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JULY 7,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:56 P.M. ET: 

HILLARY SPEAKS – Her mouth moved and there were occasional sounds, but, other than that, Hillary Clinton's first major one-on-one TV interview barely came off.  From the Daily Beast:  Any Clinton supporters who hoped that a New Hillary would emerge from Tuesday’s televised grilling of the Democratic presidential frontrunner had to be brutally disillusioned.  The Hillary Clinton who showed up for her 19-minute back and forth with CNN political correspondent Brianna Keilar—touted as Clinton’s first one-on-one interview with a national reporter since she declared her candidacy three months ago—was the same Hillary Clinton the country has come to know over nearly a quarter century on the American political scene.  Advertised by her associates as warm and funny in private, she came across as guarded, quibbling, and pokerfaced under the TV lights.  She even trotted out the old right-wing conspiracy narrative to explain her woes.  But don't underestimate her.  Media support plus the ability to drag millions of frightened low-information voters to the polls may still result in her taking the oath.  I'm biting my tongue.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SYRIA – From The Hill:   Stunning lawmakers on Capitol Hill, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter on Tuesday revealed that the Pentagon is only training 60 Syrian rebels to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).  While the program was designed to train thousands of fighters to take on the Islamic group, Carter said only a few dozen recruits have made it through the screening process.  “This number is much smaller than we’d hoped for at this point, partly because of the vetting standards,” Carter said.  Members of the Senate Armed Services Committee expressed shock at the sluggish start for the program, which Congress reluctantly approved last fall at the behest of the administration.  “I’ve got to tell you, after four years, Mr. Secretary, that’s not a very impressive number,” Armed Services Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Carter.  At least Carter was honest.  He's a good man in an impossible job, and working for an indifferent president, which is a generous description of Barack Obama.

OUR TECHNOLOGICAL FUTURE – From London's Telegraph:   Last week, MegaBots, an American engineering company, challenged Japan's Suidobashi Heavy Industry to a duel.  The battle would pitch the 12,000 lbs (850-stone) MegaBots Mark II against Suidobashi's Kuratas, which weighs 9,000 lbs.  Now, Suidobashi has responded, saying it accepts the challenge - on one condition.  Kogor Kurata, Suidobashi's founder and chief executive, posted a response on YouTube, saying his robot would fight, as long as the fight was hand-to-hand.  "Just building something huge and sticking guns on it. It's... super American," he said.  "We can’t let another country win this. Giant robots are Japanese culture. But you know, we really need… Melee combat."  Seems excessive to me.  If they wanted real robots, at a low cost, they could have just gotten the liberal justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.

MEGYN ROMPS – From the Hollywood Reporter:   Megyn Kelly is on a roll. Fresh off of a rare month atop the cable news ratings heap, the Fox News Channel host is extending her hot streak into July.  The first week of July saw The Kelly File win among the adults 25-54 demographic, averaging 458,000 viewers in the advertiser-favored group over No. 2 The O'Reilly Factor's 431,000.  Bill O'Reilly's 8 p.m. telecast is perennially No. 1 across cable news, but Kelly scored a monthly win in June — only her second month atop the heap since her 2013 move to primetime.  O'Reilly still topped the cable news race with total viewers, netting 2.5 million, but Kelly is gaining ground there too. Her No. 2 status was by a margin of little more than 200,000 viewers, averaging 2.2 million for the week.  She is becoming a major star, based on superb ability and, of course, that great look.  The question is whether Fox News will be able to keep her.  She'd be worth a fortune to any network.

July 7,  2015     Permalink

BERNIE SPEAKS – AT 10:31 A.M. ET:   Look, the guy is getting big crowds.  He's everyone's contrarian uncle.  People like him.  Now he's going after the Obama administration's economic claims.  From Daily Caller: 

Vermont U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders undermined a key Obama administration talking point Monday when he said the actual unemployment rate in the U.S. is double what the federal government claims.

“When you talk about the economy we also have to have an honest assessment of unemployment in America,” Sanders told a crowd of 7,500 gathered at a presidential campaign rally in Portland, Maine.

“Once a month the government publishes a set of figures, and the last figures they published said that official unemployment was 5.4 percent,” the Democratic nominee continued, slightly misstating the Labor Department’s most recent report which put June’s unemployment rate at 5.3 percent.

“But there is another set of government statistics,” Sanders continued, “and that that real unemployment if you include those people who have given up looking for work and the millions of others who are working part-time 20, 25 hours a week when they want to work full-time, when you all of that together, real unemployment is 10.5 percent.”

That dose of reality is like a wet blanket on President Obama’s recent claims that the economy is improving.

COMMENT:  Very brave to go after Obama the way he's going after Clinton.  The odds are still very much against Bernie, but they're a lot better for him than they were two months ago. 

People like him because he isn't a fake.  I think he'd make a disastrous president, especially in foreign policy, but it's refreshing to hear a candidate truly speak his mind. 

July 7, 2015       Permalink

IRAN TALKS, ANOTHER OVERTIME – AT 9:58 A.M. ET:  The Iran nuclear talks have been extended through Friday.   Hotels in Vienna are jubilant.  From AP and AFP:

The terms of the 2013 interim nuclear deal between Iran and major powers have been extended until Friday, the US said Tuesday, meaning this is the new effective deadline for talks on a final deal.

“To allow for the additional time to negotiate, we are taking the necessary technical steps for the measures of the Joint Point of Action (the 2013 agreement) to remain in place through July 10,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

“We are continuing to negotiate for the next couple of days,” EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told reporters during a break from the negotiations in Vienna.

“This does not mean we are extending our deadline. I told you one week ago more or less. We are interpreting in a flexible way our deadline, which means that we are taking the time, the days we still need, to finalize the agreement,” she said.

She added that a deal is “something which is still possible even if we are now getting into the difficult time. I am here to stay, to continue together with all the teams. All the six teams are here.”

She said that foreign ministers may leave the talks but “are ready to come back in the coming hours and days.”

An Iranian spokesman told AFP meanwhile that for his delegation, “we have no deadline.”

COMMENT:  The key question here is whether negotiations through Friday trigger a provision in American law that would give Congress a full 60 days to consider any agreement.  It now stands at 30 days, but we've been told repeatedly that, after July 9th – which is Thursday – the consideration period doubles.  That would give opponents valuable time to build their case against what appears to be a very defective agreement.

July 7, 2015       Permalink

SICKENING – AT 8:41 A.M. ET:   Obama did it again yesterday – he tried to present a moral equivalence between the United States and its enemies, and he did so in the presence of America's military leaders.  The man is a disgrace.  From Breitbart:

Monday at the Pentagon, after meeting on the military efforts against ISIS with his national security team, President Barack Obama urged caution to the America people and said that not only Muslims commit acts of terror, saying, “Here in the United States, we’ve all kinds of home grown terrorism.”

Obama said, “I think it is important for us to recognize the threat of violent extremism is not restricted to any one community. Here in the United States, we’ve all kinds of home grown terrorism. And tragically, recent history reminds how even a single individual can inflict horrendous harm on Americans. So our efforts to counter violent extremism must not target any one community, because of the patriotic Muslim Americans who are partners in keeping our country safe.”

COMMENT:  The American people don't have to be told that we have some bad actors in the United States.  Most countries do.  We also don't have to be told that Muslims are not the only people to engage in terrorism. 

What outrages me is the president's constant need to throw "domestic terrorism" in our faces, as if it's the same thing we face internationally.  We can take care of our domestic nuts.  I'm not sure we're taking care of the foreign ones, not under this president. 

When Obama took office, some commentators – and they were laughed at and ridiculed – wondered if he was the Manchurian Candidate.  I don't make the charge, but I think the question of where this president's loyalties lie has become serious and respectable.

July 7, 2015       Permalink

STUNNING, AND FROM A LIBERAL PAPER – AT 8:16 A.M. ET:  It is rare that a newspaper editorial provides a watershed, but an editorial in yesterday's Washington Post qualifies.  The Post is a liberal paper, a supporter of the Obama administration.  Its editorial page, though, has been responsible, reasoned, and mature, words we never apply to the editorial page of The New York Times. Yesterday the Post raised a profoundly troubling question about Obama's approach to Iran, a question that has been on many of our minds.  From the Post: 

...a recent controversy over Iran’s compliance with the interim accord now governing its nuclear work is troubling. The deal allowed Iran to continue enriching uranium, but required that amounts over a specified ceiling be converted into an oxide powder that cannot easily be further enriched. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran met the requirement for the total size of its stockpile on June 30, but it did so by converting some of its enriched uranium into a different oxide form, apparently because of problems with a plant set up to carry out the powder conversion.

Rather than publicly report this departure from the accord, the Obama administration chose to quietly accept it. When a respected independent think tank, the Institute for Science and International Security, began pointing out the problem, the administration’s response was to rush to Iran’s defense — and heatedly attack the institute as well as a report in the New York Times.

This points to two dangers in the implementation of any longterm deal. One is “a U.S. willingness to legally reinterpret the deal when Iran cannot do what it said it would do, in order to justify that non-performance,” institute President David Albright and his colleague Andrea Stricker wrote. In other words, overlooking Iranian cheating is easier than confronting it.

This weakness is matched by a White House proclivity to respond to questions about Iran’s performance by attacking those who raise them. Mr. Albright, a physicist with a long record of providing non-partisan expert analysis of nuclear proliferation issues, said on the Foreign Policy Web site that he had been unfairly labeled as an adversary of the Iran deal and that campaign-style “war room” tactics are being used by the White House to fend off legitimate questions.

In the case of the oxide conversion, the discrepancy may be less important than the administration’s warped reaction. A final accord will require Iran to ship most of its uranium stockpile out of the country, or reverse its enrichment. But there surely will be other instances of Iranian non-compliance. If the deal is to serve U.S. interests, the Obama administration and its successors will have to respond to them more firmly and less defensively.

COMMENT:  We learned yesterday of a phone call from the White House to sympathizers in many leftist organizations that laid the groundwork for what looks like a vicious smear campaign against anyone who dares oppose a deal with Iran, with special emphasis on Congressional Democrats who may waver.

The Post gets it right.  Responsible Americans are worried about a deal with Iran, and some are brave enough to worry about the loyalties of the president of the United States.

July 7,  2015     Permalink

JULY 6,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:56 P.M. ET: 

PATHETIC – From the Washington Free Beacon:   White House officials on Monday held a private conference call with liberal organizations to discuss ways of pressuring Democrats and other lawmakers on Capitol Hill into supporting a nuclear deal with Iran that is expected to be finalized in the coming days, according to an audio recording of that call obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.  The call, in which there were more than 100 participants, was organized by the liberal pro-Iran group Ploughshares Fund, which has spent millions of dollars to slant Iran-related coverage and protect the Obama administration’s diplomatic efforts.  The White House officials described a nuclear deal with Iran as President Obama’s “signature foreign policy accomplishment” and urged liberal groups to launch an all-out lobbying campaign to pressure lawmakers, especially Democrats, to back the deal.  Please note that this pressure campaign is being planned before anyone has seen a final deal.  Who cares what's in it?  Who cares how many millions might die if it goes bad?  It's all about Barack, come to save us.

BRILLIANT MIND AT WORK, NOT – From the Star.com:   Jane Fonda used to be a Blue Jays fan.  “I loved them,” she says, perched cross-legged on a sofa at a downtown Toronto hotel. “Until I married somebody that owned another team.”  But Fonda’s not in town to revive her fandom or her past betrothals. The 77-year-old actor and activist comes with a solar-fuelled fire in her belly.  “The climate change problem is the issue of our civilization. It will affect everything about our lives if we don’t do something about it,” she says.  Touching down Friday night from Los Angeles, the two-time Oscar winner is part of a parade of celebrities and distinguished guests who are putting foot to pavement in Sunday’s March for Jobs, Justice and the Climate.  I guess Jane felt she'd been out of the news too long.  Watch for her new exercise tape featuring short group runs outside the offices of oil companies, all the while shouting green slogans.   Oh, also, I guess Jane was "touching down" in an airliner run on fossil fuels. 

DUSTIN SPEAKS – From Hollywood Reporter:   Two-time Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman criticized the current state of cinema, saying it’s at the lowest point it has been in the half a century that he has been working.  “I think right now, television is the best that it's ever been, and I think it’s the worst that film has ever been — in the 50 years that I’ve been doing it, it’s the worst,” he said in an interview with U.K. newspaper The Independent.  He is correct on both scores.  The feature-film industry is essentially a sideshow, a shadow of what it was during it golden age, which ended about 50 years ago.  By contrast, there are many fine things to find on television these days, especially on the cable channels.

RUSSIAN RESET NEWS – From ABC:  As Americans were celebrating the Fourth of July holiday, four Russian long-range bomber aircraft flew close enough to the US shores that they were intercepted by military fighter jets. The first set of two bombers flew near Alaska and just 30 minutes later a separate set flew far off the west coast of California.  According to officials at NORAD the flights stayed within international airspace and at no time did any of the Russian bombers enter or get close to entering sovereign North American boundaries.  They're testing us, and reasserting Russian strength.  Obama probably thinks the worst part is that they're contributing to global warming.

July 6, 2015       Permalink

HILLARY!   COMING SOON TO A TV NEAR YOU – AT 8:14 A.M. ET:   In an act of presidential proportions, Hillary Clinton has apparently condescended to do more media interviews.  We praise our gracious queen for deciding to speak to us, the peasantry.  From Fox: 

Hillary Clinton has decided to make herself more available to the media and will begin doing national television interviews in the next week.

She reached this decision after an internal debate and the move is supported by many top campaign officials, along with her husband, Clinton insiders say.

“She’s all on board,” Jennifer Palmieri, the campaign’s communications director, told me in an interview. “America will see more of her.”

Palmieri played down the notion that the interviews, along with plans to take more questions from reporters on the trail, amount to a risky strategy. “She does fine,” Palmieri says. “That was not a concern.”

The danger, Clinton insiders tell me, is that in today’s Twitter culture, a single misstep or badly chosen phrase can be taken out of context and go viral, drowning out anything else that Clinton is saying. They are also worried that some reporters, given Hillary’s global fame, might try to boost themselves by creating a “gotcha” moment.

But a consensus has formed around the notion that allowing more routine access will drain the drama from each encounter. “The more media interviews you do, the less any one interaction matters,” Palmieri says.

The former president and first lady, as well as campaign chairman John Podesta and others, are said to recognize that keeping the press at arm’s length has damaged her campaign. They concede that her long periods of silence in the face of swirling questions about her private email, speaking fees and Clinton Foundation favor-seeking have hurt her on the crucial issue of public trust.

COMMENT:  Bottom line, it's all about electoral strategy, not the good of the country or respect for its people.  Clinton, Inc. has simply made a business decision.  Let's see what the stockholders say...if we can figure out from the financial statements who the stockholders really are.

July 6, 2015       Permalink

THE SCHISM – AT 8:05 A.M. ET:  The Supreme Court's legalization of gay marriage in all 50 states is causing the expected schism, the same kind of divide we saw after Roe v. Wade. This can get very bitter.  From The Hill:

Congressional Republicans are coming under pressure to respond to the Supreme Court’s ruling on gay marriage when they return to Washington next week.

Religious organizations aligned with the GOP are concerned the government will punish them for opposing same-sex marriage, and want lawmakers to put in place new protections for people with faith-based objections.

The groups are putting their lobbying energy behind the First Amendment Defense Act, a bill that would prohibit the government from retaliating against churches, schools and adoption agencies that only recognize heterosexual marriage.

"Regardless of where you come down on the issue of same-sex marriage, we shouldn’t allow the federal government to punish religious institutions for their beliefs about marriage,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who introduced the legislation shortly before the Supreme Court ruling.

A number of GOP presidential candidates are backing the bill, including Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). Rep. Raul Labrador (R-Idaho) is sponsoring the same legislation in the House.

Groups such as the Family Research Council, Heritage Foundation, and National Organization for Marriage are pushing for votes on the bill, calling it a commonsense response to the high court’s ruling.

“It doesn’t change the definition of marriage,” said David Christensen, vice president of government affairs at the Family Research Council. “It simply protects those who believe marriage is between a man and a woman.”

COMMENT:  Gay marriage proponents would have been wiser to wait for state legislatures to work the matter out, in true democratic fashion.  By getting a decision from the Supreme Court, they went the Roe route, indifferent to the controversy that would erupt. 

Surely people of good will can work out some formula under which freedom of religion would be protected, and the faithful not constantly be attacked as "bigots." 

July 6, 2015       Permalink

KEEPING US SAFE, THE DIVERSE WAY – 7:52 A.M. ET:  We see grave threats, including potential nuclear threats, emerging all over the world.  But our CIA may not be ready to confront them.  Why?  It's obvious:  lack of diversity.  There is a diversity crisis at the CIA.  This may be the end of our Republic as we know it.  From The Wall Street Journal: 

The Central Intelligence Agency is once again mired in crisis. CIA Director John Brennan finds himself “deeply concerned.” The spy agency he runs suffers from an affliction that he says has “persisted despite repeated efforts by Agency leaders to address it.”

What is ailing this vital guardian of national security? The CIA’s upper echelon, Mr. Brennan said on Tuesday, does “not reflect the diversity of the Agency workforce or of the nation.”

Mr. Brennan was commenting on the “Director’s Diversity in Leadership Study,” an unclassified report released that day. The study comes to the “unequivocal conclusion,” he said in a statement, that there has been a major failure at the agency in the “crucial” area of diversity and inclusiveness.

The CIA director commissioned the study last year, convening a panel of experts to perform a comprehensive assessment of diversity in the agency’s workforce. The study is partly based on the results of an “Agency-wide instrument”—in non-spy-speak, “instrument” means questionnaire—developed in conjunction with research psychologists attached to the CIA’s Office of Medical Services. It also draws on hundreds of formal and informal interviews and 28 focus groups, including not only spies based at headquarters in Langley, Va., but also agents working incognito in a dozen undisclosed locations out in the cold.

COMMENT:   So the director is "deeply concerned."  Have you ever noticed how the Washington crowd is always "deeply concerned" about something?  Never "mildly" concerned or just "concerned," but always "deeply concerned."  Have you ever wondered how deep?  I don't think very deep.

We all know that "diversity" is a codeword for groups popular on the political left.  That's what is wanted here.  Gone forever is the notion, which we were sold many years ago, that we are to judge people not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.  Too bad.  That was a great idea.

July 6, 2015       Permalink 

THUMBS DOWN ON JOURNALISM – AT 7:41 A.M. ET:  Americans are on to press bias, but I see very little inclination on the part of the press to do anything about it.  From the Washington Examiner:

Nearly three quarters of Americans believe the news media reports with an intentional bias, according to a new survey.

The 2015 State of the First Amendment Survey, conducted by the First Amendment Center and USA Today, was released Friday. It shows that only 24 percent of American adults agree with the statement that "overall, the news media tries to report the news without bias," while 70 percent disagree.

When the question was asked last year, 41 percent agreed, a 17-point difference.

"These are discouraging results for those of us who have spent our careers in journalism," Ken Paulson, president of the First Amendment Center, wrote in an op-ed for USA Today on Thursday. "In 23 years in newsrooms, I saw consistent and concerted efforts to get stories right. Clearly, the public's not convinced."

The survey suggests that controversies this year that engulfed national news anchors Brian Williams of NBC and George Stephanopoulos of ABC may have had a deep impact on public trust in media. It also floats the idea that the public has had a negative reaction to news coverage of the racially-charged events in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore, Md.

COMMENT:  One problem here is that many young journalists believe that presenting the news from a liberal viewpoint is lack of bias.  Liberalism is truth.  Anything else is deviance.  Another problem is that many journalists don't see their role as reporting the news, but, rather, see their role as "making a difference," and it's always a liberal difference.

Some of the reporting from Baltimore and Ferguson was over the top, and I suspect that millions of Americans were repelled, especially by constantly having the word "racism" thrown at them. 

July 6,  2015     Permalink