Democrats have got to shake off the Clinton albatross and find new blood

So says Camille Paglia, here.

Hillary and State both stonewalled the House Committee on Oversight about her private email already in December 2012

Hillary Clinton knew well in advance that what she was doing in shielding her email was wrong and likely to get her into trouble, which is why she subsequently destroyed the evidence, obstructing justice. Hillary makes Richard Nixon look like a piker in comparison to the scope of her crimes.

The New York Times reports here that she and the State Dept. deliberately did not respond to the House's inquiries about whether she used private email for government business while she was still Secretary of State in December 2012:

WASHINGTON — Hillary Rodham Clinton was directly asked by congressional investigators in a December 2012 letter whether she had used a private email account while serving as secretary of state, according to letters obtained by The New York Times.

But Mrs. Clinton did not reply to the letter. And when the State Department answered in March 2013, nearly two months after she left office, it ignored the question and provided no response.

The query was posed to Mrs. Clinton in a Dec. 13, 2012, letter from Representative Darrell Issa, the Republican chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Mr. Issa was leading an investigation into how the Obama administration handled its officials’ use of personal email.

“Have you or any senior agency official ever used a personal email account to conduct official business?” Mr. Issa wrote to Mrs. Clinton. “If so, please identify the account used.”

Marco Rubio is just another liberal

Marco Rubio, quoted here, wouldn't recognize conservatism if it bit him in the ass:

"[O]ur country has always been about the future and before us now is the opportunity to author the greatest chapter yet in the amazing story of America. But we can’t do that by going back to the leaders and ideas of the past. We must change the decisions we are making by changing the people who are making them.”

---------------------------------------------------------

How about going back to the American founders for inspiration? Can't do that.

How about going back to the constitution? Can't do that.

How about the anti-Federalists? or the Bible? or Shakespeare? Can't do that.

Did changing the people in charge make a difference between 2000 and 2008? How about after 2008?

Change is the mantra of liberalism, and belief in the essential superiority of a certain kind of person its fatal conceit. 

Dingbat feminism should make up its mind already

Hillary Clinton knows the way to San Jose . . . San José de las Lajas, Cuba

Hillary campaign logo: Don't call her Hillary?

Flag of Cuba

The libertarian free-traders in both parties have killed the American middle class: Reagan, the Bushes, Clinton, Obama

From Patrick J. Buchanan, here:

The average U.S. family has not seen a rise in real wages in 40 years. This is directly traceable to the loss of more than one-third of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. And that loss, that deindustrialization of America, is directly tied to the $10 trillion in trade deficits since Bush I. Writers who celebrate how U.S. imports have risen in this month or that year almost never mention the trade deficit for this month or that year. Perhaps that is because the United States has not run a trade surplus in four decades, whereas, in the first 70 years of the 20th century, we never ran a trade deficit. Trade surpluses add to GDP; trade deficits subtract from GDP.

And when in a company town the company closes the factory, the town often dies. And all the little satellite businesses—bars, diners, food stores, pharmacies—that rose around the factory, they die, too. The tombstones of countless dead towns across America should read: Killed by Free Trade. Tenured economists on college campuses call this “creative destruction.”

The stagnant wages of two generations of U.S. workers also help to explain the crisis of Social Security and Medicare. For, as workers’ wages fail to rise, or fall, so, too, do their contributions in payroll taxes. If, as Simpson-Bowles contends, our largest entitlement programs are heading for insolvency, free trade played a lead role in that American tragedy. And where is the liberal morality in passing laws to ensure U.S. workers a living wage and clean and safe conditions, and then, through fast track and free trade, signaling their bosses that they can evade these laws by shutting factories here, moving their plants to Asia, paying coolie wages, and subjecting Asian workers to conditions that would earn a U.S. industrialist a tour in Leavenworth?

--------------------------------------------------------

I've checked Buchanan's math and he's exaggerating a bit. The total is precisely $9.5 trillion . . . if you go back as far as 1982 under Reagan, but you get the point.

Winter 2015 temperatures were above average in the lower 48

The first quarter of 2015 was a lot warmer than last year.

For 2014 minimum temperature January through March ranked 25th going back to 1895, meaning there were 24 winters that had colder minimum temperature, 41st for average temperature, so obviously below normal, and 104th for heating degree days (the coldest year ranked 120th, meaning 2014 was the 16th coldest first quarter since 1895 in terms of the energy needed to keep comfortable).

2015, despite the horror stories heard from places like Boston, was overall much warmer. For minimum temperature the first quarter ranked 96th, for average temperature 98th, and for heating degree days, above average at 75th. An average winter involves 2317 heating degree days. 2015 came in at 2370, not very much higher at all. The worst winter on record was in 1912, with 2761 heating degree days.

Consider yourself armed when the wusses blame the weather for the bad economy.

You know who to blame . . . the gutsy one.

This woman should be deported today

Story here.

Gun production triples under Obama to 10.8 million in 2013 to meet sales and concealed carry demand

Seen here:

The biggest change in production has come under President Obama. From 2001 to 2007, gun production held steady at between 3 million and 4 million units a year. It topped 4 million in 2008 but shot to 5.6 million in 2009, held steady in 2010 and then spiked to 8.6 million guns in 2012 and a record 10.8 million in 2013, according to ATF data. ...

Mr. [John R.] Lott [Jr.] said firearm sales, even more than manufacturing statistics, are a measure of the health of the movement, and those are also on the rise, with adjusted background checks — a good proxy for sales — growing from 8.9 million a year in 2008 to nearly 15 million in 2013. ...

Nationally, concealed carry permits have grown from 4.6 million in 2007 to more than 12 million now, Mr. Lott said.

Einstein's successor Freeman Dyson: Climatologists don't understand the climate, burning coal is good for crop yields

Quoted here in 2013:

"I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic."

"I just think they don’t understand the climate," he said of climatologists. "Their computer models are full of fudge factors."

"The models are extremely oversimplified," he said. "They don't represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds."

"It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation," Dyson said. "About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO-2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil."

"They’re absolutely lousy," he said of American journalists. "That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed."

"It was similar in the Soviet Union," he said. "Who could doubt Marxist economics was the future? Everything else was in the dustbin."

Scott Walker could be the middle class' punk: Gabba Gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us

From a story here:

In an age when most potential presidential contenders are millionaires, Walker may end up being the closest thing to a middle-class presidential candidate that voters will see in 2016.

For most of the 1990s, the son of a Baptist minister made less than $40,000 a year from his salary as a lawmaker. As recently as 2006, Walker was making about $70,000 a year and living in a two-bedroom house with an unfinished basement, in part because as Milwaukee County executive he was giving a chunk of his salary back to taxpayers. ...

"They're as common as an old shoe," said Betty Balsley, who got to know the Walker family while the now-governor's father was serving as a pastor in Plainfield, Iowa.

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Ramones, Pinhead, here

Scott Walker's school voucher program is enormously popular with the poor in Wisconsin, but not with the establishment

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reported here last May about applications for the school year just now winding down:

Under state law, the 25 private schools that receive the most applications are selected for the statewide voucher program. Because of a tie, 26 schools are selected for the upcoming school year.

Six new participants in the program are Fox Valley Lutheran High School in Appleton, Saint Paul Lutheran School in Bonduel, Winnebago Lutheran Academy in Fond du Lac, Twin City Catholic Educational System in Menasha and Neenah, and Saint Paul Lutheran School and Trinity Lutheran School, both in Sheboygan.

Each of the 26 schools will receive at least 10 voucher slots, with the remaining assigned through a random selection process. ...

A total of 1,000 vouchers are available, up from 500 in the first year of the program. ...

"Once again, applications far exceeded the cap," Jim Bender, president of School Choice Wisconsin, said in a statement. "For the second year in a row we have thousands of parents — over 70% — on the outside looking in." ...

The statewide program, called the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, is in its second year and is separate from voucher programs in Milwaukee and Racine. There are 1,220 students in the Racine Parental Choice Program and 25,397 in the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, according fall enrollment data.

-----------------------------------------------

Governor Walker has proposed a complete elimination of the caps for the next two years, expanding the vouchers apparently at reduced amounts, and paying for it all by reducing allocations to the public school system by $150 per pupil in the first year.

School officials are predictably livid, as this story about a day long public hearing at Brillion High School recently reported:

Nearly all of the administrators who spoke opposed the expansion of the Wisconsin Parental Choice Program, which allows low-income students to attend private or religious schools using a taxpayer-subsidized voucher.

-----------------------------------------------

Here's a novel idea. True "parental choice" would allow the taxpayers themselves to decide which schools their taxes fund. Imagine a check off list on your income tax form or property tax form like they have now for various charitable causes to which you may allocate all or a portion of your tax refund. Let's see how the taxpayers vote to spend their education money. Now that might really upset the establishment.

Let the people decide!

Try getting a gay wedding cake in Dearborn: So when are the corporations packing up to leave Michigan, huh?

Trolling the bakeries. Video here.

The Anthropocene Follies

Seems some people at Nature want to change the name of the current geological interglacial period now commonly known as the Holocene (the "completely newest period" for you Greek men out there, a very small part of, or the end of the much larger "most recent" Pleistocene and its Ice Ages, depending on who you read) to the Anthropocene (the new human epoch). To some this signifies that if you thought science had long ago killed-off anthropocentrism, you must think again because geology is being pressured to ascribe change to human influence just as has climate science. 

The wags here have suggested some amusing alternatives to the Anthropocene:

• Hubrisocene
• Windowsocene
• Googolocene
• Neocene
• Hollowscene
• Hollowcene
• Misanthropocene (very popular)
• Stultucene (probably the most anthropologically apt)
• Epicene (not that there's anything wrong with that)
• Crimescene
• Hubriocene
• Absurdopocene (has a real ring to it)
• Alarmistocene
• Nihilicene
• Anthroporcene (my personal favorite, but should be Anthropoporcene)
• Bulshitocene
• Horshitocene
• Whorshitocene (tmi if you ask me)
• Algoreopocene (quite)
• Narcissistocene
• Narcissene (not to be confused with Nazarene but gets at the religious underpinnings)
• Narcissicene
• Climeobscene
• Preposterousocene
• Mommymommylookatmeocene
• Bureaucrocene
• Anthropobscene
• Plasticene (for all you Beatles fans)
• Wherethehelldidiputitcene
• Mannthropocene (that's inviting a lawsuit I'd say)
• Sputnikocene (too brief to be measured)
• Incrediblyobcene
• Anthropoidiotcene
• Needtobecene (for the selfie craze)
• Egocene (nice)
• Fantacene
• Herbacene
• Vulcacene
• ChickenLittleocene
• Idiocene.

Perhaps more amusing is how contemporary science still must fall back on a long dead language of the Bronze Age in order to fish out the finest distinctions which only the Greek language can offer. Some animals are indeed more equal than others.

Memories Pizza has raised over $225K since this morning at 8:30

Obama's shitty jobs machine sputters out in March 2015: 3 month average adds falls to 197K (watch 'em blame the weather)

Support for Memories Pizza on GoFundMe soars above $500K, putting it in the top six causes ever

To avoid the Gay Mafia, almost all of the donations are anonymous.

Ronald Machen's miscarriage of justice in the matter of Lois Lerner

Seen here:

'Ellis [1969] involved a defendant who voluntarily testified before a grand jury but then refused to testify at trial, asserting his Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination. Once Lerner voluntarily spoke to Justice Department prosecutors without receiving a grant of immunity, she lost her ability to invoke the privilege to avoid answering congressional questions about the same information she had already provided.

'Machen says that a “team of experienced career prosecutors” was assigned to review this matter, so certainly they would know about the Ellis rule. They also must know about Lerner’s extensive testimony to the prosecutors. So why would Machen completely ignore this in his letter?

'Ignoring highly relevant, although perhaps inconvenient, facts, outgoing U.S. Attorney Ronald Machen has issued a flawed legal analysis. It reaches an erroneous, but politically expedient, conclusion — one that gives Lois Lerner a pass and further hinders congressional efforts to get to the bottom of this scandal. It’s a pretty slick trick. No wonder Machen’s pulling a disappearing act.'

Winter in Grand Rapids Michigan was 23% colder in 2014 than in 2015

Grand Rapids, Michigan, was 3.2 degrees F below normal on average in March 2015, bringing the cumulative anomaly for the first three months of 2015 to -19.9 degrees F. The corresponding deficit from normal in 2014 was -24.4 degrees F, almost 23% colder. 

To that stupid prick, Josh Earnest, the Treaty clause of the Constitution doesn't exist

Seen here:

EARNEST: Well, again, I think it's hard to take seriously from some members of Congress who deny the fact that climate change exists, that they should have some opportunity to render judgment about climate change agreements.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur...

-- Article II, Section 2

What's hard to take seriously is anyone from this administration.

Hillary Clinton promised full cooperation with Congress in 2012, but still withheld at least 850 pages of Benghazi emails

Byron York reports:

[W]hen Clinton's secret email system was exposed this year, she turned over about 850 never-before-seen pages of Benghazi-related documents to the State Department, which in turn gave them to the House. Those documents had been under a request from Congress since the September 20, 2012 letter. The former secretary of state let more than two years pass before producing the information.

Take Clinton at her word that she turned over everything on her secret system related to Benghazi. The 850 pages still show that she withheld information from Congress for more than two years.

Concealing information from Congress is not a minor offense. The law allows for fines and punishment of up to several years in jail for anyone found guilty of doing it. Three examples:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the rest, go here.

Wrong about immigration, Marco Rubio joins the mouth-breathers dissing the education which helps keep us free

From the story here:

Earlier this month, addressing the issue of student debt, Sen. Marco Rubio joked that students ought to know in advance “whether it’s worth borrowing $40,000 to be a Greek philosophy major. Because the market for Greek philosophers is tight.” His remarks echo North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, who in 2013 mocked liberal-arts courses and said, “I don’t want to subsidize [a major] that’s not going to get someone a job.” Gov. Rick Scott of Florida and former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas have passed legislation encouraging students to major in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines rather than the liberal arts. ...

Thomas Jefferson recognized that a broad education could ensure the survival of the new democracy. He recognized that “even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” To defend against this threat, Jefferson wanted “to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purpose.” ...

Considered in light of Jefferson’s argument, Mr. Rubio’s choice of Greek philosophy as a useless major seems especially inapt.

It's always Earth Hour in North Korea

Earth Hour 2015 at our house in Michigan

Hillary Clinton admits she destroyed the evidence by wiping her server clean

Politico reports the story here, featuring an unflattering photograph of Hillary, reminiscent of Miss Piggy.

Obstruction of justice.

Now Scott Walker wants us to believe "legal status" isn't amnesty

Scott Walker remains soft on illegal immigration.

He doesn't want to punish law-breakers, pure and simple, but instead reward them with "legal status", if not citizenship.

Big deal. Grow a pair, pal.

The New York Times reports here.

Best thing to happen in the US Senate in years: Dingy Harry won't run for reelection in 2016

Don't get injured on the way out the door, Harry.

Free-trade has hollowed out the middle class

So reports Noah Smith, here:

"[T]here is a growing body of research showing that globalization -- and, in particular, the rise of China -- has been the biggest factor hollowing out the American middle class." 

Obama is derelict in his duty, snubs new head of NATO

And the irony is Norway's Stoltenberg hates Israel as much as Obama does. Maybe Stoltenberg is too much of a right wing socialist for Obama.

Reported here by Josh Rogin:

"President Barack Obama has yet to meet with the new head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and won't see Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg this week, even though he is in Washington for three days.  Stoltenberg’s office requested a meeting with Obama well in advance of the visit, but never heard anything from the White House, two sources close to the NATO chief told me." 

And you thought "Dewey, Cheatham & Howe" was funny

Hillary Clinton and her merry band of secretive aides all used private email to avoid leaving a public trail, contrary to what she claimed

Jake Sullivan

From The New York Times here:

Huma Abedin

"Mrs. Clinton’s top aides at times corresponded with her about State Department matters from their personal email accounts, raising questions about her recent assertions that she made it her practice to email aides at their government addresses so the messages would be preserved, in compliance with federal record-keeping regulations. ...

Philippe Reines

"Mr. Gowdy’s committee is also likely to press Mrs. Clinton on why her advisers occasionally used personal email accounts to communicate with her. At least four of Mrs. Clinton’s closest advisers at the State Department did so, including her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills; senior adviser, Philippe Reines; personal aide, Huma Abedin; and Mr. [Jake] Sullivan."

Cheryl Mills

A pretty good litany of the grievances so far, with 21 months to go

From Michael Goodwin, here:

'First he comes for the banks and health care, uses the IRS to go after critics, politicizes the Justice Department, spies on journalists, tries to curb religious freedom, slashes the military, throws open the borders, doubles the debt and nationalizes the Internet.

'He lies to the public, ignores the Constitution, inflames race relations and urges Latinos to punish Republican “enemies.” He abandons our ­allies, appeases tyrants, coddles ­adversaries and uses the Crusades as an excuse for inaction as Islamist terrorists slaughter their way across the Mideast.'

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Nothing much in there, though, about the housing catastrophe, the jobs debacle, the worst economic growth in the post-war, loss of travel freedoms, the capture of the two political parties by big business, and spying on the public in general, but hey, no one's perfect.

ObamaCare's unequal treatment of Americans under the tax law illustrated

Some people who didn't deserve a tax credit are going to get to keep it anyway because of the government's own incompetence administering the credits. I'm sure this makes people who didn't get a credit feel all warm and fuzzy about ObamaCare.

Seen here:

"The White House has said the error could result in some people receiving a tax credit meant to subsidize health insurance coverage by mistake. 

"On Friday, it said people who received the tax credit and had already filed their taxes based on the incorrect forms would not have to refile and could keep the extra tax credit."

-------------------------------------------------------------

So too bad for you if you haven't already filed your taxes. The corrected form is in the mail and you are obligated to incorporate it in your return.

Former environmental activist takes aim at anthropogenic global warming

AGW gets a dressing down from Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, Ph.D. in ecology, of Rainbow Warrior fame, here:

"[T]he Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

"The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous. ...

"Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.

"At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide. The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields. Farms and forests will produce more if carbon-dioxide keeps rising.

"We have no proof increased carbon dioxide is responsible for the earth’s slight warming over the past 300 years. There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. Carbon dioxide is vital for life on Earth and plants would like more of it."

Drudge runs story White House can't spell, as if he can

I've only published the Drudge flubs which amused me at the time, under the label "Drudge". But there have been countless others.

Kimberley Strassel detects a sign of a spine in Mitch McConnell on the Lynch AG appointment

Kim is smart as ever and looking good

From her Wall Street Journal column here:

Mr. McConnell made clear that so long as he didn’t get his trafficking bill, Democrats didn’t get Ms. Lynch. He would devote the rest of this week to the Cornyn-Klobuchar legislation, next week would be about the budget, the week after that would be Easter recess, and so on. Let’s hope Ms. Lynch enjoys Sudoku. No give, no get.

Grover Norquist is full of malarkey: G.H.W. Bush accepted the Profiles in Courage Award for raising taxes!

Seen here.

























Bush 41 might have regretted what he did in 1992, but by 2014 he and his family were all too happy with the strange new respect award from the liberal Kennedy clan.

Hey Rush! Bibi was just kidding about that about-face on a two-state solution!

Quoted here in The New York Times:

Mr. Netanyahu said he had not intended to reverse his endorsement in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but only to say that it was impossible right now. He cited the Palestinian leadership’s refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state and its pact with the militant Islamist Hamas movement, as well as the rise of Islamic terrorism across the region.

“I haven’t changed my policy,” Mr. Netanyahu said in an interview with MSNBC, his first since his resounding victory on Tuesday, which handed him a fourth term. “What has changed is the reality.”

“I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution, but for that, circumstances have to change,” he said. “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. To make it achievable, then you have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

The "peace process" is very useful also to Israeli liberals. Even they can make a career of it.

Dick Durbin knows all about the back of the bus: He and 12 other Democrats voted against the first African-American woman Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State in 2005

The Washington Post reported here at the time:

The Senate voted 85 to 13 to confirm Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, providing the most negative votes cast against a nominee for that post in 180 years.

Maybe if Dick and Dirty Harry had gotten their shit together last fall Loretta Lynch could already have been confirmed as the first African-American female Attorney General.

From the AP story here:

Lynch was nominated last fall and Democrats are growing increasingly agitated over the holdup in confirming her, although they were in control of the Senate for some of that time. "Loretta Lynch, the first African-American woman nominated to be attorney general, is asked to sit in the back of the bus when it comes to the Senate calendar," Durbin said. "That is unfair. It's unjust. It is beneath the decorum and dignity of the United States Senate."

It's not like Obama didn't have plenty of time to fill the position while Democrats still had control of the Senate. Eric Holder resigned in late September 2014, and Obama didn't nominate Lynch until after Democrats had taken a good thrashing at the polls on November 4th.

What a shock: Big Sis thinks students' protests are crap

That's also what she thought about objections to speed cameras in Arizona, and to surveillance by Homeland Security generally and to naked scanners at airports specifically.

The arrogance is par for the course with liberals.

Video here.

Outgoing US Attorney Ron Machen has stonewalled Lerner contempt case for 10 months, as has Obama

From the story here:

Ronald Machen, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia appointed by President Obama and set to step down next month, has not acted on a contempt of Congress charge for former IRS official Lois Lerner. 

Machen, who announced at the beginning of the week he'd step down April 1 to return to private practice, has not referred Lerner's case to a grand jury. Her contempt citation for not testifying at two hearings has been in Machen's hands since May 2014. ...

The Obama administration has also not publicly released hundreds of documents related to the IRS's targeting of Tea Party groups.

M'bala M'bala of France gets two months in jail, suspended, just for saying he's Charlie Coulibaly

The cartoonist Coco let the terrorists into the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

The story is here.

Condoning terrorism is punishable in France, unless you work for Charlie Hebdo.

Hey Rush! The only people who really believe in a two-state solution are liberals like George W. Bush, right?

From today's Rush Limbaugh show, here:

So you terrorize Israel with bombs from Gaza and bombs from Hamas and bombs from Hezbollah, and then while the peace process is going on you then demand the right of return.  And both of those stratagems are designed to effectively bring about the end of the Jewish state.  The people who believe in this two-state solution, like our caller here from the last hour, the only people who really believe in it are Western liberals such as American liberals, Western European socialist liberals.

Dateline Washington, December 2008, here:

US President George W. Bush summed up eight years of his administration's affairs in the Middle East on Friday, and said he still believed that "the day will come when the map of the Middle East shows a peaceful, secure Israel beside a peaceful and democratic Palestine. I was the first American President to call for a Palestinian state, and building support for the two-state solution has been one of the highest priorities of my Presidency."

Bibi beats Obama by six points

Story here.

The American Conservative is still a conmag

Oh yeah, like "relations" with Iran haven't been poisoned since the time of Jimmy Carter.

Hillary Clinton should be in jail, not running for president

From Ronald D. Rotunda, here:

Whether or not Mrs. Clinton violated a State Department rule, her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails sure looks like obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law. Let’s consider some of the basic, undisputed facts, and then the law.

First, Mrs. Clinton was worried that communicating through email would leave a trail that might be subject to subpoena. “As much as I’ve been investigated and all of that,” she said in 2000, “why would I ever want to do email?” But when she became secretary of state, she didn’t have much choice. So she set up a private server in her house. That way, in the event of an investigation, she could control which emails would be turned over. ...

By her own admission, Mrs. Clinton destroyed more than 30,000 emails once the subpoenas started coming in. She claims that she only destroyed personal records. Team Clinton initially explained that her work emails were separated from her personal emails using keyword searches. Now, after the outcry about how much this method might have missed, Mrs. Clinton is insisting that every email was individually read before the deletion. ...

The law says that no one has to use email, but it is a crime (18 U.S.C. section 1519) to destroy even one message to prevent it from being subpoenaed. Prosecutors charging someone with obstruction don’t even have to establish that any investigation was pending or under way when the deletion took place. As T. Markus Funk explained in a journal article for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, the prosecutor “need only prove that the defendant shredded the documents, at least in part, to make life more difficult for future investigators, if and when they eventually appear.”

Legal commentators call this “anticipatory obstruction of justice,” and the law punishes it with up to 20 years imprisonment. The burden of proof is light. The Justice Department manual advises that section 1519 makes prosecution much easier because it covers “any matters” or “’in relation to or contemplation of’ any matters.” It adds, “No corrupt persuasion is required.”

The completely daft and utterly ridiculous political news suitable only for a Monday: Lindsey Grahamnesty for president!

The story here about John McCain's closest ally says he's going to explore a run for president for a couple of months.

And just to show old Lindsey hasn't completely cornered the market on tin ears:

"[P]otential rival Rick Perry, the former Texas governor, last week noted he takes advice from Graham on foreign affairs."

The only way I can imagine those three characters together is with Rick Perry holding a bottle in one hand and a six shooter in the other telling those two lovebirds to start dancing.

Where's Vladimir?

From a story about Putin's "disappearance" since the 5th of March, here:

Those keeping track insist Putin has not been seen since March 5.

Regardless of how or when this speculation ends, it tells us much about the political realities of Russia.

This whole thing started after Putin's trip to Kazakhstan was canceled on Wednesday and a Kazakh official told a reporter that the Russian President had fallen ill. Then the Kremlin released a picture of Putin speaking with the leader of the Republic of Karelia. But it turns out that happened on March 4.

On Thursday, Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the President would miss his regular meeting with the Federal Security Service (FSB). When asked about his boss's health, Peskov said he is "absolutely healthy," his handshake so strong he could "break your hand." To illustrate the point, the Kremlin's Russia Today posted a picture of the mighty President slamming a judo opponent hard against the ground. Peskov says Russia is in the grips of a "spring fever" that is causing people to dream up harebrained scenarios.