacy project to promote the president’s successes that aren’t obvious.
Successes that aren’t obvious.
WHEN IN ROME… Trump to Nevadans: You say Nevada wrong.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Russia launches massive nuclear war training exercise that ‘involves 40 million people.’ The 1980s called, yada yada.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Clinton Campaign Helped Script Steve Harvey Interview.
Flashback: Email Reveals Hillary Clinton Was Fed Questions Before Meet The Press Appearance. And a few additional examples of DNC-MSM collusion also in that post.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: At New Smithsonian Museum, Justice Thomas Is an Invisible Man.
But then, the Smithsonian dropped the A-bomb on history quite a long time ago.
THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: ObamaCare’s Meltdown Has Arrived.
Last week BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee announced it would leave three of the state’s largest exchange markets—Nashville, Memphis and Knoxville. “We have experienced losses approaching $500 million over the course of three years on ACA plans,” the company said, “which is unsustainable.” As a result, more than 100,000 Tennesseans will be forced to seek out new coverage for 2017.
BlueCross is only the latest insurer to head for the exits. Community Health Alliance, the insurance co-op established under ObamaCare, is winding down due to financial failure, leaving 30,000 people without coverage. UnitedHealthcare said in April it is departing Tennessee’s exchange after significant losses. That’s another 41,000 people needing new plans.
All told, more than 60% of our state’s ObamaCare consumers will lose their coverage heading into 2017. When they go in search of a replacement plan, they will confront two unfortunate realities: a dearth of options and skyrocketing costs.
Leave it to government to force a marketplace into existence, where people are coerced into buying something many of them can’t afford to use, and which sellers still lose money selling.
And then leave it to government to blame free markets for the failure.
(If you need a way to get past the WSJ paywall, you might find it here.)
ROLL CALL: In TV Ads, Senate Democrats Avoid Trump.
OF COURSE! BUT ONLY IF HE’S A REPUBLICAN: Should We Judge A Politician By His (Or Her) Garbage Supporters?
RE-RECALL? Replacement Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone catches fire on Southwest plane.
Southwest Airlines flight 994 from Louisville to Baltimore was evacuated this morning while still at the gate because of a smoking Samsung Galaxy Note 7 smartphone. All passengers and crew exited the plane via the main cabin door and no injuries were reported, a Southwest Airlines spokesperson told The Verge.
More worrisome is the fact that the phone in question was a replacement Galaxy Note 7, one that was deemed to be safe by Samsung. The Verge spoke to Brian Green, owner of the Note 7, on the phone earlier today and he confirmed that he had picked up the new phone at an AT&T store on September 21st. A photograph of the box shows the black square symbol that indicates a replacement Note 7 and Green said it had a green battery icon.
There was a report last week from China that a replacement Galaxy Note 7 had caught fire, but with Chinese vendors sometimes you can’t be sure what you’re getting. This is the first instance I’ve seen where a known replacement model from the U.S. has proven dangerous.
THE HILL: GOP chairmen slam ‘unusual restrictions’ on FBI Clinton probe.
Four Republican committee chairmen on Wednesday pressed Attorney General Loretta Lynch on what they termed “the unusual restrictions” placed on the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server while secretary of State.
In a letter to Lynch, they pointed to a pair of letters from Beth Wilkinson, an attorney for two of Clinton’s lawyers, that laid out a limited immunity agreement that the Department of Justice (DOJ) agreed to in exchange for cooperation with the investigation.
“The Wilkinson letters raise serious questions about why DOJ would consent to such substantial limitations on the scope of its investigation, and how [FBI Director James] Comey’s statements on the scope of the investigation comport with the reality of what the FBI was permitted to investigate,” House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah), Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) and House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) wrote.
Members of a few committees and “one or two staff members” were allowed to review the letters last week but could not take notes or make any record of them, according to lawmakers.
According to members who saw the documents, Wilkinson and the DOJ negotiated a deal for Cheryl Mills and Heather Samuelson, who sorted Clinton’s personal emails from her work-related ones before turning over 30,000 to the State Department in 2014.
Mills and Samuelson, who were acting as Clinton’s attorneys throughout the proceedings, turned over their computers to the FBI as part of the investigation.
The immunity deal promised that the Justice Department would not prosecute Mills or Samuelson based on information obtained from the laptops.
It also limited the emails that the FBI was allowed to review to those sent between June 1, 2014, and Feb. 1, 2015, and promised that the DOJ would destroy the laptops at the close of the probe.
Wilkinson has said that she advised Mills and Samuelson to take the deal “because of the confusion surrounding the various agencies’ positions on the after-the-fact classification decisions.”
The four lawmakers took issue with the restrictions on reviewing the letters, the timeframe limitations and the agreement to destroy the laptops.
The timeframe limitations, according to the Wednesday letter, “would necessarily have excluded, for example, any emails from Cheryl Mills to Paul Combetta in late 2014 or early 2015 directing the destruction or concealment of federal records.”
Yeah, how about that.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: From Yale to Stanford, an Academic Curtain has descended across America’s universities, Thomas Sowell warns.
Or as Iowahawk likes to say, “College: an oasis of totalitarianism in a desert of freedom.”
RESET: Russia Adds Hundreds of Warheads Under Nuclear Treaty.
Russia increased its deployed nuclear warheads over the past six months under a strategic arms reduction treaty as U.S. nuclear warhead stocks declined sharply, according to the State Department.
During the same period, the United States cut its deployed nuclear warheads by 114, increasing the disparity between the two nuclear powers.
Russia’s warhead increases since 2011 suggest Moscow does not intend to cut its nuclear forces and will abandon the New START arms accord as part of a major nuclear buildup.
“It is now highly unlikely that Russia intends to comply with New START,” said Mark Schneider, a former Pentagon nuclear weapons specialist now with the National Institute for Policy.
Heckuva job, Barry.
ROSS DOUTHAT: Will We See A Trumpism Of The Left?
Some kind of celebrity (ahem, Oprah, ahem) might be able to win the Democratic nomination under present circumstances. But they would need to be respectable rather than disreputable, and run a campaign that accepted guardrails and gatekeepers rather than gleefully destroying them. The wrecking-ball left-wing analogues to Trump that pundits have imaginatively toyed with — an Oliver Stone, a Sean Penn — wouldn’t stand a chance.
But what’s true today might not be true forever. The differences between the Democratic Party’s younger, poorer, browner base and its older, whiter, richer and more moderate leadership are a potentially unstable equilibrium. The anger coursing through left-wing protest politics could find a cruder, more nakedly demagogic avatar than Bernie Sanders. A Hillary Clinton administration could supply various betrayals and compromises or foul up in some disastrous way, encouraging a sense that the professional class that dominates liberalism’s upper reaches needs to give way to a revived (and larger) version of Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition — a “real American future” analogue to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” appeals.
If Trump has thrived by imitating Europe’s right-wing nationalists, a Trumpism of the left would imitate the left-wing populists of Latin America and Asia — the Chavismo of Alicia Machado’s native Venezuela, or the Trumpian socialism presently being served up by the ranting, trigger-happy president of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte.
This may sound implausible, indeed frankly un-American — but so did the ascent of Trump’s National Front-ish politics, and yet here we are. Cultural and demographic change can ripple into politics slowly, and then all at once. The elite checks on a gonzo left-wing populism are real and powerful, but so are the cultural forces roiling underneath. And the same demographic changes that have made the right more nativist and populist, more European and reactionary, could expose the left to a Latin American temptation if liberal governance ever really hits the rocks.
If and when it does, the Hillary Clinton campaign’s skillful deployment of Alicia Machado may be cast in a somewhat different light. It’s Clinton’s Democratic Party today — managerial, technocratic, polished, a little smug. But Machado’s wilder, messier, “I’m not a saint girl” style might have its own claim on the American left’s future, if the technocrats and managers ever let her kind of Democratic voter down.
And they will.
DANG, THEY CALLED OUR BLUFF: The stunning tale of naive weakness that led to the Iran deal. In other news, leftist oikophobes rolled by “them poor brown peoplez”. Who could have seen it coming?
YES IT MATTERS, IT REALLY MATTERS: Yesterday, just before going to bed, I found myself in the midst of a group talking about how wonderful, competent and patriotic Hillary was. No. She isn’t. This is a small corner of why not. Why Hillary Clinton’s Email Server Matters.
ET TU CATO INSTITUTE? No.
DREAMS OF CHINA’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS: Liberal Protesters Surround, Berate Conservatives At University Of Kansas. This sounds like stuff that went on in my high school in the seventies. Pro tip, if you tell them where to put it and that they’re boring and walk out, they don’t know what to do. Okay, it probably helped that I was a head taller than most girls my age and wore steel toed boots. Maybe conservative-libertarian students need to consider the steel toed boots.
WHAT? ANOTHER ONE? ARE WE COLLECTING THE FULL SET? Letting cabbies not learn English is another ‘progressive’ debacle.
CHINA’S PLA DREAMS OF WIELDING THE POWER OF IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARDS: How the nuke deal is funding Iran’s darkest forces.
HOW IS THIS EVEN A QUESTION: Why Watching Silly Cat Videos Is Good for You.
COMBATING THE CULTURE OF COMPETITIVE VICTIMHOOD: What Tocqueville Can Teach Us About Microaggressions.
CLINTON TROLLS ATTACK DILBERT, IN MOVES THAT ARE BECOMING STUNNINGLY FAMILIAR: The Week I Became a Target.
YES, BUT EVEN A PRO-ABORTION REPUBLICAN COULDN’T GET AWAY THIS STUFF: Intimidating and defaming accusers of sexual assault, violating security protocols, and using political office for private enrichment are part of liberal privilege. Hillary Clinton supports abortion, so we should forgive her terrible acts?
October 5, 2016
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Living donor uterus transplants performed in US.
IN 2016, IT’S NOT CLEAR THAT WE DO: Why Do We Need Healthy Brains?
OCTOBER 5, 1877: “Hear me, my Chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands I will fight no more forever.” Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce. What an eloquent man.
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GLOBAL DEBT: Business Insider reports that the IMF believes world-wide debt is $152 trillion. This is “…the highest gross debt ever recorded. The debt-to-GDP ratio is also at an all-time high of 225%, up from 200% 14 years ago.”
This is non-financial public and private sector debt combined.
Here is Zero Hedge’s take on the report.
No one really knows the real global debt total, other than “it’s really big.” I gave a speech a year ago to a professional group that briefly discussed some of the total debt estimates (I emphasize briefly). In September 2015 total US federal debt was a little less than $20 trillion. Estimates for total US debt (including state, local government and private debt) ranged from $55 trillion to $60 trillion, with the higher figure given credence. Every source agreed total global debt exceeded $200 trillion. $230 trillion was a common estimate. This Bloomberg report says global debt went over $200 trillion in 2014. A Wall Street Journal article I read last year said the world exceeded $200 trillion in 2013. A trillion here, a trillion there. This LA Times analysis (July 2016) has some more recent debt figures.