Monthly Archives: August 2015

More sleepless nights for Team Clinton as additional classified documents are released

Featured image The State Department has just released a batch of about 7,000 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server. Approximately 150 of them are redacted because they contain classified information. The classified emails deal with Haiti, China, and Sudan, among many other subjects. A preliminary analysis by Fox News, presented on Megyn Kelly’s program, found that some of the information on Clinton’s server was inherently classified. Fox’s analysts cited a memo transmitting »

Russia and China Are Using Hacked Data to Identify and Neutralize U.S. Agents

Featured image This is one of the great scandals of the Obama administration–really, of the post-war era. But our Democratic Party media, fearful of what may be coming in next year’s presidential election, have consistently downplayed it. The Los Angeles Times reports: “Foreign spies use hacked data to identify U.S. intelligence agents.” Foreign spy services, especially in China and Russia, are aggressively aggregating and cross-indexing hacked U.S. computer databases — including security »

Poll: Trump and Carson tied in Iowa

Featured image Over the weekend, I discussed a Bloomberg-Des Moines Register poll that puts Dr. Ben Carson within 5 points of Donald Trump (23-18) among likely Iowa caucus-goers. I speculated that Carson was a better fit than Trump for Iowa Republicans given his geniality and unfeigned social conservatism. Now, a freshly-minted Monmouth poll has Carson tied with Trump at 23 percent. According to Monmouth, this marks the first time since late July »

NOAA Meteorologist: Politics and Money Drive Global Warming Hysteria

Featured image David Dilley has been a meteorologist for 40 years, 20 of which he spent with NOAA. At NoTricksZone, he writes about how government money and political pressure have distorted climate research: For over 15 years an inordinate proportion of government and corporate research grants have been awarded to universities for a single specific purpose: to prove human activities and the burning of fossil fuels are the main driving mechanisms causing »

The Socialist Dream Will Never Die (2)

Featured image A reader of my post last week on “The Socialist Dream Will Never Die” writes in reminding me of the late Leszek Kolakowski, the great Polish philosopher who broke with Communism in the 1970s, and produced the magisterial three-volume treatise, Main Currents of Marxism, originally published in 1978, when Communism and the Soviet Union were still on the march. Main Currents walked through the evolution of Marxism from before Hegel »

Accused murderer of Texas deputy sheriff had extensive criminal record

Featured image We frequently hear that America suffers from over-incarceration. We should not dismiss these claims out-of-hand. But neither should we dismiss the possibility of under-incarceration. It’s also possible that we are incarcerating lots of people who shouldn’t be jailed but at the same time failing to hold many who should be in prison. My sense that we may be under-incarcerating stems in part from reports about the criminal records of certain »

“Pigs in a blanket”

Featured image The Black Lives Matter protest at the Minnesota State Fair included a frank expression of hatred of the police in the sickening chant “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” (video below). The Star Tribune somehow missed this episode in its coverage of Saturday’s protest on Saturday, hours after the murder of Deputy Sheriff Goforth in Houston. Protest organizer Rashad Turner helpfully explained that the chant is nonviolent; those »

They’ve Messed with Seinfeld’s Lemonade!

Featured image The good folks at ReasonTV (the ones who produce so many of Remy Munasifi’s parody videos) are packing in their “Nanny of the Month” features, alas. The last one out today, however, notes a fresh outrage that I’ve tracked: shutting down little kid lemonade stands. Only this time, the stand they shut down in the Hamptons was run by Jerry Seinfeld and his kids: Seinfeld has had a lot to »

Surfing the Wave?

Featured image Surfers are perhaps the only souls more patient than fishermen; they’ll wait an hour for the perfect wave that might only yield a 20-second ride. And most common of all, when a set starts to roll in, is trying to peer over the top of the first wave to see if there’s a better “outsider” wave on the way. I got thinking of outsider waves when seeing the stunning results »

Washington Post reporter among the “pilgrims” paying homage to Jimmy Carter

Featured image Yesterday, Jimmy Carter taught Sunday school in Plains, Georgia. It was Carter’s second lesson since he announced that he has brain cancer. The Washington Post sent Dave Weigel to cover the event. He reports that (in the words of the Post’s sub-headline, print edition) “pilgrims pour[ed] into Plains Ga.” for the event with “an outpouring of good wishes.” When it rains, it pours. It’s to Carter’s credit that he teaches »

CRB: The Obama transformation…

Featured image The new (Summer) issue of the Claremont Review of Books is in the mail today. Subscribe here for the heavily subsidized price of $19.95 and get online access thrown in for free. Weighing in at 102 pages, the new issue is full of good stuff including essays by William Voegeli and Peter Wood as well as scintillating reviews by Benjamin Balint, Christopher Caldwell, James Ceaser, Christopher DeMuth, Charles Murray and »

If Obama had a son

Featured image President Obama has not hesitated to inject himself into racially charged incidents involving law enforcement. Indeed, he has not hesitated to aggravate the gravity of these incidents with his own animus. When his friend Henry Louis Gates was arrested for disorderly conduct by the Cambridge police in July 2009, Obama went out of his way to pronounce on the officer’s alleged stupidity. Though the facts of the case were in »

LeDuff’s five-minute mystery

Featured image Charles LeDuff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who has posted the video below as the most recent installment of FOX TV’s The Americans. He titles it “Black Lives Matter. All lives matter. The facts matter.” This installment of The Americans comes with the following summary: “Black men who die at the hands of Police. A nationwide problem brought front and center through video tape. But what about the hundreds of »

German Physicists: Late 20th Century Warming “Nothing Unusual”

Featured image As regular readers know, a battle over global warming hysteria is raging among scientists, and the alarmists are consistently getting the worst of it. German scientists Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Alexander Hempelmann and Carl Otto Weiss have published two influential studies in the European Geophysical Union journal. The first, published in 2013, examined the past 250 years of climate history. The second, published earlier this year, extended the research through the past »

Venezuela in the Midwest

Featured image Illinois can’t pass a budget, and now can’t even pay out to lottery winners. When a state can’t even manage to pay out lottery winners. . . From Time magazine: Big-time Illinois Lottery winners aren’t getting the largesse. They’re getting left out. Without a state budget agreement two months into the new fiscal year, there’s no authority for the state comptroller to cut checks over $25,000. That means smaller winnings »

IRS sued over treatment of Americans who bank abroad

Featured image The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) requires, in essence, that U.S. citizens who reside outside the U.S. disclose to the IRS all of their foreign banking assets including retirement plans, savings accounts, etc. It also requires foreign banks to assist the IRS in applying the disclosure rules or else face enormous penalties. As its not-so-subtle acronym suggests, the Act purports to be an anti-fat-cat measure through which to crack »

Obama’s Stonewall Tactics: A Case Study

Featured image The Obama administration has proved to be the least transparent in our modern history. To an unprecedented degree, the administration is staffed by scofflaws who flout their legal obligations. When confronted with requests for information, let alone actual investigations, Obama’s habitual response is to stonewall. This strategy has been remarkably successful in avoiding accountability, in part because legal processes are so slow. We have seen this pattern dozens of times. »