It’s Friday, March 18th, 2016…and we apologize for the belated transmission of this edition.  After putting our laptop to sleep yesterday evening, we were unable to awaken it until this morning, and then only with the help of the IT department, i.e., our middle son Mike.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, these next two commentaries from the WSJ detail why you don’t want either one of these miscreants…

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…anywhere NEAR the White House.  First, William McGurn details…

Hillary’s Soft Despotism

She prefers the hidden authoritarianism of the vast and growing administrative state.

 

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“Donald Trump is Hitler. Donald Trump is a fascist. Donald Trump is a dictator.

Certainly Mr. Trump has a mouth, and he’s not afraid to use it. He also speaks to adoring crowds who cheer when he says to respond in kind to activists trying to disrupt his rallies. Even so, the over-the-top claims that Mr. Trump is the new Il Duce may be distracting attention from the soft despotism that Tocqueville deemed the far likelier menace to American liberties.

This kind of authoritarianism doesn’t come with goose steps or brown shirts or large populist movements. It prefers bureaucracy to bombast. It presents itself as a solution to the complexities of modern government, and it’s called the administrative state.

Philip Hamburger—a Columbia law professor and author of the 2015 book “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?”—defines the administrative state as the substitution of regulatory edicts for laws passed by the people’s elected representatives. In the American iteration, at least, this often means the same federal agency that writes the rules also enforces and adjudicates thema confluence of powers Madison once called the “very definition of tyranny.”

Mistake Department

…According to the most recent edition of “Ten Thousand Commandments”—the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual survey of federal regulations—in 2014 federal agencies issued 3,554 regulations while Congress passed only 224 new laws. That is 16 new regulations for every new law.

The result is the effective transfer of power from the American people acting through their elected representatives to the American people being told what to do—and threatened with crushing fines if they do not—by federal bureaucracies that use the vague congressional language in everything from Dodd-Frank to the Affordable Care Act to impose their own interpretations. Even worse, under the Supreme Court’s 1984 Chevron decision, the courts are basically told they must defer…”

A decision which, incidentally, a SCOTUS justice Merrick Garland would wholeheartedly support.

Second, the Journal‘s editors paint a very dim but accurate view of a very dismal individual:

Trump’s Unification Tour

No debates, a threat of riots, and a one-man foreign-policy team.

 

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“No, seriously; this is the only guy I’ve ever met who cheats on his wife more than me!”

Donald Trump is the likely GOP presidential nominee, but he still hasn’t won over enough reluctant Republicans he’ll need to get 1,237 delegates and win in November. His unity tour is off to an odd start.

Mr. Trump started it Wednesday on “Fox and Friends” by declaring that he’s done with debates. “We’ve had 11 or 12 debates—I did really well in the last one, I think I’ve done really well in all the debates,” he said. “But I think we’ve had enough. How many times can the same people ask you the same question?” Fox News then canceled the debate scheduled for Monday. So the man who so easily conquered his opponents now thinks he’s above engaging them.

Next he traveled to CNN, where he said he is entitled to the nomination even if he doesn’t reach a delegate majority. “I think we’ll win before getting to the convention, but if we didn’t and we’re 20 votes short, or we’re, you know, a hundred short, and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400, cause we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say we don’t get it automatically. I think you’d have riots.” He added that “if you disenfranchise those people . . . I think you would have problems like you’ve never seen before.” Riots?

A GOP convention can’t steal something Mr. Trump doesn’t own. Since 1860 the rules have required a candidate to have a delegate majority to win on the first ballot—not a mere plurality. If a candidate fails, the rules allow delegates to support someone else. If Mr. Trump can’t win a majority of Republicans, he can’t win a majority of Americans in November. By the way, Hillary Clinton’s primary vote total so far is 8,646,551, according to the Real Clear Politics count. Mr. Trump’s is 7,533,692.

Mr. Trump also visited MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” where Mika Brzezinski asked about foreign affairs and “who are you consulting with consistently so that you’re ready on day one?”

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“I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things,” Mr. Trump replied, (“I’ve said a lot of things”; seriously?!?) invoking a book he published in 2000 that riffed on Osama bin Laden. “So I know what I’m doing, and I listen to a lot of people, I talk to a lot of people, and at the appropriate time I’ll tell you who the people are. But I speak to a lot of people, but my primary consultant is myself, and I have, you know, I have a good instinct for this stuff.”

Richard Nixon forgot more about foreign policy than Mr. Trump has ever known, and he still brought in Henry Kissinger. George H.W. Bush, a former Vice President and CIA director, had James Baker andDick Cheney. All Presidents need trusted lieutenants who have thought about the world. On stage with Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Trump will have to do more than point to his real-estate deals as a qualification for negotiating with China’s Xi Jinping.

Maybe Mr. Trump figures he can keep blustering his way to the White House. But the anti-Trump coalition could grow if voters see a front-runner who won’t debate, threatens riots if he doesn’t win, and whose foreign-policy brain trust consists of one brain.

And a clearly addled one at that.  There’s only one word which aptly describes an election in which the two leading candidates are a serial liar and a con man:

As regards the serial liar, as FOX News‘ Catherine Herridge reports, things ain’t exactly looking up in Clintonville:

Clinton tried to change rules to use BlackBerry in secure facility for classified information

 

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Less than a month after becoming secretary of state, and registering the personal email domain that she would use exclusively for government business, Hillary Clinton’s team aggressively pursued changes to existing State Department security protocols so she could use her BlackBerry in secure facilities for classified information, according to new documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

“Anyone who has any appreciation at all of security, you don’t ask a question like that,” cybersecurity analyst Morgan Wright told Fox News.  “It is contempt for the system, contempt for the rules that are designed to protect the exact kind of information that was exposed through this email set up.“ Current and former intelligence officials grimaced when asked by Fox News about the use of wireless communications devices, such as a BlackBerry, in a SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility) emphasizing its use would defeat the purpose of the secure facility, and it is standard practice to leave all electronics outside“When you allow devices like this into a SCIF, you can allow the bad guys to listen in,” Wright added.

A February 17, 2009 email marked SECRET and cleared through the NSA says, “Ms. Mills described the requirement as chiefly driven by Secretary Clinton, who does not use standard computer equipment but relies exclusively on her Blackberry for emailing and remaining in contact on her schedule etc. Ideally all members of her suite would be allowed to use Blackberries for communication in the SCIF (Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility)”

Cheryl Mills was Clinton’s chief of staff from 2009-13…”

If we’re mystified how anyone, least of all a self-described Conservative, could support a charlatan like Trump, we’re no less flummoxed by The Left’s continued support for a pathological prevaricator who so obviously sacrificed the nation’s security for purely personal gain.

Next up, the great Victor Davis Hanson echoes Bret Stephens’ piece featured in our last edition, as he observes that when it comes to Barry Obama’s desk…

The Buck Never Stops Here

 

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“…Taking responsibility for mistakes is a sure sign of character; blaming others is not.

After nearly eight years of buck-passing, Obama is starting to sound a lot like his Republican alter ego, Donald Trump, whose failed business ventures and embarrassing rhetoric are likewise always the fault of somebody or something else.

This narcissistic cretin reminds me of a classic scene from The Blues Brothers:

Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side

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Finally, we’ll call it a wrap with these two gems forwarded by R.B. Diffenderffer:

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Magoo



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