Inquiring Minds Want to Know, but there are no Inquiring Minds on the Left

The Obama/Biden administration was the most corrupt administration in U.S. history, despite the Clinton administration's efforts to be as corrupt as possible.  The Obama/Biden administration used the IRS to prevent hundreds of Tea Party and Limited Government organizations from becoming tax-free institutions to minimize their effectiveness in the 2012 election.  The fact that they got away with this emboldened them to go massively in on interfering with the 2016 election.  The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) hired the Brit Christopher Steele to collaborate with the Russians to produce the faked dossier that was used with the extensive collaboration of the Obama/Biden administration to obtain FISA permissions to spy on the Trump campaign.  We now know that Obama, Biden, FBI Head James Comey, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Director of the CIA John Brennen, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and numerous Dept. of Justice bureaucrats such as the lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were all involved in the effort to spy on the Trump campaign using a dossier they knew to be fake as their justification.

Claims based on the known fake Steele dossier that Trump was collaborating with Russia were used to offset attention to Hillary Clinton's theft of tens of thousands of government emails, some of which were classified, and which she made readily available to foreign governments by callously putting them on an unsecure server in her home.  Unless Russia, Red China, North Korea, and Iran have only incompetent hacker resources, there is every reason to believe they had access to all of Hillary Clinton's emails dealing with many fascinating State Department activities, which are intertwined with military, intelligence, and commercial national interests of the United States and our allies.  Actually, even our allies may have been hacking into her emails, since they also want more insight into the activities of the State Department and its activities with the military, intelligence, and commercial interests so they can gain an advantage over American in their dealings with us.  By the way, we know that Russia and China have extremely competent hacker resources.

Let me remind you that Nixon was driven from office because a few people broke into the DNC headquarters in the Watergate because they actually believed the DNC was collaborating with Cuba to influence the upcoming election.  They did not break in using a dossier they knew was fake as their justification.  They at least thought they were actually chasing down a national security threat.  Then Nixon tried to cover this up and discovered doing it.  Obama and a host in his administration, including Joe Biden, went a step into corruption beyond what Nixon did by creating a hoax and using it to spy on the Trump campaign and then as a means to claim the illegitimacy of his presidency for about 2.5 years, before slighting altering their claims to then impeach the President.

Now we have a Democratic Party nominee for the presidency in Joe Biden who has amassed a fortune while serving as a public servant in Washington, D.C. for 47 years.  He has a son and other relatives who have made fortunes selling his influence to Russia, oligarchs in Ukraine, and the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China.  The Old Guard Media, the Swamp Rats of Washington, D.C., and the socialist left controlling academia do not want the American people to learn about the many decades of rampant corruption in the Federal Government and more state governments than not.  Their power, influence, easy moral pretense, and income all depend upon being the well-connected special interests who can take advantage of the power to make laws and regulations based on government force and on the vast taxes paid by the great majority of hard-working Americans in the private sector.

If you have an inquiring mind, then you will find this video of Tucker Carlson to be very interesting:

Should Joe Biden become President, we will have many national security problems, since he is certainly a puppet to not only the extreme socialist wing of his party, but he is also in the pockets of Russia and China, and oligarchs in Ukraine. Those are not nice people and they are very happy to hurt the American people.

Executive Branch Corruption Prevention vs. Foreign Contributions of Value

The President of the United States of America is constitutionally tasked with enforcing the laws of the nation within its constitutionally delimited powers.  That enforcement function implies that he must not allow corruption within the Executive Branch.  It is his duty to root it out, reveal it, and prosecute it.

During the Obama presidency, his administration had numerous incidences that appeared to be examples of severe corruption and which he ought to have seriously investigated.  However, it is highly plausible that Obama was actually involved in some or all of these instances of very plausible corruption.  None of these corruption instances were properly investigated.  It is not unusual for an administration to fail to investigate instances of corruption for fear of embarrassment or for fear that they will lose votes in the next election because they were caught in their planned corruption.  This is especially true of the Democrat Party, whose corruption is commonly so pervasive that they cannot even be embarrassed by the fact of it and are only ever embarrassed by the ineptness that caused them to be overtly caught engaging in it.

Now let me give you a few of the very plausibly corrupt actions that occurred by politicians under the Obama administration:

• Lois Lerner and the IRS holding up more than a hundred Tea Party, Constitutional Government, and Patriot tax-exempt status requests which kept many of them from expounding policy arguments that the Democrat Socialist Party did not want Americans to hear before the 2012 election.
• The Uranium One, whose controlling ownership was Russian, but also partly Canadian, deal to buy American uranium which required the approval of several Obama agencies, including the State Department, then headed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.  Prior to these approvals and during the approval process, huge donations were made to the Clinton Foundation by Uranium One officers and Bill Clinton was offered $500,000 to give a speech in Moscow at a meeting that recommended investments in Uranium One.
• Hillary Clinton stole more than 60,000 e-mails from the U.S. government while Secretary of State, routing them through an insecure server in the basement of one of her homes.  When these were demanded back, she destroyed about half of them, claiming they were only personal notes.  Even among those that were returned, numerous instances of information requiring secure handling were found.  The hard drive and other storage media for the e-mails had been destroyed, in violation of the legal requirement that the e-mails be returned to the government and for a proper investigation into security violations.  After Clinton had the e-mails destroyed she and the media pretended that Trump had called upon the Russians to steal these already destroyed e-mails.  This is the Democrat Socialist Party way to turn a violation of the law to advantage.  This invitation to steal narrative became part of the myth of Russian collusion by Trump.
• A deal was made by the Obama Attorney General Lynch with Bill Clinton on the tarmac of an airport not to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her theft of the State Department e-mails and for any security violations.
• Violations of the FISA court requirements occurred at least four times in requests made by the Obama FBI and intelligence agencies for FISA warrants to spy upon the Trump presidential campaign.  This violation of law is at least as serious as the Watergate burglary that ended the Nixon presidency.  Numerous high-level Obama officials were involved in the Spygate scandal and were collaborating with the intelligence agencies and other persons in the United Kingdom, Russia, Australia, Ukraine and Italy.
• Vice President Joe Biden using his special envoy assignments with Ukraine and Red China to win sweetheart deals for relatives who had nothing to offer in exchange for large sums of money except the fact that they were related to Joe Biden.

Since Obama did not root out, reveal, and prosecute these likely cases of corruption under his administration, it is the very proper job that the following President do so.  Indeed, the following President would be slacking his responsibilities if he did not do so.

Ah, but note that in several of these cases there are actors from other countries.  During the 2016 election, had Trump actually received any useful information from the Russians on e-mails they may very well have stolen from Clinton's insecure home server, the Democrats would have said he had received something of value from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance laws!  This is a Get out of jail free card for a corrupt politician.  The same would have been true if Trump had received damning evidence against Clinton from a Canadian or a Russian source connected with Uranium One.

Now, the claim is being made that because Joe Biden is running for President, any evidence of his corrupt activities in Ukraine and China obtained by the Trump administration is something of value received from a foreign country in violation of campaign finance law.  So all a corrupt politician needs to do to be forever protected from investigations of his crimes is to be sure that the witnesses of his crimes are all foreigners and that he continue his political career without end so he can never be investigated and prosecuted.  What an incredible trick and the Democrat Socialist Party appears to have discovered its utility.  Corruption safe and forever.  Rather like Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton staying married forever, so neither can ever be forced to testify to the crimes of the other.  The abuse of power through foreign corruption and a political career are a marriage made in heaven, apparently.

As always, context is extremely critical in rational thinking.  One can understand how the campaign finance laws came to be and their intent.  One can understand how those who wrote the laws may not have anticipated the way the Democrats are currently trying to use these laws to prevent the proof of corruption of some of their leading politicians.  The rational man must understand that any valid intent of the campaign finance laws was to prevent corruption, not to enable it.  

The rational man understands that no campaign finance law can stand in the way of a President's core constitutional functions to execute the laws with proper respect for the individual rights of every citizen and that must mean to do so without corruption.  A President must be free to root out, reveal, and prosecute corruption in the Executive Branch of the government.  And we must note that both Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden may have been guilty of corruption as officials of the Obama administration.  That very plausible possibility needs to be seriously investigated and to do so requires that foreign actors be able to deliver information about their deeds to the present administration headed by President Trump.

Meowing Media Fuel Mass Delusion of Russian Collusion by Steven J. Allen

Dr. Steven J. Allen has written a very succinct article on the media role in constructing one aspect of a mass delusion that President Trump has colluded with the Russians.  Many, many members of the media have demonstrated various measures of irrationality, incompetence, and dishonesty on an overall massive scale in claiming that presidential candidate Trump called upon the Russians to spy on Hillary Clinton and on the USA.  The facts are clearly explained by Dr. Allen in his weekly column at American Greatness in his 21 April article entitled Meowing Media Fuel Mass Delusion of Russian Collusion.  I love that title (be sure to read it aloud) and both the historical mass delusion reference and the cartoon image with the article.  Well-done Dr. Allen.

Dr. Steven J. Allen (J.D., Ph.D.) is vice president and chief investigative officer of the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C., and author of the forthcoming book Revolt of the Deplorables.  He began writing a weekly column for American Greatness in March 2018.  All of his articles make essential reading if you want to understand how governance in the USA actually works.  They are all very well-written.  You can find them collected here.

I not infrequently disagree with some of the ideas of other writers at American Greatness, but I have also found many articles there well worth reading and thinking about.  There are a limited number of commentators who are not swept up in blind hatred for Donald Trump or in a love of socialism or collectivism in one guise or another, so having another source for a differing and often rational viewpoint is of value.

Post-Mortem Observations on the 2016 Election

Hillary Clinton is claiming that she lost the election because FBI Director Comey re-opened the investigation of her criminal e-mail activities days before the election.  In reality, her speculation and that of many others claiming a single reason for her loss, or for that matter a loss in any close presidential race, is simply silly.  It was a close contest and the loser was the loser for many, many reasons.  Yes, changing one or two choices the candidate made might have made the difference and brought victory instead of defeat.  But, almost always there are many choices any one of which might have changed the outcome of the election.

Broadly speaking, Hillary might have had a more positive attitude toward allowing businesses to grow, and she would have won the election.  In fact, she might well have won the election had she simply not been a threat to those who earn a living in whole or in part due to the coal industry and due to the fracking of oil and gas.  She very barely lost Pennsylvania with its 20 electoral votes and while she lost Ohio rather more decisively, it was still an obtainable state.  Hillary especially lost votes in western PA and in eastern and southern OH, relative to Obama's results.  See the US map on the front page of The Wall Street Journal of 10 November 2016, which color codes the degree of the Democrat vote loss relative to the 2012 election.  These are areas in which coal was long a mainstay to the economy and in which the recent booms due to oil and gas from fracking operations have produced an economic revival.

So, did Hillary lose the 38 electoral votes of OH and PA because she was threatening the fossil fuels and all the service providers of these areas?  Had she won those votes and still lost Michigan, she would have had 270 electoral college votes to Trump's 268 electoral votes, assuming his win in MI holds up.  Her completely bogus and irrational vendetta against these industries may well have cost her the election.  Irrational choices often have direful consequences. As hard as I have fought to argue against the false catastrophic man-made global warming hypothesis and such additional bogus claims such as measurable harm from mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants, Hillary's loss of the election due to her desire to destroy the fossil fuel industries is sweet indeed.

Of course, Obama had himself threatened the coal industry, but many people did not take that so seriously back then.  Whatever his predilections, they may have thought that Congress would keep him from destroying the industry.  As it happened, Obama used the regulatory agencies to do that destruction, so a Hillary following him and using the same strategies had to be taken as a more serious threat in this election. In addition, the growth of the oil and gas production in eastern and southern Ohio and in western Pennsylvania was remarkable in the four years straddling Obama's re-election, with the realization of the importance of fracking to the benefiting areas of OH and PA taking some time to occur to much of the population in those areas.  Try as hard as Obama's EPA did to find an excuse to attack the fracking practice, they had limited success in doing so, though pressure among the "environmental" Democrats continues to mount for doing so.  Some unnecessary and wrongheaded regulations based on the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud are in the pipeline now.

Some Democrats like to make a big deal about Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote by about 798,000 votes.  Of course the rules are that one has to win the electoral vote, which requires the candidates to try to appeal to people across the nation.  This requirement helps to minimize factions in politics, which we surely have more than enough of as it is.  It helps to keep candidates from just favoring those who live in high population density areas.  It helps to keep them from stomping on the interests of those who live in low cost of living areas too much.  In other words, it penalizes those who want to exterminate the industries that some people depend upon for a living if they do not live in those high population areas.  It means that if you promote a minimum wage of $15 an hour for the entire nation, you might incur a political cost for the concerns that many people living in low cost of living areas, almost always outside high population density areas, will have about losing their jobs or their businesses.  It even serves as a bit of protection against those who would discriminate against people based on their ethnicity, since ethnicity is not evenly distributed across the country or between low and high population density areas.

Hillary needs to grow up and realize that she lost the election according to its rules.  Of course, it is too late for her to ever grow up.  But others may still have that within their grasp.  The claim that those extra 798,000 votes mean much is diminished by a number of additional factors.  For one, the Democrats rack up a few hundred thousand illegal votes in presidential elections.  In addition, because the most populous state of California, which is heavily Democratic, had a Senate election in which both candidates on the ballot were very leftist Democrats, the Republicans of that state had much less incentive to go to the polls than did Democrats.  As a result, Trump did not get many votes in California that he would have had if a Republican had been allowed on the ballot in that Senate seat contest.  The Democrats of California have found an interesting way to diminish the meaning of the popular vote for the presidential elections.

It is interesting to note that Republicans in the elections for the House of Representatives received 3.1 million more votes than did the Democrats running for House seats.  The Republicans won 238 House seats to the Democrats 193 seats.  Republicans won 22 Senate seats (counting LA which is not technically decided until December) and the Democrats won only 12. Trump won 30 (counting MI) of the 50 state popular vote contests.  Even with a Republican presidential candidate who was not all that popular, the Republicans trounced the Democrats.  Nonetheless, such a beating can be reversed in the next election cycle if the Republicans do not keep enough of their promises, such as finally repealing ObamaCare and allowing the economy to grow.

A Crime Syndicate Head, Foreign Agent, Harridan President?

Hillary Clinton is the worst major party presidential candidate in my lifetime, with the possible exception of Obama.  The first election of Obama at least came with a built-in excuse for those of a lame mind and irresponsible nature.  Those who make no real effort to learn about the candidate for whom they vote could claim him as an unknown.  Of course they could not make the same excuse in 2012.

Hillary is a decades long known collectivist, personal power luster, and criminal and crime abettor.   She is now known also as the thief of government e-mails, a paid (through the Clinton Foundation) foreign government lobbyist while Secretary of State, and an effective undercover spy for foreign governments using her highly insecure e-mail server as a drop for our national security information for any foreign government to pick up at their leisure.  Hillary gave up classified documents and much insight into State Department bargaining positions for her convenience in hiding her pay for play schemes through the Clinton Foundation.  Any foreign government, generally friendly to the U.S. or unfriendly, that was not monitoring her e-mails was negligent or incompetent.  It is known that at least five foreign governments did and that some also monitored the e-mails of Hillary's close confidants.  It is likely many more were able to do so without leaving amateurish traces of their snooping.  Hillary truly should be in jail for her effective work as a spy against the national interests of the United States.

Let us not forget that Hillary also defied court orders to turn over the e-mails she stole from the government by destroying them.  Then she testified that she suffered massive memory loss both to the FBI and more importantly to the court when she evaded the answers to many of the Judicial Watch questions the court ordered her to answer.  Can a person with such massive memory loss function as President of the United States of America?  Before her severe memory loss, she failed to take the State Department required course to be able to recognize classified information and to handle it correctly.  Can anyone unable to recognize classified information be entrusted as President, the Commander-in-Chief?

Hillary took a nearly $100,000 payoff engineered through a commodities trading scheme from Tyson Foods and worked for them as a lawyer when Bill Clinton was attorney general and then governor of Arkansas so the state would look the other way as Tyson Foods heavily polluted the state rivers. Tyson Foods was then and still is one of the nation's top polluters.  Then she and Bill contributed to the savings and loan disaster with their Whitewater activities.  As President, Bill Clinton pardoned a top Tyson executive who was imprisoned for trying to bribe the Secretary of Agriculture.  Of course he also pardoned a fugitive from justice, Marc Rich, with the encouragement of Eric Holder.  Rich, a long-time contributor to the Clinton Foundation, was convicted of tax evasion, wire fraud, trading with the enemy, and racketeering.  The Clinton's have also had a long relationship with the billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and have often visited him on his island in the Caribbean Sea, known to many as Lolita Island.  The Clintons are very unusually nasty people.  They have close ties with many other corrupt people, including Hillary's brother.

Hillary Clinton was even later than Obama in continuing to support Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) and the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), both of which came out of the Clinton administration and deprived LGBT individuals of their individual rights.  The reason for this may well be that most of the major nations providing contributions of money to the Clinton Foundation have laws making sex between two people of the same sex a crime punished by death.  Most also routinely deny women equal rights.

The Clinton Foundation claims that it is a charitable foundation and says on its website that it spends 87.2% of its money on program services.  But you are in serious error if you assume that this means that needy people are receiving 87.2% of the Foundation's contributions.  Almost all of that money is actually used to promote such causes as the catastrophic man-made global warming fraud and the provision of sub-standard AIDS medications made in India and the jetting around the world of Bill Clinton, Chelsea, and their colleagues as they build their world-wide crime syndicate with close alliances with scam artists and dictators around the world.  Now it appears that the Foundation even paid for Chelsea's wedding and a lavish income for her and her husband, the son of a convicted criminal.

Let us take note of Hillary's bad policy positions:

• A national $15 minimum wage, still higher in high cost of living areas, which she wrongly claims will help grow the economy, but which will increase unemployment and force many businesses out of business
• Support for union card check and the outlawing of Right-to-Work laws in the states, forcing many Americans into unions, dues payments, and making contributions to the Democrats many oppose
• Kill off more coal industry and supporting industry jobs
• Decrease or end fracking which provides us with relatively inexpensive and reliable energy
• A 12-week family and medical leave mandate to be paid by increased taxes
• Higher tax penalties to force more people to use the ObamaCare they hate
• She has said behind closed doors that she wants open immigration
• She wants the government to decide whether equal pay for equal work is the case in companies, but not for her staff.
• Free college education, with taxpayers to pay for young people uninterested in learning, but very interested in four years of play
• Increased business taxes, which will increase the cost of goods and services, decrease business investment, and decrease employee compensation
• Supports the idea that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and the false claims of catastrophic man-made global warming
• Spend more money on Medicaid and induce the states to do so also
• Maintain the government monopoly on education, preventing school choice and anchoring the teachers unions as the prime beneficiary of government-controlled education
• More limitations on the right to bear arms
• Campaign limits on freedom of speech for individuals and companies, but not labor unions or other Democratic Party support organizations
• Have taxpayers provide matching money for first-time home down-payments
• Give preferred status to women and chosen minorities for capital access in starting businesses, thereby making it harder for men not in the preferred minorities to obtain capital
• Force taxpayers to pay for more free Internet
• Block efforts to privatize the VA and its medical services
• Expand national service at taxpayer expense
• Prevent options to save for retirement that by-pass Social Security impoverishment in retirement
• Maintain policy to force Christians and others to violate their conscience

Well, Donald Trump is not a gentleman.  He can be childish and indelicate.  He has paid politicians to favor his business.  But, he is not the head of a major crime syndicate and he has not massively shuttled national security information into a drop to be picked up by any old foreign government.  He did not fail to act in Benghazi to save American lives and he did not lie about why those lives were lost.  He may well prove to be a failed President, but with Hillary's political track record and her massively wrongheaded policies, she will certainly be a failure.  Known failures should not be put in office.  If Trump fails, he should be put out of office in four years.  He does have a some good policies, such as

• Supports the fossil fuel industries
• Repeal of ObamaCare
• Reduction of business taxes, making it much easier to U.S. companies to hire and build facilities and plants again in the U.S. and to bring home $2 trillion of money now kept abroad
• Allow private schools to compete with the generally poor government schools
• Bring order to immigration laws
• Oppose the catastrophic man-made global warming scam, saving tens of billions of taxpayer money and ending distortions to the economic markets through crony mercantilism
• Favors term limits on members of Congress
• Freeze government employee hiring
• Reduction of regulations with active effort to retire many
• Allow energy infrastructure building to provide less expensive, safer, and more reliable energy
• Cancel many of Obama's unconstitutional executive orders
• Allow veterans to see private doctors rather than travel long distances to VA Hospitals and provide them timely service
• Seriously investigate fraud in the VA
• Overhaul the IRS with its attacks on freedom-favoring tax exempt organizations
• Reduction of personal income taxes
• Repeal the death tax
• Supports the right to bear arms

I do not like Trump and since he will not win in Maryland, I may not vote for him.  But, he is clearly the lesser of two evils and it is not even close.  Trump is not a principled defender of individual rights, but neither is he a fully committed collectivist as Hillary Clinton is.  He probably has some respect for productive people operating in the private sector, which Hillary clearly does not.  He may prove a rascal as so many politicians do, but it may also take him time to become so corrupted and to learn the usual political paths to scamming the People.  If he disappoints us, as Hillary surely will, we should be happy to throw him out in 2020.

Hillary says "We are Stronger Together."   What she means is "I am stronger when you jump to it and do what I tell you to."  I for one do not want this not very intelligent, power-hungry person telling me what values I must choose and micromanaging my life.  She is incredibly presumptuous and would be even if she knew me, which she most certainly does not.

I am appalled by the number of Americans supporting her authoritarianism.  I note that this includes the majority of American women, who clearly do not wish to protect the rights of the individual against the force of government.  The use of force should be minimized in our society, not made rampant and placed in the hands of a corrupt, unknowing, uncaring harridan.

Paul Driessen - Olympic-sized climate propaganda

I am posting this article at Paul Driessen's request.  I would add to the comments of the Egyptian commentators he quotes about Obama's belief that man-made global warming is our foremost crisis that Hillary Clinton claims she will have an even more radical program of fossil fuel use suppression than does Obama.  And yes, I do believe that Hillary is so divorced from reality, such a criminal, and so mad for power that it is very reasonable to evaluate her as insane. Here is Paul Driessen's article:

Olympic-sized climate propaganda

It was wrong to interrupt Rio’s delightful opening ceremonies with deceitful agitprop  

XXXI Olympiad competitors are joyfully showcasing their skills and sportsmanship, while delighted fans revel in their amazing efforts. But opening ceremonies featuring colorful history, dance, song and athletes were rudely interrupted by an unprecedented propaganda film.

As audiences around the world were getting pumped up in eager anticipation for the upcoming events, a slick but deceitful video soured the mood by inserting partisan climate change politics.

Fossil fuels are warming our planet, and the manmade heat is melting its ice caps, narrators intoned. Animated maps showed Greenland “disappearing very quickly” and Amsterdam, Dubai, Miami, Shanghai, Lagos and Rio being swallowed up by rising seas.

Well, yes, if average global temperatures really did soar 4 degrees Celsius (7.5 Fahrenheit), and if all of Greenland’s ice melts, oceans certainly could rise 20 feet and other terrible things certainly could happen.

But wild assumptions, computer models and animations are not reality. Few of us are really worried about being eaten by raptors and Tyrannosaurs cloned from DNA in fossilized amber, even though Jurassic Park sure made them look real. Ditto for Hollywood sharks, werewolves, cave monsters – and global warming.

In the Real World outside the animators’ windows, average planetary temperatures barely budged for 18 years. After climbing a headline-grabbing 0.55 degrees C (1 deg F) in 2015, a strong El Niño year, they plummeted a media-ignored 0.5 degrees C the first seven months of 2016, as La Niña approached. That’s a far cry from the 4/7.5 temperature spike that animated the animators’ fear-mongering. The sun has entered a low-sun-spot phase, possibly heralding a new colder period for Planet Earth.

As to temperatures increasing “since the industrial era began,” that primarily reflects Earth’s emergence from the 500-year Little Ice Age. Of course, climate alarmists happily claim this natural warming is due to mankind’s growing fossil fuel use during the same period of time, though scientists still cannot distinguish human and natural factors. With temperatures rising 1850-1940, cooling 1940-1975, warming 1975-1998, and mostly flat-lining since then, it’s hard to blame oil, gas and coal for any warming.

So the likelihood of Greenland’s ice all melting is about zero. In fact, its ice mass has been growing since the time period the Olympics propaganda squad selected to show the ice sheets “disappearing.”

News stories about the Rio video also featured claims that climate change has “already had real effects in Brazil,” where 60% of the Amazon rainforest is located. Some 240,000 acres were clear-cut just in June 2016, “as a result of deforestation” – related to global warming, it was slyly suggested.

If they’re talking about replacing rainforests with biofuel plantations, to replace fossil fuels that could be produced from a fraction of that acreage, then yes, there’s a climate (policy) connection. But there would be little need to chop down all those trees if climate chaos campaigners weren’t obsessively opposed to the fossil fuels that power 80% of the world’s economy and provide other vital human needs.

The indispensable benefits of hydrocarbons and petrochemicals for Olympic Games alone are impressive.

They are the raw materials for uniforms of every description; swim suits, goggles and caps; kayaks and kayaker helmets and paddles; bicycle helmets, shoes and carbon-fiber frames; basketballs, vaulting poles, tennis balls and racquets, soccer balls and shin guards; bows and arrows; volleyball and field hockey nets; basketballs [Paul really likes basketballs]; seats and clothing for fans; prosthetics and wheelchairs for Paralympians; and much more.

No one could watch the games without plastics for computers, cameras, monitors, cell phones, dish antennas, banners and other equipment that promote, record and transmit the events. Neither athletes nor fans could get to the games without airlines, vehicles and fossil fuels.

In short, virtually nothing we make, grow, eat, use or do is possible without fuels and materials that come out of holes in the ground somewhere on our planet. But radical greens want it all put off limits. They would rather see billions of acres of croplands, rainforests and wildlife habitats cleared and plowed – and trillions of gallons of water and fertilizer expended – to grow biofuel crops to replace fossil fuels. “Keep it in the ground,” they demand.

African, Asian and European countries cannot afford to stop using oil, natural gas or coal. Nor can the United States or any other modern or developing country.

Naturally, the video and news reports mentioned none of this. So why did the Rio organizers agree to present this manmade climate cataclysm video?

One possible reason is a desire to distract people from its real problems. Mosquitoes are spreading Zika. Shoddy athletic housing has bare wires and sinks falling off walls. The open-water swimming venue is a bacteria-infested open sewer. Swallowing just a few teaspoons of Rio’s tap water will make visiting athletes and fans horribly sick. Eleven construction workers died while preparing Rio for the games.

Brazil’s economy is on the rocks and #174 out of 189 nations for starting a new business. Its current and previous presidents are under investigation for corruption.

But once the games got underway, they were fantastic, fun, exciting and dramatic; their own distraction.

So the video could be simple “greenwashing” – making the 2016 games the “greenest ever.” Or it might be to reinforce Brazil’s claim to billions of dollars that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have promised for mitigation, adaptation and compensation for the climate chaos we supposedly caused.

Just as strange, even ExxonMobil played the politically correct climate game. Its Olympics TV ad says the company is doing all it can to reduce “carbon pollution.” Surely Exxon knows it’s not carbon (soot); it’s carbon dioxide. And it’s not pollution; the plant-fertilizing CO2 is enriching the atmosphere and making forests, grasslands and food crops grow faster and better. So why use Obama/EPA terminology?

Maybe the company just wants to buy some feel-good PR and “peace in our time.” Maybe it and its corporate and political colleagues are forgetting 1960s radical activist Jerry Rubin’s comment: “The more demands you satisfy, the more we’ve got.” And Winston Churchill’s blunt truth: “An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last.”

All of it reminds me of the way several Egyptian journalists responded to President Obama’s 2015 commencement speech at the Coast Guard Academy. “Climate change is a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security,” he asserted. “It will impact how our military defends our country.” Anyone who fails to recognize this is guilty of “dereliction of duty.”

The journalists reacted in disbelief. “Is he insane? Is he on drugs?” asked one. “What did you expect from a president who never served in the military and never worked a day in his life?” said the second. “I’m sure he’s not deliberately trying to destroy his country,” the first suggested. “Of course he is,” the third said.

Now millions of Americans appear perfectly willing to sacrifice their livelihoods, living standards, liberties and country on the altar of manmade climate Armageddon. Are they insane? Are they on drugs?

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.

The Obama Economic Growth Record

In the seven years 2009 - 2015 under Obama, the rate of real GDP growth has averaged 1.4% a year. It takes zero increase in productivity to increase the GDP at the rate of growth of the population. Over the six Obama years 2009 - 2014, the population of the USA has decreased from an initial high of 0.98% in 2009 to a 2015 rate of 0.77% as hope has died.  The average population rate over those six Obama years was 0.91%.  The real, per capita GDP growth rate is then about 1.4% - 0.9% = 0.5%. This real, per capita GDP rate is the rate that actually tells us how fast our standard of living is improving.  A 0.5% annual rate is pathetic and the result of a serious national malaise.

Hillary would continue down this sorry path.  That path is looking even worse so far this year.  The 1st quarter real GDP growth rate was just revised downward to 0.8%, while the second quarter rate was reported to be 1.2%.  Subtract the population growth rate to estimate the per capita real GDP growth rate and that rate so far this year is less than the 0.5% of the prior Obama years.  As is the case with Obama, Hillary knows nothing about economics or how to grow a business.  Nonetheless, many Americans will be voting for more of the same in a few months.

Obama is the only President between 1950 and the present to never achieve a 3% real GDP growth rate.  The suppression of high rates of growth following a deep recession is a very great feat, since such high rates are almost invariably the result of the corrections that occur in a recession.  Of course, the Obama administration frustrated many of those corrections in the Great Recession, wasted huge fortunes of money, and enacted extremely expensive and irrational laws and regulations to wreck havoc on the U.S. economy and its businesses.  See:

Let us examine a crucial consequence of adopting the Obama-Hillary new economic growth normal with a government taking huge chunks of the private sector economy under its dictates year after year.  Let us compare the resulting size estimates for real per capita GDP based on a 0.5% Democratic Party rate of growth and a number of rates of growth which could be achieved by more rational economic policies giving us lower tax rates, fewer regulations, no irrational laws, and no violations of the Rule of Law.  Most Americans can expect to live another 40 years.  So let us ask what the size of the economy in terms of the real per capita GDP will be 40 years from now should we forego big government controls for a free and robust private sector economy.

Growth rate of 0.5%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 1.22 times the present case on the Obama - Hillary course.

Growth rate of 2.0%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 2.21 times the present case, with economic policies marginally less irrational than those of Obama - Hillary.

Growth rate of 3.0%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 3.26 times the present case, with economic policies based on a modest level of rationality.

Growth rate of 4.0%, real, per capita GDP in 40 years is 4.80 times the present case with a free market economy.

If we measure the size of the real, per capita GDPs at higher growth rates as ratios to the Obama - Hillary new normal 40-year economy, the economy is much larger.

2.0% growth, the economy is 1.81 times larger.

3.0% growth, the economy is 2.67 times larger

4.0% growth, the economy is 3.93 times larger

Do we really love the big government directed economy of Obama - Hillary so much that we wish to forego an economy in 40 years which is 2, 3, or 4 times wealthier than it is now for one that is only 22% larger than it is now?  We are not just giving up several times more wealth, but we are also giving up all of the extra inventions, the extra funding for science, the extra funding for medical research and its clinical applications, the additional knowledge, the greater national security, improved housing and retirement, and the abundance of interesting and challenging jobs of such robust and diverse economies.  Does the big government model really offer anything to improve our standard of living that begins to compare to what we are giving up by adopting that model of human and economic controls?  It is absolutely inconceivable that the Obama - Hillary 0.5% real per capita GDP growth rate is the rational choice.

This is truly a case of checking out the claims of someone who is claiming to offer you something for nothing. There is clearly an alternative outcome one can choose and that outcome, consistent with liberty, is vastly superior for our personal security and our desire to flourish in life. The freebie is purchased most dearly.  One is reminded of Ayn Rand's frequent refrain that we should ask when offered a packaged deal, "Instead of what?"

Progressivism Evolves from Soak the Rich to Soak the Poor

Progressivism used to pretend to soak the rich in order to provide welfare for the poor.  To some degree it did what it pretended to do, but it mostly hurt the middle class to provide welfare for the poor and a false and easy sense of morality to the rich.  Of course the rich looked down on the poor and claimed to make their supposedly miserable lives better even as they shut them off from joining the middle class.

The platform of the Hillary-run Democratic Party has now been proclaimed the most Progressive in terms of its environmental policies ever.  Tom Steyer, the single largest campaign donor of the 2014 elections with donations of about $74 million, has already spent $31.5 million on the 2016 campaign with most of his effort aimed at ensuring the Democratic Party has radical and destructive environmental and energy policies.  Once again, he is the biggest campaign donor so far in this election.  The Democrat pledge to end freedom of speech for corporations and for-profit companies is not intended to apply to this businessman's gigantic donations.  "Free speech for me, but none for you" is the motto of the Democrat Party.

Under the bought influence of Tom Steyer, the Democrat Party platform is the "most progressive environmental platform in the history of the Democratic platform or in the history of American politics", according to the buyer himself.  Steyer boasts that efforts to thwart climate change appear everywhere in the platform document.  “So it really isn’t a question of any one single silver bullet. It’s an attitude where we basically put it into every discussion we have, so when we’re talking about jobs, we’re also talking about clean energy, we’re also talking about fighting climate change.” 

Of course, the number of coal mining, oil and gas fracking, railroad, pipeline, and power plant jobs killed is de-emphasized and the number of so-called green energy jobs is hugely exaggerated.  The health benefits of using less and less fossil fuel are multiplied many times in their imaginative telling of the story.  The dangers of fossil fuels to the environment are blown to heroic proportions, while those of covering state-sized sunny areas with photovoltaics, boiling birds with directed and amplified sunlight, and blenderizing birds with spinning dicing blades are lost in silence.  Where any other structure made by man is an abomination to the beauty of nature, tall and broad wind generators are a problem only when they are in the backyard of wealthy "Progressive" aristocrats eager for the absolute power of the nobility of ages once thought behind us. The fact that the few unemployed coal miners so deep in despair that they commit suicide greatly exceed the numbers of those killed by air-borne pollutants downwind of coal-fired power plants, is never noted.  The fact that unemployed workers due to the war on fossil fuels who commit suicide can actually be counted, while there is no epidemiological evidence for those imagined downwind deaths due to the use of coal or natural gas in electric power generation plants, gives the aristocrats of power no qualms at all.

Not only does the War on Fossil Fuels cause unemployment and the destruction of huge prior capital investments, but it causes the cost of energy to go up greatly.  It also causes energy to be less reliably available.  Both increased cost and decreased reliability hurt the poor and the lower middle class the most.   They pay a larger fraction of their incomes for energy.  They are the most likely ones to lose their jobs, whether they work in an energy related field or for a company whose energy prices are going up because of the Democratic Party efforts to make them go up, or to skyrocket, as Obama once said was his purpose. Some companies are so dependent on reliable energy that as energy becomes unreliable, their costs go up due to lost time and production.  My own materials analysis laboratory is such an example of a company that pays a terrible price when the electricity goes down.  And while the rich can afford a stand-by generator at their home, less than rich Americans commonly cannot afford that luxury.

So, the Democratic Party "Progressive Environmental Agenda" is absolutely committed to harming the poor and generally the less than wealthy.  It offers rich scammers wondrous opportunities to turn modest campaign contributions into huge government loans and grants for their fake green energy companies, which fail left and right, err ... left and left and left.  The companies go bankrupt after paying the principals great salaries and the taxpayers lose the money they loaned the fraudulent companies and receive little in innovations for their grants.  The green companies last longer than they should because of additional mandates that their energy output be used to meet unrealistically high quotas.  The economic fallacy of a government-directed economy once-again has proven the principle that government direction is vastly inferior to private sector direction. 

It takes but a little unproductive kick to the head of the private sector to significantly reduce the growth of the per capita real private sector income.  The new big government real per-capita private sector income growth rate is about 1%.  This is the growth rate which the new Progressive Democrat program will actually try to decrease in the name of the environment. Most Americans can expect to live another 40 years.  So under the "Progressive" embraced 1% real per-capita private sector income growth rate, that essential measure of the health of the economy will be 1.489 times larger than it is today.  An easily achievable growth rate, with a modest decrease in the size of government and in regulations, of 2%, gives us a private  sector economy which is 2.208 times larger than what our economy is now.  A little more effort to reduce the relative size and scope of government could achieve a real per-capita growth rate of 3% a year.  At the end of 40 years, the private sector economy would be 3.262 times larger than it is now.

So, the economy desired by the Democrat Party in 40 years will be a pip-squeak economy compared to that of an economy with a real per-capita growth rate of 3%, such as a smaller government economy can readily achieve.  The smaller government private sector economy is 3.262 / 1.489 = 2.19 times larger.  Does big government really offer sufficient value to trade it for an economy that can readily be more than twice as big in 40 years?  The many more jobs and much better paying jobs of 40 years from now also will come with many more improved products, more scientific advancement, much better medical care, much more national security, improved retirement security, and even more ability to treat the environment with care than will the Democratic Party dream private sector economy dominated by big government.

This choice really is a no-brainer choice.  It requires one to shun the truly retrogressive Democratic Party platform and to embrace with confidence the productivity advantages of the private sector.  One has only to understand that the fear and the alarmism spread by the Democrats on the environment and against the private sector comes with horrible consequences for our future, that of our children, and especially that of our grandchildren. It appears that Democrats simply do not care about the future.  In fact, the near zero economic growth of the Middle Ages appears to be their favored growth model.  For some of them, the ravages of the plague with huge population and economic decreases are even better.  So of course, not caring about the future of human beings, they represent themselves as Progressives!  That lie and their refusal to recognize the existence of individuality in their embrace of collectivism are the most fundamental errors of their political worldview.  These are grievous, unnecessary errors indeed.

Donald Trump Again Proves He is Not Trustworthy

Donald Trump has stated that it is right for a businessman to do anything to make money that is not illegal.  Such an attitude is the basis for many claims that big government is justified to control unethical big businesses.  He has tried to steal the property of others by using eminent domain for his benefit.  He has long made most of his campaign contributions to Democrats to buy a position as one of their favored special interests.

Within two days of Senator Ted Cruz suspending his campaign for the Republican nomination for the presidential race in 2016, Trump has now

• Stated that he will not follow through on his tax-cut plan.
• Said that he would not oppose an increase in the minimum wage.
• Will seek campaign contributions.
• Appointed a former Goldman Sachs partner, George Soros hireling, and major Hillary Clinton donor to head up his campaign fund. 

Many more betrayals will be forthcoming from this most unethical man.  This is a man who holds the viewpoint that most people are incapable, readily hoodwinked, and like him are ethically challenged.  This is the viewpoint of the convinced Progressive Elitist.  But, Donald Trump is an actor and he has fooled many supporters, proving many people are indeed easily hoodwinked.  The Progressive Elitist and special interest control of the federal government will continue for another four years.

When Americans persist in not understanding the principles of legitimate and limited government, they will be ruled badly and arrogantly by special interests.

Hillary Clinton Makes 12 Million Illegal Aliens Citizens

Hillary Clinton, on the campaign trail, accused Donald Trump of wanting to deport 12 million Americans. He has said, though he is not consistent in this, that he wants to deport 12 million illegal aliens.  Hillary, being a Clinton, may well say that she is right because most of the illegal aliens, no undocumented persons, are from either North America (Mexico and Central American states) or from South America, so they are Americans.  But for political reasons, she is trying to create the impression that she is conferring legal status on all of the illegal aliens, whose votes she wants in the future for the Democrats and whose U.S. citizen relatives or countrymen she wants to vote for her now.  Democrats being Democrats, she is actually not at all fussy about whether her voters are really citizens of the U.S. or not.  This is only too evident in past elections and in the opposition to voter identification.

Dr. Allen on The Great Green Fleet, Chicken Fat, and Hillary Rodham

Dr. Steven J. Allen's article on the green energy deception called The Great Green Fleet, Chicken Fat, and Hillary Rodham is a good read.  You will learn that the Protecting Americans From Tax Hikes Act of 2015 hides green energy special treatment in plain view.  The name of every law produced in Washington is designed to hide a plethora of harmful actions in the bill.  The green energy industries are almost entirely predicated on special interest legislation at the federal and state government levels, whether it be subsidies, mandates, or tax advantages.  Very little of the green energy industry can stand on its own two feet.  Or is it its own hundred feet like the nasty insect it is?

Steven Allen on Hillary Clinton as Thief and Liar

Dr. Steven Allen, the Vice President and Chief Investigative Officer of the Capital Research Center, has written a clever article on Hillary Clinton describing what she has accomplished in matching the record for corruption of many a male politician.  He goes on to quote a number of progressives about why her lack of honesty and trustworthiness is a positive attribute or at least not a negative one.

On Hillary's mendacity and her advance of female equality:

She has advanced gender equality by proving that a woman in politics can be as corrupt as any man—with the “commodities deal” scheme for laundering payoffs from polluters… the Whitewater deal (selling people real estate they couldn’t afford, repossessing the properties, repeating the process)… the apparent mass collection of information, suitable for use in blackmail, from Republicans’ FBI files… Clinton flunkies’ role in the sale of missile technology to China… the granting of presidential pardons based apparently on political considerations and cash… the Benghazi deception (silencing critics of radical Islam while leading voters in 2012 to believe wrongly that Al Qaeda was “on the run”)… the theft of at least 66,000 government e-mails (and the storage of those e-mails, containing some of our country’s most precious life-or-death secrets, in a way that made them readily available to our country’s enemies)… and the “speaking fees” (ha!) that made Hillary and Bill and Chelsea ultra-rich. In the eight years prior to her presidential run, which included Hilary’s time as secretary of state, the Clintons raked it in at an average of almost $350,000 a week. Politico reported last September: “She earns more for a 20-minute speech to an industry trade group than a dozen fast-food workers make in a year.”

Indeed, it is clear that Hillary has surpassed any male politician's accomplishments for brazen theft and dishonesty that I know about.  Women should be proud!  And to imagine that she denounces income inequality even as she rakes in the cash for one of those 20-minute speeches that would remunerate a dozen fast-food workers for a year!  But she does advocate a minimum wage for them of $15/hour, to be paid by their employer, who manifestly is not a Clinton.  Hillary is such a good person, with money she has government's steal from others.

Max Ehrenfreund of the Washington Post says

For progressive voters looking for the candidate who could best advance their goals in the White House, personal traits other than honesty might be more relevant: skill in negotiation, say, or in managing the bureaucracy or the press.

Those who make a pretense of Progressivism, care only about their agenda 
Steve Allen responds:

Got that? You don’t want to elect an honest president, because he or she might not be an effective negotiator.

Because the most effective negotiator is someone whom no one trusts. Right?

It is interesting to note that the Progressive Obama is not off-put in negotiating with Iran, North Korea, China, or Putin in the least, despite their proven track records for mendacity.  Apparently, it is a trait of the Progressive that concern for the honesty of those with whom you reach agreements is of no interest.  Now anyone with a smidgen of knowledge of history would know better, but there is no one better at ignoring the lessons of history than a Progressive.  For them, it is easy to square Obama's oath of office to preserve and protect the Constitution from all enemies both foreign and domestic with his many violations of the Constitution. How well has the American Peoples' contract with Obama the Mendacious worked out?  Would that contract with Hillary the Mendacious work out any better?

Is the Clinton Foundation a Charity?

It is widely being said that the Clinton Foundation gives only about 15% of its income to charity, with the rest going to administrative costs. The truth is actually worse than the unbelievably low 15% pass-through rate. Out of $140 million of donations, the Clinton Foundation has only delivered about $9 million to direct charity work. That is 6.4% or only 43% of the widely stated 15% pass-through rate. It is usually held that a decent charity foundation has a pass-through rate of at least 75%. To be sure, one may make charitable donations to a think tank, where one expects most of the money to go to organization employee salaries, office expenses, and travel to meetings. But, the Clinton Foundation claims to be a charity devoted to women's rights, environmentalism, and mitigating harm caused by catastrophic man-made global warming.

The Clinton Foundation has large contributors from Ukraine, Russia, Saudia Arabia, and other Middle Eastern countries. In view of the following observations, why are wealthy people from these countries giving money to the Clinton Foundation?

• These countries are not very keen on women's rights, environmentalism, or catastrophic man-made global warming.

• There is so much need for charity in work within these countries that they ought to donate their money locally.

• Large donors do their homework to find out what the charity pass-through rate is. If they are really interested in doing charity work, they will not accept a 6.4% pass-through rate to actual charitable aid.

So how else can one provide a motive for the large contributions to the Clinton Foundation coming from nations such as Ukraine, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and other Middle Eastern nations? It is very clear that the donations were motivated by a desire to influence Hillary Clinton's decisions as Secretary of State and perhaps after she might become President. Given this clear motivation, Hillary Clinton had to know she had a very serious conflict of interest problem. Yet, the Foundation took the money and hid the fact that it was being given to the Foundation for such purposes.

Then Hillary compounded the bad perception by actually approving the take-over of a company that provides 20% of the U.S. uranium needs by Russian interests with close ties to Putin.  Our extensive aid to Ukraine is now subject to being questioned as the result of bribes, rather than as a result of our national interest as well.  I expect we will learn about many other questionable decisions now that this Clinton Foundation is in the spotlight.

Any rational individual will be greatly influenced by the past history of immorality exhibited by the Clintons in assessing the likelihood that they were actually influenced by these bribes to make decisions that might be contrary to the national interest of the United States.

Hillary Clinton -- Lawless, Power-lusting, Opaque, and Now, Finally, Done

Hillary Clinton has hung around and hung around, despite her long record of lawlessness, secrecy to hide her power-lust, and disregard for others.  As an admirer of Saul Alinsky, she, like Obama, is a proponent of class and group warfare who sees oppressors and victims everywhere in American society.  That vision is most useful in justifying never-ending power grabs by government and the politicians who use that power to extort wealth and further power from the People and their private sector enterprises.  As does Obama, she turns a blind eye to the obvious conclusion that her government solution to all problems is flawed because there is no power in the private sector as great as that of government, which is controlled by people even more morally challenged for the most part.

Hillary has always been drawn into corrupt practices.  The Whitewater and Tyson's Chicken scandals while the First "Lady" of Arkansas set the expectations of rational observers before she moved into the White House.  Her unlawful practice of hiding documents and violating transparency laws was early in full evidence when she became First "Lady" of the United States.  She could not find subpenaed documents relating to Whitewater, until they or some subset of them turned up in plain sight quite mysteriously.  Then the HillaryCare fiasco she orchestrated with Ira Magaziner demonstrated a penchant for holding secret meetings that were required to be public meetings.  Hillary removed papers from Vince Foster's office after his mysterious death.  Hillary and Bill accused the operators of the White House Travel Office of wrongdoing, without any justification, in order to try to install their own friends in that job.  What kind of person would send someone to prison in order to gain a job for a friend?

So, it is hardly surprising that we are now hearing that Hillary used her position as Secretary of State to extort and/or to offer favors to nations if they granted money to her foundation.  Alright, it is true that I do not directly and certainly know that favors or harm were promised unless the donations were made.  But the appearance is very bad and what is worse, knowing Hillary's ethics and practice, the rational individual has to expect it to be most likely that promises or threats were made, which caused some nations not very friendly to America or to the equal rights of women to make contributions to her foundation.  Once again, one senses that transparency is greatly lacking on Hillary's relationship with these donator nations.  Her foundation is widely known to function as a sort of political slush fund, though it does also do some charitable work.  The foundation fits the pattern of being another tool to obscure her activities.

Now most recently we discovered that the reason that the House of Representatives and Judicial Watch could not get her e-mails relating to the Benghazi incident, is because she did not use the State Department e-mail account as she was required for conducting State Department business.  No, she used e-mail addresses operating off of a server in the basement of her home, as did some of her close assistants in the State Department.  Federal law requires that all government e-mails be maintained and preserved.  Hillary had her people examine her e-mails on one of the e-mail addresses operating out of her personal server and turn some set of them over to the State Department, many months after leaving the office.  This is a huge violation of the transparency requirement.  Those and who knows how many other e-mails she has not turned over should have long ago been examined by the State Department to find any that might be relevant to the Freedom of Information Act requests made by Judicial Watch and to the investigation of the House of Representatives.  This is a majority interference with the essential checks and balances We the People must maintain on our government to constrain its tendencies to tyranny and excess.

Hillary was well-aware that her actions were in violation of law and yet she did not step forward with her e-mails until she was caught.  I heard her friend Lanny Davis make the claim that she was not hiding her personal e-mail, because she had sent thousands of e-mails to thousands of people using it.  This does not mean that she was obeying the transparency requirements.  What it does imply is that the many people who were in government positions knew that she was violating the law by using her personal e-mail account for government business.  The extreme and total corruption of the Obama administration is evident in the fact that these people did not bring down an Inspector General investigation of her e-mail use while she was still serving as Secretary of State.  But while the Inspector General did not bother Hillary, nine investigations within the State Department did find that the law-violating use of private e-mails was widespread in the State Department and in many of our embassies around the world.  Such a violation was even used as a reason for sacking one ambassador during Hillary's tenure in the State Department.  But Hillary is always above the law!

As bad as Hillary Clinton's violation of transparency laws and court orders is, it may be even more disturbing that because she did not use the State Department e-mail, she had to have exposed many, many secrets to governments and groups unfriendly to the U.S. and opposed to individual rights.  It is already known that her home server system was not very secure with respect to hackers.  It was only a useful tool to deceive the American People, but not to hide classified State Department business from Qatar, North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China.  I expect many Americans do not understand how much State Department business is classified and do not understand how badly many other nations would want to see the Secretary of State's email and that of the people she corresponded with.  While there are many reasons that her tenure as Secretary of State was not a success, it may very well turn out that one of them was because many nations were hacking her insecure e-mail accounts.  [Ari Fleischer has also said that it is most likely the case that Russia, China, and Iran, among other nations, have read all of Hillary Clinton's e-mails, including everything about State Department business.  Update on 9 March 2015.]

Any thinking American should be horrified by the risk she put U.S. foreign policy and defense in with what for her was a political career convenience.  This was an extremely irresponsible act and one which surely violated the law.  She belongs in prison, not in a campaign to become the next President of the United States and the most powerful leader of the world's most powerful government.

But, who cares why Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died in Benghazi and who cares if court orders were violated?  Who cares if an essential check on government power and corruption was violated?  Who cares if Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea were reading Hillary's e-mail and that of her correspondents about our foreign and defense policies?  We are about to test the American voter once again.  I hope they will not prove as unthinking as they were when they twice voted for Obama.  If they only prove a wee bit better thinkers, then Hillary Clinton is now toast.

For those of you who do care about why Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans died in Benghazi, Judicial Watch did recently obtain enough e-mails from a number of Hillary Clinton's top State Department aides and advisers to discover that they had immediately recognized that the attack was by a terrorist group.  They did not speculate in those e-mails that it was a "random" mob that was incensed by an obscure Internet video.  Given the strident and angry "Who cares" attitude of their boss, perhaps it is at least possible that they did not inform Hillary that the attack was a terrorist attack.  So which of these are part of the real story?

• Hillary was unable to conclude from the evidence that the attack was a terrorist attack.
• Her aides knew she would not be interested in the cause of the attack.
• Her aides knew that she wanted plausible deniability for her ridiculous claim that a random mob was incensed by an obscure Internet video and spontaneously attacked the Consulate.
• Her aides, knowing her famous furies, were afraid to tell her the real reason for the attack.
• Hillary did know that the attack was by a terrorist group, but it was politically inconvenient to make that public with Obama's re-election campaign underway, so she lied about the cause.

Update on 11 March 2015:  Hillary Clinton destroyed 32,000 e-mails last year which she claimed were personal.  She refused to turn her home server over for any attempt to recover and check the disposed e-mails according to a report in the Washington Times.  We do not know how many other e-mails she has not turned over, but the timing of her destruction of e-mails would have allowed her to destroy the e-mails relating to the Benghazi incident.