What do liberals think of Hillary’s email problems?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s DaTechGuy:

…[M]any political scandals involve complicated rules and laws that the American people either do not understand or have no interest in understanding that’s why a clever pol with the media behind them can usually get away with things.

This scandal however involves things that most Americans work with every day. They don’t need it explained to them, which is why when the American people see Hillary lawyering up or try to explain away this scandal, they understand she is lying to their faces.

That makes sense. But if my small sample of four (the number of liberals I’ve discussed this issue with so far) is any indication, although he may be right that this is something with which Americans are familiar, I think he’s wrong in his conclusions if he thinks this matters to most liberals. Unfortunately.

First let me set the scene. I’ve said many times that I try not to talk politics any more with the many liberals I know, because it tends to be extremely counter-productive. However, there are a few exceptions. There are some people with whom I do have political discussions on a fairly regular basis, although not very often. One of the four was in this category. The other three were involved in a political discussion about something else, and I happened to be there and got involved in it. Then to change the subject (and because I was curious) I asked what they thought about Clinton’s emails.

One of those three stated at the outset that Hillary was way too moderate for her and she was a Sanders supporter anyway. Another shrugged and said that Hillary was being framed by Republicans who were always making stuff up about her and were out to get her. I asked her what she would think, however, if the charges turned out to be true, and she answered that everybody does it and it’s no big deal. When I asked her if she worried about national security considerations, she didn’t seem to think that was any big deal or anything unusual. She then explained that she herself has two email addresses, one for work and one for personal use, and sometimes she makes an error and sends something official on her personal email. She was likening Hillary’s actions to her own—just a careless, understandable error. When I pointed out that Hillary had a much higher level of responsibility, she didn’t seem to think so, or if so it just didn’t concern her.

That’s when the third person spoke up. She said the emails did bother her. She works in a highly responsible job that involves a certain amount of confidentiality as well, and she said she is not allowed to make such an error and knows that it is a very serious one. She further said that until now she’s always considered Hillary Clinton to be a very intelligent woman, and therefore she’s having trouble explaining this as a mere lapse. She said that this means that either Hillary actually isn’t all that intelligent after all, or if she is then this was done purposely through arrogance or for some other unacceptable reason.

I’m not sure how much that last person’s viewpoint matters in terms of the election, because she was also nodding when the others were praising Bernie Sanders. So my guess is that she’d happily vote for him instead of Hillary both in a primary and in the general. But that’s just a guess, because I was already so exhausted from the conversation that I couldn’t bear to press them on what they liked so much about Sanders.

The fourth person was someone with whom I had a separate conversation. He stated that he did not care about it, that he would vote for Hillary because he believed that whatever she would do as president would be better than any Republican (he cannot stand Republicans for a number of reasons, and has for years).

So we have one out of four who even seems to care about the emails or find them the least bit alarming. Not a great record, and I bet it’s representative.

[NOTE: And please don’t start telling me to shun these people. Several of them are not such very good friends and they are people I rarely see, so that’s not a problem. But several of them are people extremely close and dear to me and I would never break those bonds.]

[ADDENDUM: Of course, there’s always the possibility that Hillary will be charged with a felony:

By transmitting the server’s contents to a third-party (Platte River), she may well have committed a felony. As of now, Clinton’s best defense is that she only passively received classified e-mails ”” as opposed to having sent, forwarded, or deleted them ”” and that she is thus not in violation of USC 18 793(f). But if she handed over a server full of classified information and then actively copied that information onto computers owned by a commercial provider ”” a clear violation of both the “communicates, delivers, transmits or causes to be communicated” and “fails to deliver” clauses in USC 18 793(e) ”” that defense becomes horribly moot.

However, I don’t think that Hillary will ever be charged as long as Democrats control the executive branch.]

[ADDENDUM II: And then there’s the fact that Hillary as president would be highly susceptible to blackmail.]

Some prescient comments here predicting Obama’s course of tyranny

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then while searching for something on the blog I come across an old thread and start reading, including the comments.

Thus, this post. Obama’s campaign year was 2008 and then of course his election, while early 2009 represented the first months of the Obama administration. If we’re trying to recall exactly what we said and how we felt back then, memory can play tricks. So I thought it would be an instructive exercise for me to post some of those comments and illustrate some of what was being said on this blog.

Here’s one by a commenter who used to be very active here, “southern james,” written about a week before the election of 2008. It turns out that not only is he describing the 2008 election, but also the 2012 one and beyond (including some conversations I’ve had with people recently):

…“The One” isn’t going to be swept into office by “far leftists” (of course he’ll get a huge assist)…

But of the millions upon millions who vote for this disaster, the HUGE ENORMOUS and vast majority of them are going to be well meaning, uncomplicated souls, who are not particularly educated; who don’t follow politics very much; who never read political blogs; what little daily news they do glean comes from short pops of CNN or CBS or ABC or NBC…

And they have been oblivious to all the non-stop, 24/7 propaganda that has been pounded into their heads. For example, they see Sarah get mocked and ridiculed on the comedy channels and late night talk shows and SNL”¦and they see biased edited snippets of her stumbling through a hostile interview filled with questions a Dem would never get challenged with”¦and so I overhear my secretaries say”¦”she doesn’t seem too smart, does she””¦..(and they haven’t been exposed to Biden AT ALL!)”¦”¦and then”¦ “Now Obama, HE just SEEMS so calm and smart, and you know ”“ we need a change from Bush, and people say McCain is a lot like Bush.” (without even realizing where they have been hearing that”¦”¦over and over and over and over again)

They do not understand what “Socialism” or “Marxism” even is ”“ just that it has always sounded kind of icky ”“ wasn’t that back, like, in you know, Russia or whatever?? ”“ “But, then Ed from the loading dock was talking to Lois, our receptionist the other day, and he really follows this politics stuff you know”¦ and HE was sayin, ”˜if someone is in the Army that’s socialism, and so is the Post Office, so this is just some McCain thing to scare people about Obama’, and so, you know, like, I don’t see what is so bad about 95% of us getting a tax cut ”“ hardly anybody makes over $250,000 anyhow and they can afford it. And anyway, we need a change and we need to end that war, and who wants more of Bush anyway! This economy is all his fault, right? And I’ve heard that McCain is just like Bush, and that Sarah ”“ she’s kind of scary because she just doesn’t seem too smart ”“ and my cousin Dan said she thinks Dinosaurs walked on the earth with humans!! Can you believe it?!!”

It is really that simplistic and basic. People on sites like THIS, think deeply and thoughtfully”¦”¦But “The One” is going to get tens of millions of votes from perfectly nice ignoramuses like my two secretaries, or the guy who bags your groceries, or changes your oil, whose political discussions are at about the level I just illustrated above.

I’m not saying most of the voters on the other side are not the exact same way. I’m saying, you have to appeal to simplistic gut emotions.

In fact, you might want to read the entire thread that comment came from. I was surprised at how prescient and insightful many of the comments were, even way back then. The post isn’t half-bad, either.

Here’s a comment from “FredHJr,” who needs no introduction to most of the readers here. It was made in March of 2009, two months into Obama’s tenure as president:

THE core of Obama support is the under-30 voter, urban, and single female. The cities and the universities are solidly supportive of him.

Never underestimate the power of large numbers of kids who are indoctrinated, poorly educated (even if they have degrees or on their way to getting them), and lacking in a lot of life experience. ACORN really signed these people up big time. Also, ACORN did massive work in the ghettos of minorities and illegal immigrants.

It was not the economy that did in George Bush and his party. Why? Because Obama’s popularity was already solid long before the economy was even on the radar screen. It was the war. The very day after 9/11 the Left was already hard at work building the anti-war coalitions, and on college and university campuses this was already up and running. Then, the MSM went to work on George Bush and his party, selling the alternate reality. Everything else, which was substantial, was ancillary to that major theme: the war. Guantanamo, “torture,” electronic eavesdropping, the Patriot Act, etc. No effort was spared to create an atmosphere where George Bush and his party were made to look buffoonish or criminal. In truth, sometimes George Bush did make mistakes and he was especially wrong on the issue of illegal immigration. Thus, you had a considerable minority of Republicans who already were inclined to simply not vote.

I have a hard time assigning malevolent motives to most of the kids. However, to most of their teachers and professors I have an easy time assigning malevolent motives, simply because I got to know that culture very, very well and noted their revolutionary intent.

Antonio Gramsci really did have the right blueprint. Lenin and Stalin did not. By the time Andropov and Gorbachev were true disciples of Gramsci, it was too late for the Soviet Union. But Gramsci’s work has been an astounding success.

About a week later I wrote the following (it was April Fools’ Day, but the post and the comments were very serious):

Although I remain open to evidence to the contrary, for now my working hypothesis is that Obama is a man of the Left, that he is insufficiently devoted to the age-old American idea of liberty but is instead a committed statist, and that the mind-numbing pace of his change is deliberate and has been effective so far…

…[Obama] knows that those [voters] more in the middle will not be noticing much, until the deeds are done. And he is counting on them to look away and hope for the best. The question is whether his pace is fast enough, and whether they will catch on””and whether they will then understand what is happening, or care. Or will the predictions of the Grand Inquisitor come to pass in this country, as they have in so many others?

From “Roy Lofquist” on April 1, 2009:

Nobody has mentioned one of the most blatant and disturbing of his power grabs ”“ the appointment of Czars and commissions. These take powers that are normally lodged in the Cabinet, which is subject to Senate confirmation, and given to his own selected people.

Senator Byrd sent a letter to Obama complaining specifically about this, proclaiming that this looked like an attempt to subvert the Congress’ overview authority.

Oh, I bet Obama really paid attention to that letter—not. It was probably a relief to him when Byrd died about a year later, however.

The following comment by “southern james” is great; he writes about recognizing Cuba, and thinks it will happen in Obama’s second term. Well, Obama waited till the 2014 elections, but nevertheless I would say touché, southern james!:

The blistering pace of new sh”“t cooked up out of thin air, thrown out on virtually a daily basis just won’t let up. This morning’s misdirection “look ”“ over there!!” is an announcement that it APPEARS that fully open travel and open relations with Cuba is suddenly, for some unknown and unexplained reason, going to be pushed and pushed hard, to happen NOW.

NOW! Not after a period of measured and well thought-out, intelligent debate and consideration. But”¦right now. Crammed down our throats. Intantly. Like the stimulus bill.

Why isn’t anyone in the main stream press asking “Why?” or “Why Now,” with everything else on our plates? What’s the rush? Can this topic not wait until we have G-20, N Korea, General Motors, etc, etc, etc, issues resolved?

So it happens”¦unless”¦there is a whole lot of outcry. And then”¦.it gets quietly withdrawn. For now. For the moment. But the waters get tested ”“ the concept gets floated ”“ and notes are taken on how to approach it again next year, or the year after, or perhaps right after the re-election. And, just as when the idea of making Vets pay for their own medical care for their injuries idea went “poof” ”“ as far as Pravda arm of the Obama Admin is concerned (aka the MSM) ”“ it never occurred at all.

Can you even begin to imagine the flurry of sh”“t that will get done via executive orders/pardons, etc., when (if?) this guy finally becomes a lame duck? It will make Bill Clintons actions like the Marc Rich et al nonsense look like a Siesta in comparison.

I really don’t WANT to get all paranoid, and become a conservative version of those left wing moonbats who were convinced that Bush/Rove/Cheney only went to Iraq to enrich their oil buddies; 911 was “an inside job”; the Neocons are going to impose a christianist theocracy, etc. I’m fighting it. I’m fighting it hard. But I’m starting to lose.

Yes, we’ve been talking about this stuff for a long, long time. And although it’s scant comfort—and Cassandra-like, it hasn’t done a particle of good in terms of preventing any of it from happening—this is a blog, and this is what we do. Recognizing the problem of who the left is and the actions it’s taking and why is the first step, after all.

Here’s another psychopath who hired hit men to murder her parents

The New Neo Posted on by

The extremely sad and horrifying story of how Jennifer Pan, a Canadian woman whose parents hailed from Vietnam and who had huge dreams for her academic success and pressured her to achieve it, came to hire three hit men to murder them is told as though it’s a tragedy of “tiger parenting” gone wrong:

Bich and Hann had raised Jennifer and her brother, Felix, to believe in the supreme importance of academic success, and they restricted their activities to ensure nothing less. Pan, whose high school life included numerous extracurricular activities, like figure skating, piano, martial arts and swimming, in addition to long nights studying, was forbidden from attending parties of any kind. Dating was out of the question. In their Markham home, they had trophy cases displaying Pan’s many awards.

When Pan’s parents learned that all of their efforts had been for naught [and she had been deceiving them for many years about her grades and status as a college student when in fact she had failed to graduate high school], they placed further restrictions on their now-adult daughter. No more cellphone. No more laptop. No more clandestine dates with her boyfriend, Daniel Wong.

While she eventually gained more freedom, Pan stayed angry. She thought about how much better her life would be without her parents. And so, with Daniel’s help, she plotted to kill the two people who had made her life like “house arrest.”

The scene described in Toronto Life and earlier in the trial is gruesome. In a planned murder disguised to look like a robbery gone awry, Pan played the part of helpless witness as three hired hit men, David Mylvaganam, Lenford Crawford and allegedly Eric Carty, fatally shot her mother and severely wounded her father. She called 911, distraught, to bolster the illusion.

This story sounds like it has to do with parental pressure. But if you look back at the post I recently wrote about the patterns shown by psychopathic children who murder (or try to murder) their parents, Jennifer Pan fits the template very well. She seems to have a knack for deception and had been expertly practicing it long before the plan to murder, faking grades in high school, and creating a complex web of evidence that she was attending college for four years when she actually was not. It was when her parents found out, and tried to impose consequences and restrictions on her as a result, that her plan to murder them seems to have been hatched.

This article written by a former classmate of Pan’s relates incident upon incident of Pan’s deception and later cold-blooded violence, a veritable blueprint of teen and young adult psychopathy, but the author remains sympathetic to Pan. She ascribes emotions to Pan of “inadequacy, self-doubt and shame,” but offers little evidence of any of these except to say that Pan made “little horizontal cuts on her forearms,” but doesn’t say who saw these cuts or how she knows this happened.

But to me the best indication of Pan as psychopath rather than abused child who had no recourse is that when the murders occurred she was 24 years old, and had a boyfriend. They could certainly have gone out and lived on their own at that point, but chose not to. What’s more, here’s the classic “psychopathic teen who kills parents” story, a sort of smoking gun:

According to the police, it was at this point that Daniel and Jennifer, who were back in contact and exchanging daily flirty texts, devised an even more sinister plan: they’d hire a hit on Bich and Hann, collect the estate””Jennifer’s portion totalling about $500,000””and live together, unencumbered by her meddling parents. Daniel gave Jennifer a spare iPhone and SIM card, and connected her with an acquaintance named Lenford Crawford, whom he called Homeboy. Jennifer asked what the going rate was for a contract killing. Crawford said it was $20,000, but for a friend of Daniel’s it could be done for $10,000. Jennifer was careful to use her iPhone for crime-related conversations and her Samsung phone for everything else.

This is not a portrait of a child who is abused for years, has no way out, and who snaps. This is something else entirely.

The description of the killings, and Jennifer Pan’s part in them, makes very chilling reading—and includes the sadly ironic fact that Jennifer’s mother, who thought it was a home invasion and thought Jennifer was threatened as well, pleaded desperately with the killers to spare her daughter.

Pan’s father lived, despite being shot in the head. Here’s one small part of how Jennifer’s involvement in the crime came to be known:

By November 12, Hann [Jennifer’s father] had woken up from his three-day induced coma. He had a broken bone near his eye, bullet fragments lodged in his face that doctors couldn’t remove and a shattered neck bone””the bullet had grazed the carotid artery. Remarkably, he remembered everything, including two troubling details: he recalled seeing his daughter chatting softly””“like a friend,” he said””with one of the intruders, and that her arms were not tied behind her back while she was being led around the house.

When confronted with the fact that the police strongly suspected she was involved, Jennifer’s reaction was also very typical of a psychopath: she was “hunched over and sobbing, ask[ing] repeatedly, ‘But what happens to me?’”

Stories like this make terrible reading. No doubt Pan’s parents were not ideal, but most parents are not ideal and most children don’t hire hit men to kill their parents and live high off the hog on the insurance money. That is the province of the psychopath, and we do ourselves no good when we make excuses, blame the parents, or fail to see a pattern.

Once again…

The New Neo Posted on by

…we have Ksenia Parkhatskaya (see yesterday’s post if you don’t know who I’m talking about).

This dance has a completely different tone than the ones I posted yesterday, and therefore it spotlights her versatility. Although it’s not the sort of style I tend to like—too sexually obvious—I am incredibly impressed with her concentration that never flags, her complete and very serious commitment to her choreography, and most particularly the fact that this woman possesses joints and sinews and muscles in her back and arms that the rest of us can only dream of.

Take a look at what I mean:

The forgotten ones

The New Neo Posted on by

Quick: name all seventeen Republican contenders.

Whom do you leave out? I leave out Gilmore, who barely has gotten in, as well as Graham and Pataki (yes, had to look them all up). Sorry Jindal; you’re a good man, but I tend to forget you, as well. Santorum, too. In the beginning Perry was more of a presence, but now he’s faded into the woodwork. And Kashich doesn’t register for me.

That’s seven. I listed my seven before I read this article at The Hill which lists seven, because I was curious whether it would up being the same seven. It is for the most part, with one difference: the author says Rand Paul and I say Kasich.

I disagree about Paul because I think he’ll have a bit more staying power as the only libertarian choice, or at least the designated libertarian choice, and the heir apparent to his father Ron who had such die-hard supporters. But to me he looked and sounded like a peevish imp at the debate.

I think the more interesting question is: who will be the last three or four standing? A long time ago I would have said Walker, Cruz, Rubio, and Bush, in no particular order. Now I’d have to add Trump, and perhaps Fiorina or even Carson. Which of those will fade first? That’s a difficult one to answer, so I won’t even try.

My first choice for a long time was Walker. I’m still fine with him, but I don’t think he’s my first choice any more. Now it’s between Cruz and Fiorina.

They All Laughed—and danced

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a video (with subtitles) of an interesting Russian entertainer named Ksenia Parkhatskaya, performing on a Ukrainian TV show. She starts out giggling—and gets practically everyone else giggling, too—but don’t let that fool you. She a good singer, with no Russian accent at all, and an astounding and amusing dancer, in a style all her own.

Did I write that Ksenia dances “in a style all her own”? Actually, it’s a style that’s a bit reminiscent of some of the 1920s dances of Josephine Baker, a black American woman who took Paris by storm with her risque act (some of it far more daring than the following videos) and a 1000-watt smile:

In an interesting circular US/Russia history, the song the Russian woman chose to sing, “They All Laughed,” is by George Gershwin, whose parents came from Russia and Lithuania. It was written for the movie “Shall We Dance,” with Astaire and Rogers, in which Fred played an American dancer who (back in the days when American and British dancers liked to give themselves Russian names) gave himself the Russian-sounding name “Petrov.” Here is the scene where the song and the dance occurs:

[NOTE: If you go to Ksenia’s website, you’ll find a lot more information, and many more videos of her dancing in highly varied styles. Note this performance by Ksenia as a chicken (start watching around 3:25), which also harks back to certain moments in that first video of Josephine Baker, the one where she’s dancing with her shadow—particularly 1:20-1:26 in the Baker video, and at 2:00 where Baker notices the audience and tries to cover up.]

Schumer lets us know he wants the Iran deal to go through

The New Neo Posted on by

Why do I say that? Because of this Politico piece entitled “Chuck Schumer working the phones on Iran.”

Now, if you were to stop there, you might assume that Schumer is trying to get other Democrats to agree with him to block the Iran deal. But you would be wrong—as the subtitle of the piece makes clear, “He calls colleagues to explain his decision and assure them he will not be whipping opposition.”

So the message has to be: “I’m going to vote this way because I have to in order to please my constituents, but I don’t want you to vote the same way and I’ll do nothing to either persuade you to come over to my side or stop you from voting against me. What’s more, when I take over Harry Reid’s position I won’t take it out on you for disagreeing with me.”

This is the way it will go down:

Schumer, though, is not lobbying his colleagues to vote against the agreement when the Senate takes up a “resolution of disapproval” next month, several undecided senators said during interviews. The disapproval resolution is expected to win the 60 votes needed to overcome any Democratic filibuster.

The real question, however, is whether President Barack Obama can rally the 34 senators he needs to uphold a veto of the resolution. Right now, the Senate vote is too close to call, although Obama’s support for a veto override appears more solid among House Democrats, with three more coming out on Tuesday in favor of the agreement.

Prediction: the override will fail.

When it does, I’m wondering whether the Senate will then vote on it as a treaty, in which case it will not be approved. That is of interest to me in terms of whether the GOP shows any spine. But as I’ve written before, even if that were somehow to happen, Obama would ignore it and say it’s not a treaty. And I believe he would win any challenge on that in the Supreme Court.

The varsity versus the JV: remember Claire McCaskill and Todd Akin?

The New Neo Posted on by

Claire McCaskill certainly remembers, because (as was strongly suspected even at the time) she helped engineer Akin’s win in the 2012 Republican primary for senator in Missouri, since she was well aware he’d be a weaker opponent against her than his major opposition, John Brunner.

Now she has published an article in Politico describing some of the details of her machinations. It’s an excerpt from a memoir of hers that’s just come out:

It was August 7, 2012, and I was standing in my hotel room in Kansas City about to shotgun a beer for the first time in my life. I had just made the biggest gamble of my political career””a $1.7 million gamble””and it had paid off. Running for reelection to the U.S. Senate as a Democrat from Missouri, I had successfully manipulated the Republican primary so that in the general election I would face the candidate I was most likely to beat. And this is how I had promised my daughters we would celebrate.

McCaskill describes how she had done polling and research that led her to conclude that Akin—who at the time was polling poorly and was unlikely to win the primary—would be her weakest opponent and relatively easy to defeat. The rest of the article describe how she went about trying to help him get nominated; please read the whole thing, replete with details such as this:

As it turned out, we spent more money for Todd Akin in the last two weeks of the primary than he spent on his whole primary campaign.

If we were going to spend that kind of money on ads for Akin, I wanted to get him nominated and start disqualifying him with independent voters at the same time. By that prescription, our ad would have to include Akin’s statement that Obama was a “menace to civilization” and that Akin had said of himself that he was “too conservative” for Missouri. This presentation made it look as though I was trying to disqualify him, though, as we know, when you call someone “too conservative” in a Republican primary, that’s giving him or her a badge of honor.

There’s much much more. But we all know what happened in the end—Akin was nominated with McCaskill’s assist, put his foot in it big time and alienated voters, and McCaskill now sits in the Senate and will till at least 2018.

Her piece has an air of very proud triumph, even though the events occurred three years ago. It also is a primer, a how-to for the future. My guess is that that’s why it’s being published now, as an election guide for the left and a reminder as to how it’s done. And you know what? If it happened again, the conservative electorate in Missouri and elsewhere would again fall right into the trap.

Here’s an interesting sidelight: Rick Hasen, an election law expert and professor, indicates that McCaskill may be admitting to acts that indicate she violated election law when she describes giving advice on tactics to the Akin camp through intermediaries she knew. MCaskill had decided that an ad showing a Huckabee endorsement for Akin would be golden for the Akin camp, which had unaccountably pulled it. She wanted Akin to win, and so she wanted that ad back up there, and this is what she did:

On the Thursday before the election, I called Ron Gladney, the husband of Rep. Jo Ann Emerson, a Republican from Missouri. I asked him if he could get a message to the Akin camp to put the Huckabee ad back up. Of course Gladney started laughing and asked, “Are you kidding?” “No,” I replied. “If he gets the Huckabee ad back up by Friday, he’s going to win.” I also placed a call to Michael Kelley, a Democratic Party and labor operative who was friends with a former Akin staffer, and asked him to convey the same message to the Akin camp. A short time later my campaign manager, Adrianne Marsh, got a call from the Akin campaign. The person on the line wanted to talk to our pollster. Adrianne called me, and I gave clearance, allowing Kiley to speak in broad generalities. Three hours later the Huckabee ad was back up.

For me, there are a lot of unanswered questions there. I get what McCaskill was doing, but what was Gladney thinking? He’s the husband of a Republican member of Congress, but is he perhaps a Democrat? Because if he’s a Republican, why would he not be more suspicious of what McCaskill was doing? In fact, his “Are you kidding?” response to McCaskill, and her response to him, indicated he knew full well that she was trying to orchestrate Akin’s win, and the only explanation for that would have been that she felt very confident she would beat him in the general. So what was Gladney’s motivation for co-operating? Was he a McCaskill supporter? Or was he so strongly pro-Akin that he thought Akin would be the best candidate against McCaskill despite whatever McCaskill thought? Or did he just not care?

And then there’s whoever it was from the Akin campaign who called McCaskill’s campaign manager back in order to speak to the McCaskill pollster. Their motives are more clear: even though they probably were suspicious of McCaskill’s motives, their job was to get Akin nominated and her pollster had information to help them do it. The fact that her motive was her conviction that Akin would be toast in the general was not their concern; I suppose they had faith (or they were paid to have faith) that Akin could surge in the general and beat her, no matter what she thought. It is also interesting that McCaskill had a lot more money than they, and since they couldn’t even afford polling, hers was the only polling information they had access to.

It was JV operation (Akins) versus varsity operation (McCaskill) all the way.

This is what Rick Hasen thinks about it:

Rep. [Justin] Amash contends this should count as illegal coordination, and I think this does raise a serious question about coordination. The Senator’s campaign was sending a message to the Akin campaign about what strategy to follow.

So, will possible charges against McCaskill ever be followed up? I think we know the answer: unlikely.

Top secret

The New Neo Posted on by

For a while now I’ve been ignoring the emerging information about Hillary Clinton’s use of her server for classified information. My assumption was that, no matter how incriminating the evidence, she would be protected from any serious repercussions.

So—what difference would it make?

Now I’m beginning to think that more news like this could in fact make a difference and mean that her baggage is just too weighty for even the Democrats and the MSM to drag around.

Maybe. Of course, as I wrote here, be careful what you wish for. Her replacement could be worse.

[NOTE: More here.]

Beauty at the Sunapee Fair

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been going to the Sunapee League of NH Craftsman Fair nearly every year for decades, and look forward to it with delight each time.

A juried fair with about 350 exhibitors in a series of large tents, the setting is a ski area in New Hampshire in the summer. There’s something about it that is just beautiful on a lovely August day or even a not-so-lovely one; I’ve even gone in light rain. I often meet a friend there who lives nearby, but this year she couldn’t make it and neither could anyone else I tried to rustle up, so like the Little Red Hen I did it myself.

The drive is long but extremely pleasant, especially as one gets within about thirty miles of the park and the mountains start coming into view. I always pass a couple of lakes, too. Sunday it was supposed to be overcast but the sun was out almost the whole time, not too hot and not too cool. And the Fair itself did not disappoint, not for an instant. But it never has.

It’s a riot of beauty and color, created by the dedication of a group of people who focus on the old-fashioned task of making objects by hand with skill and precision and a devotion to beauty. The vast majority of them succeed; I can only think of one or two exhibitors whose work is a tad bit schlocky.

Sometimes I don’t buy anything. They’re not giving this stuff away, after all. But this year I splurged a bit and purchased a couple of items.

Most of the exhibitors don’t seem especially focused on their websites, because when I looked them up I noticed that many are in a state of some disrepair, with only a couple of forlorn photos. But I thought I’d show you some of the better and most interesting ones.

Here’s a very strange necklace that is something like one I purchased, only mine doesn’t have that metal “x” on the wood. All of this woman’s stuff (her name is Kathleen Dustin) is extremely expensive, but this one was considerably less so. It gives me a very Zen-like feel, and I could use a bit more serenity these days:

necklace

Take a look at the entire website. Everything there is very unusual but beautifully done and definitely an eye-catching conversation piece. Here’s one of her polymer (clay) purses:

purse

Here’s another artist from the Fair, Ira Frost. I will say at the outset that his work isn’t especially to my taste (and it’s mega-expensive) but I find it fascinating and I am lost in admiration for his astounding carving skill. These pieces are all painted woodcarvings, and they look even better in person:

kestrel

owl

owlwing

woodpecker2

You can find an almost endless supply of photos of his work here.

Here’s another artist I like, Matt Brown. These are woodblocks that are made by the traditional hanga method. They are much more beautiful in person than in the photos. I own this one; bought it many years ago; it’s more dramatic than this, because the dark is actually much darker:

AlongFranconia2nd200

As I said, a lot of the artists don’t have fully functional webpages with good photos. And often the photos don’t do the work justice. The Fair has everything, and I never have enough time to see it all, no matter how much time I allow. If you’re ever in New England in August, hie yourself there.

John Hinderaker on the plight of the unarmed perpetrator

The New Neo Posted on by

Excellent, excellent article. Here’s an excerpt:

This is the point I really want to make: the constant emphasis on police shootings of *unarmed* men that we see in the press is, for the most part, crazy. If you are a perp, or a suspect, or an inoffensive person walking down the street, you may be unarmed, but the police officer is not. Nor, in most cases, will he have any immediate way to know whether you are armed or not. If you attack him, what do you expect him to do? Challenge you to an arm-wrestling match? He is entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. Attacking a police officer rarely ends well. Likewise with fleeing a police officer who is ordering you to stop.

If there is a problem here, it does not demand a thorough revamping of American police practices. Rather, it suggests that those who have influence with a small demographic group”“6% of the population, according to the Post”“impress upon them that they should not attack police officers under any circumstances, and if told to stop, they should stop. If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot.

This makes the point that should be obvious to all but has somehow gotten obscured by all the post-Brown propagandist verbiage, which is that a police officer can’t tell whether a belligerent aggressive suspect is armed or not unless he/she is brandishing the weapon in full sight. If you begin to attack a police officer, that officer can’t ascertain what hidden weapons you might have, but must defend him/herself and do it quickly and effectively. Officers are not required to be martyrs, although the left would like to pretend they should be.

Just one quibble with Hinderaker: the press is not crazy when it writes these preposterous things. It is purposeful. The press wants to guide you in a certain direction and believes that you don’t have the brains to see the fallacy of its argument, and in a large number of cases the press is correct about this.

I would also like to add something. Hinderaker writes that “If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot” should be a message taught to all those who would otherwise defy the police and try to attack them. I believe that most of these people already have heard it, and perhaps were taught it by their parents. However, they choose to defy that advice for a number of possible reasons: macho bravado, knowledge of guilt of crime and fear of apprehension, and/or being high on drugs and/or alcohol. What’s more, the “hands up, don’t shoot” crowd has perpetrated a related lie about Michael Brown, who never said or did any such thing. For some, their motivation is to get the opposite message across than the one that Hinderaker suggests should be spread around. One effect of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie is to tell would-be perpetrators that they’re better off defying a cop than surrendering, because it won’t help them to put their hands up since the cop will shoot them anyway. So the covert message is that they may as well try to attack the police officer (or run), who would just as soon shoot them as not no matter what they do.

In addition, if the person happens to be killed by a police officer as a result, it wouldn’t be so bad for the movement because it would garner more publicity and become another cause célé¨bre and grist for the publicity mill.