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.'

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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."

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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.”

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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.”