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JUNE 23,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:52 P.M. ET: 

MORE HYPOCRISY – From the Washington Times:   Hillary Rodham Clinton beseeched voters Tuesday to confront the “deep-seated biases and prejudice” that she said many Americans harbor in their hearts as she pushed racial politics to the forefront of her presidential campaign.  The former secretary of state already had been aggressively wooing black voters but plunged headlong into the race debate following a shooting massacre last week at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. There are certainly bigoted Americans, but a racist society doesn't produce a black president, nor does it permit an Oprah Winfrey, nor would it name a day in January for a black hero.  Clinton shows once again how the liberal left divides the country and plays the race card to drag people to the polls.  Shame.

THE MARCH OF DUMBNESS – From the College Fix: Hobart Boulevard Elementary School’s Rafe Esquith, who’s “written several books on teaching and received multiple awards for his work,” hasn’t been allowed back in the classroom since March.  That’s because he read a passage from Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," which … apparently miffed another teacher.  It happened in Los Angeles.  Esquith is getting a lot of support from educators, but will undoubtedly be labeled a racist for using Huck Finn.  Such is our condition.

HUH?  As the comedian Red Buttons used to say, "Strange things are happening."  From The Wall Street Journal:   He’s dismissed by the political professionals, but there is no denying that the appetite for Donald Trump among Republican primary voters is real.  The New York developer and reality television star is second among 2016 presidential candidates in a new Suffolk University poll of New Hampshire Republicans – behind only former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.  The poll of 500 likely GOP presidential primary voters found 14% back Mr. Bush. Mr. Trump is right behind at 11%. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio come next, with 8% and 7%, respectively. The poll tested 19 GOP candidates – a rare survey that included ultra-longshots like Mark Everson and former Govs. Bob Ehrlich and Jim Gilmore.  This is nuts.  But the low numbers – the frontrunner only gets 14% – indicate that we're at the very start of the race, with no serious trend in public opinion.

ARE YOU CONFUSED, TOO? – From London's Express:   Climate experts warn the amount of light and warmth released by the sun is nosediving to levels "not seen for centuries".  They fear a repeat of the so-called 'Maunder Minimum' which triggered Arctic winter whiteouts and led to the River Thames freezing 300 years ago.  The Met Office-led study warns although the effect will be offset by recent global warming, Britain faces years of unusually cold winters.  A spokesman said: "A return to low solar activity not seen for centuries could increase the chances of cold winters in Europe and eastern parts of the United States but wouldn't halt global warming.  "Return of 'grand solar minimum' could affect European and eastern US winters."  Do you sometimes get the feeling these people know a lot less than they claim?  Do you also get the feeling there's a lot of money tied up in this whole area? 

June 23, 2015     Permalink

UNBELIEVABLE – AT 11:58 A.M. ET:  We tend to forget the horror of ISIS, what it stands for, what it does.  And of course the multiculturalist crowd tends to downplay the nightmare, at times suggesting that we just don't understand the "frustrations" and "grievances" of those who do awful things.  From Fox:   

BERLIN – A Syrian woman believed responsible for helping to deliver hundreds of young European girls to ISIS has defected, and is now warning young women of the hell that awaits them in the black-clad Islamist army's so-called caliphate.

“You are young," the defector, who used the alias Um Asma in an interview with German newspaper Bild am Sonntag, told young women considering running away to join ISIS. "The caliphate is not what you think it is. Women are whipped, sold and stoned. Corpses are on display publicly for weeks.”

Asma described her efforts as a member of the women’s terror group al-Khansa, named after a 7th century female poet who converted to Islam and wrote odes to dead Muslim fighters. The 23-year-old wore a full covering niqab that shields everything but her eyes in the interview, and used the alias because she fears ISIS retaliation. Before the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011, she said, she wore “entirely normal clothes, had Christian friends, listened to music and went dancing.”

But after ISIS conquered Raqqa in 2013, she said she joined in order to survive. Al-Khansa, which believes women can marry jihadists as early as age 9, and advocates a frighteningly misogynistic view of their role in Islamic life, picks up the women and girls on the Turkish border and takes them to Raqqa, the de facto capital of ISIS caliphate.

COMMENT:  It is a chilling picture, but notice the silence of so-called "feminist" groups in the West.  They are so drunk on their left-wing ideology that the real interests of women are forgotten, or even ridiculed. 

When will the media start calling out these "feminist" groups?  When will the media challenge their silence?  Don't hold your breath.  The left protects the left.

June 23, 2015       Permalink

THE HORRIBLE IRAN DEAL – AT 9:12 A.M. ET:  We don't often recommend op-ed pieces from The New York Times, but this vigorous critique of Obama's presumed Iran deal is superb.  It comes from Alan J. Kuperman, a nuclear-proliferation expert at the University of Texas: 

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S main pitch for the pending nuclear deal with Iran is that it would extend the “breakout time” necessary for Iran to produce enough enriched uranium for a nuclear weapon. In a recent interview with NPR, he said that the current breakout time is “about two to three months by our intelligence estimates.” By contrast, he claimed, the pending deal would shrink Iran’s nuclear program, so that if Iran later “decided to break the deal, kick out all the inspectors, break the seals and go for a bomb, we’d have over a year to respond.”

Unfortunately, that claim is false, as can be demonstrated with basic science and math. By my calculations, Iran’s actual breakout time under the deal would be approximately three months — not over a year. Thus, the deal would be unlikely to improve the world’s ability to react to a sudden effort by Iran to build a bomb.

Breakout time is determined by three primary factors: the number and type of centrifuges; the enrichment of the starting material; and the amount of enriched uranium required for a nuclear weapon. Mr. Obama seems to make rosy assumptions about all three.

Most important, in the event of an overt attempt by Iran to build a bomb, Mr. Obama’s argument assumes that Iran would employ only the 5,060 centrifuges that the deal would allow for uranium enrichment, not the roughly 14,000 additional centrifuges that Iran would be permitted to keep mainly for spare parts. Such an assumption is laughable. In a real-world breakout, Iran would race, not crawl, to the bomb.

And, finally:

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, says that he wants 190,000 centrifuges eventually, or 10 times the current amount, as would appear to be permissible under the deal after just 10 years. Such enormous enrichment capacity would shrink the breakout time to mere days, so that Iran could produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb before we even knew it was trying — thus eliminating any hope of our taking preventive action.

Nothing in the pending deal is worth such risks. Unless President Obama can extract significantly greater concessions at the negotiating table, Congress should refuse to lift sanctions, thereby blocking implementation of a deal that would provide Iran billions of dollars to pursue nuclear weapons and regional hegemony.

COMMENT:  I doubt if any of this will influence the little man in the White House.  I doubt if he's even interested.  In 2009 he had the chance to apply moral pressure on Iran as the regime was murdering its opponents in the streets.  He barely lifted a finger.

He doesn't care.  To Barack Obama, Iran is not the problem.  America is the problem.

June 23, 2015       Permalink

SPEAKING THE TRUTH – AT 8:49 A.M. ET:   The left, especially in Europe, loved Obama's "reset" with Russia, in part because the left never had much of a problem with the old Soviet Union.  But the reset button is in for servicing as it never seemed to work.  Now an American general speaks the blunt truth.  From, ironically, Britain's Independent, a lefty newspaper: 

The US commander in charge of most of America’s nuclear missiles has warned that too much power is concentrated in the hands of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and drawn parallels between Russia’s recent behaviour and that of Nazi Germany.

Lieutenant General Stephen Wilson, commander of US Global Air Strike Command, said: “I don’t think we’ve ever seen so much power put in one person in Russia, and some of the things happening there are troubling and concerning for everybody.”

He added: “[They’ve] annexed a country, changing international borders, raising rhetoric unlike we’ve heard since the cold war times, and so lots of people are trying to figure out what is the strategic intent of Russia.

“Some of the actions by Russia recently we haven’t seen since the 1930s, when whole countries were annexed and borders were changed by decree

Lt Gen Wilson, who is responsible for US intercontinental ballistic missile and nuclear-capable bomber forces, made the comments at a briefing in London attended by The Independent.

His outspoken remarks come amid rising tensions between the West and Russia. Yesterday, the EU extended economic sanctions against Moscow over its actions in Ukraine, and the US Defence Secretary, Ashton Carter, declared that America’s Nato allies must join it in standing up to Russian aggression.

COMMENT:  And what has Obama done about the rise in Russian aggressiveness?  Almost nothing, and that is unlikely to change.  Obama was brought up in a leftist family, openly admits his early attraction to Marxism, and hung out with an extreme crowd at the University of Chicago.  He has appeased Putin regularly.

And the person who carried out the "reset" with Russia was Hillary Clinton.

June 23, 2015       Permalink

RURAL MEDIA IN REVOLT – AT 8:33 A.M. ET:  It's a great idea.  Rural media, fed up with being ignored by the big guys downtown, is starting to hold candidate interviews of its own. Yippee.  From the Washington Examiner: 

Tired of big city media taking over political coverage in early rural primaries and caucuses, local media is elbowing in to demand that the parties and candidates address small town issues such as agriculture beyond basic talking points.

Led by the Nashville-based RFD-TV, the goal is to force candidates to get up to speed on rural concerns rather than focus simply on questions posed by the national media.

"Rural states set the tone," said RFD-TV founder Patrick Gottsch, noting that four — Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — are the first to choose presidential nominees. "There aren't enough rural questions being asked," he added.

In a move endorsed by the parties, RFD-TV working with SiriusXM and cable provider Mediacom are planning a new one-hour interview program called "Rural Town Hall" that will feature one candidate at a time addressing rural issues and questions from group such as the 4-H.

Host Orion Samuelson said questions will range from agriculture to small-town education, water supplies and aging workers and migrant immigration.

One thing it won't be, added Gottsch, is gotcha journalism: up to 200 questions will be provided to candidates in advance. "Hopefully," he said, "we'll light a fire and create an understanding. We're in the business of building a bridge between urban and rural."

Samuelson said that RFD-TV's audience will be encouraged to email questions and ideas for discussions. He said the sessions should help to discover both where the candidates stand on rural issues and help connect those with the concerns of city dwellers.

COMMENT:   Now the question is whether the big guys will cover these forums.  Or will they dismiss them as pablum for the "flyover people"?  The fact that we have to ask the question tells us much about big media.

June 23,  2015     Permalink 

JUNE 22,  2015

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – AT 11:55 P.M. ET:

A LOSS – From London's Daily Mail:   A single-engine plane registered to Oscar-winning composer James Horner has crashed in Southern California, and, while the identity of the one person who died has not been released, it is believed to be the famed musician, according to one of his friends.  Ventura County fire spokesman Mike Lindbery said the crash happened around 9:30am Monday in the Los Padres National Forest.  The pilot was killed. No one else was on board.  Horner wrote the music for "Titanic."  No one has heard from him since the crash.  As his lawyer was quoted as saying, if it wasn't him in the plane he would have called.  He was a quality composer.  This is a loss.

MAJOR MEDICAL NEWS – From the Los Angeles Times:  Are conservatives more likely to stick to a diet than liberals? The answer might be yes.  In a paper published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers say there is a link between political ideology and the ability to exert self-control.  In a series of three studies with more than 300 participants, the authors found that people who identify as conservative perform better on tests of self-control than those who identify as liberal regardless of race, socioeconomic status and gender.  Ah, we've always known it.  We have greater discipline.  We're more mature.  And we're thinner!  Think I'll have some ice cream.

HYPOCRITE – From Vanity Fair: News outlets, the Internet, and Hillary Clinton’s own staff were charmed by the former secretary of state’s decision to headquarter her presidential campaign in Brooklyn. But in the months since the campaign’s official launch, it seems that one person is pretty much over Brooklyn: Hillary Clinton.  Clinton has been spending most of her time in the city at her Manhattan office, which is located in Tower 45, a Midtown high-rise not far from Times Square. According to Politico, Clinton “works exclusively from Midtown” when she’s in New York.  The now-candidate had signed a two-year lease on the Midtown space before she declared her campaign. The thought then, a spokesman told Politico, was to use it as a personal office. Once senior staffers developed a habit of working at the Manhattan office while they were taking meetings in the city, however, it had to be declared a campaign expense.  What a hypocrite.  Woman of the people.  Headquartered in Brooklyn.  Seems like a phantom office.  She has a tin ear, and her campaign is not going well.

THE NEW MUSIC – From RealClearScience:  Barney was a fairly normal chimpanzee. A 24-year-old, low-ranking member of a group of five adult male chimpanzees raised at the Biomedical Primate Research Centre in the Netherlands, he generally showed stereotypical behaviors: he played, he banged bottles, he climbed trees. Then, one January day, he walked away from his group and sat down outside, placing an upturned bucket between his feet. He then rattled off the only-known spontaneous, unsolicited chimpanzee drum solo. Primatologists at the center were taken completely by surprise.  Watch.  He'll be signed by a recording company.  He'll have an agent by Friday.  Movie deal.  It's understood he wants to direct...and will probably raise the level of Hollywood movies several notches.

June 22, 2015       Permalink

ARE WE STILL THE UNITED STATES? – AT 1:21 P.M. ET:  If you don't think Obama has gutted our armed forces, please read this.  From USA Today:

Faced with a shortage of U.S. Navy ships, the Marine Corps is exploring a plan to deploy its forces aboard foreign vessels to ensure they can respond quickly to global crises around Europe and western Africa.

The initiative is a stopgap way to deploy Marines aboard ships overseas until more American vessels are available, said Brig. Gen. Norman Cooling, deputy commander, U.S. Marine Corps Forces Europe and Africa.

The Marines will be able to respond quickly to evacuate embassies or protect U.S. property and citizens, a need highlighted by the 2012 attack in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador.

"There's no substitute for U.S. amphibious" vessels, Cooling said. "We're looking at other options" in the meantime, he added.

The Marines have been working with Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom and other close allies to determine the suitability of the foreign ships for U.S. personnel and aircraft.

COMMENT:  Did you ever think you'd see the day when the U.S. Marine Corps had to hitch rides?  What an indictment of the Obama administration.  But, of course, it reached the point quite a while ago where we started depending on the Russians to put us in space.

Nations decline.  This one is being murdered from within.

June 22, 2015       Permalink

HILLARY'S WEAKNESS – AT 8:58 A.M. ET:  Michael Barone, one of the best political analysts we've got, is noting Hillary Clinton's poll weakness, not something a frontrunner enjoys.  From the Washington Examiner: 

Hillary Clinton has relaunched her campaign on Roosevelt Island with a 4,687-word speech. But it's not clear whether she and her husband Bill Clinton can win four presidential elections as Franklin Roosevelt did.

Negative news for Clinton's prospects comes in the latest Quinnipiac polls in the key mega-states of Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania. In each of them she leads or ties Republican opponents, though in many cases not by statistically significant margins.

But she also is running under 50 percent of the vote in every pairing, averaging 47 percent against six different Republicans in Florida, 44 percent against seven Republicans in Ohio and 46 percent against four Republicans in Pennsylvania. That's a danger zone for a candidate with universal recognition.

Similarly, less than 50 percent — 47 percent in Florida, 44 percent in Ohio and 46 percent in Pennsylvania — express favorable feelings about her. Only 43 percent in Florida and 40 percent in Ohio and Pennsylvania feel she is honest and trustworthy.

And, perhaps surprisingly for a Democrat, only 48 percent in Ohio and Florida and 45 percent in Pennsylvania say she "cares about the needs and problems of people like you."

Clinton campaign spokesmen have said their goal is to reassemble Barack Obama's winning coalition. But she's falling short in three large states which Obama carried in 2012 with 50, 51 and 52 percent of the vote. These states have 67 electoral votes, without which Obama would have won only 265 — and Mitt Romney would be president.

The latest Detroit News poll has Clinton averaging 44 percent against four Republicans in Michigan, whose 16 electoral votes Obama won with 54 percent in 2012.

COMMENT:  Read the whole piece.  Barone always knows his stuff.  It's clear that there's no great wanting of Hillary, even in the Democratic Party.  There is an opening there.  Problem is, there may not be a Democrat who can fill it, and who wants to take on the Clinton machine.

But the Democratic race, as we've noted before, isn't a sure thing.

June 22, 2015       Permalink

BY THE NUMBERS – AT 8:35 A.M. ET:   Some GOP candidates are moving up in some polls.  Keep your eye on Carly.  From The Hill:

Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Mike Huckabee have each earned more support from GOP primary voters since launching presidential campaigns last month, a new poll finds.

Republicans’ support for one of those candidates has risen since a similar sampling in April, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey released on Sunday.

It said that Fiorina saw the biggest jump in GOP primary voters’ backing.

The former Hewlett-Packard CEO now has 31 percent of Republicans saying they would support her, up from 17 percent in April, it said.

It added that those results are roughly even with the 29 percent who would not back Fiorina’s candidacy.

Carson, the poll said, now commands 50 percent approval from positive voters.

That number, it added, is up from 41 percent in April for the retired neurosurgeon.

The survey additionally saw Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, nabbing 65 percent of positive voter support in June.

He is thus up 13 points from a similar poll in April, it said, where he earned 52 percent instead.

COMMENT:  Huckabee is probably benefiting from high name recognition.  I applaud the rise of Fiorina and Carson.  We've got to move Carly up in the polls so she's included in the top tier of candidates, and eligible for the first debate.  She's the best speaker of the lot.

June 22, 2015       Permalink

IRAN COUNTDOWN – AT 8:18 A.M. ET:  We are eight days away from the presumed deadline for reaching a nuclear agreement with Iran.  Things don't look good.  In the face of American displays of weakness, the Iranians are stiffening their position.  Consider this late news, from PJ Media:

The Iranian parliament passed a bill outlining the country’s “nuclear rights” as the deadline for a final agreement on their nuclear program approaches at the end of this month.

The bill would prevent any inspections of military sites, forbid the IAEA from interviewing its nuclear scientists, and insist that all sanctions on Iran be lifted at the time they begin implementation of the deal.

Administration talking points released after the framework deal was agreed to state that sanctions would be lifted over several years, that all sites deemed “suspicious” would be open to inspection, and that the IAEA would investigate previous efforts by Iran to build a nuclear weapon. This would necessitate interviewing Iranian scientists, something the Iranians have now taken off the table.

COMMENT:  The only way an agreement can be reached is if Obama caves in on vital points, which would not surprise me.  As noted last night, his apparent strategy would be to label opponents of the deal as warmongers.  He would be helped by his increasingly leftist party and by The New York Times. 

But what would Hillary say?  She'd have to support Obama, but would inject enough caveats to allow her to say later that she was for it before she was against it.

June 22,  2015     Permalink