A great leader takes a problem and turns it into an opportunity for success. With Rand Paul’s recent confrontation with Savannah Guthrie still fresh in every one’s mind this was the perfect opportunity for Mr. Trump to show that he is presidential. Megyn Kelly served up the perfect opportunity for Mr. Trump to show graciousness with the question and put his abrasive relationship with women to rest. It was a win-win opportunity for him. If Ms. Kelly continues to attack him he will elicit sympathy and probably improve on his unfavorable ratings. If Ms. Kelly acknowledges his graciousness in her follow up questions then he has probably proven to the media and the voters that he has the right stuff to argue the issues with Ms. Clinton.
Politics
Run, Carly, Run
On Friday my wife and I decided to contribute a little money to the Carly for President campaign. It is not much but maybe the media will notice when small contributors vote with their pocket book. She has been one of the most intriguing candidates for some time with her articulate answers. Her speech at the Reagan library might be a classic. On Thursday she was the most Presidential candidate on the stage. It is likely she will be in the final group next time. Sometimes the best man for a job is a woman. Time to bring the ‘A’ game boys or drop out.
Does Hillary Clinton’s Bad Decision Making Disqualify Her From Being Our Next President?
Back in March I wondered out loud whether anyone could be stupider than the IRS with handling emails. Then I learned that Ms. Clinton ran her own computer system for her official emails. One of the many problems the Secretary of State had with running a private mail server is that she or people corresponding with her may have inadvertently leaked sensitive government information. Since our government threw the book at General Petraeus over leaking sensitive government information, it was highly likely that Ms. Clinton would eventually have to pay for her bad decision making. This week the Wall Street Journal wrote:
Mrs. Clinton took an enormous risk to national security by putting her official emails on a private server. Sooner or later she was certain to send or receive some information useful to foreign governments even if it wasn’t officially classified. Every intelligence expert we’ve talked to says it is close to a certainty that some foreign intelligence agency was able to hack her emails while she was America’s chief diplomat.
Now the Washington Times reports:
The U.S. intelligence community is bracing for the possibility that former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private email account contains hundreds of revelations of classified information from spy agencies and is taking steps to contain any damage to national security, according to documents and interviews Thursday.
The top lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committee have been notified in recent days that the extent of classified information on Mrs. Clinton’s private email server was likely far more extensive than the four emails publicly acknowledged last week as containing some sensitive spy agency secrets.
So now I wonder whether she will be offered a Petraeus-like agreement by federal prosecutors in which she would plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge for mishandling classified information. It sounds like her email account contains security breaches that are more numerous and serious than General Petraeus. At some point we have to admit that her dumb decisions with her email account will land her in court, seriously damaged national security, and disqualifies her as a Presidential candidate.
If Mr. Stephanopoulos Cares About AIDS Why Did He Not Use Charity Navigator To Help Him Select The Best AIDS Charity?
Politico makes a good argument that Mr. Stephanopoulos has earned a reputation as a smart and savvy journalist. When I go to the Clinton Foundation web site I found it difficult to figure out what they have done for treating or preventing AIDS. Surprisingly AIDS is not one of the Clinton Foundation #trendlines for Africa. So you have to ask the question why did he choose the Clinton Foundation over one of Charity Navigator’s top rated AIDS charities for his $75,000 donation. If Mr. Stephanopoulus really cares about AIDS then any one of those 27 top rated charities would have been the smarter, savvier choice. If Mr. Stephanopoulus is as smart and savvy as we think he is, then what could motivate him to be so disingenuous to his concern for AIDS? It is a question of character. If I was a AIDS fund raiser I would be reminding Mr. Stephanopoulos at every opportunity that a very large contribution to a “real” AIDS charity will go a long way to overcoming his misguided donation to the Clinton Foundation.
Until The Clinton Cash Allegations I Thought The Biggest Obstacle For The Clinton Presidential Campaign Was Satire
Early last week I was planning on emailing my son a Clinton cartoon when it struck me that he was a good example of how the millennials are getting their political news. So if Ms. Clinton keeps up her trend of being the butt of every joke and cartoon she is going to lose the millennial vote. I doubt millennials will give her any slack for deleting emails and you really cannot blame Republicans for this problem.
Millennials are not the only voter segment who have problems with Ms. Clinton. An Ohio congressman recently asserted that Ohio was Hillary territory because of her performance in the primary in 2008. As a person who seriously considered voting for Ms. Clinton in the 2008 Democratic primary, I see the story differently. In 2008 I assumed that with Bill Clinton on her team, she would make better decisions than Mr. Obama. I continued to believe that she was the better presidential candidate up until the Benghazi disaster. When I tried to understand the logic behind Benghazi I came to the conclusion that she was the manager in charge of a broad policy failure and Benghazi was just the beginning. Shortly thereafter my analysis was confirmed when the Administration bungled the problems in Syria, Ukraine, and Iraq. I do not know how much blame to put on the Obama Administration versus Ms. Clinton but I can say with certainty that my hope that Bill Clinton would stop help her making dumb decisions was ill-founded.
Back in February I took a look at Form 990 for the Clinton Foundation when the allegations of corruption first started to swirl. As a former treasurer for a Habitat for Humanity affiliate I know my way around the Form 990. Since the Clinton Foundation is a 503c3 charity there are pretty strict rules against participating in politics and they seemed to be abiding by those rules. What annoyed me the most about the Foundation’s tax return was that it was pretty difficult to see who besides the employees benefited from the Foundation. Unlike notable charities like Samaritan’s Purse or the Salvation Army, there was very little direct aid and a large part of donations went into the bank account or for overhead. If I was a board member my first question would be what are they saving the cash for? If you are a serious charity then you should spend it like you are serious about making a difference in the world. Another thing that caught my attention is that unlike Habitat for Humanity who frequently does promotions as a way of both thanking their major contributors and highlighting their cause, the contributors to the Clinton Foundation were invisible. When you compare the Clinton Foundation to the standards set by Samaritan’s Purse, Salvation Army, or Habit for Humanity, the foundation looks more incompetent than corrupt but it could be both.
Then the Clinton Cash book story was released by the New York Times and the Democratic leadership has been playing defense all week. The problem reached a peak last Sunday on This Week With George Stephanopoulos. Newt Gingrich laid out the case for criminal charges and the normally cheerful Donna Brazile was visibly dismayed defending the Clinton’s actions. Both Donna and George know that when it comes to political corruption, many politicians have fallen from grace with less circumstantial evidence then is in this book. Much to the chagrin of the Democratic Party when the New York Times and the Washington Post are leading the investigation, it looks like a legitimate political corruption story that is not going away anytime soon. So far the Clinton campaign has acted more like a never ending reality show than a presidential campaign. I am curious how this ends.
If Reducing Nuclear Proliferation In The Middle East Is The Goal Then Why Is Israel and Saudi Arabia Not At The Table With Iran?
If the Administration’s goal is to prevent Iran from developing or getting a nuclear weapon then you have to wonder why the countries with the most to lose are not at the table with the Iran. If the United States is abandoning their traditional role as the world’s cop then who cares what the United States thinks anymore? The omission of Israel and Saudi Arabia is intriguing. Even though Israel maintains that they “would not be the first country to “introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East”, there are plenty of rumors about how close Israel was to using nuclear weapons when they thought their forces were about to be over-run. So you would have to think that a “limited nuclear war” is still part of their war plans today. Saudi Arabia is concerned if not panic stricken over Iran’s desire for nuclear weapons. Once upon a time they could afford to sit idly on the sidelines while the victims of terrorism was Israel or the United States but with Sunni-Shiite wars to the North and South of them. The idea that Iran might either attack them or black mail them is now a real threat. If we use the Camp David Accords as the model, then Israel, Iran, and Saudi Arabia have to be the major players in reducing nuclear proliferation negotiations.
A Couple More Reasons Why Hillary Clinton Should Not Use A Private Email Server For Official Correspondence
I was pondering whether anyone could be stupider than the IRS with handling emails when I learned that Ms. Clinton ran her own computer system for her official emails. Which part of violating government document retention requirements of the Federal Records Act, impeding an ongoing investigation, and potentially leaking sensitive government information does she not understand? They just threw the book at General Petraeus over leaking sensitive government information! I immediately came up with a bunch of questions like:
- How did she read top secret emails?
- Were any of the Benghazi emails on her server confidential or secret?
- Which Inspector General signed off on this email server fiasco?
- Is she deliberately sabotaging her 2016 presidential election?
Then I decided I should give her the benefit of the doubt till I did a little more research. With a little more time to ponder the AP report, Clinton ran her own computer system for her official emails, I have to say that of all of the bone-headed things for a Secretary of State to do, running a mail server from your home is at the top of my list. I am an IT professional who ran a mail server from my home and I can say unequivocally that it is a pain in the butt. In addition to the hardware requirements you have to be concerned about security, backups, and disaster recovery. To top it off it is particularly difficult to get the Domain Name System settings correct so that your emails do not end up in everyone’s spam folder. Even if you have to pay Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo, let them do it. You will be much better off. It is not worth your time and money to run a mail server from your home!
I cringe thinking about this but if we assume the AP report is correct then what can we say about her email server setup. My first check found out that her email is filtered from spam and protected from viruses by Mxlogic. This matches the claim in the article but it begs the question what did she do before she signed up with Mxlogic in 2013? I know Mxlogic was protecting my company email back in 2008. Did she run a naked email server? Then I checked for TXT records. I did not find any. This is the part of the DNS that email providers check to see if you are who you say you are. In my day job I manage a newsletter with over 80,000 subscribers. To keep in the good graces of the email world we include TXT records for SPF and DKIM so the major email providers know that we really are the one sending the email and not a spammer. At the very minimum you should have a static IP for the mail server and the DNS should have a TXT record for SPF, an A record for the sub-domain pointing to the IP of the email server, and a reverse PTR record for the sub-domain. So how did a person getting an email from this server know it was Ms. Clinton and not someone impersonating her? I don’t think I want to know any more. Ms. Clinton running an email server is far worse than anything that General Petraeus did!
Will we allow ourselves to be sorted into factions and turned against one another?
When I heard President Obama ask this question in the 2015 State of the Union speech I immediately thought of the pressing problem we have with reforming, replacing, or repealing the Affordable Care Act insurance exchanges. ACA exchanges is a dumb policy that is not only inefficient and cumbersome but it has split the American middle class into factions and turned ourselves against one another. It is an easy moral and political argument to make that ACA exchanges as a necessary policy to facilitate wealth redistribution between the rich and the poor. It is a completely different moral and political argument when the ACA is more accurately described as wealth redistribution amongst the middle class. That is how Professor Gruber, one of the architects of the Affordable Care Act, described it. As a healthy person in the middle class when I see higher health insurance rates I conclude that last year’s pay raise went to pay either someone else’s health insurance, protect insurance companies from bad government policies, or to help build a federal health care bureaucracy. It makes me bitter. As a healthy person I was not supposed to be affected by ACA reforms. Instead of stimulating the economy and creating jobs, increased health care spending is likely causing the middle class to hunker down. When I look at 21,000 pages of new regulations and rising health insurance costs, I think it is fair to describe the ACA as a deal made in political hell between between HHS, Democratic politicians, and insurance companies. It looks and smells like cronyism so it is not exactly the moral high ground that the middle class is likely to rally around. It is the second question he posed in the SOTU speech that goes to the heart of the reform, replace, or repeal debate. How do we recapture the sense of common purpose when the ACA has pitted middle class factions against each other? Is the ACA too morally corrupt to middle class sensibilities that reform is impossible or can we find some non-partisan reforms to make the ACA less evil?
Will we allow ourselves to be sorted into factions and turned against one another — or will we recapture the sense of common purpose that has always propelled America forward?
Many politicians believe that “America is great because America is good.” and “If America ever stops being good, it will stop being great.” Tocqueville attributed American exceptionalism to the fact their “morals can turn the worst laws to advantage”.
So how do we reform health care if America stops being good?
Venezuela should be rich, but its government has destroyed its economy
Since I lived in Venezuela in the 1960s and have blogged about it in the past, I was surprised to find an article at the Wonkblog about the Venezuelan economic crisis. I am surprised anyone cares right now. The chance of a political solution appear slim. Venezuela will fix its problems in 2015 but it will not be civil. Here is the leading line from the article.
The problem with socialism isn’t that you eventually run out of other people’s money. It’s that you eventually run out of oil money.
Voters Think Obama’s Plan Makes More Middle Class Taxes Likely
When President Obama says he wants to help the middle class by taxing the rich, I get worried. I cynically associate his idea to President Reagan’s nine scariest words, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” It is still fresh in my mind President Obama claims that the Affordable Care Act would allow me to keep my insurance plan if I wanted and that it would lower my health insurance costs. Since my health insurance costs are rising rapidly I think I have a very good reason to be skeptical of Democratic politicians when they say they want to help the middle class. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. What surprised me was this Rasmussen poll showed that there are a lot of people who are leery of the President’s latest claims. Here is one the more intriguing statements in the report.
One reason for the opposition may be that 66% of all voters think that if the president and Congress agree to a plan that raises taxes on wealthy Americans, it’s likely that middle-class taxes will go up, too. Thirty percent (30%) consider that unlikely. But this includes 33% who say a middle-class tax hike is Very Likely and just five percent (5%) who consider it Not At All Likely.
From the Rasmussen poll it looks like the President and the Democratic party have a trust issue with 66% of the population. This trust issue reminded me of this chart from a Gallup poll before the last election. The Rasmussen poll appears to confirm that the “the way federal gov’t works” is still a more important issue to most people than “wealth and income distribution” issue.