Category Archives: Political Commentary

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Weird

The Upside-Down World Of Robert Reich

7 Comments

One group leaves its demonstration sites cleaner than they found them, and wants to clean up an overgrown corrupt federal government. The other poops on police cars and has rape tents. Guess which ones he calls “wreckers” and which he calls “rebuilders”?

[Update a couple minutes later]

This seems related, somehow: Hillary’s big donors are giving to Jeb, too. It’s almost like it’s all just one big-government party.

[Update a few minutes later]

This seems related, somehow, too: Chelsea Clinton is the closest thing America has to a princess. Just what we’ve always needed.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Thoughts on Princess Chelsea, from Jonah Goldberg:

As for the bit about her being the closest thing America has to a princess, well, when you think about it for a second, I think that’s right. The problem is that the closest thing to a princess in America is very, very, very far from an actual, you know, princess. We don’t do royalty here very well. The thing that makes her most princess-like is that she really doesn’t seem to know what to do with herself except get caught up in the lie of her family business. What I mean is that she may actually believe that the Clintons are a kind of secular royalty and a dynasty. No doubt she’s been told that a lot. No doubt her parents don’t loop her in on the seamier side of how the Tudors of the Ozarks operate. She probably thinks the primary purpose of the Clinton Foundation is philanthropy rather than extending the Clinton brand and empire, in much the same way descendants of the original medieval robber barons believe their family has always been about public service. Bless her heart.

And Jim Geraghty:

The comparison to a princess is a pretty accurate one, and you’re right, the profile piece in the Post doesn’t quite gush. But throwing jobs, awards, opportunities, speaking fees, and other honors at Chelsea seems to have been a pretty easy way to build goodwill with an ex-president and a future president, and I feel like we’ve all been asked to avert our eyes from this.

[Afternoon update]

Heh.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Hillary And Huma

79 Comments

…have until the end of the week:

I noted that Judge Sullivan recently reopened the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by Judicial Watch to obtain emails from Huma Abedin, the top Clinton aide who is married to infamous and disgraced former Congressman Anthony Wiener. Judge Sullivan reopened the case when he learned that Clinton and her staff used personal email accounts to conduct government business. This is a flagrant violation of the Federal Records Act and jeopardizes national security—prompting rapidly escalating concerns of countless ramifications internationally, nationally, and criminally.

Over at the WaPo, Marc Thiessen explains Hillary’s very serious legal problem:

The Clinton e-mail scandal reached a new level of seriousness when the intelligence community inspector general found classified information from five intelligence agencies in e-mails housed on Clinton’s private server. It is against the law to remove classified information from government facilities and retain it after you have left office and have no official reason to possess it.

Just ask Sandy Berger. In 2003, Bill Clinton’s former national security adviser was caught removing five classified documents from a secure reading room at the National Archives, as he prepared to testify before the 9/11 commission.

A Justice Department investigation ensued and in 2005 Berger reached a plea agreement in which he was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized removal and retention of classified material instead of a felony. He was sentenced to two years of probation and 100 hours of community service and was stripped of his security clearance for three years. Prosecutors and defense lawyers agreed on a $10,000 fine, but the judge raised it to $50,000. In 2007, in order to shut down a disbarment investigation by the District of Columbia bar, he relinquished his license to practice law.

That was for unlawfully removing and retaining just five classified documents.

Clinton has apparently been caught removing at least five e-mails containing what we now know to be classified information and retaining them on her personal server in her home in Chappaqua, N.Y., after she left office. And in the weeks ahead, that number will probably grow to the hundreds, if not thousands.

Hey, laws are for the little people.

Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Social Commentary

P. J. O’Rourke On Democrats

5 Comments

#ProTip: They hate your guts:

Democrats need your vote and they’ll do anything—no matter how low and degrading—to get it. They hate you the way a whore hates a john.

…political rulers need the acquiescence of the ruled to slake the craving for power. Politicians hate you the way a junkie hates junk.

Politicians gain power by means of empty promises or threats, or both when they’re on their game. Should you vote for people who are good at politics? No. You should vote for Republicans. We’re lousy.

Sure seems that way to me. As he once said, politicians are interested in people in the same sense that a flea is interested in a dog. Anyway, the whole thing is worth a read.

Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

Huma’s Special Treatment

8 Comments

Gosh, it’s like it’s corruption and cover up to the core:

By allowing it, Clinton wasn’t just helping a friend boost her income. She was increasing the potential leverage of the Clinton machine, and in ways that could, and maybe did, benefit the Clinton Foundation.

The Abedin scandal is thus related to the “Clinton cash” scandal.

It is also related to Hillary’s email scandal. According to Grassley, the State Department investigators have “reason to believe that email evidence relevant to [its] inquiry was contained in emails sent and received from her account on Secretary Clinton’s non-government server, making them unavailable to [the investigators’ office] through its normal statutory right of access to records.”

Laws are for the little people.

[Update a while later]

Then there’s this:

The finding against Abedin, which she disputes, is that she was improperly paid while on leave. According to Sen. Grassley’s description of the investigation’s findings, Abedin’s time sheets indicate that she never took vacation or sick leave during her four years at the State Department. However, the investigation discovered that Abedin did, in fact, take time off, including a 10-day trip to Italy. In emails, she told colleagues that she was out “on leave.”

Just FYI, if you’re a government contractor, falsifying a time sheet is a firing offense.

Anyway, it’s pretty clear that when Her Highness said that she used a private server “for convenience,” she meant that she would find it very inconvenient for her political career for people to learn the contents of her emails.

Business, Economics, Law, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The Blue Model Melts Down

25 Comments

Get ready for the bankruptcy of Puerto Rico:

Ultimately, bankrupt blue cities and states and their pension funds will troop to Washington with their hands out, begging for bailouts. Already we’ve seen a leading New Jersey state Democrat call for a $1 trillion federal bailout fund for pensions. The political pressures around the issue will be intense. Some (mostly Republicans) won’t want to give a single dime to the improvident fools and crooks who created this mess. Others (mostly Democrats) will insist on no-fault bailouts, arguing that social justice demands nothing less than an infinite willingness to pour money down ratholes, so long as those ratholes are Democrat-run.

What the country needs is something in between: relief for reform. Cities, counties, and states (or, as in the case of Puerto Rico, commonwealths) who can’t manage their debts anymore can qualify for limited help—but only if they undergo serious, life-changing reform. That may well mean the end of public unions, drastic changes in governance, haircuts all around, tax reforms, and other substantive changes. Forward-looking people in Congress should be thinking now about the legislation that would be needed to set up a framework of some kind to handle these cases. The legal issues are complex; courts have been upholding, for example, the inviolability of employee pensions under state constitutional provisions. It’s hard to see how federal bailouts would let those pensions go unchallenged.

As I’ve written before, a California bailout by the federal government should come only with the condition that it revert to territory status, and not be allowed back in as a single state. Individual regions (like Draper’s South California, or Central California) that get their act together could petition for readmission.