Martin O’Malley’s Populist Pandering Is Causing Him to Say Remarkably Stupid Things

Martin O’Malley’s Populist Pandering Is Causing Him to Say Remarkably Stupid Things

By Jonah Goldberg

 Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley is thinking about running for president on the Democratic ticket by appealing to Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren’s populist fans. Warren is a very bright former Harvard law professor. So it is interesting that O’Malley thinks the best way to reach out to her fans is to say remarkably stupid things.

Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, recently interviewed O’Malley, asking him to respond to something GOP-presidential-contender Senator Marco Rubio had said.

Inskeep: “[Rubio] argues that an active government actually keeps people frozen at their economic status because if you are well off, if you can afford a lawyer, if you can deal with regulations, you can maneuver through government and stay prosperous. And if you are not so well off, it’s harder to work the system. Is there some truth to that? You were a big-city mayor; you know how government works.”

O’Malley replied: “No, I don’t think there’s any truth to that.”

RELATED: O’Malley Made a Mess of Maryland

He did unload some talking points about how the tax code is “Swiss cheese” because of deregulation and Wall Street lobbyists. But as for the idea that regulations can hold poor people down or keep the middle class from advancing, he said that’s plain wrong, adding a familiar bovine-scatological colloquialism for emphasis.

A reasonable or informed person — on the left or the right — could argue that many regulations are good or valuable. But O’Malley’s position is not that of a reasonable or informed person, it is modern-day know-nothingism.

---

TODAY ON NATIONAL REVIEW
Kevin D. Williamson: ‘Willie Lynch’ Is Back
Jillian K. Melchior: MSNBC’s Touré Has the IRS on His Case
Jonah Goldberg: Martin O’Malley’s Modern-Day Know-Nothingness
Charles C.W. Cooke: How to Censor Speakers on College Campuses
David French: Wisconsin’s Shame: ‘I Thought It Was a Home Invasion’ 

---

The original Know-Nothing party was a bigoted political movement that sought to use regulations to bar Catholics, Irish, Jews and other immigrant groups from economic and social advancement. The movement died out in the 1850s, but the approach in various forms lived on.

The first minimum-wage laws were advocated by progressive economists on the assumption that if you forced employers to pay a “white man’s wage,” they’d only hire white men. As the sociologist E.A. Ross put it in the context of Chinese immigrant workers, in the early 1900s, “the Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.”

RELATED: If Not Hillary, Who?

The Davis-Bacon Act, still cherished by Democrats and their labor-union patrons, was passed in 1931 to prevent blacks and immigrants from competing with all-white unions for federal contracts during the Depression. And Jim Crow laws certainly locked millions of blacks out of the middle class.

Explicit racist justifications for regulations have disappeared, but the racial consequences of many regulations tragically endure.

Hair braiding is probably one of the most famous examples of the scandalous abuse of occupational licensing in this country. Hair braiding is a thriving business in the African-American community. It’s also the kind of career that’s easy for someone without a lot of formal education to break into. And yet, in state after state, politicians dig regulatory moats that keep African-American and other entrepreneurs out of the middle class.

Melony Armstrong, of Tupelo, Miss., told Congress last year that she had to complete 300 hours of course work to open her salon, “none of which covered hair braiding.” Armstrong wanted to teach others how to braid, too. That required an additional 3,200 hours (that is well more than a year of full-time work). By the way, according to the Institute for Justice, O’Malley’s Maryland has been one of the worst offenders when it came to such burdensome licensing rules.

O’Malley is also a passionate supporter of hiking the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which would be a boon to many union members and others who managed to keep their jobs. But it would also impose a significant burden for many small businesses that can’t pass the costs on to consumers (and a gift to big businesses that can). Worse, it would make it that much harder for unskilled workers to get their first job, which is largely the point of the minimum wage.

O’Malley is a cheerleader for Dodd-Frank and other Wall Street regulations. Whatever their merits, such laws put huge compliance costs on small banks, which are dying out. These small-enough-to-fail banks are where people like Armstrong go for loans.

In countless other ways, government at all levels rewards those who made it and creates problems for those who want to. No doubt O’Malley is serious about his concern for the little guy, but if he wants to be taken seriously, he should probably stop talking.

— Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor of National Review and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail atgoldbergcolumn@gmail.com or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2015 Tribune Content Agency, LLC

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417266/martin-omalleys-populist-pandering-causing-him-say-remarkably-stupid-things-jonah

CLINTON CASH — “NOT A SHRED OF EVIDENCE”?

CLINTON CASH — “NOT A SHRED OF EVIDENCE”?

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, CLINTON FOUNDATION, HILLARY CLINTON

Team Clinton spokesman Brian Fallon responded to the New York Times Clinton Foundation/Russian uranium deal story by asserting that there is not a “shred of evidence” Hillary Clinton approved the deal to reward donors of the Clinton Foundation.

The “shred of evidence” cliche is not a happy one for Hillary. After all, she has admitted, in essence, that she shredded tens of thousands of State Department emails, and the server that housed them apparently has been destroyed. If smoking gun evidence were to be found, one imagines that it would be in shreds, literally.

But smoking gun evidence isn’t the only form of evidence. Let’s consider another potential “Clinton cash” scandal — the one involving Clinton Foundation supporter Frank Giustra and his interests in Colombia:

Assume the following facts, which have been publicly reported, at least some of which are not disputed: (1) As a candidate for president Hillary Clinton opposed a free trade deal with Colombia, (2) as Secretary of State she supported such a deal, (3) in the interim, Frank Giustra made large contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and (4) Giustra’s interests benefited from the agreement Clinton supported.

If evidence supports each of these propositions, then this is evidence that Clinton changed her position to reward Giustra. To be sure, the evidence is circumstantial, not direct. But such circumstantial, i.e., inferential, evidence is commonplace in civil litigation.

For example, if an employee in good standing complains about racial discrimination and is fired soon thereafter, a jury can infer that the complaint caused the firing. There need not be a document, or other smoking gun, that establishes a causal relationship.

Moreover, as Jennifer Rubin points out, in political corruption cases the government wouldn’t even need to prove a quid pro quo relationship between Giustra’s donations and Clinton’s decisions to support a free trade deal (or to sign off on a uranium deal). It is enough, the government argued successfully in the case of former Virginia governor Robert McDonnell, if a public official is inclined to look more favorably on a donor’s interests because of a financial contribution.

Hillary Clinton is not going to be prosecuted for political corruption. Nor is it realistic to think that the issue of her corruption will arise in civil litigation.

The real question is how the public will view the facts in deciding on her fitness to be president. One would hope that, as Rubin puts, “you can’t prove I’m a crook” will not be the standard.

It certainly wouldn’t be if we were talking about a Republican candidate — the mainstream media would see to that. Since we are talking instead about a liberal Democrat trying to become the nation’s first female president, it’s quite possible that “you can’t prove I’m a crook” will end up being the standard, and that the bar for proving this will be higher than in the criminal law.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/clinton-cash-not-a-shred-of-evidence.php

RIOTING INTENSIFIES IN BALTIMORE; LIBERAL NARRATIVES AMONG THE CASUALTIES

RIOTING INTENSIFIES IN BALTIMORE; LIBERAL NARRATIVES AMONG THE CASUALTIES

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CRIME, POLICING

In presenting the Justice Department’s negative findings about the Ferguson police department, Eric Holder characterized the violent and lawless response of Ferguson residents to the justified shooting of Michael Brown as an unsurprising reaction to the “highly toxic environment” created by the Ferguson police over the years. But in Baltimore — the un-Ferguson, where the mayor and police chief are Black, and Whites are a minority within the police department — we are now witnessing the same kind of violence and lawlessness as in the allegedly racist Missouri town.

The Baltimore Sun reports:

Violence and looting overtook much of West Baltimore on Monday, seriously injuring several police officers and leaving a store and several vehicles in flames.

At least seven police officers were injured in a clash that began near Mondawmin Mall and spread toward downtown. One officer was unresponsive and others suffered broken bones, police spokesman Capt. Eric Kowalczyk said.

Smoke filled the air as police responded with shields and a tactical vehicle. Demonstrators pelted officers with rocks, bricks and bottles and assaulted a photojournalist, and officers fired back with tear gas and pepper balls.

Demonstrators set a police vehicle ablaze at North and Pennsylvania avenues. Nearby, they looted a CVS drug store, which store officials said had already closed, before it caught fire. Rioters cut the fire hose as firefighters battled the blaze.

If police seemed ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with the riots, it’s probably not a coincidence. This weekend, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said she told police to give “those who wished to destroy space to do that.”

Liberals and many conservatives like to complain about police “militarization.” But as soon as city authorities realized, as the mayor clearly did, that the protesters of Freddie Gray’s death included “those who wished to destroy,” they should have responded with a massive show of strength — “militarization,” if you will. Instead, the mayor basically gave rioters the green light, thus paving the way for the violence that occurred over the weekend and today.

Protesters should, within reason, have space to protest. They should never have space to destroy.

In fact, once a protest morphs into a rampage of destruction, it ceases to be a protest and becomes a riot. The peaceful protesters seemed to recognize this reality. According toreports, protest leaders have pleaded with rioters to desist. But absent a strong, effective police presence, their pleas were to no avail.

We see, therefore, that strong policing actually promotes protest and the rights of protesters. Weakness encourages the end of protest and the beginning of thuggery.

There is, as Mayor Rawlings-Blake has said, a balance to be struck in policing. It’s plausible to believe that a large scale show of force during the pure protest stage can fuel resentment off of which the violent element can feed. But the absence of a show of force once it becomes clear that things are going to take a violent turn makes rioting almost inevitable. And a statement like the mayor’s that destruction will be tolerated is even worse; it’s an invitation to violence.

The Baltimore rioting has given the lie to Eric Holder’s left-wing Ferguson narrative. Rioting isn’t an understandable reaction to a “toxic” environment created by the police. It’s an opportunistic response by those of a criminal disposition to events that would not, and do not, cause decent people to engage in violence.

The Baltimore rioting also undermines Mayor Rawlings-Blake’s left-wing policing prescription. Violent “protesters” should never be given space to destroy. Instead, a mobilized police force should make it clear at the first hint of trouble that no destruction will be tolerated.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/rioting-intensifies-in-baltimore-liberal-narratives-among-the-casualties.php

Who’s the Right Man for Conservatives in 2016?

Who’s the Right Man for Conservatives in 2016?

By Thomas Sowell 

Painful as it is to realize that both the Democrats and the Republicans will still be holding their primaries a year from now, that is one of the high prices we pay for democracy.

Seldom does the initial “front-runner” in either party’s primaries end up being the actual candidate when Election Day rolls around. However, even if we cannot predict the outcomes of the primaries this far in advance, we can at least start trying to understand the candidates, the almost candidates, and the people who are running just for the publicity.

RELATED: The GOP Needs to Run Against the Last 16 Years

One of the curious things this early in the process is that, while the Republicans’ three freshmen Senators — Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Rand Paul — have all had interviews on various television talk shows, veteran politician Hillary Clinton has been hiding out from real interviews by hard-news reporters, as if she is afraid to be cross-examined.

This is by no means an irrational fear on Mrs. Clinton’s part. There are all sorts of questions that she would find hard to answer. They range from questions about recent events like the e-mails from her days as secretary of state that she destroyed illegally, after Congress called for her to produce them, to the still unsolved mystery as to what she and Barack Obama were doing during the hours when four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, were under attack by terrorists in Benghazi.

RELATED: The GOP Pack’s Anti-Hillary Playbooks

Then there are the bald-faced lies, such as Mrs. Clinton’s claim to have been shot at in a war zone, her claim that she and her husband were “dead broke” at the end of his terms as president, and her claim that charges of sexual misconduct against Bill Clinton in the White House were fictions invented by a “vast right-wing conspiracy.”

Supporters of Hillary Clinton tout her “experience” in high-level institutions of government — as first lady in the White House, as a senator, and as secretary of state. But years of such “experience” raise the embarrassing question as to whether she ever actually accomplished anything in all those years, other than being physically present.

Among the many Republicans’ announced and unannounced candidates, three of the most prominent are freshmen senators with no tangible accomplishments to go with their rhetoric. Whatever their potential, which seems especially striking in the case of Senator Marco Rubio, the White House is not the place for on-the-job training, in an age of international terrorism and nuclear bombs.

Barack Obama has already given us repeated demonstrations of what a mess a freshman senator with rhetoric can make in the White House.

While there are a number of Republican candidates who can point to substantial accomplishments as governors, the fact that most have strong track records as conservatives means that they may well split the conservative vote so many ways in the primaries as to let the nomination go by default to a mushy moderate — of the sort beloved by the Republican establishment, but not by enough voters to beat even a weak or troubled Democrat on Election Day.

Former Florida governor Jeb Bush is today’s mushy moderate candidate who may well follow in the footsteps of a whole string of similar losers, from Mitt Romney and John McCain in recent elections, all the way back to Thomas E. Dewey, who managed to lose even in an election where three different Democrats were on the ballot, fragmenting that party’s vote.

While the Republicans have several governors who would make good presidents, of whom Scott Walker and Bobby Jindal are the most prominent, that is very different from saying that these governors would make successful presidential candidates. How they handle themselves in the primaries can reveal that.

Former governor Jeb Bush has lots of political savvy on his side — his own savvy and that of others — and a ton of money behind him. So he could end up being the last man standing after the many Republican conservatives knock each other off.

What could prevent that would be if each of the successive conservative Republican candidates who fall behind were to throw their support to whoever becomes the conservative candidate with the best chance of rescuing us all from another Clinton versus Bush election.

But we should never bet heavily on rationality prevailing in politics.

— Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His website is www.tsowell.com. © 2015 Creators Syndicate Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417217/whos-right-man-conservatives-2016-thomas-sowell

Don's Tuesday Column

THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson  Red Bluff Daily News   4/28/2015

     Our failing economic self-worth

The Tea Party Patriots will present a very timely and informative address by Fred Kelly Grant on DVD during the 6:30 segment of tonight’s meeting at the Westside Grange on Walnut Street. Mr. Grant has been instrumental in helping citizens push back against out-of-control state and federal agencies trampling on local property and governmental rights. He will explain the abuses of California Air Resources Board (CARB), currently seeking to saddle trucking and agricultural industries with onerous and phony air quality standards.

Multiple legs support the platform of a healthy economy: 1) business and entrepreneurial activity (you can’t have too much), 2) utilization of natural resources (always a reliable source of jobs and income—always opposed mindlessly by the environmental left), 3) taxation levels (the lighter the burden, the more the economy will grow), 4) government regulations (currently excessive, constituting a $1-2 trillion annual drag on the economy);

5) An available labor force that is educated, eager and willing to forego government handouts for the pride and satisfaction of self-sufficiency (our current labor force is heavy on available workers but contains too few of the latter), and 6) an immigration system designed and implemented for the purpose of protecting American jobs, while encouraging reasonable numbers of legal immigrants with skills matching employment needs not being filled by current citizens and legal immigrants—which also affects the ability of businesses to grow.

When it comes to the collective wisdom of the American people, for instance, we can set aside happy, glowing reports on the economy and employment because “Only 1 in 4 buy Team Obama’s claim unemployment improving” (Jan. 15, The Examiner). Those polled accept “that the nation’s economy is improving, but not their own personal situation, a depressing reality that the administration can’t shake the country out of no matter what it does. They just don’t believe the president and his team’s boasting about the economy,” with a majority believing “more people are unemployed than the president says.”

The Economist/YouGov poll found that people don’t credit Washington but rather business and consumers for any economic improvements. “The poll offers two reasons why the public is slow to buy into the improvement, and give Obama the credit. First, it says Americans have a negative attitude about the economy. Second, they just don’t believe the government.” A third say their conversations with friends and family about the economy are mostly negative, with less than 1 in 5 reporting positive discussions.

“Only 1 in 4 Americans think they are personally better off today than they were when Barack Obama took office in 2009. A third say they are worse off.” They are evenly split on whether their financial status is better or worse than it was just one year ago. “Many Americans—mostly Republicans—simply don’t believe the data. Only one in four think the unemployment figures are accurate. More than half think there are more people unemployed than the Bureau of Labor Statistics figures say there are.”

In March, I used data from the EDD website to estimate what Tehama County’s unemployment rate really is when consistent, 20-years long, population, labor force and unemployed numbers are factored in. I found that we really have about 15 percent unemployment, not 9 percent—they’ve removed up to 1,600 people cumulatively from the labor force compared to what it should be based on population growth.

In February, Jim Clifton, Chairman and CEO of Gallup, confirmed what many perceptive analysts and conservative think tanks had already concluded—writing “The Big Lie: 5.6% Unemployment” (easily searchable by title). He followed that article up with a CNBC interview to clarify that “hopelessly deceptive” was a better descriptor than “lie,” and that “the BLS and Department of Labor numbers are very, very accurate. I need to make that very, very clear so that I don’t suddenly disappear.” I’m sure that was a tongue-in-cheek comment.

While I’ve frequently read that the official “underemployment” rate—which includes those working part time but wanting full time work—is around 11 percent, reality is far worse. You aren’t even counted as “unemployed” if you’ve given up looking for a job—defined as having stopped searching in the last 4 weeks.

Clifton: “Right now, as many as 30 million Americans are either out of work or severely underemployed. Trust me, they aren’t throwing parties to toast ‘falling’ unemployment…An out-of-work engineer, healthcare, construction worker or retail manager (with) a minimum of one hour of work making at least $20—is not officially counted as unemployed…The official unemployment rate, which cruelly overlooks the suffering of the long-term and often permanently unemployed as well as the depressingly underemployed, amounts to a Big Lie.

“And it’s a lie that has consequences, because the great American dream is to have a good job, and in recent years, America has failed to deliver that dream more than it has at any time in recent memory. A good job is an individual’s primary identity, their very self-worth, their dignity—it establishes the relationship they have with their friends, community and country. When we fail to deliver a good job that fits a citizen’s talents, training and experience, we are failing the great American dream.”

Black Murderers Matter

Black Murderers Matter

By Dennis Prager

The “Black Lives Matter” campaign is based on as big a lie as the “campus rape culture” lie, the Rolling Stone magazine gang rape at the University of Virginia fraternity lie, the gang rape by the Duke University lacrosse team lie, the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” Ferguson lie, and all the other lies that animate leftist hysterias.

Building hysterias based on falsehoods is a primary modus operandi on the left. One can even say that without hysteria there is no Left.

First a lie or exaggeration is manufactured. Then it is repeated over and over by the mainstream media and myriad left-wing groups; academics hold conferences and write thoughtful-sounding op-ed pieces about the fake issue; meanwhile activists on its behalf demonstrate, taking over public buildings and highways, sometimes violently.

RELATED: Police Shootings and the Eternal Dilemma

The latest left-wing hysteria is “Black Lives Matter,” based on the lie that black lives don’t matter because white police kill blacks wantonly.

Two weeks ago the cover of Time featured the words “Black Lives Matter” in stark white letters on a black background. The cover also featured photos of what appears to be the morally inexcusable fatal police shooting of Walter Scott, a black man, as he ran away from a routine police stop. Credit the Left with never giving up. In North Charleston, South Carolina, the Left finally found its seemingly perfect example of a wholly unjustified police killing of a black man. Hence the Time cover.

RELATED: Can We Apply Some Common Sense to the Police Shootings Debate?

The problem with the mantra and the hysteria is not that no blacks are ever killed unjustifiably by police. The problem is that it is so rare as to constitute a libel.

In 2013, of America’s 6,261 black homicide victims, more than 6,000 of them — 97 percent — were killed by people other than police. About 3 percent of black homicide victims were killed by police. And of that 3 percent, nearly every one was armed and dangerous. To label that an epidemic of police racism is a libel.

In addition, more than nine out of every ten blacks murdered were murdered by another black person. Now that is an epidemic — an epidemic of black murderers. (In response, it is pointed out that about 83 percent of whites are murdered by whites. But there is no equivalency here. Blacks murder at nearly eight times the rate whites do — 34.4 per 100,000 versus 4.5 per 100,000.)

In the eyes of Americans who value truth, the black and white leftists who blamed the Ferguson, Mo., police officer for Michael Brown’s death despite knowing absolutely nothing about what actually happened look like demagogues now that the truth has come out. That’s why so many police officers turned their backs on New York’s left-wing mayor, Bill de Blasio, when he attended the funerals of the two New York City policemen murdered by a black man angry about Ferguson and the Staten Island death of Eric Garner (another black man who died at the hands of police who, as in Ferguson, were not indicted). They were repulsed by de Blasio’s generalizations about police racism.

So here is a truth. The Left is not only engaging in demagoguery and creating hysteria when it claims that “Blacks Lives Matter” in reference to police killings of blacks. It is also not telling the truth. Black lives don’t really interest the Left. If they did, the Left would focus on all the black murderers taking black lives.

The Left’s overriding interest lies elsewhere: in defaming America, with its “legacy of slavery,” “institutional racism,” and “white privilege,” and in depicting white police as racists. To understand the Left one must first understand that it hates conservatives more than it loves almost anything.

Because if it really believed that “Black Lives Matter,” its message would be “Black Murderers Matter.”

— Dennis Prager is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host and columnist. His book, The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, was published recently by Regnery. He is the founder of Prager University and may be contacted at dennisprager.com.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417214/black-murderers-matter-dennis-prager

OBAMA IS RIGHT, THE REPUBLICAN SENATE IS EMBARRASSING

OBAMA IS RIGHT, THE REPUBLICAN SENATE IS EMBARRASSING

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN HOLDER JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, LORETTA LYNCH, REPUBLICANS, SENATE

On Friday, President Obama lashed out at the Republican Senate for not confirming Loretta Lynch as Attorney General. “There are times where the dysfunction in the Senate just goes too far,” Obama scolded. “This is an example of it.” Doing his best impression of Harrison Ford in “Witness,” Obama huffed:

Enough, enough. Call Loretta Lynch for a vote, get her confirmed, let her do her job. This is embarrassing.

You can watch the president’s whiny performance here.

Now comes word that Lynch likely will be confirmed in short order. Sen. Bob Corker told CNN that he expects a deal to come together quickly this week to clear both Lynch and an anti-human trafficking law that Democrats have blocked due to an abortion-related provision.

Did Obama “shame” Republicans into giving Lynch her vote? No. In all likelihood, Obama knew that a deal was in the works and decided (1) to land another punch before the deal was consummated and (2) create the impression that he had bullied Republicans.

But Obama is right. This Republican Senate is embarrassing.

It’s embarrassing that, notwithstanding the lawlessness of the Holder Justice Department, the Republican Senate will confirm a Holder ally who has been unwilling to repudiate the Attorney General’s most outrageous policies and practices. It’s embarrassing that the Republican Senate previously backed away from a showdown with the White House over executive amnesty. The confirmation of Lynch means that the Republican Senate will exact no price on the Obama administration for it unconstitutional rewriting of our immigration laws.

It’s embarrassing that Senators like Corker are claiming victory because, if they can muster a super-majority of two-thirds, they can block a bad nuclear deal with Iran. Under the Constitution, the president needs a two-thirds super-majority to have a deal like this approved. Corker’s legislation thus stands the Constitution on its head. To celebrate his bill is an embarrassment.

The real question in assessing the Republican Senate’s performance is how one assesses Obama’s. If he’s just a garden-variety opposition party president, the Senate’s soft response is appropriate. But if, as I believe, Obama is usurping congressional power to an unprecedented degree, the Senate’s response has been criminally lame.

Obama isn’t conducting business as usual. Neither, therefore, should the Senate. As Obama says, “enough, enough.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/obama-is-right-the-republican-senate-is-embarrassing.php

CLINTON CASH; CLINTON LIES

CLINTON CASH; CLINTON LIES

 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN 2016 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, BILL CLINTON,CLINTON FOUNDATION, HILLARY CLINTON

There’s an interesting, though hardly surprising, footnote to the Clinton/Russia/uranium story. If reports are true, the Clintons and their backers have already been caught in at least two lies about the matter.

The first lie pertains to the deal Bill Clinton brokered on behalf of Clinton Foundation backer Frank Giustra, in which Giustra obtained major uranium concessions from Kazakhstan. When he helped obtain these concessions for Giustra, Clinton spoke favorably about alleged progress in democracy and human rights being made in Kazakhstan. Quite likely, Clinton’s comments helped induce Kazakhstan to make the concessions.

Hoping to negate this suggestion, the Giustra-Clinton camp reportedly has claimed that the government of Kazakhstan was not involved in the deal that granted the uranium concessions. But Peter Schweizer presented Bret Baier with documents that show Kazakhstan was, in fact, a party to the deal.

The second lie came from Bill Clinton himself (this is shocking, I know). After the deal between Kazakhstan and Giustra was completed, the Kazakhs reportedly wanted a stake in U.S. energy giant Westinghouse.

This required U.S. government approval. According to Jo Becker of the New York Times, Giustra arranged for key Kazakh players to meet with Bill Clinton at the former president’s home in New York state for purposes of enlisting Clinton’s assistance in obtaining this approval.

The Times’ Becker told Fox News that both Bill Clinton (through the Clinton Foundation) and Giustra denied this meeting took place. But after Becker presented pictures from the meeting — prized possessions, apparently, of the Kazakhs who had the honor of seeing Bill — Clinton admitted that there was, in fact, such a meeting.

As ever, the Clintons seem prepared to lie (and to destroy documents) for the purpose of explaining away their ethical problems. As ever, we shouldn’t believe anything they say.

NOTE: I have modified this post slightly to reflect that Clinton’s denial that he met with Kazakh representatives in New York came via the Clinton Foundation, not directly from Clinton.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/clinton-cash-clinton-lies.php

A FINE “MESS”

A FINE “MESS”

BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN BARACK OBAMA, IRAN, ISRAEL, OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY

Having lived through the Sturm and Drang over the precisely accurate “16 words”regarding Saddam Hussein in President Bush’s 2003 State of the Union Address, I am struck by the media’s — how to put it? — lack of interest in the absurd falsehoods retailed by President Obama et al. in the service of equally consequential causes.

President Obama and Secretary Kerry, for example, have both cited the fatwa allegedly promulgated by Iran’s Supreme Leader prohibiting the development of nuclear weapons in support of their arrangement in process with Iran. MEMRI has demonstrated over and over the nonexistence of the fatwa. Most recently, MEMRI has put it this way (footnotes omitted):

In President Obama’s announcement of the joint statement following the conclusion of the negotiations in Lausanne, he again mentioned the nonexistent fatwa, stating as fact that Iran’s Supreme Leader has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons. This assertion by the president is not true. Such a fatwa has never been issued, and to this day no one has been able to show it, as MEMRI has detailed in five reports so far.

Where is the Sturm? Where is the Drang? They having gone missing along with the fatuous fatwa.

In his recent interview with the worshipful New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, Obama said this:

“I have to respect the fears that the Israeli people have, and I understand that Prime Minister Netanyahu is expressing the deep-rooted concerns that a lot of the Israeli population feel about this, but what I can say to them is: Number one, this is our best bet by far to make sure Iran doesn’t get a nuclear weapon, and number two, what we will be doing even as we enter into this deal is sending a very clear message to the Iranians and to the entire region that if anybody messes with Israel, America will be there.”

Elliott Abrams seeks to explicate Obama’s use of the term “messes with” in this passage:

What does “messes with Israel” mean? No one has the slightest idea. The President unfortunately uses this kind of diction too often, dumbing down his rhetoric for some reason and leaving listeners confused. Today, Iran is sending arms and money to Hamas in Gaza, and has done so for years. Is that “messing with Israel?” Iran has tried to blow up several Israeli embassies, repeating the successful attack it made on Israel’s embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992. Fortunately Israel has foiled the more recent plots, but is attempting to bomb Israeli embassies “messing with Israel?” Iranian Revolutionary Guards, along with Hezbollah troops, are in southern Syria now near the Golan. Is that “messing with Israel?” And what does the President mean by “America will be there?’ With arms? With bandages? With the diplomatic protection his administration is now considering removing at the United Nations?

If Iran “messes with Israel” via a nuclear weapon, is Obama promising retaliation by the United States? The context seems to me to suggest something like this, yet it is an absurd form of reassurance. If Iran were to “mess with Israel” via a nuclear weapon, Israel would retaliate on its own behalf, but otherwise wouldn’t be around to enjoy the show. Abrams takes this up in connection with another of Obama’s statements to Friedman, commenting:

What Israel worries about today is a nuclear attack by Iran or a terrorist group like Hezbollah to which Iran has given the bomb. No doubt that qualifies as “messing with Israel,” but were that to occur what exactly would “America will be there” and “stand by them” mean? Take in refugees from the destroyed State of Israel after the nuclear attack on it? The President’s language about “commitments” suggests that he may envision a formal defense commitment by the United States to Israel. Israel has not wanted such a treaty because it has always said it wants to defend itself, not have Americans dying to defend it. That position has served the US-Israel relationship well for 67 years. Should it really be changed now, and would that really help Israel? What would the value of such a commitment be? To ask the question another way, are not Poles and Estonians wondering right now about the value of their membership in NATO, if Mr. Putin “messes” with them?

The conclusion that I draw is not a new one; it is an old one. Obama and his minions repeatedly prove themselves willing to say anything in a bad cause. Beyond that, Obama’s words signify nothing. It is best not to put to much effort into trying to construe their precise meaning other than as instruments to promote the sale. One would think that this development might be newsworthy, but in Obama’s case, the news has become the preserve of an obscure institute specializing in Middle East research, or an out of the way blog maintained by a former Reagan/Bush administration official.

Abrams has more, all of it worth reading, in “‘Messing’ with Israel.”

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/a-fine-mess.php