Time passes so quickly when we’re enjoying ourselves, doesn’t it?
But it’s been a while since I asked you to donate to a semi-worthy cause: this blog. And so I’m going to ask you again to use the “donate” button on the right sidebar beside the photo of the hat, and give whatever you see fit.
Every single donation— large or small—adds up, and helps me a great deal in continuing the blog. If each and every reader gave even a few dollars, it would be a glorious thing. But whether you decide to donate or not, please keep visiting and keep commenting. I appreciate all of you. Comments and readers are a very big part of what makes this blog work.
I thank you all in advance. I’ll probably repeat this notice every now and then for the next week, the equivalent of jiggling that cup/hat.
Drugs aren’t ordinarily involved in the formation of identical twins. They can be involved for fraternal ones, though, because fertility drugs tend to make it more likely that the mother will release two (or more) eggs in a single ovulation cycle. If each were fertilized, the resulting twins (or triplets, or other multiple births) would be fraternal. In contrast, identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two very soon after fertilization.
In this case the mother didn’t take fertility drugs. But she must have released two eggs anyway, which were then fertilized by one sperm each. Then, instead of developing into a single set of fraternal twins as would ordinarily happen, each fertilized egg split to form the two sets of identical twins. No wonder it’s rare!
Edward Klein has written Blood Feud, a book that purports to give the inside info on the Clintons and the Obamas and the fact that there’s no love lost between the two couples.
Klein is a curious figure. A former editor of the New York Times Magazine and Newsweek, he would appear to have peerless liberal MSM credentials. But after leaving those publications he turned to writing expose-type biographies that have not been kind to their liberal subjects.
I initially thought Klein might be a political changer. But that’s not entirely correct:
Having watched Klein’s subsequent literary career, Frankel added, “None of those books are the kind that normally you’d expect a New York Times person to produce.”
His former colleagues wonder how he emerged as a combative conservative targeting powerful liberals. Klein acknowledges hawkish sentiments as far back as the Vietnam War, but while working at Newsweek and the Times he realized that “it was not my business to push my personal ideology through the pages.”
He believes he has suffered not only for turning his back on the mainstream media world but also for succeeding as an outsider in the exclusive realm of conservative commentary. The left reviles him, and the right has yet to embrace him.
In other words, nobody quite trusts him, although he swears that each fact he publishes is confirmed by two reliable sources. Who knows? Reading a few excerpts from his book, I am suspicious. Although some may be true, it has the ring of gossip, and much of it falls into the category of What You Imagine Could Be True, as well as featuring dialogue in the style of Grade B novels.
Take this tale about Hillary’s reaction the night of Benghazi. It is distinguished by being plausible, but that doesn’t mean it actually happened this way:
“Hillary was stunned when she heard the president talk about the Benghazi attack,” one of her top legal advisers said in an interview. “Obama wanted her to say that the attack had been a spontaneous demonstration triggered by an obscure video on the Internet that demeaned the Prophet Mohammed.”
This adviser continued: “Hillary told Obama, ”˜Mr. President, that story isn’t credible. Among other things, it ignores the fact that the attack occurred on 9/11.’ But the president was adamant. He said, ”˜Hillary, I need you to put out a State Department release as soon as possible.’”
It’s possible that it happened just that way, with Hillary reluctant to go along. It’s also possible it didn’t happen that way at all, and Hillary just wants you to think that, finally freed of Obama’s pernicious influence and elected president on her own, she would have handled it a lot differently and a lot better.
At any rate, the story continues with her calling Bill for advice. This is very believable, too:
Hillary’s legal adviser provided further detail: “During their phone call, Bill started playing with various doomsday scenarios, up to and including the idea that Hillary consider resigning as secretary of state over the issue. But both he and Hillary quickly agreed that resigning wasn’t a realistic option.
If her resignation hurt Obama’s chances of winning re-election, her fellow Democrats would never forgive her. Hillary was already thinking of running for president in 2016, and her political future, as well as Obama’s, hung in the balance.”
I find that part fascinating. I’d thought about the possibility before. Whether it’s what actually happened or not in the case of Hillary, if she or any other politician in her position had been in deep disagreement with the way Obama wanted to handle the Benghazi fallout (or Benghazi itself), the only recourse that person would have had would have been to resign.
Talk about profiles in courage! It would have taken extraordinary guts to have resigned—because, as Klein indicates, it would have been the equivalent of stabbing herself and Obama and her party in the back simultaneously, for the sake of principle. I wonder how many politicians today would have acquitted themselves well had they been faced with that decision? Very few, if any. Politics is a dirty game, and it either attracts those with no principles at all in the first place, or encourages people to jettison their principles as time goes by if they want to get ahead. Another reason to not appoint politicians to the post of Secretary of State.
I also wonder something else: if, faced with such a decision, Hillary (or fill in the blank with any politician of your choice in a similar situation) had resigned in protest, how would her subsequent political fortunes have gone? My guess is that she would have sunk like a stone. But some small part of me would like to think that such an act of patriotism and devotion to truth would cause a groundswell of popular support. People say they want public figures with integrity, but do they? And could they recognize them even if they saw them?
Or do we get the politicians we deserve?
[NOTE: According to Klein, here’s a quote from Bill Clinton:
I hate that man Obama more than any man I’ve ever met, more than any man who ever lived.
So, has Bill succumbed to that dread disease that’s only supposed to affect Republicans: Obama Derangement Syndrome? If so, I have to say he’s stepped up a notch in my estimation—although his reasons for succumbing are probably a lot different than most. For Bill it’s probably personal rather than political.]
He was wrong about the time frame. He was wrong about the “brilliant” part; we could fill in with a lot of other adjectives, and “inexperienced” and would be among the kindest. Also, perhaps “generated”—with its implication of “manufactured rather than real”—wasn’t the best word, either.
But otherwise, Joe Biden had the right idea when he said in 2008:
“It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”
“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities.
How about both?
And yet in 2012 they mocked Romney for saying that Russia was our greatest geopolitical enemy, and for predicting that Obama’s complete abandonment of Iraq would have dire consequences.
Every time Hillary opens her mouth lately something worse pops out of it. Did she suddenly get bad at politics, or was she already this bad in 2008? I can’t remember, but I think the depth of the problem is relatively new. Maybe in the ensuing almost-six years of high living and jet-setting since 2008, she’s lost whatever common touch she may have once had:
Clinton responded to criticism of her wealth in an interview with the Guardian newspaper published Saturday night by suggesting Americans won’t be concerned about the more than $100 million her family has reportedly earned in recent years because they’re not “truly well off.”
“They don’t see me as part of the problem,” Clinton said of Americans who are upset about income inequality, adding, “Because we pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through dint of hard work.”
Clinton earned an $8 million advance for her 2003 book “Living History” and her publisher is rumored to have paid “significantly more” for “Hard Choices.” Additionally, Clinton reportedly earns $200,000 in speaking fees each time she makes a speech. Bill Clinton has reportedly made over $100 million in speaking fees since leaving office.
I guess that, in the circles in which the Clintons run these days, a person doesn’t have real money unless it’s in the billions.
And although these kinds of statements should hurt her—and especially her ability to be perceived as a person who can feel your pain—many of the liberals who want her to be the first female president and think she’s owed the job will support her no matter what she says.
[NOTE: To clarify, I happen to think that quote is incorrect in characterizing what Hillary said. She didn’t actually say that she and Bill aren’t “truly well off,” although she didn’t say they are, either. She left it somewhat ambiguous. But the idea that she somehow gets off the hook as a nefarious person of privilege because she pays taxes and others don’t (when in fact all the candidates—including the Clintons—have used perfectly legal tax strategies to reduce their taxes as much as possible) is absurd and off-putting, particularly after her “dead broke” faux pas in an earlier interview.
As far as I’m concerned, Clinton can do with her money whatever she wants, as long as it’s legal. And if she wants to voluntarily redistribute it, that’s fine with me, too.]
I was at the beach the other day and I noticed that about half the people walking around seemed to be tattooed. Highly unattractive, IMHO.
In other beach observations, the going rate for a soft-serve kiddie-sized ice cream cone is now four dollars. And a kiddie-sized cone—the very smallest you can purchase—is now the equivalent of two scoops.
…[blamed] misinformation that is being deliberately planted by criminal organizations, by smuggling networks, about what people can expect if they come to the United States” for the influx of Central Americans.
This may just be the truest thing the administration has said in years.
Of course, belief in the untrue assertions of those “criminal organizations” and “smuggling networks” was encouraged by Obama’s bypassing Congress in June of 2012, prior to the 2012 election, to announce his very own passage of the blocked DREAM act. But who needs Congress?—we don’t need no steenking Congress.
Deputy DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the department is “surging resources to increase our capacity to detain individuals and adults with children, and to handle immigration court hearings.”
“This will allow Immigration and Customs Enforcement ”” or ICE ”” to return unlawful migrants from Central America who are ordered removed to their home countries more quickly,” Mayorkas said. “”¦With very few exceptions, all individuals apprehended, including adults with children, are placed in removal proceedings.”
“”¦But let me make one very important point, and that is that our detention and notice-to-appear decisions are made on a case-by-case basis, and of course, our detention decisions are predicated on an assessment of our prioritization, including at the very top our national security and public safety concerns.”
Sounds pretty tough, right? Of course, why was there virtually no response from the feds till now, after the whole thing was publicized on Fox?
And then there’s also this [emphasis mine]:
“The question before us is how can we make the process more efficient, given the surge in the number of individuals who are being apprehended, and how best can we address those individuals in terms of their humanitarian claims of relief, as well as the removal for those who are not claiming credible fear,” Mayorkas said.
Aye, there’s the rub. Who among them don’t have “humanitarian claims,” and who wouldn’t be claiming “credible fear”? Nobody.
You think I’m making up that “nobody”? Think again:
…[T]he children and adults respond with very deliberate and rehearsed answers when questioned by Border Patrol.
They immediately claim credible fear from gang violence or say, “I was scared I would be killed,” one of the Border Patrol agents working along the border told TheBlaze.
“It’s something they’re all saying and it’s obvious that it is well-rehearsed and it is a consistent story,” said Albert Spratte, a Border Patrol agent and union representative with the National Border Patrol Council’s Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley sector. “We can’t even get them to answer their name before they tell us the gangs were the reason they fled their country.”
And what of the administration’s policy of releasing the newcomers with a letter to appear in court in a bit? That usually goes about as you’d expect:
They all know that their family and friends before them received an “order to appear in court” document that allows them safe passage throughout the country.
The illegal immigrants rarely report to court within the 90 days ordered, and most disappear into the fabric of immigrant communities throughout the country without fear of deportation.
I don’t see either Munoz or Mayorkas announcing a change in that policy.
The whole thing seems to be a pretense to give the appearance of action when in fact all that might happen is a speeding-up of an already corrupt system. Why no National Guard to actually guard the borders? One can only conclude that it’s because the federal government has no intention of stopping this influx.
The truth on the widely covered “John Doe” is that two judges, one state and one federal, reviewed the accusations of partisans within a Democrat District Attorney’s Office and determined their theories have no merit or basis in law.
Each of these judges explicitly issued judicial orders that these partisan prosecutors must end their investigation immediately.
These are the truths that need to be stated over and over again to fight the slander directed at me and our campaign by my political opponents.
Still, many in the media proceed as though the opinion of the partisan prosecutors is new information and ignore the truths I have stated above. It is not. It is old news that has already been discounted by two judges. No charges. No case.
In reaction to the information that was released to the public and seized on by the media, the federal judge just this week sharply criticized the prosecutors. He said that they are now seeking “refuge in the Court of Public Opinion, having lost in this Court on the law.”
Watching the media frenzy it is clear that this is what happens when someone takes on the big government special interests. They push back. No wonder so many politicians are afraid to make tough decisions.
That last point is a very good one: this not only was intended to have an effect on Walker, but this and other baseless charges promulgated by the MSM have an effect on anyone who would run for office on the right.
Walker is one brave guy. I wrote in January of 2014 that he was my favorite so far for president in 2016. He still is.
As I wrote about a different attack on Walker back in February:
The whole thing also works on the low information voter, who (outside Wisconsin) doesn’t know much about Walker yet and might even like him if he/she learned something about him. Might even vote for him, for goodness’ sake. So the idea is to get in on the ground floor, to brand Walker as corrupt and get people to form a negative opinion of him before they know much else.
It works. The template, of course, is what happened to Sarah Palin at the hands of Democrats and the MSM during the campaign of 2008. I saw and heard it occur in real time, and it happened quickly and was incredibly effective.
They are starting earlier now, that’s all. And although Walker’s life doesn’t give them much ammunition, they will find what they can and make the most of it.
It wasn’t rocket science to make that prediction, which I had also made a bit earlier:
The Christie brouhaha and the Walker aide investigation not only have the goal of trying to bring these particular men down. They also serve as notice to anyone else even thinking of running on the Republican side, letting them know what’s ahead for them, no matter how uncorrupted they may appear to be or how uncorrupted they think they actually are.
It’s been difficult getting clear on the IRS timeline, but here are some salient facts that have come out recently, from Kimberley Strassel at the WSJ:
As to Ms. Lerner’s behavior, consider that House Ways & Means Chairman Dave Camp first sent a letter asking if the IRS was engaged in targeting in June, 2011. Ms. Lerner denied it. She engineered a plant in an audience at a tax conference in May 2013 to drop the bombshell news about targeting (maybe hoping nobody would notice?). She has subsequently asserted a Fifth Amendment right to silence in front of the only people actually investigating the affair, Congress. Now we learn that her hard drive supposedly defied modernity and suffered total annihilation about 10 days after the Camp letter arrived.
Some “coincidences” are just too coincidental.
It’s also been hard to get much information on the emails of the people I call the IRS Six—those other IRS employees who figure in the investigation and whose emails, just like Lois Lerner’s, have “coincidentally” disappeared off the face of the earth. Most articles I’ve read so far mention the Six but fail to indicate whether the IRS is claiming their email difficulties occurred in separate incidents, or whether it all happened in a single huge kaboom. Also, I haven’t read whether other IRS employees were affected or just these Six plus Lerner.
In addition, I’d love to know how often such crashes happen at the IRS. Are they a routine matter? If not, the crash becomes even more suspicious, if such a thing were possible. And if so, why on earth wouldn’t the IRS have fixed the problem—or at least, its backup system—long long ago? Is it possible that the IRS doesn’t want its emails saved for very long? And why, pray tell, would that be?
I’ve also had some difficulty finding the exact date range of the missing emails. I know that information is out there, because I’ve seen it before, but I don’t recall where and I can’t seem to find it now.
However, I did find this Seattle Times article purporting to give the timeline for the IRS scandal. But its timeline is incomplete, to say the least. For example, it leaves out the Camp letter that Strassel at the WSJ indicates Lerner received 10 days before her computer crash, and it doesn’t tell us the dates of the missing emails. It does add this, though:
Dcember 2011: The computer of Lerner’s boss’ chief of staff, Nikole Flax, crashes.
So at least we know that one of the Six had a separate crash; I suppose it stands to reason they all did. What are the chances of that being a coincidence (again, it would help to know whether the IRS system was so bad that computers were crashing constantly everywhere)? And what was the timeline on each crash for the Six?
Flax is the person who has since been reported as having visited the White House “35 times after talking with former head of tax exempt groups Lois Lerner about working to criminally prosecute conservative tea party groups for ‘lying’ about political activity.” Flax is listed as having spoken with a top Obama aide during some of those meetings.
So I’ve got another question: what was Flax’s timeline for these White House visits? Had she been going to the White House at the same rate in 2009, for example? Or did her meetings suddenly begin at a certain point, and if so, when? What about her predecessor? Did that person go to the White House much, if at all?
Strassel lists some of the other smoke surrounding this smoldering fire:
But the alleged disappearance of Ms. Lerner’s hard drive””and the fact that the missing conversations are those the former IRS director had with people outside the IRS””has suddenly resurrected, with force, the explosive possibility that she was chatting with Democrats who mattered.
There’s plenty of reason to believe she was. Just last week Congress discovered (via a subpoena to the Justice Department) emails showing that Ms. Lerner had conversations with Justice prosecutors about investigating conservative nonprofits. Who else in the Obama administration was Ms. Lerner talking to?
Or consider the extraordinary interaction between congressional Democrats and the IRS. Some of it was in a recent complaint filed to the Senate Ethics Committee by the Center for Competitive Politics against nine Democratic senators. It details their many letters and statements (that we know of) demanding the IRS shut down specific organizations that posed a threat to their Democratic House and Senate majority in the 2010 election.
I’ve been puzzled by something else in connection with the IRS scandal and the emails in particular: why would the emails show anything that implicated the senders, even if they are guilty? Why would people plotting something like this leave incriminating evidence in emails, which tend to be hard to eradicate (that is, if you’re not in the IRS, in which case it’s apparently easy)? Don’t conspirators usually employ other means? Carrier pigeon or some such?
[ADDENDUM: One reason I wanted the timeline for the missing emails is that I suspect that even after Lerner’s computer crashed in June 2011, the emails for the previous six-months were still on the server and could easily have been recovered. Why were they not? Lerner’s email to the IT guy after the crash inquires about missing “documents” rather than emails. Would she, or someone else, not have ordinarily tried to recover the emails as well? Was no attempt made to do so at the time? And if so, why not?:
It was unclear why the IRS did not attempt to recover the emails from backup servers in June 2011, especially since Lerner told an IRS computer technician in a July 2011 email, “There were some documents in the files that are irreplaceable.”
Shawn Henry, the FBI’s former cyber director, said technicians should have been able to retrieve data from the servers around the times the computers crashed.
“If they knew there was a problem in 2011,” said Henry, now president of CrowdStrike, a security technology company, “they could have or should have been able to recover it.”
We also have an IRS policy change in May of 2013:
At the time that Lerner’s computer crashed, IRS policy had been to make copies of all IRS employees’ email inboxes every day and hold them for six months. The agency changed the policy in May 2013 to keep these snapshots for a longer, unspecified amount of time. Had this been the policy in 2011, when at least two of the computer crashes occurred, there likely could have been backups of the lost emails today.
The chief executive for an email-archiving company, Pierre Villeneuve of Jatheon Technologies, said most public and private sector organizations keep emails for several years, not six months, because of financial regulations and inexpensive computer storage.
Gee, I guess the IRS could have done that in the first place. But we can’t expect the IRS to know anything about financial regulations or computer storage, can we?
As for what else occurred in May of 2013 in the IRS scandal that might have prompted the agency to finally change its email-saving policy, plenty. Checking back, I see that I was writing about the topic pretty much on a daily basis during that month, which reflects how enormously the story had heated up during that time. On May 22, Lerner took the Fifth, for example. Interesting that it was that month that the IRS finally decided to keep emails a bit longer than six months.]
Think about it. As James Oliphant points out—in a piece which indicates that the writer would answer “fool” to the knave vs. fool question—“the move is a tacit acknowledgment that many of the assumptions that Obama and his foreign policy team made about the world have proven to be incorrect.”
Obama doesn’t like to backtrack or admit he was wrong about anything. He’s certainly not explicitly doing the latter, but he is explicitly doing the former, and it implies the latter. It is particularly significant that he’s doing it in an arena where, as Oliphant observes, “Iraq was a box that his administration had checked.”
Oliphant is assuming that Obama wanted things to stay stable and peaceful in Iraq. And although, unlike Oliphant, I would answer that “knave vs. fool” question “both,” I agree with him. Whatever Obama’s long-term strategic goals around the world (and I think we can agree that one thing they involve is taking America down a peg or two), he cannot have wanted to face intense public pressure to do something about an Iraq that’s collapsing despite his having declared it relatively peaceful and promising under his watch just a couple of short years ago.
And it’s ironic that he might have prevented this had he been more serious about negotiating a SOFA and leaving several thousand troops there. He still could have taken credit for taking most of the troops out, and for leaving an Iraq that was at least somewhat stable. My guess is that in this case he really believed that Iraq would not blow up under his watch, and that he could have his withdrawal cake and eat it too. I wonder if any of his advisors warned him against thinking that way, and if so which ones.
