Master of None

In what should be no surprise to anyone, Hillary Clinton wrote and sent sent classified information through her private email server. This information was always classified, and if it wasn't properly marked by the originator (i.e., Hillary) then that isn't a defense, it's another misdeed.

While she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote and sent at least six e-mails using her private server that contained what government officials now say is classified information, according to thousands of e-mails released by the State Department.

Although government officials deemed the e-mails classified after Clinton left office, they could complicate her efforts to move beyond the political fallout from the controversy. They suggest that her role in distributing sensitive material via her private e-mail system went beyond receiving notes written by others, and appears to contradict earlier public statements in which she denied sending or receiving e-mails containing classified information.

Ron Radosh has a few campaign predictions that I find eminently plausible. Read the whole thing; I'm going to excerpt the predictions.

No candidate for president can win without Ohio. Florida is crucial as well, and if Marco Rubio ran as Kasich's vice president, the Republicans likely would have a successful ticket.

Kasich/Rubio would be a very electable and respectable ticket. Kasich doesn't seem likely to win the nomination right now.

I believe Trump's support will erode and the people will choose a conservative candidate with actual political experience. [...] I pick Walker as the eventual winner because of his record and his proven ability to win elections in the blue state of Wisconsin.

Walker is still my top candidate, and I'm rooting for him to pull things together. I don't think Trump will end up with the nomination, but I do worry about him running as an independent.

I believe Hillary Clinton will be forced to pull out of the campaign -- for personal health reasons, of course -- and the Democratic field will be wide open.

I agree that Hillary is doomed, even if the axe hasn't fallen yet.

If Joe Biden enters, he will pass Clinton quickly in the polls even if she does not drop out.

A Joe Biden / Elizabeth Warner ticket seems very plausible.

I don't have to make a prediction, but I will anyway: Walker/Rubio vs. Biden/Warner in 2016.

President Obama has decided to rename Mount McKinely, North America's tallest peak to "Denali". He must have just found out he can rename things. I'm sorry, but this is idiotic.

His excursion north of the Arctic Circle will make Obama the first sitting president to step foot in the Alaska Arctic, home to Alaska Natives who have received less attention amid Obama's recent efforts to improve conditions for Native Americans. In a major show of solidarity, Obama announced on the eve of his trip that his administration is changing the name of North America's tallest peak, Mount McKinley, to Denali, its traditional Athabascan name. ...

In renaming 20,320-foot Mount McKinely as Denali, Obama was instating a moniker Alaskans have informally used for centuries. The name means "the high one" in Athabascan.

Martin O'Malley took the stage at the Democratic National Committee and fearlessly spoke truth to power, attacking the Democrat's coronation of Hillary Clinton. DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a hack Clinton crony, and O'Malley was brave to confront her on her own stage standing barely ten feet from her.

Accusing party leaders of trying to keep Democratic ideas hidden as the Republican presidential candidates spew "racist hate" from their debate lecterns, Mr. O'Malley, the former Maryland governor and mayor of Baltimore, questioned the decision to hold "four debates and four debates only" before the first four states finish voting.

"This is totally unprecedented in our party's history," Mr. O'Malley said. "This sort of rigged process has never been attempted before. Whose decree is it exactly? Where did it come from? To what end? For what purpose? What national or party interest does this decree serve? How does this help us tell the story of the last eight years of Democratic progress?"

While Mr. O'Malley never named the party's chairwoman, Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, his remarks about the debates were clearly aimed at her - and she sat looking grim throughout, barely clapping, and appeared angry when she shook his hand once he finished.

Hillary would be a terrible president, and I hope the Democrats nominate someone else. I'm obviously no fan of their policies, but I'd be thrilled for America to have a choice between two patriotic, competent candidates.

Democrats are growing frustrated that Hillary Clinton isn't making the controversy around her private email server go away.

Rosalind Wyman, a veteran Democratic national committeewoman from California who is also a Clinton supporter, said Mrs. Clinton had not shown enough urgency in battling questions about her judgment, and complained that the campaign's responses to the controversy -- and the federal inquiries that have followed -- were becoming only more muddled.

"The only thing Hillary can do, I think, is get out there in front of reporters and take five hours of questions -- if that's what it takes -- until people understand her, at least, and hopefully believe her," Ms. Wyman said. "And we have to have people who are talented, independent experts on classified secrets defending her on television, rather than who we have now."

But Hillary can't just say "sorry" and answer a few questions when her apology will constitute an admission of guilt to a series of crimes. She has to dodge and weave to try to avoid prosecution.

In Kentucky, where a hard-fought governor's race will be decided in November, some Democrats are privately fretting that Mrs. Clinton's problems could damage the party's brand. The departing Democratic governor, Steven L. Beshear, said he believed that Republican attacks over Mrs. Clinton's email use would continue through the fall and beyond -- and that the Clinton campaign had to devise a strategy of more effective countermoves.

"Honestly, at this point there isn't any great way to handle it," Mr. Beshear said. "While Hillary Clinton has been straight up from the very beginning, the Republicans will not let the issue die, and they will conduct as many witch hunts as possible. She will really have to start addressing those attacks as the campaign becomes more active."

Beshear is delusional or lying. It's President Obama's DOJ and inspectors general who are investigating, and they're hardly Republican hatchet men. Hillary isn't being "straight up", and she can't be without going to jail.

Strange event in the lunch line. The guy in front of me buys a sandwich and bag of chips, and the cashier tells him, "You'd save a dollar if you got a drink with that. The combo is cheaper."

The guy says, "No thanks." He pays for his meal and walks off.

I step forward to pay for my soda and the cashier just waves me off. "Just take it. That guy paid for your soda already," she says, gesturing towards previous customer who is now walking away, oblivious. "Now I feel better," she says.

So what should I do?

• Take my free soda and leave.
• Catch the guy and offer him a dollar.
• Catch the guy and offer him 50 cents.

What does the modern-day Molech demand? More baby livers.

David Daleiden of the Center for Medical Progress sat down for a meal in May with Cate Dyer, founder of StemExpress, which partnered with Planned Parenthood to sell organs to medical researchers.

"What would make your lab happy?" Daleiden asked.

"Another 50 livers a week," Dyer said. "We're working with, you know, almost like triple digit number of clinics. So it's a lot on volume. We still need more than what we do. So it's a lot. ... I don't think you're going to hit a capacity with us any time in the next 10 years."

The High Priests of Molech laugh about squeamish unbelievers.

StemExpress: I know we get requests for neural [tissue]. It's the hardest thing in the world to ship.

Buyer: You do it as the whole calvarium [the entire intact head of a dead baby].

StemExpress: That's it, yeah, that's the easiest way. And I mean we've actually had good success with that in the past.

Buyer: Yeah, Make sure the eyes are closed!

StemExpress: [Loud Laughter] Tell the lab it's coming. So they don't open the box and go, "Oh God!" [Laughter] So yeah, wheras so many of the academic labs cannot fly like that. They're just not capable.

Buyer: Why is that? I don't understand that.

StemExpress: It's almost like they don't want to know where it comes from. I can see that. Where they're like, "We need limbs, but no hands and feet need to be attached." [...] They want you to take it all off, like, "Make it so that we don't know what it is."

Buyer: Yeah. Bone the chicken for me and then I'll eat it.

StemExpress: That's it. But we know what it is [Laughter]. [...] Their lab techs freak out, and have meltdowns, and so it's just like, yeah.

Sacrificing children for medical research is an abomination.

Leviticus 20:2-5 (ESV)

2 "Say to the people of Israel, Any one of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who gives any of his children to Molech shall surely be put to death. The people of the land shall stone him with stones. 3 I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name. 4 And if the people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, 5 then I will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech.

Glenn Reynolds writes that "victimhood isn't the only response" when you're threatened. Three Americans and a Brit take out a would-be terrorist on a French train:

The three were riding on a train from Amsterdam to Paris when a gunman -- an Islamist from Morocco who had visited Syria and was flagged as a possible jihadist -- started shooting. One of the Americans, Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone, 23, sprinted at the gunman and tackled him. The others, Oregon National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Sacramento State University student Anthony Sadler, 23, joined in.

As Skarlatos recounted in a Sky News interview from his hotel in Arras, northern France: "I just looked over at Spencer and said, 'Let's go!' Spencer got to the guy first, grabbed the guy by the neck, and I grabbed the handgun, got the handgun away from the guy and threw it. Then I grabbed the AK (assault rifle), which was at his feet, and started muzzle thumping him in the head with it."

Arm yourself. Be a wolf.

Fear is contagious. But so is courage. People should respond not like a herd of sheep but like a pack of wolves.

Scott Adams (author of Dilbert) writes about Donald Trump, clown genius. Adams is now predicting that The Donald will be our next president.

Allow me to describe some of the hypnosis and persuasion methods Mr. Trump has employed on you. (Most of you know I am a trained hypnotist and this topic is a hobby of mine.)

For starters, Trump literally wrote the book on negotiating, called The Art of the Deal. So we know he is familiar with the finer points of persuasion. For our purposes today, persuasion, hypnosis, and negotiating all share a common set of tools, so I will conflate them. ...

For example, when Trump says he is worth $10 billion, which causes his critics to say he is worth far less (but still billions) he is making all of us "think past the sale." The sale he wants to make is "Remember that Donald Trump is a successful business person managing a vast empire mostly of his own making." The exact amount of his wealth is irrelevant.

When a car salesperson trained in persuasion asks if you prefer the red Honda Civic or the Blue one, that is a trick called making you "think past the sale" and the idea is to make you engage on the question of color as if you have already decided to buy the car. That is Persuasion 101 and I have seen no one in the media point it out when Trump does it.

Via an anonymous journalist who writes to Instapundit, thoughts on Hillary's vulnerability to blackmail:

WHAT NOBODY IS TALKING ABOUT BUT WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS TO WORRY ABOUT

Hillary will be totally blackmail-able if elected. Here's the logic:

1. It's safe to say that there were things on that server which could cause Hillary tremendous harm politically - which is why she destroyed the evidence that would have been exculpatory if you believed her explanation. In my mind, it's also why she used a private server to begin with.

2. She is lying about what was on that server, potentially to include while under oath in her upcoming congressional testimony.

3. If someone had all the copies of her emails and those of her staff, they could readily blackmail her because of the above. They'd have proof of her wrongdoing and her lying about it.

4. Hillary Clinton, as both a future Presidential candidate and a sitting Sec. of State would have been one of the Top 100 intelligence targets in the world and probably one of the top 10.

5. It's thus certain that the Chinese and Russians would each have had a team focused on accessing her communications.

6. Every security expert I know of has said it's a virtual certainty the Chinese and Russians both gained access to her server and all her emails. From what I know about their capabilities, I'd agree.

There are probably a bunch of folks in China and Russia who are praying (even if they're atheists) for Hillary to be elected. If she wins, they own the President of the United States. I can just imagine in a meeting with Putin, Hillary being told to back off supporting Ukraine or he'll release her emails (as he hands her a folder containing the most damaging ones for her to peruse). Put in that position, would Hillary fall on her sword or sacrifice a country like Ukraine? I don't know, but I wouldn't want to be living in Ukraine...

Someone with that kind of vulnerability to blackmail shouldn't be allowed to sweep the floors of the NSA, much less run our country.

Sidney Powell attempts to catalog Hillary's countless crimes, and there are so many it's hard to keep track. He calls for a special prosecutor, but is that really necessary? I won't be surprised if the Obama Justice Department is eager enough to take her down. From what I've seen so far the DoJ has been moving cautiously but steadily forward in their investigation of Hillary. The caution is appropriate -- a slip up in the highest possible profile case would be humiliating. There's plenty of time to sort things out before the election.

If Hillary and her cabal don't end up in jail (or with a presidential pardon) it will be a national embarrassment.

While the FBI and Department of Justice have willfully ignored Hillary Clinton's outrageous conduct, they didn't hesitate a minute to investigate and prosecute former CIA Director and national hero, General Petraeus. He was just tarred, feathered and ridden out of the CIA on a rail for sharing some information (his own notebook) with his biographer who was both in the military and had a top secret clearance. Yet, Petraeus did not have a secret server set up to house his classified and top secret information or digital satellite imagery; he destroyed nothing; and, there was no "leak." But that's not all.

During the same years that Hillary was communicating about national security and world affairs off the grid, the Department of Justice has had no qualms threatening news reporters and prosecuting whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. To hell with the First Amendment and Supreme Court precedent, even the New York Times reported that this administration prosecuted more reporters and whistleblowers for "espionage" than all prior administrations put together.

The inspector general investigation into Hillary's use of a private email server for top secret communications has expanded to her top aides, and Hillary is no doubt looking among them for a scapegoat with enough importance to distract the public from her misdeeds. Who will be sacrificed so that Hillary can go free?

As pressure builds on Hillary Clinton to explain her official use of personal email while serving as secretary of state, she faced new complications Tuesday. It was disclosed her top aides are being drawn into a burgeoning federal inquiry and that two emails on her private account have been classified as "Top Secret." ...

At least four top aides have turned over records, including copies of work emails on personal accounts, to the State Department, which is collecting them in response to a subpoena from Capitol Hill, according to the department. Lawmakers have demanded records, including personal emails, from six other aides, but it's unknown whether they used personal email for work.

And now Hillary has decided she has no choice but to surrender her email server to investigators. A proper forensics investigation will help us understand the use, configuration, and breaches that occurred on the server over the past six years, but it will also be interesting to see what is discovered about about the cover-up that's been going on for the past few months.

Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign casts her decision to turn over her personal email server to the Justice Department as cooperating with investigators. Her Republican critics suggest that the move and new revelations about classified information points to her malfeasance as secretary of state. ...

Federal investigators have begun looking into the security of Clintons' email setup amid concerns from the inspector general for the intelligence community that classified information may have passed through the system. There is no evidence she used encryption to prevent prying eyes from accessing the emails or her personal server.

Hillary Clinton's handling of classified material is worse than the behavior that led David Petraeus to plead guilty to a criminal charge last year. General Petraeus is a generally honorable man who made some very bad decisions that cost him (and our country) dearly. Hopefully Hillary will act as honorably and plead guilty when she is charged.

The inspector general for the government's intelligence community, I. Charles McCullough III, has found that some of the 30,000 Clinton e-mails turned over to the State Department contain classified material. Taking a random sample of 40 e-mails, he found four with classified information -- material that was classified at the time it was sent and that was extremely vulnerable to hackers and foreign intelligence agencies. A fifth e-mail concerning the 2012 Benghazi attack that left an ambassador and three other Americans dead is already public and appears to have contained classified information. In all likelihood, there are many more.

Not so long ago, the government took that sort of thing seriously. The U.S. Criminal Code states, with regard to documents or materials containing classified information: "It is a crime to knowingly remove such documents without authority and with the intent to retain such documents or materials at an unauthorized location." David Petraeus, the former CIA director and Army general, pled guilty just this year to mishandling classified information after storing sensitive CIA data in an unlocked desk drawer at his home in Arlington, Va. If a desk in a house in Virginia is an unauthorized location, a server in a house in Hillary Clinton's New York home is one, too.

Will the three million gallons of toxic waste spilled by the Environmental Protection Agency at Gold King Mine slow down the Obama administration's pseudo-environmental agenda? Maybe we'd be comfortable with government regulation if the regulatory agencies were competent. Unfortunately, they're staffed by fallible humans (just like us!), which is why we shouldn't give them so much power.

The political fallout from last week's toxic spill at Colorado's Gold King Mine intensified Monday, with critics saying the incident has exposed clear hypocrisy within the Obama administration while threatening the credibility of the Environmental Protection Agency at a crucial moment.

Rather than express outrage as it has done in the wake of previous environmental disasters, the White House would not comment on the spill and instead directed all questions to the embattled EPA.

The agency, meanwhile, remains under intense fire after its contractors accidentally breached a dam at the mine last week and sent toxic sludge flowing into the Animas River. The contaminated water has spread to New Mexico, Arizona and Utah, and EPA officials were forced to concede that more than 3 million gallons were released into the river -- a much higher amount than the agency's initial estimate of 1 million gallons.

The fluid contains lead, arsenic and other heavy metals.

Ross Douthat at the New York Times explains that contraception and abortion are very different and should be unbundled. Let's separate contraception and family planning from dismembering babies.

If, like many of the moderate-liberal columnists writing on this issue, you are 1) made at least somewhat uncomfortable by the dismemberment of living human beings in utero but 2) are convinced that Planned Parenthood's non-abortion-related services are essential to the common good, why not write a column urging Planned Parenthood to, I dunno, get out of the dismemberment business? If all these other services are such a great, crucial, and (allegedly) abortion-reducing good, why do you, center-left journalist, want them perpetually held hostage to the possibility of public outrage over the crushing of tiny bodies in the womb? If a publicly-funded institution does one set of things you really like, and another thing that makes you morally uncomfortable, why are you constantly attacking that organization's critics and telling them that they just have to live with the combination, instead of urging the organization itself to refocus on the non-lethal, non-dismembering portions of its business? ...

So let's be clear about what's really going on here. It is not the pro-life movement that's forced Planned Parenthood to unite actual family planning and mass feticide under one institutional umbrella. It is not the Catholic Church or the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles or the Southern Baptist Convention or the Republican Party that have bundled pap smears and pregnancy tests and HPV vaccines with the kind of grisly business being conducted on those videos. This is Planned Parenthood's choice; it is liberalism's choice; it is the respectable center-left of Dana Milbank and Ruth Marcus and Will Saletan that's telling pro-life and pro-choice Americans alike that contraceptive access and fetal dismemberment are just a package deal, that if you want to fund an institution that makes contraception widely available then you just have to live with those "it's another boy!" fetal corpses in said institution's freezer, that's just the price of women's health care and contraceptive access, and who are you to complain about paying it, since after all the abortion arm of Planned Parenthood is actually pretty profitable and doesn't need your tax dollars?

Whoever "these people" are, the WaPo claims they've confirmed that Hillary Clinton's private email server was insecure and unreliable when it was used to transmit classified material. Will Hillary and her cronies require a presidential pardons?

With the new server came an additional specialist: Bryan Pagliano, who had worked as her campaign's IT director. According to federal campaign finance records, Pagliano was paid by Clinton's Senate leadership PAC through April 2009. The next month, he went to work for the State Department as an IT specialist, a department official said. The people briefed on the server indicated that he continued to act as the lead specialist responsible for it.

The e-mail system was not always reliable, these people said, with Pagliano summoned at various times to fix problems. Notably, the system crashed for days after New York was hit by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.

That led to new conversations about the need for better security, durability and a more professional setup, according to these people. In 2013, the Clintons hired Platte River to maintain the data.

UK Home Secretary Theresa May and French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve write a joint piece about the importance and difficulty of controlling what they call a "global migration crisis". They explicitly oppose illegal immigration motivated by the prospect of economic gain.

What we are currently facing is a global migration crisis. This situation cannot be seen as an issue just for our two countries. It is a priority at both a European and international level. Many of those in Calais and attempting to cross the Channel have made their way there through Italy, Greece or other countries. That is why we are pushing other member states - and the whole of the EU - to address this problem at root.

The nations of Europe will always provide protection for those genuinely fleeing conflict or persecution. However, we must break the link between crossing the Mediterranean and achieving settlement in Europe for economic reasons. Together, we are currently returning 200 migrants every month who have no right to asylum. ...

Ultimately, the long-term answer to this problem lies in reducing the number of migrants who are crossing into Europe from Africa. Many see Europe, and particularly Britain, as somewhere that offers the prospect of financial gain. This is not the case - our streets are not paved with gold.

The Clintons give 10% of their income to charity... their "charity".

Hillary Clinton late Friday afternoon released her 2007-2014 tax returns, showing that she and Bill reported $139.1 million in adjusted gross income, paid $43.9 million in taxes (a 31.6% tax rate), and made $15 million (10.8% of their AGI) of charitable contributions, $14.9 million of which went to the Clinton Family Foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative.

Why is Donald Trump running for president? Marc Hodak nails it. Trump is planning to auction the Presidency to the highest bidder.

Sure, he may be happy to win the presidency. He can go for it, and see how far he gets. But what happens when it becomes plain that he can't win, that he is only polling ten percent of the vote, or five percent of the vote? No matter; he still has what every dealmaker wants--huge negotiating power.

If his support would largely draw from a Republican candidate, he can go to, say, Jeb (or whoever wins the R slot), and propose to drop out if Jeb gives him X*. Or, he can got to his old pal Hillary (assuming she wins the D slot), and propose to stay in the race if he gets X.

The art of the deal is to have something that other people desperately want, and get them to bid on it. Imagine holding the keys to the White House, and the top candidates have to get them from you.

What's that cracking sound?

In this new video there are more scenes in the pathology lab where Planned Parenthood personnel and picking through body parts in a petri dish. At one point there is a cracking sound and a medical assistant says it's the cracking of the baby's skull.

Dr. Ginde laughs and says, "It's a baby."