The Daily Gouge Archive, Monday, August 24th, 2015

On August 25, 2015, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, August 24th, 2015…but before we begin, some more of that sh*t you just cannot make up:

Yeah; the rules governing classified emails confuses not only Hillary all to hell, but her countless myrmidonic minions as well. But rest assured, she…and they…are ready, willing and more than able to run the country!

Yeah…and Monica dug Bill because he felt her pain.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, as Commentary Magazine‘s Noah Rothman notes, when it comes American politics, unless your a partisan hack dependent upon the status quo for your livelihood, regardless of your particular side of the aisle…

The Joke’s on Us

“…The presidency that was allegedly destined to repair the damage Bush did to the credibility of the federal government has only quickened the pace of America’s disaffection with politics. Today, the three co-equal branches of the federal government inspire confidence in only a handful of Americans. The media, organized labor, banks, schools, and big business, too, are no longer trusted. Among government-run enterprises, only the police and the military retain the trust of a majority of American citizens – a dangerous place for any civilian-led republic to find itself. Even on the matter of racial comity, a perpetual sore spot for most Americans, Obama has not lived up to his transcendental promise. In fact, the state of racial tensions in the Obama era makes the Bush presidency look like a utopian epoch characterized by ethnic harmony. The Obama presidency has failed on a variety of fronts, but its most injurious may be the ruinous effect it has had on faith in the republican experiment itself.

Americans’ disregard for the value of the governing institutions that serve as the country’s foundational structures is evident in how the voting public has approached the coming presidential election. Thus far, the process has been a joke, and the public has treated it like one.

…All of this cynicism is both trite and toxic. It is a tedious sort of juvenile rebelliousness that sees no value in the most resilient and vibrant political system man ever devised. We’re not talking about satire here – even if any of it were clever. We’re talking about stakeholders – candidates, pollsters, and political parties that have skin in the game – making light of the American system in order to capture the prevalent mood of alienation and apathy. But that dark and self-destructive mood is not one that deserves to be captured; it should be repudiated and dispelled, not incubated. It’s a republic only so long as we can keep it, and there is a vocal minority who appears increasingly indifferent to its longevity. What’s worse, there is an influential set in positions of authority who apparently feel the same way.“

Though we maintain whatever seriousness remains in Washington, it emanates from The Right.

In a related item, the WSJ details the depths of Dimocratic duplicity as epitomized by latest political pandering by the party’s presumptive front-runner:

The Progressive Principle

First you encourage student debt, then you write it off on taxpayers.

The arc of progressive politics these days seems to be hoping to benefit from proposing policies to solve the problems their previous policies have created—and hoping nobody notices the cause and effect.

Hillary Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates have been proposing new ways for college students to reduce or write-off their student loans. The goal is to win over millennial voters with more taxpayer largesse, while slowly turning higher education into one more universal federal entitlement. Mrs. Clinton’s proposal would cost a hefty $350 billion over 10 years, by her own no doubt conservative estimate.

What Democrats don’t say is that such taxpayer generosity wouldn’t be necessary if they hadn’t done so much to encourage students to load up on taxpayer-guaranteed debt. The Education Department reported this week that some 6.9 million Americans with student loans hadn’t made a single payment in at least 360 days. That’s up 6%, or 400,000 borrowers, in a year.

The Obama Administration took over the student loan market in 2010, easing terms and expanding benefits. Now that the bills are coming due in more deadbeats, Democrats hope to benefit again by handing the tab to taxpayers. They nail you coming and going.

Though Barry and Hillary belong in a class by themselves, Liberals in general remind us of TLJ’s occasional effort to bankrupt us under the guise of “saving” money, though with two noteworthy differences: come the end of the day, (1) TLJ’s “finds” leave us with something of value; and (2) we can always get our money back!

Next up, as Jim Geraghty observes in last Friday’s edition of his Morning Jolt, even Reuters, the international equivalent of MSDNC and National Progressive Radio, is beginning to grasp the obvious absurdity of Hillary’s “facts”, aka, deliberate dissimulation:

Reuters: Hey, Doesn’t ‘Classified’ Mean, You Know, Classified?

Reuters takes the long route in calling Hillary Clinton’s excuses a bunch of nonsense:

For months, the U.S. State Department has stood behind its former boss Hillary Clinton as she has repeatedly said she did not send or receive classified information on her unsecured, private email account, a practice the government forbids.

While the department is now stamping a few dozen of the publicly released emails as “Classified,” it stresses this is not evidence of rule-breaking. Those stamps are new, it says, and do not mean the information was classified when Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner in the 2016 presidential election, first sent or received it.

But the details included in those “Classified” stamps — which include a string of dates, letters and numbers describing the nature of the classification — appear to undermine this account, a Reuters examination of the emails and the relevant regulations has found.

The new stamps indicate that some of Clinton’s emails from her time as the nation’s most senior diplomat are filled with a type of information the U.S. government and the department’s own regulations automatically deems classified from the get-go — regardless of whether it is already marked that way or not.

In the small fraction of emails made public so far, Reuters has found at least 30 email threads from 2009, representing scores of individual emails, that include what the State Department’s own “Classified” stamps now identify as so-called ‘foreign government information.’ The U.S. government defines this as any information, written or spoken, provided in confidence to U.S. officials by their foreign counterparts.

This sort of information, which the department says Clinton both sent and received in her emails, is the only kind that must be “presumed” classified, in part to protect national security and the integrity of diplomatic interactions, according to U.S. regulations examined by Reuters.

“It’s born classified,” said J. William Leonard, a former director of the U.S. government’s Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO). Leonard was director of ISOO, part of the White House’s National Archives and Records Administration, from 2002 until 2008, and worked for both the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.

“If a foreign minister just told the secretary of state something in confidence, by U.S. rules that is classified at the moment it’s in U.S. channels and U.S. possession,” he said in a telephone interview, adding that for the State Department to say otherwise was “blowing smoke.”

The Clintons corrupt what they touch. They get otherwise normal government employees to insist that the law means the opposite of what it says.

Two more revealing sentences close out the article. First, “Spokesmen for Clinton declined to answer questions, but Clinton and her staff maintain she did not mishandle any information.” Uh-huh. Then, “The State Department disputed Reuters’ analysis but declined requests to explain how it was incorrect.”

Likely because anything those involved might say can and likely will be used against them in a court of law. And they know Hillary ain’t takin’ the rap for sh*t; not as long as there’s still plenty of room under the bus…

…as Huma’s no doubt beginning to realize.

And in the Environmental Moment, courtesy of Jeff Foutch and CNSNews, the voice of reason interrupts what’s become a non-stop cacophony of baseless bunk masquerading as science:

“We have a “moral imperative” to burn carbon dioxide-emitting fossil fuels because the energy they provide is a “liberator” of humanity, says Dr. John Christy, a climatologist and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. “We are not morally bad people for taking carbon and turning it into the energy that offers life to humanity in a world that would otherwise be brutal,” Christy wrote in a recent oped. “On the contrary, we are good people for doing so.”

He also challenged what he says are contradictions in Pope Francis’ encyclical, Laudato Si, in which the pontiff called climate change “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day.” The pope’s encyclical “displays a lack of understanding of how the real world works,” Christy told CNSNews.com. According to microwave data from satellites going back to 1978, which are precise to within .08 of a degree, “very little warming is taking place,” he pointed out…”

Since we’re on the subject of those displaying a lack of any understanding of how the real world works, as Katherine Timpf records at NRO, despite the complete paucity of any evidence…

Top Activist and Author: It’s ‘Clear’ That Climate Change Is Making Racism Worse

Ms. Klein in one of her…saner moments; any questions?!?

According to social activist and best-selling author Naomi Klein, climate change isn’t just destroying our planet — it’s making racism worse, too. “You see that in Australia where the treatment of migrants is a profound moral crisis,” she said, according to a piece published in The Guardian. “It’s clear that as sea levels rise that this mean streak and open racism is going to become more extreme – climate change is an accelerant to all those other issues,” she continued.

Yes — “clear.” The idea that racism rises with the sea is just so “clear” that no further evidence or explanation is needed. Climate change is making people more mean, and that is just a fact.

If you’re dying to know more, you’re in luck: Klein has written plenty of books about climate change, including This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate and The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, which MSNBC host Rachel Maddow praised as “the only book of the last few years in American publishing that I would describe as a mandatory must-read.

That’s a compelling endorsement, but I still don’t think I’ll read it — after all, the fact that Klein is totally right is already so “clear.”

Liberals increasingly evoke a classic scene from My Cousin Vinny in which Fred Gwynne’s character, Judge Chamberlain Haller, so accurately observed “you want to skip the arraignment process, go directly to trial, skip that, and get a dismissal.”

Well, to borrow another phrase from Judge Haller, we’re not about to revamp the entire scientific method just because Naomi Klein finds herself in the unique position of defending a Progressive policy without any factual support whatsoever.

On the Lighter Side…