Hillary and Gabbard

Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.--from a speech written for Nixon in the event the Apollo 11 mission failed


 “All the US politicians and pundits and social media virtue signalers who are quick to windbag opine on Hong Kong protests are quiet on Chile and Barcelona this week where brutal rioters are destroying their cities and police are aggressively cracking down.” --Sameer Chisty. I didn't know this guy and thought the perspective suspicious. But he's a VC,  Founder and Chairman of Streeton Partners and ex-Bain.

Peter Gunter, professor at North Texas State University, predicted in the spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness: "Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions. ... By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine." 

Sports Business Journal recently estimated that the NBA’s presence in China is worth $5 billion to the league. Nike, with [Lebron] James as a primary spokesman in China, received 17% of its $37.2 billion in brand revenue from Greater China in fiscal 2019…James also has served Tencent as a spokesperson, consultant and endorser of the NBA 2K League in China.

The #MeToo movement has ended the U.S. career of legendary 78-year-old Spanish tenor Placido Domingo, one of classical music’s greatest ambassadors and impresarios. (The opening line of a very angry article by MacDonald in Quillette.)

A study of four cities, Seattle, Philly, Oakland and San Francisco on the impact of taxing surgery drinks. An increase in the beverage tax rate of 1 cent per ounce decreases household purchases of taxed beverages by 53.0 ounces per month or 12.2 percent. This impact is small in magnitude and consistent with a reduction in individual consumption of 5 calories per day per household member and eventual reduction in weight of 0.5 pounds.  Separated by city, the decline was concentrated in Philadelphia, where the tax decreased purchases by 27.7 percent. There are no impacts of the taxes in the other three cities.

For Thomas: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/go-back-to-work-outcry-over-deaths-on-amazons-warehouse-floor/ar-AAIY7rF?ocid=spartandhp

A recent study of 180 academic curricula vitae found that 56 percent that claimed to have at least one publication contained at least one unverifiable or inaccurate publication, and it suggests that CV falsification could be much more common than scholars committed to professional integrity might hope. The study is small — the 56 percent reflects only 79 CVs, of 141 that claimed to have at least one publication. The researchers behind the study make no presumption as to whether the errors were intentional.

The empirical case for limited government is that although human beings have something in common – human nature – they are different in capacities and aspirations. From this it follows, not logically but practically, that government cannot hope to provide happiness to all. The most it can reasonably expect to provide are the conditions under which happiness, as each defines it, can be pursued.--will 

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is set to meet with his Russian counterpart to discuss dividing influence in Syria as U.S. troops pull out and a five-day halt to a Turkish offensive comes to an end. (wsj)
So the hawks were right?

On this day in 1962, Kennedy gave his Cuban Missile speech, one of those events where everyone remembers where he was.

                        Hillary and Gabbard

The high-mindedness of American politicians continues with this weird thing from Hillary. Lying is like breathing.




Hillary Clinton has floated a conspiracy theory that the Russians are "grooming" Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.to be a third-party candidate in 2020, while claiming 2016 Green Party nominee Jill Stein is "also" a Russian asset. (In 2016, Stein won enough votes in the key states of Wisconsin and Michigan to keep those states blue, had she been able to magically gift them to Hillary. In other words, it’s a pretty fair statement that, all other things being equal, a third-party candidate, Jill Stein, may very well have cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election. Shades of Perot.)

Do you notice a preoccupation with Russians and Evil here? And when did the Left start getting afraid of the Russians anyway?

During this week’s Democratic debate, Gabbard blasted debate co-sponsors CNN and the New York Times for "smearing" her along similar lines. CNN commentator Bakari Sellers called her a "puppet" for the Russian government and the Times reported on her “frequent” mentions in Russian state news media.

"Just two days ago, The New York Times put out an article saying that I'm a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different smears,” Gabbard said. "This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I'm an asset of Russia — completely despicable."

Then she tweeted this.
"Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know — it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It’s now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don’t cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly."

And, true to journalistic ethics, this from a CNBC panel: “One thing that was interesting about Tulsi Gabbard’s response, I mean she went after Hillary Clinton, she was strong, she said she wasn’t gonna run as a third party candidate — she never denied being a Russian asset,” said a panelist MSNBC identifies as Kimberly Atkins. “That was the one aspect that was missing from her response, which, you know, you would think that would be within the first line or two. It was not there.”

How do we tolerate these people?

Trump and Other Illnesses

“Football combines the two worst things about America: It is violence punctuated by committee meetings.”--Will


Chris' girlfriend, Alyssa, arrived back from Italy for a week.
A professor of mine in college used to say that diagnosing an opponent was the hallmark of the demagogue. So read what is below with care.

Smith revised The Theory of Moral Sentiments six times.

President Trump overruled advisers to ramp up tariffs on China after a heated exchange in which he insisted it was the best way to make China comply with demands. (wsj)

AARP has a lot of insurance and annuity plans. They are in favor of the horrific Secure Act. Think they have a conflict?

A report, published in the Spanish newspaper El País, claims a team of researchers led by Prof Juan Carlos Izpisúa Belmonte from the Salk Institute in the US have produced monkey-human chimeras. The research was conducted in China “to avoid legal issues”, according to the report.

 “Drinking at least one artificially sweetened beverage daily was associated with almost three times the risk of developing stroke or dementia compared to those who drank artificially sweetened beverages less than once a week,” according to the study, published in the American Heart Association journal “Stroke.”

On this day in 1861, Lincoln imposed the first federal income tax by signing the Revenue Act. Strapped for cash with which to pursue the Civil War, Lincoln and Congress agreed to impose a 3 percent tax on annual incomes over $800.


        Trump and Other Illnesses

There is a strange narrative emerging in some political analysis of the current American scene: Trump support and opiate addiction comes from the same demographics. "According to the common wisdom and several sociological studies, the main reason that communities hit by the opioid crisis are also addicted to Donald Trump is the economic distress that underlies both." One article quotes JAMA, reporting “socioeconomic conditions” account for only about two-thirds of the Trump-opioid connection. So Trump support is sort of a pathology.

Science.

One article leaps to this conclusion: "What is immediately different for indigent people in rural Kentucky or the Mahoning Valley of Ohio is that so far as they are concerned, they didn’t simply lose their jobs, the Blacks got them–because the Government favors Blacks." Sean Mcewee reported in Salon during the 2016 campaign, these Trump supporters experienced their pain as discrimination and victimization. “Racism is the real driver of Trump’s success,” he wrote, ”social pain is understood through the lens of racial animus.” The victimized people expressed animus toward Muslims, gays, lesbians, coastal elites, Harvard, and Washington.

I was not aware that lesbians were taking jobs from tough old white guys in West Virginia but, if a reporter writes it, I suppose it is true. But I do know that in March 2016, at a Democratic town hall in Ohio, Hillary Clinton  said, “We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.” This was immediately taken as a sign of her hostility to the working class and a confirmation of Democrats’ “war on coal.” She later lost every county in West Virginia — the country's premier coal-mining state — to Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, a dramatic reversal from her landslide win against Barack Obama in the state's 2008 Democratic primary.

There may have been some subtle racism in that vote but it is truly hard to see. What is easy to see is a reaction of a sizable portion of poor working people to the unmasking of the disguise that they are cared for by people who have, at their core, a profound Utopian vision of the world that simply does not include them.

Narratives

Nazis Clarify They’re Only Calling For ‘Democratic Nazism'--Babylon Bee


Chris' surgery is this morning.

Economic growth won’t last as the U.S. labors under the burden of growing entitlement programs, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan told CNBC.

Since we are willing to govern our lives on narratives and tropes, we now have proof that a wall at the border works: A wall kept the North free of Wildlings for one thousand years. Take that, Pelosi.

A new app for the iPhone named Jumbo will automatically delete old tweets on Twitter, apply Facebook privacy settings, and delete history stored by Google and Amazon Alexa.

Reuters

Smoke rises around the altar inside the Notre Dame Cathedral.

San Francisco’s Speakeasy Ales; Lagers or New Hampshire’s Smuttynose Brewing, which relied on traditional distribution, have been forced to sell in the face of looming foreclosures.

No primitive people were ever yet so stupid as to suppose that they could increase their wealth by taxing themselves. (george)

Anna Wintour has suggested that Melania Trump will likely never be on the cover of Vogue in the future. Wintour, the longtime editor-in-chief of the magazine, explained her reasoning in an interview with CNN. "You have to stand up for what you believe in, you have to take a point of view,” she told chief international anchor Christiane Amanpour. “I don't think you can try to please everyone all the time.”  My goodness. Who knew fashion cut so wide and deep?

“The villain here is big oil. The fossil fuel industry did this to us,” said De Blasio at a press conference, standing at a podium adorned with a “Stop Plastic Waste, Stop Big Oil” sign. “Today, we say no to plastics. We say no to fossil fuels. We say yes to a better and fairer future.” This is not Agincourt. He is speaking here about single use plastics, like bags and straws. It sounds like The Onion.


Almost all federal income taxes (97%) are paid by the top 50%, more than 2/3 of income taxes are paid for by the top 10% and more than 40% of taxes are paid by the top 1% of taxpayers. 

The rising percentage of Americans who are not required to pay taxes — whose percentage as a share of all taxpayers has more doubled over the last 25 years.
The notion that the rich do not pay taxes is a canard.

                                   Narratives

We are obsessed by stories, news. And, conversely, we are disinterested in old news as it is replaced by the new, shiny story. So one wonders how far this new question about an old story--the AG question about the government spying on the Trump campaign--will go. With this in mind:

From an old, 2017, article by Andrew C. McCarthy in the National Review (the emphasis is his):

"FBI Director Comey began drafting his statement exonerating Hillary Clinton in April 2016 – more than two months before he delivered the statement at his now famous July 5 press conference. This indicates the decision to give the Democrats’ nominee a pass was clearly made long before the investigation was over, and even long before key witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed.

On April 10, 2016, President Obama publicly stated that Hillary Clinton had shown “carelessness” in using a private e-mail server to handle classified information, but he insisted that she had not intended to endanger national security (which is not an element of the [criminal statutes relevant to her e-mail scandal]).

McCarthy writes, "a series of Justice Department shenanigans we would come to learn about: Cutting off key areas of inquiry; cutting inexplicable immunity deals; declining to use the grand jury to compel evidence; agreeing to limit searches of computers (in order to miss key time-frames when obstruction occurred); agreeing to destroy physical evidence (laptop computers); failing to charge and squeeze witnesses who made patently false statements; allowing subjects of the investigation to act as lawyers for other subjects of the investigation (in order to promote the charade that some evidence was off-limits due to the attorney-client privilege); and so on. There is a way – a notoriously aggressive way – that the Justice Department and FBI go about their business when they are trying to make a case. Here, they were trying to unmake a case."

He summarizes: "The decision not to indict Hillary Clinton was not made by then-FBI Director Comey. It was made by President Obama and his Justice Department – Comey’s superiors.

....Bottom line: In April, President Obama and his Justice Department adopted a Hillary Clinton defense strategy of concocting a crime no one was claiming Clinton had committed: to wit, transmitting classified information with an intent to harm the United States. With media-Democrat complex help, they peddled the narrative that she could not be convicted absent this “malicious intent,” in a desperate effort to make the publicly known evidence seem weak. Meanwhile, they quietly hamstrung FBI case investigators in order to frustrate the evidence-gathering process. When damning proof nevertheless mounted, the Obama administration dismissed the whole debacle by rewriting the statute (to impose an imaginary intent standard) and by offering absurd rationalizations for not applying the statute as written."

If true, such a distortion could not occur without the help of opinion-makers. And, would it have been a lot worse if it had been done by Russians?

Birthers

Some people have a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to lower the powerful to their own level, and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality in freedom.--deTocqueville

Mick Jagger is having an open heart this week in N. Y..

Self publishing works! On Monday, the Sun reported that the health insurance giant Kaiser Permanente paid Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh $114,000 for copies of her books from 2015 to 2018. In September 2017, the city’s spending board, which Pugh controls, awarded Kaiser a $48 million contract for insurance for city employees. Pugh has not said anything about a deal with Kaiser.

This week gender activists and feminist organizations like the American Association of  University Women will be promoting “Equal Pay Day” on Tuesday, April 2. This continues the wonderful tradition of just blatant mendacity that has become our cultural norm. These lies just stagger on, unchallenged, and feed the smoldering resentments of a misunderstanding minority.
"This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers." (from a study by the Dept of Labor, 2009)
If women were paid 77 cents on the dollar, a profit-oriented firm could dramatically cut labor costs by just replacing male employees with females. 

And going along with the lying:  “Undoubtedly there is collusion,” Rep. Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, told reporters in Washington this week. This is the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee who earlier had implied that he had knowledge of the Collusion.  Maybe the Left thinks the Collusion of Mass Destruction was "settled science."
We need better leaders.

And, as if we don't have enough trouble with stupidity, Catholic priests in Poland burned books they say are sacrilegious this weekend, including  J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series of fantasy novels. "We obey the Word," priests said in a Facebook post showing photographs of the public book burning and quoting Biblical passages from the book of Deuteronomy in the Old Testament.
They're on Facebook.

The most viewed old post this week: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2018/09/reverie_5.html

80% of domestic ETF assets are managed by just three firms. 

On this day in 2005, John Paul II died.

                                      Birthers

The original smear against Obama was that he was a crypto-Muslim, floated in 2004 by perennial Illinois political candidate Andy Martin. Other related versions of this theory alleged that Obama was educated in an Indonesian “madrassa” or steeped in Islamist ideology from a young age, and the theories began to spread virally after Obama appeared on the national stage – to the casual observer, from nowhere – with his early 2007 presidential campaign announcement.
Obama’s controversial but emphatically Christian pastor emerged as a campaign issue and the belief that he was a Muslim seemed to lose traction.

Then, as Obama became a national candidate, the suggestion emerged that he was not eligible to serve. That theory first emerged in the Spring of 2008 as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama's citizenship.

"Barack Obama's mother was living in Kenya with his Arab-African father late in her pregnancy. She was not allowed to travel by plane then, so Barack Obama was born there and his mother took him to Hawaii to register his birth," asserted one chain email that surfaced on the urban legend site Snopes.com in April 2008.
(From Smith and Tau in Politico, 2011)

That is, the smear came from the Clinton camp. Two supporters of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign reportedly shared the claim that then-rival Barack Obama was not born in the United States and thus was not eligible to be president.

One was a volunteer in Iowa, who was fired, Clinton’s former campaign manager said Friday. The other was Clinton confidant Sidney Blumenthal, according to a former McClatchy Washington Bureau chief. (From McClatchy Bureau)

Quora, Hillary and Kavanaugh

One of my many failures is my inability to see trends and participate. So, in the spirit of the recent unabashed Kavanaugh character assassinations, here is another, from Quora.

 

Quora is a fun, sometimes very interesting forum where questions are asked and answered. May of the questions look to be from high school students in search of term paper information but others are sometimes very informative. There is a lot of European anti-American stuff on it.

 

There is a very bad element to this, the risk that it can become a public gossip forum without any rebuttal. I am no fan of Hillary but this was published recently in response to the question, "Who was the rudest celebrity you've met?" The answer is signed, but unfair; it is  brutal, cannot be refuted and comes from a guy I, at least, do not know. The answer:

 
"HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON.

No question….

Night one: Random encounter with the wife of the candidate. She is belligerent. Rude. Drunk. Obnoxious, and foul-mouthed. Ordered me around like a coolie.

Night two: I am formally introduced to the candidate and his wife as a) a donor and b) the compute genius who was going to smooth the path to the White House.

Her: Thank you, blah etc. and very sincere…are you all right? What is that bruise?

Me: At your rally last night you assumed I was a staffer not moving fast enough, and you threw a hot (heavy!) mug of coffee in my face. With the mug. With the bourbon IN the coffee (hence, my guess at drunkenness).

Her:

Yep."

Clinton/Book

What Happened


The WashPo has an article on some of the pages leaked from Clinton's new apologia, What Happened, and some of it about Sanders is interesting. "Clinton attacks some of Sanders's supporters for being “sexist” and suggests the Vermont senator doesn't have the Democratic Party's true interests at heart. Most notably, she also intimates that he may not have even cared that his underhanded (in her opinion) attacks on her helped Donald Trump become president." according to the writer, Aaron Blake. "But inside the measured language are some pretty harsh judgments of Sanders. She's not just suggesting he's not a Democrat; she's suggesting he doesn't truly care about the party or that he may have played a hand in electing Trump. She's suggesting he doesn't appreciate the party. She claims his attacks were out-of-bounds and unprincipled."
All this despite structuring the primary specifically against him, aided and abetted by the DNC.


Here is the section that was leaked:


Because we agreed on so much, Bernie couldn’t make an argument against me in this area on policy, so he had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character. Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist. When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn’t come up with anything. Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump’s “Crooked Hillary” campaign.
I don’t know if that bothered Bernie or not. He certainly shared my horror at the thought of Donald Trump becoming President, and I appreciate that he campaigned for me in the general election. But he isn’t a Democrat — that’s not a smear, that’s what he says. He didn’t get into the race to make sure a Democrat won the White House, he got in to disrupt the Democratic Party. He was right that Democrats needed to strengthen our focus on working families and that there’s always a danger of spending too much time courting donors because of our insane campaign finance system. He also engaged a lot of young people in the political process for the first time, which is extremely important. But I think he was fundamentally wrong about the Democratic Party — the party that brought us Social Security under Roosevelt; Medicare and Medicaid under Johnson; peace between Israel and Egypt under Carter; broad-based prosperity and a balanced budget under Clinton; and rescued the auto industry, passed health care reform, and imposed tough new rules on Wall Street under Obama. I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too.

A Campaign of Firsts

Hillary's unprecedented nomination and campaign got trumped. But she more than lost her place in history. True, she was the first nominated woman to run--certainly a legitimate achievement. But what about Trump? A guy who had never run for public office gets nominated for president in a political party whose leadership opposes him and never supports him, runs a campaign the likes of which had never been seen before against an astonishing array of opposition from the press, the entertainment industry, domestic and foreign tycoons and wins.
Her achievement was considerable but it casts a shadow when compared to Trump's.

A Few Last Words About the Lady Who Has Been Working for Us All Her Life

Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the New York Times bestselling author of The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents and The Secrets of the FBI. He is not well liked by the Left, who, if you review him on Google, refer to him as "disgraced" or "discredited." Their objections seem more personal than factual but he is mostly a gossipy guy with a lot of hearsay who does not usually follow the normal deference afforded Hillary.
This is excerpted from a recent article which seems to be a rehash of material from his book, apparently stimulated by Trump's tasteless resurrection of the Vince Foster suicide. There is little new to be said about this terrible election except the take on Starr which is interesting and different. Nor have I read anything like this regarding Foster's motive.

In interviewing Clinton White House aides and Foster's friends and family, the FBI found that a week before Foster's death, Hillary held a meeting at the White House with Foster and other top aides to discuss her proposed health care legislation. 

Hillary violently disagreed with a legal objection Foster raised at the meeting and ridiculed him in front of his peers, former FBI agent Coy Copeland and former FBI supervisory agent Jim Clemente told me. 

Copeland was Starr's senior investigator and read the reports of other agents working for Starr.

During the White House meeting, Hillary continued to humiliate Foster mercilessly, both former FBI agents say.

'Hillary put him down really, really bad in a pretty good-size meeting,' Copeland says. 'She told him he didn't get the picture, and he would always be a little hick town lawyer who was obviously not ready for the big time.'

Indeed, Hillary went so far as to blame Foster for all the Clintons' problems and accuse him of failing them, according to Clemente, who was also assigned by the FBI to the Starr investigation and who probed the circumstances surrounding Foster's suicide.

'Foster was profoundly depressed, but Hillary lambasting him was the final straw because she publicly embarrassed him in front of others,' says Clemente, speaking about the investigation for the first time.

'Hillary blamed him for failed nominations, claimed he had not vetted them properly, and said in front of his White House colleagues, "You're not protecting us" and "You have failed us," Clemente says. 'That was the final blow.'
 

Starr issued a 38,000-word report, along with a separate psychologist's report on the factors that contributed to Foster's suicide. 

Yet Starr never mentioned the meeting with Hillary, leaving out the fact that his own investigation had found that Hillary's rage had led to her friend's suicide.

Why Starr chose to not reveal the critical meeting and his own investigators' findings remains a mystery.

While the Clintons claimed Starr was out to get them, Clemente says that as his staff hanged, Starr vacillated between pursuing the investigation aggressively and pulling his punches.

For example, the former FBI supervisor agent reveals that Starr refused to allow him to try to interview Hillary about her commodities trading. 

For reasons still unknown, in her first commodity trade in 1978, Hillary was allowed to order ten cattle futures contracts, which would normally cost $12,000, although she had only $1,000 in her account at the time, according to trade records the White House released.

Hillary was able to turn her initial investment into $6,300 overnight. In ten months of trading, she made nearly $100,000. She claimed she made smart trades based on information from the Wall Street Journal. 

The question, Clemente says, was why she was allowed to make investments while ignoring normal margin calls that require traders to cover any losses incurred during the course of trading.
 

Starr never told Copeland or Clemente why he decided to exclude the material from his report, and the former FBI agents can only speculate on his reasoning.

'Starr was a very honorable-type guy, and if it did not pertain to our authorized investigation, he did not want to pursue it,' Copeland says. 'And I think he felt that Hillary's personality and her dealings with subordinates in the White House were immaterial to our investigation.'
 

Secret Service agents consider being assigned to Hillary's detail a form of punishment because she is so nasty.

As he was serving a subpoena in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House, Copeland says, another FBI agent working on the Foster investigation made the mistake of saying hello to Hillary as she passed him.

'She had a standing rule that no one spoke to her when she was going from one location to another,' Copeland says. 'In fact, anyone who would see her coming would just step into the first available office.'

But the agent 'didn't know the ground rules,' Copeland says. 'He dared to speak to her in the hallway,' he says. 'As he was leaving, she got out of the elevator and was approaching him.'

'Good morning, Mrs. Clinton,' the agent said.

'She jumped all over him,' Copeland says. "How dare you? You people are just destroying my husband."

'It was that vast right-wing conspiracy rant. Then she had to tack on something to the effect of, "And where do you buy your suits? Penney's?'

For many weeks, the agent told no one about the encounter.

'Finally, he told me about it,' Copeland says. 'And he said, "I was wearing the best suit I owned."'

The Last of Benghazi

The campaign death march continues. Now the FBI threatens us with prolonging the crisis with post-election  investigations. The mind reels. The hand trembles. Inquiring minds want solace.

The Hill has several articles about the Benghazi Report, that seemingly unending congressional investigation about the attack in Libya where four Americans, including  the Ambassador Chris Stevens, were murdered by terrorists. Reviewing them is worthwhile because, despite the irrational arguments, there were some real problems with the Benghazi event that have become lost in the screaming. One thing to remember, as was part of the story-line in Ben Affleck's movie "Argo," management of security at an embassy is the jurisdiction of the Department of State, not any department with experience in such matters. In spite of all the heat and accusations, these are some reasonable generalities:
 

Based on the collective intelligence compiled by the Select Committee, led by Committee Chairman Trey GowdyTrey GowdyDems circle wagons of lies around Hillary after Benghazi reportBenghazi committee plans new interviewBenghazi panel faults ClintonMORE, the indisputable fact is that there was a blatant disregard for warning signs, an inept response to the attack, and a fabricated cover-up; a complete and utter failure of will by the senior leadership of the Obama Administration.
The Obama Administration’s foreign policy in Libya, led by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a dismal failure. Most notable was the decision by the Secretary of State to pursue the ouster of Libyan leader Muamar Qaddafi without having a plan in place for what happened afterward. Placing trust in the various militia factions to set aside their longstanding differences and establish a governing body in the war torn country illustrates another amateur mistake. And none of these decisions were in the interests of the United States.
Additional security was denied even though intelligence reports clearly indicated the presence in Libya of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups hostile to the United States.
What is undeniable is that the administration made a decision early in the attack that this was a public relations problem first. The protection of the people under attack was never a primary consideration.

It was a bad idea, badly done.

(AllSides rates The Hill's coverage of Washington news as center biased.)

Hard Choices: One Obnoxious Politician Assesses Another.

John Bolton, the offensive lawyer and diplomat served as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations from August 2005 until December 2006 as a recess appointee. He has an article that assesses Hillary Clinton's reputation as a "hawk" in U.S. foreign affairs, using her book, "Hard Choices," as the basis of his insight to her philosophy. (Just because your obnoxious doesn't mean you're stupid.) Here is a bit of it:

Clinton has Rice and Power asserting that America bore a responsibility to protect” innocent civilians threatened by Gadhafi. This so-called “duty of humanitarian intervention,” a fixture of the international left for years, was the central rationale for Obama's Libya intervention. Clinton describes the qualifications and limits Obama placed on U.S. involvement — but never implies disagreeing with them, before or after the intervention.
She also showed eagerness to subordinate America's role to international approval. Her caveat about the absence of “international authorization” essentially adopts John Kerry's 2004 “global test” for the legitimacy of U.S. policy, namely that Washington should act only with approval by the U.N. Security Council or some comparable body.

Obama plainly shared this perspective, stressing in his public announcement of U.S. military action that “the writ of the international community must be enforced. That is the cause of this coalition.”

Bolton's conclusion? "Hillary Clinton's 'hawkishness,' by contrast, is decidedly tilted ideologically. It subordinates U.S. discretion to international organizations and disconnects military action from American national interests as historically understood. And we can justifiably surmise that Clinton's passivity as an adviser will be even more pronounced when the mantle of decision-making rests on her shoulders rather than another's. That is Hillary Clinton's unspinnable message to voters, in her very own words."

The Investigative Press

I do not know much about Eric Zuesse but I admit to suspicion of a guy called an "investigative historian" who writes a lot for The HuffPo. But he has written a fierce article about the UK and US in the Middle East. Some is just quoting reasonable people, though. Some excerpts, fwiw:

Peter Ford, who was the UK’s Ambassador in Syria during 2003-2006, was asked by the BBC in the "The Big Question" interview on Feb.14th, whether the current Syrian President Bashar al-Assad would have to be a part of the solution in that country after the war is over, and Ambassador Ford said:

“I think sadly, but inevitably, he is. Realistically, Assad is not going to be overthrown. This becomes more clear with every day that passes. Western analysts have been indulging in wishful thinking for 5 years; it’s time to get real, we owe it to the Syrian people to be much more realistic and hard headed about this. The West has to stop propping up the so-called ‘moderate opposition’, which is not moderate at all.”

This was quoted by Almasdar News on Feb. 18th, which went on to note that,

"The frustrated interviewer asked Mr. Ford about 'what we should have done,' and he responded that 'we should have backed off, we should have not tried to overthrow the regime.' Mr. Ford eloquently added that this policy has been 'like a dog returning to vomit.’”

"...we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.”
He was saying there that we support only non-secular regimes, sectarian regimes, in Arabia, this meaning fundamentalist Sunni governments — especially Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, the very same regimes that even the U.S. Secretary of State acknowledged in a 2009 cable that was wikileaked are the chief regimes that are funding jihadist groups.
Ford was noting that the United States and UK strive to keep in power those governments, the ones that are led by royal families that supply the bulk of funding for jihadist groups — jihadists who perpetrate terrorism in the United States and Europe.
“We never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow”: Ambassdor Ford was so bold as to imply that our governments are supporting, under the table, the very same ruling families that they know to be funding (as that cable only vaguely referred to them) “Sunni terrorist groups worldwide” (which includes in Western countries, too).
The BBC’s interviewer ignored that statement; he wasn’t struck by it, such as to ask: “Why are we supporting the chief funders of Islamic jihad? Why are we overthrowing (or in Syria are trying to overthrow) a secular regime, against which we join foreign jihadist groups in order to overthrow that non-sectarian regime; why are these dogs, as you call the U.S. and UK, returning time and again to that vomit?”

This was a live interview program, and so the BBC censors weren’t able to eliminate Ambassador Ford’s responses from the interview; but, instead, the interviewer did his best to interrupt and to talk over Ford’s shocking — and shockingly truthful — assertions about the government (ours) that supposedly represent our  interests (and not the interests of Western oil companies etc.). Ford will probably not be invited again to be on live television in the West to air his views about Syria.

Now, on Clinton:

Here she was, expressing her current view regarding Syria, in a recent debate against her Democrstic Pasrt opponent Bernie Sanders:

QUESTIONER: In respect to when you take out Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Right now or do you wait? Do you tackle ISIS first? You have said, Secretary Clinton, that you come to the conclusion that we have to proceed on both fronts at once. We heard from the senator just this week that we must put aside the issue of how quickly we get rid of Assad and come together with countries, including Russia and Iran, to destroy ISIS first. Is he wrong?

CLINTON: I think we're missing the point here. We are doing both at the same time.

QUESTIONER: But that's what he's saying, we should put that aside for now and go after ISIS.

CLINTON: Well, I don't agree with that.

She's still (now after five years, and even though she knows that we’re supporting jihadist-backing Arabic royal families and their Shariah-law regimes) comes back to that “vomit”: that "we never saw a secular Arab regime that we didn’t want to overthrow.”She does this even though, in October 2014, the man who had collected the mega-donations to Al Qaeda (all of which had been in cash) had detailed, under oath, in a U.S. court proceeding, that the Saud family were the main people who paid the "salaries" of the 9/11 terrorists. The Saud family are now the chief backers of the overthrow-Assad campaign. Do politicians such as Clinton actually represent the Sauds? It’s not only the Bush family who do. What’s exhibited here is a double-scandal: first, that a person such as that would even be a Democratic Party candidate for the U.S. Presidency (and Jeb Bush shares Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy prescriptions, though he’s virtually certain not  to win the Republican Presidential nomination); and, second, that the Western press try to avoid, as much as possible, to expose the fact that this is, indeed, “vomit,” and avoid to explain to their audience the very corrupt governmental and news-media system that enables people such as Ms. Clinton to become and remain a leading Presidential candidate in the United States. Clearly, a person like that isn’t qualified to be in government at all; she’s corrupt, or else incredibly stupid. And no one thinks she’s that stupid. But lots of people accuse her of being corrupt.

A View of Hillary's Trouble

Here is a segment of an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on the recent State Department paper on Clinton's management of her emails and server. He is a FOX guy with libertarian tendencies and is a real strict constitutionalist so he is not open-minded about these questions. Nor is he dumb, though:

"Today is a big deal for a couple of reasons. First, it directly refutes a statement she has made dozens of times, 'it was allowed', we now know that it was not allowed. She never even asked."

"She signed a two page statement under oath on her first day on the job which was given after she had a two hour tutorial by two FBI agents telling her about the proper care and legal obligations for state secrets. In that oath she swore that she had the obligation to know how to care for state secrets and to recognize them."

"Here is what's new in the report today. Her server in her house went down a couple of times, and when it went down the blackberry wouldn't work. The state department IT people said 'here use a state department blackberry', and she said through her assistant Huma Abedin 'no because we are concerned with the Freedom of Information Act', so she went dark and she had documents verbally read to her rather than transmitted to her through the state department email system."

When the interviewer expressed surprise that Clinton was concerned about having documents subject to FOIA, Napolitano hammered home the the point that now the FBI has intent.

"Now what does this tell the FBI? This shows intent. You don't have to prove intent when you're talking about espionage, you can prove it by gross negligence, there's ample evidence of gross negligence. But avoiding the transparency laws shows a consciousness of evading the requirements."

He concluded that only a political decision could keep her from indictment.

Bad Juju

Many think the investigation into Clinton's e-mail should be in quotes. That is, the investigation is no more an investigation that the WWE championship is a competition. This kind of thing is inevitable, of course, when the quality and integrity of a performance is judged by the performers themselves. This story might be a worthwhile indicator of the sincerity of the entire event.


In March of 2013, a Romanian hacker calling himself Guccifer hacked into the AOL account of Sidney Blumenthal and leaked to "Russia Today" four e-mails containing intelligence on Libya that Blumenthal sent to Hillary Clinton.
Sidney Blumenthal is a long time friend and adviser of the Clinton family who in an unofficial capacity sent many “intelligence memos” to Hillary Clinton during her tenure as Secretary of State.
The emails have since been released in all of the Clinton hubbub--except for one, which exists only in the hacked release. That email says the Saudis funded the Benghazi attack, and not only was this not followed up on, but there is not any record of this e-mail ever existing except for the "Russia Today" leak.
There is another e-mail missing with the subject “H: Libya security latest. Sid”
The fact that it is missing suggests one of two possibilities, at least according to William Reynolds of Medium.com:  

1. The State Department does have a copy of this e-mail but deemed it top secret and too sensitive to release, even in redacted form. This would indicate that Sidney Blumenthal was sending highly classified information from his AOL account to Secretary Clinton’s private e-mail server despite the fact that he never even had a security clearance to deal with such sensitive information in the first place. If this scenario explains why the e-mail is missing, classified materials were mishandled.
2. The State Department does not have a copy, and this e-mail was deleted by both Clinton and Blumenthal before turning over their subpoenaed e-mails to investigators, which would be considered destruction of evidence and lying to federal officials. This also speaks to the reason why the private clintonemail.com server may have been established in the first place. If Blumenthal were to regularly send highly sensitive yet technically “unclassified” information from his AOL account to Clinton’s official government e-mail account, it could have been revealed with a FOIA request. It has already been established that Hillary Clinton deleted 15 of Sidney Blumenthal’s e-mails to her, this discrepancy was discovered when Blumenthal’s e-mails were subpoenaed, although a State Department official claims that none of these 15 e-mails have any information about the Benghazi attack. It would seem from the subject line that this e-mail does. And it is missing from the public record.