new en -titlist golf ball!
Hillary joking abut her e mails on Jimmy Kimmel late night TV but cannot meet press.
Elect then prosecute. (See 1 and 3 below.)
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More commentary regarding Obama's Iran Deal and Bret Stephens . (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Trump on Clinton criminality and independent prosecutor. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)
2a) The New Dictators’ Club
By Eric Mack
Donald Trump's campaign speech in the battleground state of Ohio on Monday was billed as another presentation on law and order, but it wound up being a referendum on Hillary Clinton's "criminality," as he called for an independent investigation of the Democratic nominee's actions due to his belief that the Justice Department has a Clinton bias.
"After the FBI and Department of Justice whitewash of the Clinton email crimes, they certainly cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton's new crimes, which happen all the time," Trump told a rally in Akron, Ohio.
". . . The Justice Department is required to appoint an independent special prosecutor because it has proven itself to be, really, sadly, a political arm of the White House. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before. The DOJ has acted very unethically, particularly the Attorney General's private lengthy, 39-minute meeting in the back of an airplane before the Department's decision not to prosecute her for crimes that would have been prosecuted against any other citizen in our country.
"If the Justice Department fails to do so, it will make it even clearer that a second of four primary constitutional departments have been corrupted. It's as simple as that."
Trump's rallies have broken out into chants of "Lock her up" in recent weeks and this one did the same after he stated: "As the evidence has become public over the last several months, I have become increasingly shocked by the vast scope of Hillary Clinton's criminality."
A transcript of Trump's Monday night speech can be found at Heavy.com.
"Every insider, getting rich off of our broken system, is throwing money at Hillary Clinton," Trump said. "It's the powerful protecting the powerful. Insiders fighting for insiders.
"I am fighting for you."
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4)
More commentary regarding Obama's Iran Deal and Bret Stephens . (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Trump on Clinton criminality and independent prosecutor. (See 3 below.)
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A recent CNN poll asked 1,000 female DNC delegates if they would sleep with Bill Clinton.
38% said "Yes", while 62% said
"Never Again."
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Erick Erickson and The Republican's Humpty Dumpty. (See 4 below.)
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Another take on the impact of robots! (See 5 below.)
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Another take on the impact of robots! (See 5 below.)
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1)
Clinton’s Ticking Time Bomb
Any Republicans hoping the ongoing ethical problems revolving around the Clinton Foundation will somehow turn the tide in the presidential election are likely indulging in excessive optimism. That said, the Clinton camp is making a mistake if its denizens think the firestorm regarding conflicts of interest involving foundation donors at Hillary Clinton’s State Department can be doused by vague promises about the foundation’s future conduct. As the Wall Street Journal noted on Friday, assurances by former President Clinton that the foundation won’t accept corporate or foreign donations if his wife is elected won’t help. Nor will his promise to resign from its board. Or guarantees that Chelsea will stop raising money for it. As the Journal’s editorial correctly points out, if such activities become problematic once Hillary Clinton becomes president, why weren’t they just as inappropriate when she was secretary of state? During those four years, the Clinton family business—a political slush fund thinly disguised as a charity that peddles influence in exchange for supporting the former first family’s lavish lifestyle–was doing big business. And, as Clinton’s emails and the reporting done by liberal newspapers like the New York Times show, we’ve just started to scratch the surface of revelations involving links between those who gave the Clintons big bucks and their influence on U.S. foreign policy.
Secure in the knowledge that Trump’s rants will keep the focus off of Hillary’s problems, their foundation is likely to keep on amassing huge donations right up until the last possible moment. In doing so they are forgetting that if Trump is defeated, the liberal mainstream media will likely go back to their early 2015 mode, when papers like the Times were devoting massive resources to reporting on the foundation’s activities. They won’t hesitate to go back to investigations that could mire her administration in scandals, which won’t compete with Trump nonsense for the front page. The past and continued activities of the foundation could become a cancer that might eat away at her presidency. Every dime it took in during her campaign, especially those given in the last months once her lead over Trump began to build, will be especially scrutinized.
The Clintons are either too besotted with their self-image as do-gooders unfairly afflicted by a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” or too invested in the defensive idea that any systematic shutdown right now would prove their critics right, to listen to sensible Democrats and liberals. Though Trump’s behavior may mean the foundation won’t stop Clinton from winning in November, it’s possible Bill and Hillary’s stubborn refusal to face facts about the foundation has sewn the seeds of her presidency’s self-immolation.
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2)
Former Pentagon Analyst:
As in Past, Iran Seeking to Humiliate US With Accusations of Nuclear-Deal Violations (INTERVIEW)
Recent accusations by top Iranian officials that the US has violated last year’s nuclear agreement merely represent a continuation of a longstanding Iranian policy of “humiliating” the US, a Middle East expert and former Pentagon analyst toldThe Algemeiner on Monday.
Harold Rhode, an expert on Islamic culture who worked for the Pentagon for 28 years, was referring to the latest Iranian claims that America is not abiding by the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), reported by Iranian regime-aligned news agency Tasnim on Sunday.
According to the report, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, an adviser to the speaker of the Iranian parliament, said, “Iran proved its honesty to everyone, but the US reneged (on the agreement) as usual and like (it did) in the past.”
Last month, as The Algemeiner reported, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani threatened that Iran would withdraw from the JCPOA if the US did not live up to its commitments.
“Without understanding Iranian culture, it is impossible to understand what is going on,” Rhode said. “Nothing is in and of itself. The way negotiations work among Iranians is that an agreement as we understand it means nothing. It is nothing more than a step along the way to getting what they want.”
Rhode continued: “In the Middle East, you never take responsibility for anything yourself; you always push whatever it is onto somebody else. You blame others. And the problem is that both President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, I don’t know whether willfully or unwillfully, refuse to understand Iran in the Iranian context. And the Iranian context is that the agreement means nothing, except as a way to shame America into doing what Iran wants, which is to push further and further.”
Rhode, who studied at a university in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad in the late 1970s and speaks Farsi, pointed to the 1979 taking of US diplomats in Tehran hostage for 444 days as a past example of this behavior.
“From an Iranian cultural point of view, at all times there is a balance — ‘Are you giving it or are you getting it?’ And this has nothing to do with women,” Rhode said. “It’s simply domination; it’s simply power. That is what happened with the hostage crisis under Jimmy Carter.”
According to Rhode, the Iranian students who took over the US Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 at first “figured they could get something small out of America.” But, he noted, when America “gave in and tried to negotiate with the new regime over the hostages, the Iranians said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a good thing going,’ so they kept pushing more and more and humiliated America. And each time America gave in, the humiliation got stronger. Throughout the Middle East, it showed that America was weak and either unwilling or unable to do what was necessary to stop the whole thing.”
The fact that the American hostages were released on the very day that Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president in January 1981 was very significant, Rhode said.“When Reagan became president — and this has something to do with Donald Trump as well — the Iranians were petrified he’d nuke them,” Rhode said. “The exact moment the plane carrying the hostages home left Iranian airspace was when Reagan raised his hand to take the oath of office. Now the question is why. Because the Iranians were afraid of Reagan.”
Turning to the handling of the Iran nuclear issue by the current administration in Washington, Rhode said, “When you don’t want to learn from what has happened in the past, the saying is, ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ For Obama and Kerry, the nuclear agreement is exactly in that context. The Iranian leadership is playing them, constantly humiliating them.”
Rhode, whose detailed analysis of Iranian negotiating behavior for the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs can be found here, said a proper American approach to Iran would entail ensuring that “the Iranians understand it is not in their interest” to defy the United States.
“In the Middle East, there is no such thing as public opinion; there is survival. I saw how people in Iran went overnight from being pro-Shah to pro-Khomeini,” he said, referring to the Islamic Revolution that ousted Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi and ushered in the reign of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Rhode concluded: “We’re in a situation today in which it’s not just the Islamic world, but the entire world, which is seeing America as a paper tiger. Two things are always necessary in a power relationship — the ability and the willingness to impose your will. Lacking both, it’s as if you have no power and no ability. You could be the strongest country in the world, but if you have no will, it’s as if you have no power. The Iranians know that Obama has no will, and therefore they can say and do whatever they want.”
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Meanwhile, Reuters reported on Monday that German exports to Iran jumped 15 percent in the first half of 2016 compared to the same time period last year, thanks to the removal of international sanctions in the wake of the nuclear agreement.
Michael Tockuss, the head of the German-Iranian Chamber of Commerce, was quoted by Reuters as saying exports to Iran were expected to rise by as much as 25% for the whole of 2016, and by 30% in 2017.
“The sanctions against Iran were built up over several years and it now will take some years to reverse them and establish new business ties,” Tockuss said.On Sunday, as reported in The Algemeiner, Iran released images of its first domestically built long-range missile defense system — called the Bavar 373.
2a) The New Dictators’ Club
An echo of the 1930s in the budding alliance of Russia, Iran, Turkey and China.
In the fall of 1940 the governments of Japan, Italy and Germany—bitter enemies in World War I—signed the Tripartite Pact, pledging mutual support to “establish and maintain a new order of things” in Europe and Asia. Within five years, 70 million people would be killed in the effort to build, and then destroy, that new order.
The Pact was the culminating act in a series of nonaggression, friendship and neutrality treaties signed by the dictatorships of the day, sometimes to deceive anxious democracies but more often to divvy up the anticipated spoils of conquest. So it’s worth noting our new era of cooperation between dictatorships—and to think about where it could lead.
The era began in July 2015, when Iran’s Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani paid a visit to Moscow to propose a plan to save Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria from collapse. Iran and Russia are not natural allies, even if they have a common client in Damascus. Iranians have bitter memories of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, and the Kremlin has never been fond of Islamists, even of the Shiite variety.
But what tipped the scales in favor of a joint operation was a shared desire to humiliate the U.S. and kick it out of the Middle East. “America’s long-term scheme for the region is detrimental to all nations and countries, particularly Iran and Russia, and it should be thwarted through vigilance and closer interaction,” Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei told Vladimir Putin during the Russian’s visit to Tehran last November.
Since then, Tehran has agreed to purchase $8 billion in top-shelf Russian weapons and is seeking Moscow’s help to build another 10 nuclear reactors—useful reminders of how the mullahs are spending their sanctions-relief windfall. The two countries have also conducted joint naval exercises in the Caspian Sea. Just last week Russia used Iranian air bases (a little too publicly for Tehran’s taste) to conduct bombing raids on Syria.
All this is happening as the nuclear deal was supposed to be nudging Iran in a more pro-American direction. It’s also happening as Moscow and Ankara are moving toward rapprochement and even a possible alliance, less than a year after the Turks shot down a Russian jet. Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim allowed last week that Mr. Assad will remain in power for the foreseeable future, and Russian media outlets are touting the possibility that Russian jets might use the air base at Incirlik to bomb targets in Syria. That all but presumes U.S. withdrawal.
Would Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan forfeit a U.S. alliance for the sake of a condominium with Russia, his country’s historic enemy? The real marvel is that it hasn’t happened already. Washington first proved useless to Ankara by failing to depose Mr. Assad. It’s again proving useless by failing to destroy Islamic State.
Barack Obama went out of his way to court Mr. Erdogan in his first term, but strongmen always have an instinctive contempt for feckless moralists. There’s a reason Turkish newspapers—all of them organs of the state—are whipping Turks into an anti-American frenzy with allegations that retired American generals were behind July’s failed coup. Mr. Erdogan is rapidly Iranianizing his regime on the Khomeini model. Turning the U.S. into a Great Satan is a necessary part of the process.
Then there’s China. On Monday, a Russian military spokesman announced that his country’s Pacific fleet would conduct joint operations with the Chinese navy in the South China Sea. This follows an apparently coordinated effort by the two navies in June to encroach Japanese territorial waters near the disputed Senkaku islands.
Mr. Putin’s relations with Beijing haven’t always been smooth—China is as adept at stealing Russian military technology as it is at hacking U.S. secrets, and the Russians don’t appreciate being treated as junior partners. But the drills in the South China Sea are another reminder that the Kremlin’s overriding foreign policy goal is to hobble and diminish the U.S. It’s a goal Beijing appears to share.
And why not? President Obama and his advisers continue to insist that the world has never been a better, safer, happier place than under their benign stewardship, meaning they no longer even register the continuous embarrassments of their foreign policy. The administration has become the Black Knight from “ Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” comically indifferent to his own dismemberment. Arms and legs all hacked off? “Tis but a scratch!”
Perhaps it’s in every strongman’s nature to seek and admire his political reflection wherever he finds it, whether it’s in a czar, an ayatollah, a sultan or a general secretary. Then again, what mainly unites the leaders of the new dictators’ club is the shared perception that they stand to lose very little in working against a country they detest and a president they contemn.
That’s a perception that is unlikely to change with the next U.S. administration. Readers searching for historical analogies with the present would be wrong to reach for the Tripartite Pact. But the ingredients from which that foul soup was made have now been laid on the table.
3) Trump Calls for Independent Prosecutor for Clinton's 'Criminality'+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
By Eric Mack
Donald Trump's campaign speech in the battleground state of Ohio on Monday was billed as another presentation on law and order, but it wound up being a referendum on Hillary Clinton's "criminality," as he called for an independent investigation of the Democratic nominee's actions due to his belief that the Justice Department has a Clinton bias.
"After the FBI and Department of Justice whitewash of the Clinton email crimes, they certainly cannot be trusted to quickly or impartially investigate Hillary Clinton's new crimes, which happen all the time," Trump told a rally in Akron, Ohio.
". . . The Justice Department is required to appoint an independent special prosecutor because it has proven itself to be, really, sadly, a political arm of the White House. Nobody has ever seen anything like this before. The DOJ has acted very unethically, particularly the Attorney General's private lengthy, 39-minute meeting in the back of an airplane before the Department's decision not to prosecute her for crimes that would have been prosecuted against any other citizen in our country.
"If the Justice Department fails to do so, it will make it even clearer that a second of four primary constitutional departments have been corrupted. It's as simple as that."
Trump's rallies have broken out into chants of "Lock her up" in recent weeks and this one did the same after he stated: "As the evidence has become public over the last several months, I have become increasingly shocked by the vast scope of Hillary Clinton's criminality."
A transcript of Trump's Monday night speech can be found at Heavy.com.
"Every insider, getting rich off of our broken system, is throwing money at Hillary Clinton," Trump said. "It's the powerful protecting the powerful. Insiders fighting for insiders.
"I am fighting for you."
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4)
A Case Study in Why the GOP’s Humpty Dumpty Won’t Get Put Back Together Easily
Last night I linked to this piece by Steve Deace about conservative media failing to do its job in telling the truth about Donald Trump. It was a good piece and on point.
Then political consultant Brad Todd replied taking issue with me for my and RedState’s advocacy over the years for conservatives. According to Brad, whose political consulting firm helps the National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee, both of which have for several years waged wholesale warfare against conservative candidates, RedState and I have been misleading people about House “conservatives” He then proceeded to claim I had made a career “off for-profit grievance”.
It is worth noting given these criticisms that Brad Todd and his firm are working to defeat Marco Rubio in Florida. When Jamestown Associates worked for Matt Bevin in the Kentucky primary, they were blackballed by the NRSC. But in this similar situation, OnMessage still lists the NRSC as a client.
Todd’s remarks [about Marco Rubio] could raise eyebrows in Washington, where OnMessage is seen as one of the country’s top Republican political strategy shops. It’s also closely aligned with the GOP establishment, having done extensive work in recent elections with both the National Republican Congressional Committee and National Republican Senatorial Committee.In the 2013, the NRSC told GOP firm Jamestown Associates that it would not receive any of the committee’s lucrative contracts because of its work with the Senate Conservatives Fund, which had a track record of supporting challengers to incumbent Republican senators. The NRCC similarly blacklisted the firm, effectively shutting it out of two of the biggest spends in Republican politics.
Beruff, it should be noted, was a Charlie Crist supporter against Rubio in 2010 and stayed loyal to Crist even after Crist left the GOP.
Regardless, I’m sure there will be as many people who agree with Brad as not. But this is indicative of the problem the GOP faces. As I’ve written a couple of times lately, I am absolutely taking stock of how I contributed to the rise of Trump. But as I have also written, I suspect a lot of the GOP consultant class and establishment will not assess their own role. They will be too busy heaping blame on others as they have successfully done after the losses in 2006, 2008, and 2012.
The reality is I support and think very highly of a lot of groups that Brad Todd no doubt thinks support “for-profit grievance” mongering. It is the accusation Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, and others have leveled against groups like Heritage Action for America, the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Club for Growth, etc. They have decided, rather that try to work with these groups or understand their legitimate grievances that these groups are just out to make money off people’s fears and troubles. Instead of seeing these groups as trying to push the party to the right and hold them accountable, they think these groups behave exactly as they themselves behave.
I genuinely don’t know anyone at any of these groups who are doing that. Everyone I know at these groups is profoundly committed to conservatism. But the D.C. consultant class employed by groups like the NRSC and NRCC have absolutely convinced themselves that these groups are just grievance mongering for profit. It becomes really easy to dismiss these groups when one concludes they’re in it for the money and not the cause.
So when you have the Republican establishment, which cannot even admit there is an establishment, and its outside consultants — the vast majority of whom are decent people with whom I just have disagreements on policy and politics — convinced that their right-of-center critics are just in it for money and you have their right of center critics convinced the establishment and outside consultants are for sale to the highest bidder, it is going to be really difficult to get back on the same page after November’s losses.
On top of that, you have a separate and distinct voice that just blames conservative media for the rise of Trump. It is all Sean Hannity’s fault or Mark Levin’s fault or my fault or “the blogs'” fault or Fox News’s fault or you name it. Instead of “they did it for money” it becomes “they did it for ratings.” Those of us who got Trump wrong and thought the polls were wrong get accused of lacking integrity because we were not opposed to Trump as quickly as others.
The truth is that we are all in various ways culpable, including many of those who will never admit any culpability. The Democrats are too and have no desire to even acknowledge their own culpability because they see it as a GOP problem.
Josh Kraushaar, overnight, noted that the GOP is not prepared for post-Trump politics. He notes that, among other things, “Trump’s brand of nationalistic populism isn’t going anywhere, even if he loses in November.” When the consultants and the conservative operatives are at each other’s throat claiming the other is in it just for a profit and when the #NeverTrump conservatives are attacking the other #NeverTrump conservatives as not being against him soon enough, it is going to be real hard to pivot to actually focus on the issues that drew people to Trump and figure out how to rebuild the party.
On top of that, if the establishment players cannot actually come to terms with conservative groups having real concerns and are not just doing it for money, when those outside groups start raising the concerns of the Republicans who turned to Trump out of frustration, it is going to get even uglier.
Humpty Dumpty might not get put together again at all.
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5)
5)
The Robots Are Coming. Welcome Them
Don’t believe the fears that machines will put humans out of work. Technology creates more jobs than it destroys.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES
Is it time to bow to our robot overlords? Last week analysts at Morgan Stanley, using data from an Oxford University study, predicted that nearly half of U.S. jobs will be replaced by robots over the next two decades. Ouch. Maybe we should build a wall.
Cars that drive themselves? Waiters you don’t need to pay (or tip)? Self-folding clothes? Are we headed toward a post-job future? Signs are certainly there. Abundant Robotics, a company spun from the same Stanford Research Institute that brought us the mouse and networked computing, has begun testing a robot that picks apples. Red Delicious, not iPhones. Napa Valley vineyards are using vision systems to sort grapes.
According to a 2013 Stanford University study, some manufacturing robots now cost the equivalent of about $4 an hour—and they keep getting cheaper . . . and better. This month scientists at MIT have sampled a silicon chip-based LIDAR—light detection and ranging—like radar but much higher resolution, though it covers a shorter distance.
The Tesla Model S currently uses one radar sensor and one front-facing camera as vision for its Autopilot. Neither, sadly, picked out a white tractor trailer against a bright sky before a May 7 collision that killed a Tesla driver. LIDAR would. Current LIDAR can cost up to $70,000. The new chip? Maybe $10. At that price, they’ll probably be standard in every new car, “self-driving” or not.
And now we have thinking robots. Editors at the Associated Press claim robots write thousands of articles a year for them. So it’s over? The robots win? This certainly fits a certain world view for a bigger welfare state and universal basic income and other services to coddle displaced workers. See the May 26 Fortune magazine article “What Governments Can Do When Robots Take Our Jobs.”
But not so fast. The arena of prognostications is littered with the wrecked utopian dreams of leisure living—recall geodesic domes—and Skynet nightmares of roving robot armies. Both are bunk. Instead this is progress.
Technology always creates more jobs than it destroys. JFK worried how to “maintain full employment at a time when automation . . . is replacing men.” Employment was 55 million in 1962. It’s 144 million today. We’ve come a long way, baby.
This time will be no different. Steam engines destroyed jobs—OK, mostly for horse handlers—but enabled an explosion of manufactories, never imagined jobs and the Industrial Revolution. Cars killed trolleys but enabled hundreds of millions of new jobs. Vacuums and washing machines destroyed jobs for “domestic engineers” (though I will never admit to knowing how to operate either) but freed women to enter the much more productive paid workforce. Computers killed jobs for those with rulers and exacto knives who were laying out magazines or constructing physical spreadsheets. Now media and Wall Street don’t exist without Microsoft Office. In each case, technology augments humans, rather than replaces them.
Even Chinese workers shouldn’t fear robots. The coming global demand for manufactured goods will swamp a robot-deprived manufacturing economy. Robots will solve China’s looming logistic problems.
Simply put, jobs that robots can replace are not good jobs in the first place. As humans, we climb up the rungs of drudgery—physically tasking or mind-numbing jobs—to jobs that use what got us to the top of the food chain, our brains.
Every cycle, capital seeks to destroy low-productivity jobs. Like Lucille Ball wrapping chocolates on an assembly line. Or tellers. Wait, check that; more tellers today are doing higher-end banking tasks now that low-level cash dispensing is handled by ATMs. Travel agents are gone, but tour packagers proliferate. Certainly services will be next to see automation. Take doctors, lawyers, investment bankers . . . please.
But it’s not true. McKinsey & Co. published research last fall suggesting 45% of “the activities individuals are paid to perform can be automated” using existing technology. But, and here’s the punch line, less that 5% of “occupations can be entirely automated.” Maybe a third or more of activities within jobs can be automated. That’s the good news. Workers are augmented, not replaced. Salesmen with Google Maps, realtors with 3-D home views, carpenters with laser tape measures. Doctors doing robot assisted minimally invasive surgery. Plumbers with . . . OK, plumbers have the most job security in the world.
Yes, some people are left behind. But as society gets wealthier, we can help them catch up. We need to get our education system right, teach the fundamentals of computer science much earlier, and provide continuing education on how to adapt to changing technology and adopt these new tools. I can think of a dozen community-college courses besides French literature to assist displaced workers. Some could even be taught by robots.
Doing more with less is what drives progress and societal wealth. We all benefit by the investment of the savings into higher productivity activities, like immunotherapy, drones or even finding Pokémon (entertainment too can become more productive). These will all create new and maybe even better jobs.
Robots are coming. Don’t worry, be happy. It’s the path to growth and higher living standards. As a postscript, actor Kenny Baker recently passed away. He was in the original “Star Wars” movies—the guy inside the robot R2-D2. A human augmenting a robot. But that’s in a galaxy far far away and as big a fiction as robots stealing all of our jobs.
Mr. Kessler, a former hedge-fund manager, is the author of “Eat People” (Portfolio, 2011).
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