A small LinkSwarm for a busy Friday:
Hillary Clinton wanted to attend this evening's baseball game but she couldn't get out of her second shift at McDonalds. Money's tight.
— SunnyRight (@sunnyright) June 26, 2014
Apparently, the leading cause of hard drive failures is subpoenas.
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) June 25, 2014
I hope to have a longer post of the kangaroo court trying Michael Quinn Sullivan next week…
Since Iraq and Syria are now all part of the same greater Sunni/Shia conflict, let’s take a look at recent developments in the broader theater:
The War Nerd pinpoints the biggest reason for ISIS’s rapid Iraq advance: the flat geography of the area they’ve taken: “It’s the Bonneville Salt Flats of insurgency, the place you go to set new speed records.” He also thinks the Kurdish Pesh Merga will slaughter them if ISIS is foolish enough to make a big push into the northern hill country.
Michael Totten has a depressing interview with Lee Smith, the author of The Consequences of Syria:
Read the whole thing.
A look a Syria’s Christians, who are getting it from both sides.
Here’s a piece that suggests that moderate Sunnis are just using ISIS to get Maliki out. (Well, what are a few Shia mass graves anyway?) Yeah, not buying it. It’s the guys with guns who use “moderates,” not the other way around. Also argues for a de jour rather than merely de facto partition of Iraq.
This bad (click to embiggen):
GDP Disaster: Final Q1 GDP Crashes To -2.9%, Worst Since 2009 Far Below The Worst Expectations http://t.co/mUd91DZrdA pic.twitter.com/NhtywQBpW4
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2014
Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, contracted at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 2.9% in the first three months of the year, according to the Commerce Department’s third reading released Wednesday. That was the fastest rate of decline since the first quarter of 2009, when output fell 5.9%.
Just about every sector was down:
GDP broken down by components: aside for the collapse in PCE, everything was negative in Q1 pic.twitter.com/zuikiCaHkV
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) June 25, 2014
My takeaway is that ObamaCare has been twice as bad for the economy as the subprime meltdown.
“A new report released Tuesday by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., claims more than a thousand veterans may have died between 2001 and 2011 as the result of misconduct and a ‘culture of mismanagement’ at the Department of Veterans Affairs.”
Obama didn’t make this mess, which was a long time in coming. But he promised to fix it and hasn’t, and in fcat it’s gotten considerably worse on his watch.
Here’s the actual report, which I haven’t had a chance to read all of yet.
Hot on the heels of Hillary Clinton claiming that her family was dead broke in 2001 (for certain values of “dead broke” that include being worth more than $20 million) comes news that Hillary has doubled down on the “shucks, we’re just regular folks” gambit.
In an interview with The Guardian, Clinton said she isn’t “truly well off”:
But with her huge personal wealth, how could Clinton possibly hope to be credible on this issue when people see her as part of the problem, not its solution?
“But they don’t see me as part of the problem,” she protests, “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,” she says, letting off another burst of laughter. If past form is any guide, she must be finding my question painful.
The full quote is actually more damning than just the “not truly well off” bit because it suggests an even more radical disconnect from the economic reality most Americans face every day. Evidently Hillary is suggesting she gets a pass from class warfare envy because: A.) She and Bill have actually deigned to obey the law by paying taxes, and B.) Americans know just how hard it is for Bill to give $103 million worth of speeches.
A few choice reactions:
Seems like an opportune time to tweet these pictures again pic.twitter.com/wkTjXguf2d
pic.twitter.com/Ffru3wTJFw http://t.co/Om9zZfvkxr
— Elliott Schwartz (@elliosch) June 22, 2014
"From atop her jewel-encrusted palanquin, Hillary insisted the peasants didn't view her as "truly well off." @ThePantau @instapundit
— BattleSwarm (@BattleSwarmBlog) June 22, 2014
#HillaryClintonPovertySongs
The Long And Winding….Broke :|
#SpecialReport pic.twitter.com/QCzEOITZMs
— Shaughn (@Shaughn_A) June 24, 2014
Moreover, Hillary’s daughter seems to have picked up on her mother’s entitlement issues. It seems that the woman married to a former Goldman Sachs manager who started his own hedge fund, the woman who owns a $10 million Manhattan apartment, the woman who was given a $3 million wedding and the woman who MSNBC paid $600,000 a year to (or $26,724 for every minute she appeared on-air) says she doesn’t care about money.
At least one pundit has suggested that Hillary’s clan suffers from “Status-Income Disequilibrium”, in which people with All The Right Opinions suddenly realize how much wealthier fellow members of the Overclass are. Or, as Rush Limbaugh puts it, “in [Hillary]’s world, $50 million is peanuts.”
Let’s give Bill Clinton one small piece of praise in all this: As far as I can tell, on this particular subject he’s apparently been smart enough to keep his mouth shut…
Some Texas statewide race news to start your week with:
Democrats have already started describing the Republican slate as the “Abbott, Patrick, Paxton ticket.” There is always a “be careful what you wish for” component to these races. Patrick in particular is a very shrewd operator who has widespread support from the conservative base. He is a dangerous opponent. Democrats who underestimate him do so at their peril.
I see that #NoMoreAusterity is trending on Twitter this morning. It seems the usual leftist protest sorts are rallying against the Cameron government’s “austerity.”
The only problem is it doesn’t exist.
Real austerity is cutting government spending until it matches receipts. Under David Cameron, deficit spending has merely gone from 11.4% of GDP in 2010 to a projected 5.8% in 2014. So the UK government hasn’t practiced austerity, it’s merely slowed the rate at which it’s digging its own grave.
For the protestors, this simply will not do. They want government to give them things, and if it means having the moribund economies of Greece and Spain, so be it.
But unlike Greece and Spain, the UK won’t be able to get Germany to bail them out, nor to hold down the hyperinflation that is the inevitable endpoint of excess deficit spending.
I couldn’t make Hillary Clinton’s signing at Bookpeople today because I have to work for a living. Plus tickets were “sold out.”
Fortunately, someone else was able to make it to her D.C. stop:
Believe it or not, there seem to be a few actual glimmers of sanity in California in the latest roundup:
Instapundit linked to this Ms. magazine piece. (Yes, evidently they’re still publishing. Who knew?)
It starts off: “One in five college women are sexually assaulted, and only 12 percent of college rape survivors will report their rape to the police. And yet, some men accused of such assaults are playing the victim.”
First, the 1-in-5 statistic is completely made up garbage:
No crime, much less one as serious as rape, has a victimization rate remotely approaching 20 or 25 percent, even over many years. The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience.
Indeed, the Justice Department shows rates of 6 rapes or sexual assaults of women per 1000 on college campuses. That means that Ms.‘s rape estimates overstate the incidence by 42 times. That’s like saying “The average price of a fast food hamburger is around $100.”
Secondly, if men are “falsely accused of sexual assault and unjustly punished by their college’s judicial system” because their college does not observe the due process of law, then guess what? They are the victims.
Back to Ms. and their lies: “According to the FBI, only eight percent of rape reports are unfounded. And this is most likely an overestimate of false reports: the FBI counts cases as unfounded when deemed so by law enforcement officials, not when they are proven false through a trial.”
First, the FBI statistics are meaningless in relation to the campus cases under discussion, because those statistics deal with charges which were brought up under the due process of the law, not the “men are considered guilty until proven innocent” kangaroo courts universities have imposed based on politicized and misguided Obama Administration guidelines. Second, the “not when they are proven false through a trial” negates the statistic. Indeed, one gets the impression that Ms. is upset that men are found innocent in real courtrooms at all.
More Ms. blather: “While a false rape claim is undoubtedly detrimental to the accused…” Why yes, being falsely accused and branded a sex offender due to a complete lack of due process is indeed “detrimental.” How nice of you to notice.
Due process, the rule of law, the burden of proof and the presumption of innocence are rights that protect all Americans, of whatever sex, color or creed. The desire to throw them out to meet the demands of radical feminist identity politics is an abhorrent perversion of justice that should be opposed by all Americans.