The US State Department never searched its own system for requested Benghazi e-mails

'[State] has not, however, searched the one records system over which it has always had control and that is almost certain to contain some responsive records: the state.gov e-mail server,' [Judge] Mehta wrote.

Read the whole thing, here.

To get compliance and transparency from the Obama administration, you had to spell it out for them every time, otherwise you'd get bupkis. 

That was the MO of the Obama administration: slow-walking, foot-dragging, infinite parsing and obstruction.

Obama's Defense Intelligence Agency knew about North Korean nukes in 2013, Obama tried to suppress it, and WaPo reported neither

So forgive us, Kurt Andersen, for believing in conspiracies.

His side no doubt will respond with one of their own: Trump is leaking lies in order to start a war.

From the story here:

During an April 11, 2013, House Armed Services Committee hearing, Congressman Doug Lamborn, R-Colo., inadvertently revealed several unclassified sentences from a DIA report that said DIA had determined with “moderate confidence” that North Korea has the capability to make a nuclear weapon small enough to be launched with a ballistic missile.

The Director of National Intelligence and Obama officials subsequently tried to dismiss Lamborn’s disclosure by claiming the DIA assessment was an outlier that did not reflect the views of the rest of the U.S. Intelligence Community.

It was clear what Obama officials were doing in 2013.  The DIA report represented inconvenient facts that threatened President Obama’s North Korea “strategic patience” policy -- a policy to do nothing about North Korea and kick this problem down the road to the next president.  Obama officials tried to downplay the DIA assessment to prevent it from being used to force the president to employ a more assertive North Korea policy.

It’s worth noting that the Trump White House has not condemned the Washington Post story as a leak.  That’s probably because it was an authorized disclosure of classified information to advance President Trump’s North Korea strategy.

Kurt Andersen in The Atlantic projects his now-rejected experience of libertarianism onto all of the GOP and conservatism

Unfortunately for Kurt, he thinks recovery means doing some cherry-picking of his own, exchanging one insanity for another. It never occurs to him that while Paul Ryan found his life's inspiration in a novel, millions of young Americans today derive theirs from film. If forced to choose, I'll take active insanity anyday over passive. Kinda makes you miss the "Jesus is my favorite philosopher" president, doesn't it? And how could anyone still seriously speak of an anti-psychiatry "craze"? I must have missed that in my "Man from U.N.C.L.E." years.

In other words, it takes a kook to know a kook. In his own words Andersen expresses the affinity which exists between the insane, the left and libertarianism.

Here:

Relativist professors enabled science-denying Christians, and the antipsychiatry craze in the ’60s appealed simultaneously to left-wingers and libertarians (as well as to Scientologists) ... Another way the GOP got loopy was by overdoing libertarianism. I have some libertarian tendencies, but at full-strength purity it’s an ideology most boys grow out of. On the American right since the ’80s, however, they have not. Republicans are very selective, cherry-picking libertarians: Let business do whatever it wants and don’t spoil poor people with government handouts; let individuals have gun arsenals but not abortions or recreational drugs or marriage with whomever they wish; and don’t mention Ayn Rand’s atheism. Libertarianism, remember, is an ideology whose most widely read and influential texts are explicitly fiction. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand,” Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has said, “and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are.” It was that fiction that allowed him and so many other higher-IQ Americans to see modern America as a dystopia in which selfishness is righteous and they are the last heroes. “I think a lot of people,” Ryan said in 2009, “would observe that we are right now living in an Ayn Rand novel.” I’m assuming he meant Atlas Shrugged, the novel that Trump’s secretary of state (and former CEO of ExxonMobil) has said is his favorite book. It’s the story of a heroic cabal of men’s-men industrialists who cause the U.S. government to collapse so they can take over, start again, and make everything right.

The North Korea problem in a nutshell

George W. Bush cried wolf in Iraq, and now when faced with a genuine threat, Democrats and Republicans alike think Trump is evil for crying like a wolf. They are in denial, shrinking from reality, and incapable of anything save appeasement. There is incontrovertible evidence of a pattern of North Korean use of force, not just threats of it. Do they really want to be responsible for the deaths of many innocents before we are forced to take out North Korea's nuclear capability?

They both agree on abortion, so I guess the answer is yes.

Cost-effective warfare using the B61-12

The B61-12, here:

The B61-12 atomic bombs, for instance, are to undergo a life-extension program that will cost roughly $9.5 billion. There are 400 to 500 of these bombs, says Gronlund, which means refurbishing one will cost about $20 million.

Flashback to 12/6/2016 to Mitch McConnell: "The ObamaCare repeal resolution will be the first item up in the New Year"

Here at The Hill.

No hurry, mate.

h/t Rush

Has anyone connected Otto Warmbier's death with the North Korean novel by Han Sorya?

The North Korean novel "Jackals" from 1951 by Han Sorya provides an MO for what might have happened to Otto Warmbier.

In the novel an American missionary is showcased injecting germs into a Korean boy to kill him. You can read about it here.

I don't think it's a coincidence an American visits North Korea and suffers a similar fate at their hands. I'm guessing the North Koreans actively gave something to Otto Warmbier which they knew would kill him eventually.

Rush is absolutely right: Trump is purposely not acting "presidential" toward North Korea to keep them off balance

It's actually a North Korean value to commit spontaneous outbursts of violence. The North Koreans have never encountered the same from an American president, until now.

Smoking pot increases blood pressure and risk of death from hypertension

Story here.

Alabama US Senate race to replace Sessions shows how divided is "conservatism"

Trump has endorsed Luther Strange (all those promises to pick the very best people should have been a warning).

Mo Brooks is endorsed by Hannity, Ingraham and the Tea Party Patriots.

Judge Roy "10 Commandments" Moore, endorsed by Chuck Norris, has a 10-point lead.

Story here.

Multiple jobholding in July peaked in 1997, the go-go decade for jobs, at 8.05 million

In July 2017 it's only 7.3 million, not seasonally adjusted.

Complain that it's not more, not that it's too many.

Some people just don't get it. 

The Wall, a concrete policy which can't be reversed instantly by the next president

Levin: Republican Congress can't agree to repeal Obamacare, now we're supposed to give them war power?

Now you're talkin'.

Mark Levin is at his best to start the show this evening

He's ripping every president back to G. H. W. Bush as appeasers of North Korea, our feckless Congress, our fifth column media, and even the libertarians, observing that the president is almost alone in facing this problem.

One of Trump's biggest enemies on the radio is tonight one of his biggest supporters.

You'd better pray I don't win Megamillions tonight

With my luck I'll win and a nuclear war will start with North Korea.

Loretta Lynch now numbered among Obama's minions using e-mail aliases to avoid detection

Reported here.

She went by Elizabeth Carlisle, not Publius or Brutus.

Sort of like how Liizah Mercowsky of Alaska uses Republican as an alias for Democrat.

Medicaid enrollment increases, the number with private coverage decreases

“The danger is that the previously insured are now at risk of becoming the new uninsured,” reports Jarrett Stepman for The Daily Signal.

Hm, California has 11 counties with more registered voters than voting age adults

Reported here.

Hiroshima survivor admits school girls were being trained as decoders for the Japanese army

So they were legitimate targets.

From the story here:

On the morning of Aug. 6, 1945, Setsuko Nakamura sat with her Grade 8 classmates on the floor of her private girls school, listening to a lecture about duty to the emperor. Setsuko and some of her classmates had been training as decoding assistants for the Japanese army, in preparation for the final invasion by Allied forces.

Like most libertarians, Ben Domenech is a progressive who imagines America began as a tabula rasa on which we wrote "manifest destiny"

I'll bet he's memorized Emma Lazarus' poem, too. Ben is deeply confused about the American founding.

Here, where you might be forgiven for thinking he's talking about Australia:

Once there was a country born without an inheritance. It was a civilization carved by the rejected refuse of the old world, by the religious freaks, criminals, bastards, and orphans. They were the type of men and women willing to risk all to cross the wine-dark sea in search of their fortune. They came from all the corners of the world, and in this land they worked the good earth and made their way. In time they built marketplaces and cities and governments, and threw off the shackles of their far-off, old-world rulers to make their own law. Where other revolutions had been crushed, they prevailed. They risked it all, and won.