Showing off to other white people by calling Trump ... "Racist!"

Ann Coulter has a new column up at Town Hall.

...The same people who move heaven and earth to make sure their kids aren't blocked out of the right colleges by affirmative action, who couldn't care less about the astronomical unemployment rate and rampant crime in the inner cities, who think there's a lovefest going on between African-Americans and the illegal aliens taking over their neighborhoods and jobs, are just showing off to other white people by calling Trump ... "RACIST!”

Donald Trump has never been accused of racism in his life. Unlike self-righteous PC enforcers, who go to extraordinary lengths to avoid extensive contact with blacks, he's hired lots of black people. His golf clubs famously admit blacks, Jews and Asians -- and are often the only clubs in town that do.

Black celebrities as well as ordinary black Americans all say the same thing about Trump -- that he respects them.

Jamiel Shaw, whose son was killed by an illegal alien, spoke at Trump's first presidential rally, saying: "He's the kind of man you would want to be your dad. He's a nice guy. He put himself out there for black people. I know I can trust him.”

Mike Tyson said of Trump: "Listen: I'm a black motherf–ker from the poorest town in the country. I've been through a lot in life. And I know him. When I see him, he shakes my hand and respects my family. None of them -- Barack, whoever -- nobody else does that. They're gonna be who they are and disregard me, my family. So I'm voting for him. If I can get 20,000 people or more to vote for him, I'm gonna do it.”

Read more here.

Soldiering on

Did you know Hillary Clinton was forced to lie about her health because of sexism? Ace brings us the details, as postulated in the Washington Post and Time Magazine. Oh, and now she is "soldiering on," instead of "powering through."

Ford moving more production to Mexico

Warner Todd Huston reports at Breitbart,

Ford Motors has now announced it intends to move all its small car manufacturing lines out of Detroit and the U.S. and into its Mexico-based plants.

In a September 14 statement, Ford CEO Mark Fields insisted that in the “next two to three years, we will have migrated all of our small car production to Mexico and out of the United States.”

Fields added that Ford is investing an additional $4.5 billion to develop electric vehicles by 2020, most of which will be spent in its Mexico facilities. The company also said all emerging small car models will be made south of the border.

...Ford is hardly alone in the stampede to foreign nations. Chevy recently debuted its first Chinese-made SUV it intends to import into the U.S. But GM is already importing cars from a list of foreign countries. Buick, for instance, is importing from South Korea, Europe, and Poland, USA Today reports.

Ford is also joining the headlong rush to develop and manufacture driverless cars, and its Mexico facilities will be the locus for that advance, as well.

“We see huge social, economic and environmental benefits. We’re focused on usage where miles traveled be,” Fields said. “Autonomous vehicles will account for one of every 10 miles traveled by 2025, and will grow from 5% of all vehicles sold in U.S. in 2025 to 30% in 2030.”

Read more here.

Hillary's deplorables

Jerome Hudson writes at Breitbart,

When Hillary Clinton described half of the Americans supporting Donald Trump as a “basket of deplorables” made up of “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic” people, she opened herself up to criticism about her own “deplorables”: The repressive regimes that gave millions to the Clinton Foundation, many of those high-dollar donations flooding in while Clinton was serving as Secretary of State.

From despots looking to gain legitimacy on the international stage to oil-rich oligarchs, Hillary Clinton’s family foundation took money from the worst of the worst and countries with horrific human rights records.

Below is a list of Hillary Clinton’s Deplorables.

Algeria donated $250,000 to $500,000 to the Clintons

Gays and lesbians found guilty of “homosexual acts” can face imprisonment in Algeria. Hillary Clinton’s State Department chided the north African nation for its human rights violations, but that didn’t stop her family foundation from accepting a major donation from the Algerian Embassy.

Saudi Arabia donated up to $50 million to the Clintons

Saudi Arabia’s horrid human rights is no secret. In fact, Hillary Clinton’s Sate Department criticized the Arab nation for its “lack of equal rights for women and children” and said human trafficking and violence against women are “common” in that country. Nevertheless, the Clinton Foundation has accepted tens of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia over the years.

Anti-LGBT Russia: Bill Clinton earned $500,000 for a speech in Moscow paid for by a Kremlin-backed bank

As first documented in Clinton Cash, the former president bagged $500,000 for a single Moscow speech paid for by a Russian investment bank that had ties to the Kremlin.

“Why was Bill Clinton taking any money from a bank linked to the Kremlin while his wife was Secretary of State?” asks the New Yorker. Russia is renowned for it’s open hostility to LGBT people. According to Human Rights Watch, Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law, passed in 2013, “openly discriminates against LGBT people, legitimizes anti-LGBT violence, and seeks to erase LGBT people from the country’s public life.”

United Arab Emirates donated up to $11.5 million to the Clintons

The tiny Arab nation was ripped by Hillary Clinton’s State Department for its many human rights abuses, including the government’s interference “with privacy and to restrict civil liberties, including usage of the Internet.” Despite reports of public floggings and a ban on “all sexual acts outside of heterosexual marriage,” the Clinton Foundation still accepted millions from the UAB.

The Nation of Brunei donated $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 to the Clintons

Hillary Clinton’s troubled charity was taking in millions of dollars in contributions from the nation of Brunei, all while her State Department was citing the tiny Asian country for a multitude of human rights abuses, including, “restrictions on religious freedom; exploitation of foreign workers; and limitations on freedom of speech, press, assembly … and discrimination against women.”

Kuwait donated $5,000,000 to $10,000,000 to the Clintons

This oil-rich nation was also reprimanded by Hillary Clinton’s State department for its various “human rights problems.” And Kuwait’s policy to imprison gays for up to seven years notwithstanding, the Clinton Foundation still accepted its major donation.

Qatar donated $1,000,000 to $5,000,000 to the Clintons

According to Qatar’s penal code, the penalty for the crime of homosexual sex is up to seven years in prison. The Arab nation also has “continuing human rights concerns,” according to a report released by Hillary Clinton’s State Department. Those human rights restrictions include “freedom of religion … trafficking in persons … legal, institutional, and cultural discrimination against women limited their participation in society.”

Who are the deplorables?

h/t Wow! Magazine

1966 vs. 1996 vs. 2016

h/t Bookworm Room

Guesswork numbers

Charles Hughes Smith asks,

What's the Real Unemployment Rate? That's the Wrong Question!

...The unemployment rate is nothing but guesswork hocus-pocus. The current system has the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and other agencies guessing how many people in the workforce are "discouraged" and should be deleted from the workforce count.

Then they guess how many new businesses started up and how many closed (the birth/death model) and how many people might have been hired/let go as a result of the birth/death model guesswork.
They derive data by collecting self-reported statistics--the most unreliable source of data possible, as people will adjust their answers to avoid reporting whatever looks bad and exaggerating what looks good. Even if they are scrupulous, does collecting time sheets really provide insight into the economy, employment, and labor force utilization?

Why are we defending hocus-pocus guesswork, when the IRS has hard data on employment, wages, income and the small businesses that are paying estimated taxes for their employees and owners? This data is extracted confidentially-- the taxpayers' identities remain private.

...Asking "how many people have some earned income?" to calculate the unemployment rate is the wrong question. What we should be asking is, how many workers consistently earn sufficient income to support an independent household, i.e. they have "breadwinner" jobs.
Claiming that an earned income of a few thousand dollars a year is functionally equivalent to a fulltime job with paid benefits makes no sense. Lumping every "job" (i.e. earned income) into one category tells us essentially nothing of value about the economy or the labor market.

The IRS data allows us to break out earned income and see how many workers earn sufficient income to support an independent household, i.e. they have "breadwinner" jobs. If we're interested in expanding broad-based prosperity, this is the number that matters.

There is no policy need for guesswork numbers issued monthly when an accurate account of wages, salaries, unearned income and employment is available quarterly.

Read more here.

Promoting dynamism and churn

James Pethokoukis writes at AEI,

Forbes annually ranks the world’s largest companies based on revenue, profit, assets, and market value. In its 2016 compilation, seven of the top 10 tech companies in the world were American. Europe has just just three companies in the top 20: Germany’s SAP, Sweden’s Ericsson, and Finland’s Nokia. And there’s a simply massive size difference between America’s top tech firms and Europe’s. For instance: Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon each have a market cap of over $350 billion each. Europe’s tech trio: about $50 billion a pop.

...That’s the real challenge for the next American president: Making sure policy is supportive of an ecology — taxes, trade, regulation, intellectual property — that promotes dynamism and churn. It must guarantee the U.S economy remains open to competition, whether from within or from abroad. That’s a big part of what this election should be about.

Read more here.

Plead the Fifth Rather Than Answer Questions Truthfully

Here's another gem from Ace:

IT Specialist Who Set Up Hillary Clinton's Illegal Email Ignores Congressional Subpeona; Two Workers From Company That Hosted Her Server Plead the Fifth Rather Than Answer Questions Truthfully
—Ace

Nothing to see here, folks. Just lots of Hillary's cronies saying their lawyers have advised them not to answer questions, as the answers may expose them to legal peril.

Just another day of Clinton's pre-Administration.

Pagliano, Clinton's illegal IT guy at State, can't invoke the Fifth, as he was granted immunity by the FBI. He therefore cannot be prosecuted for anything he told them (and if he repeats the same thing to Congress, he can't be prosecuted for that, either).

So he just decided to defy the subpoena and not show up at all.

"You shouldn’t intentionally misrepresent someone’s views just because you disagree with them.”

Katie Couric and Yahoo News are being sued for $12 million dollars by a Virginia gun rights group whose members were deceptively portrayed in Katie Couric’s documentary Under the Gun. Ace has the story and some more about media bias here.

Generations were saved by one person, one decision.

Bookworm writes,

A voice of reason tries to sound out at the University of Texas. Do you remember a few years ago when Admiral William McRaven, then commander of all US special forces, gave a commencement speech at the University of Texas? I remember it vividly because I started making my bed every day after I heard that — a major habit change after five decades. And then, having made my bed every day, I started folding the laundry as soon as I took it out of the dryer. It’s a phenomenal (and, for me, life-changing) speech. I highly recommend it:



Admiral William McRaven is not happy about what’s happening at UT, which is also falling victim to the trigger, microaggression, gender, Trigglypuff hysteria infecting all of America’s higher education institutions (except for Hillsdale, of course). The National Anthem kerfuffle was the last straw for him. He just sent a nice letter to the school’s upper-level administration. It is a letter from a knowledgeable humanist:

I made it clear that honoring the flag does not imply that the republic for which it stands is perfect. I said, “Far from it, honoring the flag is our collective commitment that we will constantly attempt to get better as a nation, to improve as a people, and to use the freedoms we have been given to make the earth a better place.”

I spent 37 years defending freedom of speech and freedom of expression. Nothing is more important to this democracy. Nothing! However, while no one should be compelled to stand, they should recognize that by sitting in protest to the flag they are disrespecting everyone who sacrificed to make this country what it is today — as imperfect as it might be.

Those that believe the flag represents oppression should remember all the Americans who fought to eliminate bigotry, racism, sexism, imperialism, communism, and terrorism. The flag rode with the Buffalo Soldiers of the 9th, 10th, 24th and 25th Cavalry and Infantry Regiments. It was carried by the suffragists down the streets of New York City. It flew with the Tuskegee Airman ofWWII. It was planted in the fields where Cesar Chavez spoke. It marched with Martin Luther King Jr. It rocketed into space on the shoulder patches of women, gays, Hispanic, Asian and African American astronauts. Today, it waves high over the White House. It is a flag for everyone, of every color, of every race, of every creed, and of every orientation, but the privilege of living under this flag does not come without cost. Nor should it come without respect.

The nation and everything it strives for is embodied in the American Flag. We strive to be more inclusive. We strive to be more understanding. We strive to fix the problems that plague our society. But in striving to do so, we must have a common bond; some symbol that reminds us of our past struggles and propels us to a brighter, more enlightened future. That symbol is the American flag.

The facts are incredibly damning.

Superb journalist Sharyl Attkisson has compiled a list of dates regarding facts about Hillary's email acandal. As bookworm writes today,

If you’re trying to make sense of Hillary’s email chicanery — or, even better, you’re trying peaceably to get your Progressive friends to understand why you think there’s a problem — you can’t do better than Sharyl Attkisson’s timeline, which organizes the facts and the players without editorials or judgments. And really, Attkisson is right that editorial comments and judgments are superfluous. The facts are incredibly damning.

Keeping out of prison

Andrew McCarthy writes,

Saying ‘I don’t understand the most basic things about my job’ should not keep you out of prison.

Read more here.

Worse is yet to come

Did you know,

The canonical definition of the Yiddish word chutzpah involves a man who murders his parents and then asks for clemency because he is an orphan. An unprecedented degree of chutzpah informs the machinations of radical Muslims, who engineer humanitarian disasters and then demand that the West intervene to save them.

So writes David Goldman in the Asia Times.

In his recent book Mission Failure, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University points to the first instance of this tactic: the Kosovo Liberation Army persuaded Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeline Albright to make war on the Serbs by provoking them into killing a hundred or two civilians. Most of Clinton’s cabinet didn’t want to support the KLA, which made its money in narcotics and human trafficking, and they didn’t want to divide the sovereign state of Serbia—a precedent that Russia later used to justify its seizure of the Crimea. Nonetheless the moral blackmail succeeded, and Muslim radicals learned how to push the guilt button of the West.

...This macabre pantomime should be transparent, but such is the squeamishness of the West that enlightened opinion shudders at the prospect of more dead Palestinian civilians. The world forgets that the Allies killed 1 million German civilians and between a quarter and half a million Japanese, mostly through aerial bombardments. This sacrifice was justified by the need to destroy wicked governments that killed tens of millions of civilians in Europe and Asia. States have the right to defend themselves against artillery attacks. Israel’s right of self-defense is generally acknowledged, but with the caveat the self-defense should be “proportionate,” that is, ineffective.

Worse is yet to come. On Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah now has 150,000 rockets, by far the largest such inventory in the world, including many precision-guided missiles which can be programmed for evasive flight paths and are more difficult to shoot down with the Iron Dome air defense system, as I warned two years ago. Many of these are emplaced in civilian homes in the Shi’ite towns of southern Lebanon. To destroy them would entail civilian casualties one or two orders of magnitude greater than the collateral damage in Gaza.

...For the moment, Hezbollah is bogged down in the Syrian civil war, where it has lost perhaps a third of its front-line fighters, and in no mood for a confrontation with Israel. Nonetheless, a war on Israel’s northern border is likely some time during the next several years. Hezbollah’s masters in Iran, who provided the munitions and constructed their emplacements, and who man some of the rocket artillery on the ground, probably would begin a war with a limited bombardment—daring Israel to retaliate massively and earn the condemnation of the UN Security Council.

Simple military logic dictates that if Hezbollah begins to fire any rockets, the correct thing to do is destroy the inventory. A fraction of Hezbollah’s projectiles could shut down the national airport, destroy major refinery and electrical generating facilities, and put the whole population of Israel in bomb shelters.

If Israel were prepared to reduce Hezbollah in the event of war, it would have taken the precautionary step of publicizing its estimates of the likely number of civilian casualties, in order to inoculate world opinion against the eventual need to kill some tens of thousands of civilians. I do not normally offer advice to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but this is not an issue of Israeli defense per se but rather the management of world opinion. He should make public an estimate of the probable number of civilian dead in the event of a war with Hezbollah, but double the number. He could then argue after the fact that he had exercised restraint by killing only half as many as initially estimated. I do not mean this facetiously. The West got used to half a million dead Syrians, and it can get used to the idea of 100,000 dead Lebanese.

Hezbollah’s vulnerability lies in the fact that it is a militia that lives in the Shi’ite communities of Lebanon rather than an army based far from civilian centers. Iran is prepared to sacrifice Shi’ite life in Lebanon in its own imperial interests, but the Lebanese Shi’ites themselves may not wish to be sacrificed. By spelling out the terrible consequences of war with Israel, Jerusalem would sow fear and doubt among its prospective enemies.

The risk, to be sure, is that such an announcement would put arguments in the hands of Western governments (for example France) that want to impose a solution on Israel that ends its control over buffer lands in the West Bank. The reality on the ground, however, is that the Sunni Arab world is in such chaos from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf that the prospects of a settlement of any kind are remote.

The greater risk in destroying Hezbollah’s rocketry at high civilian cost comes from Iran, which would feel honor-bound to retaliate. Iran probably does not yet possess nuclear weapons, so it is in Israel’s interest to finish its business in the north before it acquires them. Iran is unlikely to start a nuclear war with Israel because its leaders wake up one morning feeling apocalyptic. The danger, rather, comes from the possible escalation of what would begin as a conventional exchange. Former Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (a supposed moderate) famously called Israel a “one-bomb country,” claiming that Iran could survive a nuclear exchange that would wipe Israel off the map.

In fact, it would not be technologically challenging to eliminate all mammalian life in Iran through a combination of nuclear blasts, EMP attacks on the electrical system, delivery of “dirty bombs” into water supplies, and so forth. That is not the sort of thing that governments should go bragging about, but in Mr. Netanyahu’s position, I would arrange for an obscure but respected think tank to publish a report on the subject in the style of the late Herman Kahn.

Read more here.

Women fail to blow up Notre Dame Cathedral

The New York Post reports,

PARIS — A failed attack involving a car loaded with gas canisters near Notre Dame Cathedral was spearheaded by a group of women that included a 19-year-old whose written pledge of allegiance to the Islamic State group was found by police, a security official said Friday.

“It’s at the same time rare and predictable,” Matthieu Suc, author of “Wives of Jihadis,” told France Info radio.

Modal Trigger
Police patrol Notre Dame Cathedral.Photo: AP
Women in the group do not take part in attacks, he said, but are there “to ensure the longevity of the caliphate” by having babies and providing moral support. But, he added, “there are often young girls, who are just as radicalized as the young men, and they also want the status of martyr, and they want to act.”

More than one-third of the nearly 700 French citizens who have reached the war zones of Iraq and Syria are women, according to government figures. And officials have said for months that those being recruited by Islamic State in France are increasingly adolescent girls and young women.

Same sex marriage

The New York Times notes that in same sex marriages,

Women gravitated toward commitment more than men. Among the same-sex marriages, 55 percent involved same-sex women and 45 percent same-sex men....

Female privilege

Ann Althouse notes,

There is female privilege in our culture. Mothers are free to show affection to our children without worrying that our antagonists will sexualize it.

Go here to read the specific example she had in mind.

How bacterium react to drugs we throw at them

Margaret Rhodes writes at Wired,

THIS TIME-LAPSE IS one of the most compelling—and unsettling—visualizations of evolution we’ve ever seen. The overhead footage depicts a strain of the gut bacterium E. coli evolving to be 1,000 times more resistant to an antibiotic in a matter of 11 days, starkly visualizing the speed with which diseases can adapt to the drugs we throw their way.

Watch video and read more here.

Speak softly and carry a big stick

What can you offer lower-income voters when you've already cut their taxes to zero, except a "refundable tax credit," also known as a straight up subsidy to voters from the American Treasury Department?

I would strongly prefer to let their wages rise naturally and organically by removing the constant downward pressure of ever-increasing numbers of low-skilled workers coming into the country to compete with Americans for an ever-shrinking pool of low-skilled jobs.

I don't hate the Reformacons for this -- I don't think they're "RINOs." They are dealing with a tough political fact -- you just can't offer more tax cuts to people already entirely removed from the tax rolls.

...That's why I strongly prefer limiting immigration. So that these people see a financial improvement without it costing me any money.

The point is, we can disfavor these things, but we cannot pretend that what Trump is proposing is so far out of the TrueCon mainstream as to be heretical.

If you didn't know the Reformacons -- Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, etc. -- were proposing this sort of "family friendly" child subsidy policy, well, that's your bad for being ignorant about a political philosophy you claim to care deeply about.

When Al Gore and John McCain were caught taking Chinese money and doing favors for donors (respectively), what did they do? They immediately began pushing the idea of Campaign Reform. Having compromised themselves on the issue, they had to become more Catholic than the Pope to make up for their own personal weakness on campaign donation issues.

That's what Trump is doing. Having compromised himself so badly and made himself so unappealing to the women whose votes he absolutely needs, he now has to throw them sops, and by sops, read "your tax money."

...Now, that said, let's not overlook the first point, which is that Trump is in this position of having to bribe women to vote for him precisely because his Strong, Tough mouth has landed him in a Weak, Yielding position.

As they say: Speak softly and carry a big stick.

Not Speak loudly and then try to payoff people with US Treasury funds after you've shot your mouth off so much you've pissed off voters.

Read more here.

Regulated sectors causing biggest price rises

What sectors of our economy are responsible for most of our rising costs? Healthcare, housing, education, and prescription drugs. All areas heavily regulated.


h/t Instapundit

Phillipine president wants American troops to leave

Military Times reports,

The U.S. military’s growing alliance with the Philippines may be at risk after the Pacific nation’s president on Monday issued a stunning call for American troops to end their longstanding mission in the country’s southern region.

Read more here.

Israel responds

Reuters reports,

Israel said its aircraft attacked a Syrian army position on Tuesday after a stray mortar bomb struck the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, and it denied a Syrian statement that a warplane and drone were shot down.

The air strike was a now-routine Israeli response to the occasional spillover from fighting in a five-year-old civil war, and across Syria a ceasefire was holding at the start of its second day.

Syria's army command said in a statement that Israeli warplanes had attacked an army position at 1 a.m. on Tuesday (2200 GMT, Monday) in the countryside of Quneitra province.

The Israeli military said its aircraft attacked targets in Syria hours after the mortar bomb from fighting among factions in Syria struck the Golan Heights. Israel captured the plateau from Syria in a 1967 war.

The Syrian army said it had shot down an Israeli warplane and a drone after the Israeli attack.

Denying any of its aircraft had been lost, the Israeli military said in a statement: "Overnight two surface-to-air missiles were launched from Syria after the mission to target Syrian artillery positions. At no point was the safety of (Israeli) aircraft compromised."

The seven-day truce in Syria, brokered by Russia and the United States, is their second attempt this year by to halt the bloodshed.

Powering through!

The media has a new script: She is powering through. What an inspiration!

The strength is in the struggle.

Julie Lyles Carr is the author of Raising an Original, She guest posts today at A Holy Experience.

The strength is in the struggle.

Hard as it can be to watch. Fearful as it can make us.

Fear, when fed, grows.


Once fear grows, it becomes contagious.
 And once it becomes contagious, it can limit the scope of a life.Once fear grows, it becomes contagious.
 And once it becomes contagious, it can limit the scope of a life.
But we can’t let that happen.

...Even when it seems easier to intervene in every schoolyard conflict.

Even when it seems easier to protect and buffer and bubble wrap and round off all the sharp edges of life.

It’s time to trust.

We can never clearly see the threads of purpose in our kids if all we can see is the risk, the scary, the unknown. We can never clearly see the threads of purpose in our kids if all we can see is the risk, the scary, the unknown.
We can’t raise an original if we raise them on a steady diet of worry.

For our original kids to reach their full potential, we need to model vision, courage, and daring. We need to show the way.

Ask yourself, Am I parenting in this situation, this challenge, this circumstance, from a place of raising my child’s strength and capacity, or am I wrapping him up to defensively buffer my own anxious heart? Am I enabling or empowering?

Be strong and courageous. Fear not. God commands us to do so (Deuteronomy 31:23).

Originality is not the provenance of copy cats and scaredy cats.

It’s the territory of the brave, the visionary, the bold.

It’s possible to let them boldly go.

Read more, especially about her experience with baby sea, turtles here.

Sickly, or "tough as Hell"?

Eric Schmelter writes at Huffington Post,

Yes. It turns out that, for at least a few days, Hillary Clinton has been campaigning with pneumonia.

A 68-year-old woman, with pneumonia, still kept a schedule that most of us wouldn’t make it through, flying here and there, holding multiple events and briefings a day.

That’s not weak. That’s actually strong and tough as hell.

Read more here.

Aspiration pnuemonia

Although he does not name the doctor, Scott Johnson at Power Line has this: "A prominent internist writes with admittedly speculative comments on the diagnosis of pneumonia made public today regarding Hillary Clinton. He writes:

During my 19 years as a board certified internist I have taken care of many hundreds of patients with pneumonia. The story about Hillary Clinton being diagnosed with pneumonia raises a red flag as to the cause. It could simply have been a community acquired pneumonia, which means she contracted it as a healthy person living her usual life. This happens occasionally, even to healthy people. If this is the case the timing certainly is unfortunate for her given where we are in the election cycle though it doesn’t portend anything ominous.

Another more worrisome possibility comes to mind. I raise this second possibility because of Hillary’s history of neurological illnesses (blood clot in brain, concussion), hints raised on the internet in Wikileaks documents and by others that she may have a neurological disease like Parkinson’s, and her by now well documented history of recurrent coughing fits. This second possibility is that she has an aspiration pneumonia.

Aspiration pneumonia occurs when fluids and food particles that normally enter the esophagus instead enter the windpipe and lungs. It is commonly seen in neurological conditions like strokes and Parkinson’s disease or similar diseases where the nerves to the swallowing mechanism are not working properly. This is especially worrisome because it is likely to recur given the underlying, usually incurable disease process and because it can be a life-threatening event.

I consider aspiration pneumonia to be the more likely cause because it unifies all the pieces of disparate information that are available on Hillary’s medical condition. A diagnosis of aspiration pneumonia raises profoundly troubling implications for her possible election as president.

Someone should demand full and immediate disclosure of her medical records. She should also be the subject of a swallow study to confirm that she can swallow normally (if one hasn’t been done already). Every voter should know what’s at stake.

Trump: We shouldn't have a debate moderator because the system is rigged.

Story here.

Needed: unity and clarity

David Greenfield writes about 9-11,

...The pain and shock of the attacks gave us a measure of clarity. We were hit hard enough that we felt once again that justice was on our side and we no longer had to feel guilty for standing up for ourselves. In a society whose highest morality has become that of the victim, we were suddenly victims and entitled to defend ourselves.

The need to question ourselves temporarily went away and it felt good. For a brief shining moment the country became aware of external enemies and was united. We stopped being fragments warring with each other and we became Americans.

Had that clarity been sustained, the country today would be a dramatically different place. But it diminished and fell apart, and our identity went with it.We were once again our own enemies and the real enemy went unrecognized. Now the anniversary of the attacks has become like the memory of an old war that was fought once, but no longer really matters. The nation is at war, but it doesn't know that it's at war. And those who know that we are at war, often can't even state who the enemy is.

...For the Holocaust, it was "Never Again." For 9/11 it was a more ambiguous, "United We Stand", but what do we stand for and what do we stand against?

We have not yet lost the war-- but we are losing it, and unless we decide as a nation what we stand for and what we stand against, then we will lose. It will take time, like our banks we are too big to fail, but given enough appeasement, enough immigration and enough terrorism-- it will come.

Every man and woman must defeat their own doubts before they can defeat the enemy. Only then they can they battle the false reasonableness of the consensus that denies war and the enemy, with a consensus that briefly formed after the attacks and that forms even more briefly after every attack, to see ourselves in relation to the outside enemy. To unite against that enemy and to rebuild our identity around a common conflict with those who want to subjugate and destroy us. It may be ten more years before we are ready to do that, but as long as it takes-- that unity is our only hope.

The raw reaction in the aftermath of an event is the true one and the more distance we put between ourselves and that reaction also increases our distance from the truth.

The years of war have added layers of distancing between that first raw reaction when we saw the towers fall. And it is important this day to return not only to the emotion of that moment, but to the clarity that is our greatest weapon. Only that clarity will end this war.

Read more here.

9-11-2001

The relevance of Benghazi

Gregory Hicks writes at Fox News,

Last month, I retired from the State Department after 25 years of public service as a Foreign Service officer. As the Deputy Chief of Mission for Libya, I was the last person in Tripoli to speak with Ambassador Chris Stevens before he was murdered in the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on our Benghazi post. On this, the fourth anniversary of the Benghazi tragedy, I would like to offer a different explanation for Benghazi’s relevance to the presidential election than is usually found in the press.

Just as the Constitution makes national security the President’s highest priority, U.S. law mandates the secretary of state to develop and implement policies and programs "to provide for the security … of all United States personnel on official duty abroad.”

This includes not only the State Department employees, but also the CIA officers in Benghazi on Sept. 11, 2012. And the Benghazi record is clear: Secretary Clinton failed to provide adequate security for U.S. government personnel assigned to Benghazi and Tripoli.

...the record shows that Secretary Clinton persuaded the president to overthrow Qaddafi and advocated maintaining a diplomatic presence in Benghazi after the Libyan revolution. And then she abandoned her diplomats by ignoring her security obligations. She sent Ambassador Stevens to Benghazi during the 2011 revolution and then induced him to return in the first few months of his tenure, which accounted for his September visit there. Despite the fact that Sidney Blumenthal had alerted her to the increasing danger for Americans in Benghazi and Libya, Mrs. Clinton apparently never asked security professionals for an updated briefing on the situation in Libya. Either she could not correlate the increased tempo of attacks in Libya with the safety of our diplomats, demonstrating fatal incompetence, or she was grossly negligent.

If Mrs. Clinton was unable to fulfill her security obligations to the federal employees she was legally obligated to protect as secretary of state, how can we trust her with the security of our entire country? I won’t.

Read more here.

Hillary's pneumonia

Okay, so Hillary's doctor said she was diagnosed with pneumonia Friday. Is she contagious?

Is pneumonia contagious?
Pneumonia may be contagious but it depends on multiple factors. Most simply:
The cause of the pneumonia
The immune state of the person being exposed
Bacteria are the most common cause, but pneumonia may also be brought on by viruses, fungus or even inhalation of certain chemicals. Pneumonias caused by bacteria and viruses are usually contagious, whereas those caused by fungus and chemicals are not.
References:
www.md-health.com/Is-Pneumonia-Contagious.html
www.webmd.com/lung/understanding-pneumonia-basics

Making Arabia great again

David Warren writes,

Several thousand were killed on that day in 2001 — the anniversary of the Ottoman defeat at the Gates of Vienna. This was a comparatively small number, by modern standards. The rich symbolism of this Islamist operation was lost on the West, which no longer cares for history or legend. A brilliant assault of “asymmetric warfare,” it fulfilled all of its objectives. The torch has since been passed from the more moderate al-Qaeda to the more fanatic Daesh, and will be passed again in due course. Osama bin-Laden personally lost face by being hunted down and killed like a rat, but his vision of a restored Islamic Caliphate survives him. It inspires still the young in heart and mind.

The immediate intention was to humiliate the “Great Satan”; to awaken the sleeping giant and make him blindly thrash; to goad him into self-destructive behaviour as he struck against an enemy he could neither locate nor understand. Beyond this: to expose him as a paper tiger, tilting a balance of power, and transferring initiative from the mightily-armed “Crusader” to the nimble “Jihadi.” Within the Muslim world: to show that only the radical Salafist faction could get results, could change the direction of history and, as it were, “make Arabia great again.”

As I suggested above, we are still too close to this event to grasp its full significance; but after fifteen years we in the West are in a much worse position than we were on the 10th of September, 2001. We showed, as the Islamists predicted, that we did not have the stamina to prevail, even against weak adversaries; that America and allies could only fight “Vietnams.” Our will is shaken, and to Salafist delight, we have by now expressed contrition for fourteen centuries of Christian defence against Islamic aggression. We bow respectfully, as our culture is insulted, and as versions of Shariah are imposed. In disregard of our own security, we have thrown our borders open to massive Muslim immigration. We follow, at every junction, the course of sentimentality, and adapt to the certainty of defeat. After each hit we call for grief counsellors.

It is instructive that, in the present circumstances, with Christians reduced to desperation through much of the Near East, we import Muslim refugees almost exclusively. The Christians flee to the protection of the Kurds; not to refugee camps in which they would risk massacre. Western governments take only from those camps; or in Europe, the flotillas launched from Turkey and Libya. The Islamists gloat at this demographic achievement; the Daesh now recruit from the disaffected young in the new Muslim ghettoes of Europe, radicalized in Saudi-built-and-financed mosques. Few directly engage in suicidal acts of terrorism; but those who do are lionized as heroes. Lesser, safer acts, such as rape of European women, and desecration of churches and synagogues, have become commonplace. We are, and we know that we are, as incapable of assimilating these migrants as the Romans were of assimilating the Vandals and Huns through their increasingly porous frontiers.

...The genius of Osama bin-Laden, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, was to know that the de-Christianizing West would respond in this way. Their propaganda spelt out, from the beginning, the argument for their methods. They called us chestless wonders; they said we would fold under any sustained pressure; that we had lost the confidence of our Christian identity. We are an aging society now, vitiated by abortions, needing immigrants to pay our pensions; a people addicted to drugs, from opiates to iPhones; lapsed in creature comforts, and spineless in the face of adversity.

...the Bush strategy was to repair a disintegrating international state system. National governments must take sovereign responsibility; must patrol within their own borders. Regimes which exported violence would be confronted. Either they would end the sanctuary they had granted to terrorists, or a U.S.-led coalition of the willing would do it for them. He cited long-established international law, which entitles the victims of raids to “hot pursuit” across international borders. By invading Afghanistan and Iraq successfully, Bush could compel other regimes, such as those governing Libya, Syria, and Iran, to behave themselves. That, too, was working: until Obama suddenly evacuated Iraq, vindicating indeed those who had called the USA a paper tiger. And, flew to Cairo to deliver an obsequious apology from America to the whole Muslim world.

Read more here.

9-11-2012

Four years ago today,

When Amb. Chris Stevens asked, more than 600 times, for increased security in Libya, Hillary and her staff ignored the request. We do not know whether Hillary ever saw the request, but if she did not her incompetent staff did not respect her enough to bring important issues to her attention. If she knew of the risks and did nothing, she was clearly derelict. Better yet, her bitchiness went before a Senate committee and declared that trying to find out what had really happened made no difference anyway.

Read more here.

Remember Elian Gonzales, forced to leave America at gunpoint by Bill Clinton's Justice Department?

h/t Mike Miles

Keep the lefty newsreaders out of it.

Clarice Feldman at American Thinker believes that every single one of the debate moderaters is a biased lefty.

Why the Republicans ever agree to moderated debates is beyond my ken. Just pick a topic and a timekeeper and keep the lefty newsreaders out of it.

...If that’s not enough, the scandals of the Clinton Foundation that Hillary plans to keep operating with Chelsea at the head will sooner or later be so evident than even the media lapdogs will not be able to hide it for much longer.

The next mass casualty attack will be much worse than 9-11

Dick Cheney tells Bill Kristol that the dangers we face now are much worse. The next mass attack will be far more deadly than 9-11.

From different angles

Thanks to social media, we are now getting views from different angles, as Hillary collapsed at this morning's 9-11 commemoration. Unable to walk on her own, Hillary sits on a pillar. Then she collapses as people try to help her get in the van.

Flushing our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet

On this fifteenth anniversary of 9-11, Glenn Reynolds writes at Instapundit,

One thing I guess I didn’t believe 15 years ago is that America would elect such a feckless President in 2008, and stand idly by while he flushed our global position, and security, down a left-wing toilet. But we did, and we’ll be paying the price for a long time.

God bless America. We need it.

Read more here.

Power, not communiqués, is what makes the world go round.

Walter Russell Mead writes in The American Interest,

News that North Korea has detonated another bomb comes as no surprise; few things are as obvious in this crazy world as the fact that this murderous dictatorship is making steady progress on its weapons program. The Norks are getting better and better at making more powerful bombs and longer range missiles to put them on. President Obama, like Presidents Clinton and Bush before him, sputters indignantly and wrings his hands, but the tick-tock tick-tock of North Korean nuclear build-up goes on.

...That the Norks should mark President Obama’s final departure from the region he placed at the center of his foreign policy career with the largest nuclear blast in their history is, in its way, fitting; it is a useful reminder of how history actually works.

The problem isn’t that the goals of the liberal internationalists are bad goals. They are excellent goals: no war, the spread of democracy and human rights, limits on weapons of mass destruction, strong institutions. The world they dream of is a much better world than the one we have now. And the liberal internationalists are also right that the world can’t afford to go on in the old way. Given 21st century technology and the vulnerability of our large urban populations to anything that disrupts the intricate networks on which we all depend, old-fashioned great-power politics with its precarious balance of power shored up by recurring wars is a recipe for utter disaster and, maybe, the annihilation of the human race.

But the difficulty that over and over sinks hopeful efforts by liberal internationalists is this: Liberal internationalist methods won’t achieve liberal internationalist goals. Power, not communiqués, is what makes the world go round.Liberal internationalist methods won’t achieve liberal internationalist goals. Power, not communiqués, is what makes the world go round.

...The world is less peaceful, less stable and less liberal today than it was when Barack Obama took the oath of office in January, 2009; Kim Jong-un’s latest nuclear test, and the lack of an effective response by the United States, is merely a sign of the times.

Read more here.

Denying internet access to political opponents

At MIT Technology Review Mike Orcutt shows how

Governments Around the World Deny Internet Access to Political Opponents

Keeping your enemies offline can cripple their chances of overthrowing you.

Read more here.

Unvetted

At Breitbart Ildefonso and Brandon Darby report,

Hundreds of African asylum seekers have flooded Mexican border cities with the U.S. in an effort to get to California and Texas to obtain U.S. asylum — many of the unvetted migrants are from the terror hotbed of Somalia. Rather than having to hide along the way, the African migrants have been getting a special permit from Mexico that gives them a free pass to the U.S. border.

The influx of asylum seekers from African countries who entered Mexico illegally has been building for several weeks as hundreds of individuals continue to arrive primarily to Mexicali to cross into Calexico, California, in order to seek asylum. Mexican immigration authorities have been spotted ferrying the asylum seekers from shelters and plazas to international bridges with the U.S.

Mexican immigration authorities have largely kept quiet about the wave of African migrants who have been entering Mexico through that country’s southern border and then making their way to the U.S. border to seek asylum. Some of the cities they seek include Calexico and San Ysidro, California, and El Paso, Texas.

Read more here.

Free Speech

I like free speech. I like to use good ideas to challenge bad ideas. I think the whole point of political correctness is to erase our ability even to entertain thoughts about freedom, justice, and our inherent (not government-given, but inherent) rights as set forth in the Bill of Rights. I therefore have been untroubled by the Alt-Right movement, even though I know some nasty people have slipped in on the fringes.

I’m just grateful that, being a conservative, these racists and antisemites do live only on the fringes of a freedom-based political movement. If you’re on the Left, the racists and antisemites sit dead center.

From their perch at the top of the Democrat political heap, the Leftist racists demean blacks by saying that blacks are so stupid and helpless that they can function only with government support and guidance. From that same perch, they also offer unflinching support for genocidal Palestinians and for the BDS movement that aids the Palestinians in their genocidal goals. Indeed, this antisemitic rage has become a central pillar of the modern Democrat movement.

Meanwhile, even as Hillary was castigating a group that likes to tweak noses and yank chains, and most especially make a mockery of political correctness, she was receiving an endorsement from the Communist Party of the United States. A little historic reminder is useful here: The Communist Party of the United States actively seeks to bring about the same regimes that killed more than a 100 million people in the 20th century, and that are still going strong in various parts of the world.

Read more here.

Hillary's absurdly cruel stereotyping

What Hillary said:

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables, right?” Clinton told the friendly audience fired up to see Barbra Streisand perform at the cavernous Cipriani on Wall Street. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it.”

What Ann Althouse said:

Not only did Hillary Clinton fail to anticipate how her remark would be heard outside of the ultra-glamorous Cipriani, but she also envisioned tens of millions of Americans in "grossly generalistic" terms — as if absurdly crude stereotyping belonged in presidential decisionmaking and people can be understood and dismissed as worthless under big inflammatory labels like "racist" and "sexist." It's not just an unfortunate quote that no one will forget. It's a revelation of a quality of mind that is exactly what we shouldn't want in a President.

Read more here.

"Hillary Clinton just became unelectable."

Scott Adams writes,

...If humans were rational creatures, the time and place of Clinton’s “overheating” wouldn’t matter at all. But when it comes to American psychology, there is no more powerful symbol of terrorism and fear than 9-11 . When a would-be Commander-in-Chief withers – literally – in front of our most emotional reminder of an attack on the homeland, we feel unsafe. And safety is our first priority.

Hillary Clinton just became unelectable.

Thank goodness for Twitter!

Today there was, of course, a 9-11 remembrance ceremony in New York attended by both presidential candidates. David Lawler reports for the Telegraph,

Hillary Clinton departed early from a 9/11 remembrance ceremony in New York on Sunday after an apparent medical issue.

...Fox News has reported, citing an anonymous law enforcement source, that her departure was due to a medical episode.

As Mrs Clinton was rushed into a van by her Secret Service detail, the report claims, her "knees buckled" and she lost a shoe as she was whisked away.

Zdenek Gazda captured her fall and inability to walk on this video.

Harold

This is about as much emotion as Harold ever shows.

Silence

Is silence a big part of your life? At Brain Pickings Maria Popova explores the subject

We seem to have forgotten what Susan Sontag reminded us half a century ago — that “silence remains, inescapably, a form of speech,” that it has its own aesthetic, and that learning to wield it is among the great arts of living.

...silence is not the absence of sound but the presence of an inward-listening awareness, an attunement of the mind’s ear and an orientation of the spirit toward a certain inner stillness — perhaps the positive counterpoint to loneliness, which so often thrives amid the crowd.

Progressivism and the teachings of Jesus

Bookworm asks, "Was Jesus a Leftist? She goes through the Sermon on the Mount, and classifies each verse as either Progressive or Not Progressive. Her conclusion? Read it here.

Two faces

Heroin

The BBC reports,

Ohio police have released a graphic photo of a couple overdosing on heroin with a four-year-old boy in the car.
Rhonda Pasek, 50, and James Acord, 47, were charged with endangering children after they became unconscious during a traffic stop in East Liverpool.
The boy, Pasek's four-year-old son, was taken into custody by county children's services.
Authorities released the image to raise awareness of the Midwestern US state's heroin epidemic.

"A basket of deplorables"

The BBC reports that Hillary Clinton

has called half of Donald Trump's supporters a "basket of deplorables".
Speaking at a fundraiser, she said they were "racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic - you name it".
She then went on to say the rest of the Republican nominee's supporters were "just desperate for change".
Mr Trump said the comments were "insulting" to "millions of amazing, hard working people".

Read more here.

Ann Althouse wonders,

By the way, is a basket of deplorables anything like a binder full of women?

...But "deplorable" is a good word for speech. It makes you seem lofty, which is good for looking down on people.

...Hillary used it as a noun. To call a person "a deplorable" is dehumanizing.

Read more here.

Friendly with Russia? Depends on who is in power!

Mollie Hemingway writes at The Federalist,

The New York Times is alarmed by Trump's friendliness with Russia. It's weird, considering their freakout when Mitt Romney called Russia a geopolitical foe.

The New York Times has always struggled with even-handed coverage of Republican candidates, long before this year, when they gave up even the pretense of a fight and ran an article on the front page of the paper defending and justifying explicit media bias against Trump.

Read more here.

A Moral Imperative

Have you heard of the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act? Both the Senate and House of Representatives have passed it. It allows 9-11 victims' families to sue the Saudi Arabian government for its complicity in the attacks.

KGB agent Abbas

At Front Page Magazine Carolyn Glick writes about Russian subversion and the KGB career of PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas.

Public humiliation time

Proving I have been to Ace of Spades today

Nothing new

At Observer Austin Bay reminds us that media bias is not a new phenomena, and he gives many examples here.

Washington-shrunken-soul

Austin Bay writes this to James Comey,

I carried a Top Secret clearance for three decades so I got all the briefings and I signed all the papers and I know damn well that Hillary’s grossly negligent handling of classified information—which your investigation documented—is criminal. And somewhere in your Washington-shrunken-soul, you do, too.

What we’ll call the revelation of the BleachBit Timeline gives you a shot at redemption. The BleachBit Timeline documents obstruction of justice that you cannot ignore.

...Jim, I see you as a man in a responsibility-heavy government security position who has acted irresponsibly. Obstruction of justice is an indictable crime—that’s the crime Richard Nixon and his aides committed in the Watergate Scandal. You remember Watergate, don’t you? The scandal that made The Washington Post famous? Turns out the Deep Throat source on whom WaPo reporters relied was the FBI’s Number Two Boss. Back in 1974 our country couldn’t stomach a criminal in the White House. So, Comey, why the hell in 2016 should you help get a criminal elected?

Mr. Director, it’s time for you to admit you erred in early July. You’ve got the evidence. Call a press conference. Recommend Hillary Clinton be indicted and, this time, let Attorney General Loretta Lynch make the decision. She’s the prosecutor—not you.

Recommend indictment for three reasons, Mr. Director. First and foremost recommend she face legal consequences because her actions were criminal. Recommend indictment in order to re-establish the integrity of your agency, whose reputation has been tarnished by your cowardly July decision. You know it. You face internal dissent as well as external criticism, and somewhere in your previously mentioned Washington-shrunken-soul you know the dissent and criticism is righteous, hence your prickly little memo.

Finally, sir, do it for the dead, the Americans who died at Benghazi.

If you lack the character and guts to recommend indictment, then resign, sir. Resign.

Read much more here.

Alt-Right

Chief Instructor at Accept the Challenge decides to look into what is this thing called Alt-Right. He/she found these criteria, and elaborated,

People Are Different

Our World Is Tribal

Our (the white) Tribe Is Being Suppressed.

Men Are Not Women and Women Are Not Men

Freedom Is A Responsibility And Not A Right

If We Must Be A Democratic Society, The Franchise Should Be Limited.

But it was this last criterion that Accept the Challenge could not accept: Jewish elites are opposed to our entire program.

Read more here.
The criteria were found here.

Hybrid War

It doesn't require a nation to wage a hybrid war, and criminal organizations will be drawn to hybrid warfare because it preserves anonymity. That means the first step is to find a sympathetic group on the ground to serve as a proxy. Without one, a group waging hybrid war can't take and seize terrain. (Turf isn't always the objective, but in our scenario it is.)

...Mexican cartels can hire freelance hackers to conduct industrial espionage operations that benefit cartel-friendly businesses by stealing details on bids or digging up trade secrets. Mercenary hackers from anywhere in the world can dig up dirt and blackmail moderate political voices. Websites with opposing views can be hacked and disrupted. Doctored videos and photos can spread discontent, with compromised local media eager to tout them. Politicians not used to hardball are quickly marginalized as the cartel threatens to kill them or their families.

When the Russian special operations forces entered Crimea, they hid among local militia groups. They wore no insignia, but offered weapons, training, and secure communications equipment. These paramilitary units were dubbed "little green men." They were swift, effective and most of all, deniable—since they were not official Russian forces, Putin could have denied knowledge of their activities if necessary. As NATO General Philip Breedlove told a German publication in 2014: "Once the green men are there, a revolution happens quickly."

...The cartel has invested and smuggled military grade equipment to its forces, and they wield shoulder-fired missiles that can shoot down helicopters. A traditional general, interested in causing enemy casualties, would keep this hardware a secret until it was time to surprise an enemy. But in a hybrid war, threats are even better than actions. This is the power of information—a single Youtube video can ground a fleet of the world's most advanced reconnaissance and attack helicopters.

...The tactics and techniques outlined in this hypothetical scenario may seem far-fetched, sure. But people in Crimea and Ukraine just watched more outlandish power grabs succeed even as NATO, Europe, and the United States looked on.

The reality of hybrid warfare is a stark reminder to anyone who thinks the idea of total war has vanished in the glare of the information age. Instead of carpet bombing cities and launching land-grab invasions, the 21st century's version of total war is more subtle, effective, and exportable.

Don't believe it could happen here? Take a look at what's happening with claims of Russian hacking and its impact on the U.S. election. Consider the targets of Anna Chapman and other Russian spy rings in America. Ponder the industrial espionage aimed at defense firms and federal agencies. For all we know, the hybrid war against the United States may have already begun.

Read more here.

Meet Felicia and her two babies

Sometimes hens decide conditions are right to sit a little longer. The result, two baby chicks!

How Silicon Valley sweeps ageism under the rug

Don't mention your experience! Racism? Sexism? No! Ageism! Read about it here.

Riding horses and picking squash

Teaching a horse how to allow someone to "mount."


Plus, two more wheelbarrow loads of delicious patty pan squash!

"I guess I'm over here as a warning from Europe!"

How much longer can we hack it?

Kurt Schlicter writes at Town Hall,

The year 2016 is all about hacks in every sense of the word. Hack hack hackitty-hack hacks, as far as the eyes can see.

There's Hillary's pathetic hacking, those constant pulmonary spasms and coughing fits that clearly demonstrate what we all know. She's old. She’s sick. She's tired, and she's unfit for the highest office in the land. Look at her onstage, coughing and wheezing for four minute stretches as she tries to spit out her poisonous clichés to an audience of slack-jawed idiots in SEIU t-shirts. If she were human, I’d feel sorry for her.

Won’t someone please get this sick old woman to a doctor? She needs help. She looks like a zombie without the hotness. Her eyes have more bags than Louis Vuitton, and she drapes her sagging, collapsing body in muumuus and form-fitting tentage designed to hide her puffy, misshapen mass. She needs assistance up the stairs and into her SUV. Weird handlers lurk around her, ready with the epi-pens her cronies make and that now only someone as rich as she is can afford. Every so often, she just stops talking, staring out into the audience, her empty eyes saying “What am I doing here?” before her handlers rush to surround her and she starts gacking up another lung.

I'd be worried about her absentmindedly pressing the button if it wasn't so obvious she doesn't have the strength to push it. At least with Trump, it’d be a conscious choice.

Then there are the hacks by Hillary’s on-again/off-again Russian friends – the Russkies are her pals when they are paying her for our uranium, not so much when they stop – who have actually done America a great service by exploiting Democrat incompetence to reveal the overwhelming corruption and greed of the liberal establishment in general and Hillary in particular. What used to be the KGB is doing the job of what used to be the mainstream press. Thanks to their hacks, we have an inside view of the criminal enterprise that is the Clinton Foundation. It wasn't a charity. It was a vending machine for favors for connected cronies and rich foreigners. Put your money in the slot, press the button, and out tumbles a cold, refreshing can of Bill and Hillary’s juice. Mmmm. The pause that enriches.

And then there are the hacks who And then there are the hacks who half-heartedly hunt hackers, the FBI. I’m old enough to recall the days that acronym didn’t stand for “Former Bureau of Integrity.” Think of the shame that the loyal, honest career agents trapped in that miserable clusterfark of an organization feel, knowing that today, when they flash their credentials, we don’t think “America’s best – I’m proud to help!” but instead think, “Oh, I wonder what Democrat’s mess these janitors are cleaning up?”

And the biggest hacks of all are in our mainstream media, dancing like little hat-wearing monkeys as the Democrats grind their organs – sometimes more literally than figuratively, as in the cases of Mr. Hillary and Mr. Huma. They tag along after Sick Hillary like little puppies, obligingly turning off the cameras when she starts one of her coughing fits. Hacks gonna hide the hacking.

Have you seen that photo of the eager media serfs gathered on Hillary’s plane, eagerly awaiting her to come out and speak at them, their mouths open, little drops of slobber collecting at the corners of their snouts?



...So 2016 will go down in history as one of America's most awful years, a year remembered for Hillary's hacking cough, for the Russians’ hacking successes, and for the self-inflicted humiliation of the hacks in America’s once-proud institutions. Pray that 2017 is better, because if it's like 2016, America may not be able to hack it.

Read more here.

Bill Clinton mocks the "coal people" of West Virginia and Kentucky

She could clear it all up easily!

Clinton supporters insist the concerns about Hillary's health are way overblown. Couldn't she clear the whole thing up by going and getting a physical and releasing the results?

Hillary a normal and conventional candidate?

Grim writes,

This is normal and conventional? A secretive candidate who can get away with threatening the media not to report on her potentially serious health issues, while dodging criminal prosecution on clear national security violations and obstruction of justice charges?

Maybe it's not the American people whose eyes are a bit foggy here, ladies and gentlemen of the press.

Read more here.

It's a women's world!

Did you know that we live in a women's world? That's the conclusion reached by Chateau Heartiste, after reviewing some recent scientific research.

Smokers and obese patients being denied routine surgeries in Britain

Henry Bodkin reports at The Telegraph,

Obese patients and smokers banned from routine surgery in 'most severe ever' rationing in the NHS.

Hospital leaders in North Yorkshire said that patients with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 or above – as well as smokers – will be barred from most surgery for up to a year amid increasingly desperate measures to plug a funding black hole. The restrictions will apply to standard hip and knee operations.

Read more here.

Which candidate will do the least harm?

Ace of Spades links to a USA Today column on the election by Glenn Reynolds, and adds,

Five of the last six popular presidential votes went to Democrats. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 but got in by a hair.

When that stat changes to "six of the last seven" and "seven of the last eight," what do you think the federal bureaucracy will do? They already are almost all liberal government-happy Democrats. Now they'll know that Republicans will barely ever win the Executive, and that the way to guarantee job security is to do... little favors for the Democrats whenever possible.

The #NeverTrumpers -- who are really Hillary supporters; they want Hillary to win, because they think then they can purge the Trumpkins and start winning elections as a party drawing the support of 25% of the country -- seem to think elections are just about intraparty jockeying, palace intrigues, and "principle."

They seem to not notice elections are actually about forming a government and staffing it with actual people, people the president chooses, and then directing (and hopefully restraining) a sprawling bureaucracy that not only can destroy you, but increasingly desires to.

But I guess the important thing is being able to write pungent, emotional opinion pieces for NR.

Reynolds argues,

If you want checks and balances, vote Trump.

The civil service, though supposedly professional and nonpartisan, has become a Democratic Party monoculture.

Trump is a blowhard who seems to have something of a man-crush on Vladimir Putin. His business dealings are as shady as you’d expect a New York real-estate developer’s to be, his campaign has been a madhouse, and even on the positions of his that I like, I don’t have a whole lot of confidence that he’ll actually deliver.

Hillary, on the other hand is, well, a crook. Her period at the State Department was marked by pretty much out-and-out influence peddling, the Clinton Foundation seems to be little more than a money laundry, and when she’s asked to explain herself, she sounds like a Mafia boss’s lawyer, only less believable.

Reynolds notes that

Federal employees overwhelmingly vote for Democrats, donate to Democrats, and, by all appearances, cover for Democrats as a routine part of doing their job.

So if the choice in 2016 is between one bad candidate and another (and it is) the question is, which one will do the least harm. And, judging by the civil service’s behavior, that’s got to be Trump. If Trump tries to target his enemies with the IRS, you can bet that he’ll get a lot of pushback — and the press, instead of explaining it away, will make a huge stink. If Trump engages in influence-peddling, or abuses secrecy laws, you can bet that, even if Trump’s appointees sit atop the DOJ or FBI, the civil service will ensure that things don’t get swept under the rug. And if Trump wants to go to war, he’ll get far more scrutiny than Hillary will get — or, in cases like her disastrous Libya invasion, has gotten.

So the message is clear. If you want good government, vote for Trump — he’s the only one who will make this whole checks-and-balances thing work.

Read more here.

Clinton and Trump

Pat Buchanan writes at WND,

To get her “message” out, Clinton has to punch it though a media filter. But many in this ferociously competitive and diverse media market today know that the way to the front page or top of the website is to find a new angle on the plethora of scandals, minor and major, surrounding Hillary and Bill.

And with thousands of emails still out there, the contents of which are known to her adversaries, she will likely have IEDs going off beneath her campaign all the way to November.

Consider the coughing fits, a repeated distraction from her message. Should they go away, no problem. But if they recur, people will rightly demand to know from a physician what is the cause.

Because of her own blunders, Clinton’s adversaries have achieved a large measure of control over how her campaign is reported.

In a sense this is like Watergate, where, no matter that Richard Nixon might be managing well a Yom Kippur War or a strategic summit in Moscow, the press and prosecutors cared only about the tapes.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s message has begun to come through – loud, clear and consistent.

He will secure the border. He will renegotiate the trade deals that have been killing U.S. manufacturing and costing American jobs. He will be a law-and-order president who will put America first. He will keep us out of wars like Iraq. He will talk to Vladimir Putin, smash ISIS, back the cops and the vets, and rebuild the military.

Other than being the first woman president, what is the great change that Hillary Clinton offers America?

The Clinton campaign has a big, big problem.

Read more here.

It would be a great act of patriotism

Roger L. Simon writes in PJ Media,

Hillary Clinton, who had told us she had one cellphone, turned out to have had thirteen such phones and five iPads, all of which have mysteriously disappeared, two having been smashed by hammers -- this, although the information on all of them was legally government property. Was she arrested for this or even cited? Did the FBI even ask why she did this or why she had so many phones? Some wag on television said she must have been a crack dealer.

More importantly, did the FBI even ask her the most obvious of questions: why in the world did she put ALL her government emails on a private home-brew server (and then have them deleted with the most advanced data eradication software available -- five stars on CNET -- two days after these emails came under subpoena)? Was that because the equally obvious answer -- to avoid any possible public scrutiny of her actions (for a variety of suspicious reasons) -- is itself felonious?

Of course, Comey knew this. He is the one who did not want these obvious questions and many others asked. He is the one who allowed Clinton to testify without being under oath. He is the one who de facto allowed her to assert she did not "recall" the most well known and common things like the circle "c" insignia for classified email without being questioned, further allowing her to do this a staggering 37 times. Clinton didn't even have to take the Fifth. (And this woman is running for president of the United States.)

Yes, the FBI has had, shall we say, a variegated past, but in recent years many of us had come to trust it, although the organization has been severely hampered in its internal battle against radical Islam by the nauseating political correctness of the current administration. Nevertheless, most of us suspected it was still there in a pinch and its operatives understood the political correctness was nonsense and could finally be ignored. Now I am not so sure.

I am hugely angry at Comey, as you can see, but he still could perform a great service. He actually could resign and shine a light of truth on this horrific situation before it is too late. The Democratic Party, unlike the Republicans under Nixon, apparently doesn't have the courage to face what they have wrought. Perhaps, just perhaps, Comey does. It would be a great act of patriotism.

Read more here.

Did someone restrain the FBI?

Judge Andrew Napolitano believes someone restrained the FBI. He writes in the Washington Times,

The FBI did not ask Mrs. Clinton aggressive follow-up questions. Her interrogators just blithely accepted her answers. They failed to present her with documents she had signed that would have contradicted what she was telling them — particularly, an oath she signed on her first day in office promising to recognize state secrets when she came upon them and to keep them in secure venues. And agents violated Department of Justice policy by not recording her interrogation when her lawyers told them she would not answer questions if her answers were recorded.

...It is apparent that some in FBI management blindly followed what they were told to do — exonerate Hillary Clinton. There is no other explanation for the FBI’s failure from the outset to use ordinary law enforcement tools available to it. Yet some in the FBI are not professionally satisfied by this outcome. They know that a strong case for prosecution and for guilt is being ignored for political reasons.

What else do they know?

Happy in Colorado today

The Carolina Panthers lost to the Denver Broncos Thursday night 21-20, which explains why blogging was light here.

State power

Bookworm notes,

...the more power one vests in the state, the more likely one is (and by that I mean anyone is) to become a victim of that same state power.

I know one other thing: If Hillary is elected, her Supreme Court (which she will create in one fell swoop by nominating Scalia’s replacement) will destroy the First Amendment swiftly and completely.

A single source

Bookworm writes about

The money-man behind the Balkanization. It’s not often one can point the finger at a single person behind a nation’s decline. Thanks to recent hacks, though, we can trace many of America’s current problems — specifically, those problems tied to the creation of special interest groups that are then instructed in the art of grievance and victimization — to one man: George Soros. There are lots of smoking guns lying about in plain sight (so no need for imaginary conspiracy theories) but, typically, the mainstream media is assiduously ignoring the data, so the vast majority of Americans are unaware that the social ills they see that disturb them so greatly can be traced to a single source.

It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Emphasizing diversity has been the pitfall, not the strength, of nations throughout history.

...America’s melting pot is history’s sole exception of E pluribus unum inclusivity: a successful multiracial society bound by a common culture, language and values. But this is a historic aberration with a future that is now in doubt.

Some students attending California’s Claremont College openly demand roommates of the same race. Racially segregated “safe spaces” are fixtures on college campuses.

We speak casually of bloc voting on the basis of skin color — as if a lockstep Asian, Latino, black or white vote is a good thing.

Some public figures have sought to play up or invent diversity advantages. Sometimes, as in the cases of Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Dolezal and Ward Churchill, the result is farce.

Given our racial fixations, we may soon have to undergo computer scans of our skin colors to rank competing claims of grievance.

How does one mete out the relative reparations for various atrocities of the past, such as slavery, the Holocaust, the American Indian wars, the Asian or Catholic exclusion laws, indentured servitude, or the mid-18th-century belief that the Irish were not quite human?

Sanctuary cities, in the manner of 1850s Richmond or Charleston invoking nullification, now openly declare themselves immune from federal law. Does that defiance ensure every city the right to ignore whatever federal laws it finds inconvenient, from the filing of 1040s to voting laws?

...It is time to step back from the apartheid brink.

...Campuses desperately need unity czars, not diversity czars.

Read more here.

Are you ready to support Trump against the media onslaught that is to come?

Roger L. Simon writes in PJ Media,

Donald Trump's outreach to African-Americans is the most significant action of the 2016 campaign so far, especially for its potential longterm implications for our culture.

The liberal media and their academic and entertainment industry allies know this and for that reason they will redouble their efforts to portray Trump as a racist. This is not just to defend the pathological liar Hillary--can you imagine the moral cartwheels necessary to support Clinton at this point?--but to defend themselves, to justify the way they have been living their lives for decades, all the "progressive" pronouncements covering up the most comfortable of bourgeois lifestyles, as far from the inner city as Mars.

Donald Trump has put them "up against the wall," especially by receiving a standing ovation in, of all places, a black church. My how the journos must hate him now.

I have seen this enmity personally, riding the Trump press plane on a couple of occasions. I have also noticed how the press almost never talked to the thousands of Trump supporters at the several rallies I have attended, as if these people were members of some untouchable class secretly migrated from the sub-continent. Actually, these "untouchables" were remarkably decent and open-hearted people if you bothered to communicate with them, some of the nicest I have ever met. I never heard a racist word from any of them. They were also unfailingly polite. You wouldn't know it from the reportage, but Trump rallies have been among the most peaceful crowds I have ever been in.

Read more here.

Are we going to be a banana republic?

No day is complete without a visit to the Bookworm Room. Today she writes,

Up until a few months ago, one could argue that Hillary is just another garden-variety Leftist and that the American republic will survive despite her.

That’s all changed now. Knowing as we do of her extraordinary corruption — whether in running the State Department as a Pay-for-Play profit center for herself, her husband, and her daughter, or deliberately exposing all of America’s state secrets to try to hide her gross malfeasance — electing her to the presidency means that America has fully embraced banana republic status.

In the wake of a Hillary victory, thanks to Comey and the American voters (including all those #NeverTrumpers), there will no longer be a rule of law in America that applies equally to all citizens. We will in one fell swoop have destroyed a legal system that goes back 1215 when England first put into writing in the Magna Carta a policy saying that no one, not even a king, is above the law. As of now, Hillary and her cronies are above the law and it will be a disaster if the American people put their imprimatur on that utterly corrupt, anti-democratic principle.

Read more here.

"Allowing our cells to die as they are destined to do"

Science alert reports,

A new cancer drug called Venetoclax is causing quite a stir in the medical community, with the announcement that the US FDA has given it fast-track approval for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL).

CLL is one of the most common types of leukemia in adults, and during a recent clinical trial, 80 percent of patients treated with Venetoclax experienced complete or partial remission of their cancer.

Developed in Australia over several decades, Venetoclax is taken in pill-form, and of the small sample of patients who have been treated with it so far, some reported no adverse side-effects at all.

"It causes no side-effects. Nothing, absolutely nothing," Robert Oblak, who had recurring CLL when he was selected to participate in the trial in 2013, told the ABC. "Quite amazing. So even when it's killing cells, you feel great."

Oblak estimates that he was just the 11th person in the world to be treated with Venetoclax, and within a year of treatment, he went into remission.

The phase II trial involved 107 patients aged 18 or older with CLL, who had undergone at least one type of treatment already.

The patients also had to have a particular chromosome abnormality in their leukemia cells called 17p deletion, which means they’re lacking a portion of the chromosome that acts to suppress cancer growth.

They were asked to take one Venetoclax pill per day for five weeks straight, with doses starting at 20 mg and gradually increasing to 400 mg.

At the end of the trial, which involved patients and researchers from 31 centres in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Poland, and Australia, four out of five patients experienced a positive result, with complete remission reported for one in five.

"These patients now have a new, targeted therapy that inhibits a protein involved in keeping tumour cells alive," Richard Pazdur from the FDA’s Centre for Drug Evaluation and Research, announced back in April.

"For certain patients with CLL who have not had favourable outcomes with other therapies, Venclexta may provide a new option for their specific condition."

The results of the trial, which were published in The Lancet in June, informed the FDA’s decision to fast-track approval of the drug and make it available to patients in the US.

Despite being developed by researchers at Australia’s Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research, it’s not yet been approved for use by Australian patients, but an application has been made.

So, how does the drug work? Venetoclax is one of a new generation of immunotherapy cancer drugs that are designed to address certain failings of a person’s own immune system - such as missing portions of chromosomes that inhibit the cells’ ability to fight the spread of cancer.

In CLL patients with 17p deletion, malignant cells don’t proliferate all that much, but they don’t die, because the body’s immune response has been hindered, and abundant levels of a protein called BCL2 helps keep them alive.

"Cells, when they are born, are destined to die and cancer cells and particularly leukaemia cells delay that death by using a protein called BCL2 that stops the normal time of death," John Seymour from the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in Melbourne, who helped oversee the trial, told the ABC.

"Venetoclax works by specifically blocking the action of that BCL2, and allows the cells to die in the way that they were destined to."