It’s Monday, August 22nd, 2016… but before we begin, let’s take a moment, along with the editors at the WSJ, to recognize…

The Unknown Olympic Champion

Kim Rhode has won medals in six games. Cue the non-coverage.

 

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How do you manage to win a medal at six straight Olympics and remain more or less unknown? The answer: win by shooting a gun. American skeet-shooter Kim Rhode last week became the first athlete, male or female, to win a medal at six summer games and the first on five continents, but don’t look for her on a box of Wheaties.

Mrs. Rhode, who won a bronze medal in Rio, has received little media attention despite her historic feat. The 37-year-old also lacks a single major corporate sponsor, though her ammunition and training costs are offset with sponsorship and donations from such firearms companies as Beretta and Otis Technology.

Her agent told Bloomberg he had pitched the sharp-shooter to more than 20 companies, with no luck. Our guess is they don’t want to risk a backlash from the progressive antigun culture. It probably doesn’t help that Mrs. Rhode is an outspoken critic of gun-control laws and a Donald Trump supporter.

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Even when the press has reported on her achievement, the tone has often been dismissive. An NBC story noted that her medal record is arguably “far less impressive than, say, a gymnast or a swimmer” because shooting “requires fewer physical attributes.” Sure, all it takes is remarkable hand-eye coordination, quick reflexes, steady nerves and dedication over 20 years.

Mrs. Rhode has succeeded even as countries like China and Russia train younger athletes who can rack up medals in less prominent sports for the greater national glory. Ms. Rhode has had to do it largely on her own.

Shooting will never be as TV friendly as swimming or beach volleyball, but trap or skeet shooting is a pastime for tens of thousands of Americans outside the main media corridors. Congratulations to Mrs. Rhode on her under-appreciated achievement.

You go, girl!  Though we’re proud to point out TLJ knew about Kim’s accomplishments.

And while we’re on the subject of political correctness run amok, also from the Journal, check out this amazing example of Orwell’s newspeak from one “Bob Meyer, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Stout in an August 5th email to students, faculty and staff”:

Removing Risky Paintings

‘Their current uncontrolled access pose a risk of having a harmful effect on our students and other viewers.’

 

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I am providing an update on the status of the two paintings in Harvey Hall that I have decided should be removed from two hallways in that building because their current uncontrolled access pose a risk of having a harmful effect on our students and other viewers.

“French Trappers on the Red Cedar” on the second floor will be relocated to the Dean’s Conference Room on the first floor of Harvey Hall. “Perrault’s Trading Fort” on the first floor of Harvey Hall will be relocated to room 504A in the Robert S. Swanson Library and Learning Center, the future location of University Archives.

I also want to emphasize that, despite opinions to the contrary, it was never my intent to “censor” these paintings or remove them from public view. I simply wanted to get them into situations where we had some control over who would view them. These relocations will achieve that objective.

[T]hey will be made available for public viewing, along with a document that explains their historical significance and the concerns Native Americans have expressed about how they are portrayed in the paintings. After all, a university needs to encourage a free flow of ideas, even if those ideas make some people uncomfortable, as long as we don’t foist those ideas on unaware or unwilling recipients.

So what did these paintings depict that was so offensive “relocation” was required to ensure they didn’t cause any delicate little undergraduate flowers undue…

…discomfort?

We report…

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Cal Peters, Painting, Mural, Applied Arts 315 Choir Room

…you decide!  Wow; Indians, French trappers and a fort!  Where the Hell’s The Reverends when you really need them?!?

Here’s a hint: the paintings ain’t the problem; rather chancellor Bob Meyer is an over-educated idiot of…

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…proportions.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

We lead off the week with another item courtesy of the WSJ which tells you all you need to know about the Clintons’ most recent and desperate act of disinformation and misdirection:

Now the Clintons Tell Us

The family foundation has done its job. Now they can pretend to honor ethical limits.

 

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After years of claiming that the Clinton Foundation poses no ethical conflicts for Bill and Hillary or the U.S. government, Bill Clinton now admits the truthsort of. If his wife becomes President, he says the Super PAC masquerading as a charity won’t accept foreign or corporate contributions. Bill will also resign from the foundation board, and Chelsea will stop raising money for it.

Now they tell us.

If such fund-raising poses a problem when she’s President, why didn’t it when she was Secretary of State or while she is running for President? The answer is that it did and does, and they know it, but the foundation was too important to their political futures to give it up until the dynastic couple were headed back to the Oval Office. Now that Hillary is running ahead of Donald Trump, Bill can graciously accept new restrictions on their pay-to-play politics.

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“PLUS, we’ve got more tax-free cash now than even Chelsea and our grandkids will be able to spend in their lifetimes!”

…By now the corporate and foreign cash has already been delivered, in anticipation that Hillary Clinton could become the next President. So now it’s the better part of political prudence to claim the ethical high ground.

If you choose to believe or have a short memory. Readers may recall that the foundation promised the White House when Mrs. Clinton became Secretary of State that the foundation would restrict foreign donations and get approval from the State Department. It turned out the foundation violated that pledge (in what turned out to be only the first of many times to come!), specifically when accepting $500,000 from Algeria. The foundation also agreed to disclose donor names but failed to do so for more than 1,000 foreign donors until the failure was exposed by press reports.

You also have to suspend disbelief that the foundation won’t live on as a Clinton political vehicle. Even if Bill and Chelsea take eight years off, the Clinton entourage appears to be taking no such vow. That would let friends and retainers continue to solicit donors and keep the joint running until the First Couple can return in 2025…”

As well as believe, as any number of Conservative commentators have recently suggested, the Foundation wasn’t about the money as much as the power.  Think about it: absent the cash, one cannot enjoy the lifestyle commensurate with the power.  Unless, of course, one is in

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“Barry, seriously; all these vacations, courtesy of the very people we despise, are growing pretty boring!”

…power!

By the way, if you want to read an incredibly biased “report” from ABC News on the same story, we suggest doing so…

Clinton’s Foundation to Alter Donations Policy If Elected

 

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…only on an empty stomach, as you’ll find conclusions such as these, with no objective follow-up whatsoever…

“The sprawling charitable network, founded after Bill Clinton left office in 2001, has raised more than $2 billion for initiatives focused on global health, climate change, economic development and increasing opportunities for women and girls.

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When Clinton served as secretary of state, the foundation reached an agreement with the Obama administration to prohibit, and in some cases curtail, foreign donations to its programs.

…very hard to swallow, let alone keep down!  We’re “left” to conclude ABC‘s research team couldn’t dig up a single word suggesting the Clintons promptly and repeatedly violated said agreement, let alone noting the percentage of the $2B actually spent on its purported programs.  As we observed in the June 6th edition of The Gouge, what the Clintons claim publiclyCDdgfhZWIAIvoF8

…is a far cry from what the Foundation’s tax filings report:

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MSM bias…WHAT bias?!?

Speaking of unconscionable bias, courtesy of NRO, the great Victor Davis Hanson asks a question related to what we’ve been saying ever since it became undeniably…and unfortunately…clear Trump was going to gain the GOP nomination:

Where’s the Letter from Democratic Security Officials Opposing Hillary?

They refuse to acknowledge their nominee’s long record of bungling and deception.

 

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“A group of 50 conservative foreign-policy elites and veteran national-security officials of prior Republican administrations recently wrote an open letter denouncing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump. They cited especially his lack of character and moral authority — and his “little understanding of America’s national interests.” Particularly bothersome, they wrote, is Trump’s inability “to separate truth from falsehood.” The letter stated that Trump’s one-year campaign of blustery rhetoric suggests he could be as reckless in deed in the White House as he has been in word on the campaign trail.

Is there a like group of past Democratic wise men and women who can commensurately “police their own” and so warn us about Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton? Unlike Trump, Clinton already has an actual political record as a former U.S. senator and secretary of state.

…Hillary Clinton is a fixture of the foreign policy establishment and thus is considered exempt from being judged empirically on her serial deceit and her disastrous foreign-policy record. In the world of elite Washington, crude bluster from an uncouth outsider like Trump is deemed more hazardous than the prevarication, dishonesty, and incompetence of a familiar insider.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch with the most errant marksman ever to seek primacy of The Gang Who May Never Learn to Shoot Straight, NRO‘s Kevin Williamson opines as to how and why…

Trump Is Losing, and Losing It

He and his media enablers are going down*

* Editor’s note: And they’re taking the rest of us with them!

 

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“Every profession has its in-house lingo, which may be confusing to amateurs. For example, in the world of campaign professionals, there’s a term for a candidate who spends most of his time complaining about the media: “Loser.”

Unless something radical and unexpected happens, Donald Trump is going to lose the 2016 presidential electionhe’ll lose it more than Hillary Rodham Clinton will win itfor more or less the reasons that his critics on the right have been explaining for more than a year now: In short, the sort of thing that makes hearts go pitter-patter out in derka-derka talk-radio land doesn’t necessarily fly in the rest of the country and may in fact even come off as creepy and weird, which is why three times as many people watch The Middle — a show I’d never heard of — as watch Sean Hannity’s nightly Trump-fest on Fox News. There’s more to America than your Uncle Bob’s right-wing Facebook circle, and Trump isn’t very well prepared for that.

Trump’s descent into full-bore toddler mode is not unexpected: He already is making excuses for losing in November and boasting that it doesn’t matter that much to him, because, as he put it, “I go back to a very good way of life.” And the people who supported him go back to seeing their liberties curtailed and their constitutional order perverted by an old-fashioned Democratic machine politician who could have been beaten by a dozen actual conservatives from whom Republicans had the opportunity to choose.

You can complain that the media is unfair to Republicans — it is. (And always has been!) But it isn’t the media that’s stopping Trump from organizing the basics of a presidential campaign. Trump is set to lose Georgia. Trump probably will end up winning Texas and Utah, but it is not inconceivable that he could lose them. And all that brave talk about the New Yorker making the race competitive in northern Democratic strongholds? Clinton is up 21 points in the latest New Jersey poll, 17 points in the latest New York poll, 10 points in the latest from Michigan, and 25 points in the latest from Illinois. The only Democratic states Trump currently is winning are the ones that were really Democratic until about 1994 or so, and he’s not even doing that great there, either, up by only 3 points in Mississippi.

…Most recently, he has been looking for an excuse to skip the debates against Hillary Rodham Clinton, clearly terrified that she is going to hand him his ass. Does anybody think Ted Cruz would have been looking for an excuse to dodge a debate with Clinton? He’d have been asking for 40 of them…”

But if Williamson makes a strong case for a position (#NeverTrump) with which we respectfully disagree, writing at the WSJ, John Yoo and Jeremy Rabkin make one of the more asinine arguments against The Donald we’ve ever read or heard:

What a Trumpian Supreme Court Might Look Like

Would justices appointed by Trump be able to restrain him?

 

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Seriously; how much worse could it look?!?

“…many conservatives still cling to the spirit of the 1950s — at least in their apocalyptic level of constitutional devotion. They say we must accept all other risks so that a President Trump might defend the Constitution, or at least the Supreme Court. We have already gone on record in opposition to this position, in our op-ed for the Los Angeles Times titled “Filling Supreme Court Vacancies Isn’t a Good Reason to Vote for Trump.” Among other things, people who think this way imagine that because Trump said he would appoint justices recommended by the Federalist Society, he will actually follow through. He may flip-flop and walk back and reposition himself on everything else, but not on his pledge to support conservative judges because…there does not seem to be any “because” to support this faith in Trump’s integrity, except the forlorn hope that he respects constitutional conservatives too much to throw them overboard.

Trump supporters also assume that because Trump intends to appoint good people to the courts, the Senate will acquiesce. They believe that Trump will be more successful in his appointments than Presidents Reagan, G. H. W. Bush and G. W. Bush. It’s hard to imagine why Trump, with no experience at all bargaining with legislators, would be more successful (or no less successful) than his far more experienced predecessors.

President Obama has extended executive authority beyond any of his predecessors, as with his penchant for rewriting laws or refusing to enforce them. A successor might try to repudiate or at least isolate the worst of these practices. (Like who: HILLARY?!?) How likely is a President Trump to let legal arguments stand in the way of anything he might take it into his head to do? How likely is he to appoint legal advisers with the clarity and resolution to tell him when he is overstepping?…”

Once again, Yoo and Rabkin are consumed with worry over what Trump MIGHT do, while expressing little or no concern over what Hillary will MOST CERTAINLY do!  Seriously, whose policies do Yoo and Rabkin think Hillary will emulate…

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…not to mention whose activist SCOTUS appointments…

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…she will most assuredly DUPLICATE?!?

And need we, a mere common graduate of the United States Naval Academy, remind these two learned professors of law it was Bush II and Ronaldus Maximus who nominated two of the biggest turncoats in Conservative history…

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…to the highest court in the land; as if Trump could do any worse?!?

Next, we turn South of the Border with yet another Progressive phenomena coming soon to a town, city, county, state and nation near you!

While country starves, Venezuela’s Maduro spent $400K to celebrate Fidel Castro’s birthday

 

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Oh,…sorry:

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We apparently confused our high-spending Socialists!  Then again, money means nothing when what you’re spending…

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…isn’t yours!

Finally, on The Lighter Side

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Magoo



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