DEBKAfile"The Iraqi army, for its part, has been virtually wiped out,
along with the many billions of dollars the US spent on training and
weapons. There is no longer any military force in Iraq, whether Sunni or
Shiite, able to take on ISIS and loosen its grip on the central and
western regions.
"The Kurdish peshmerga army, to whom President Barack
refused to provide armaments for combating the Islamists, has run out of
steam. An new offensive would expose the two main towns of the
semi-autonomous Kurdish Republic – the capital Irbil and the oil city of
Kirkuk – to the depredations of the Islamist belligerents."
. . .
"The Obama administration can no longer pretend that the pro-Iranian
Shiite militias are the panacea for the ISIS peril. Like Assad, Tehran
too is being forced to regroup. It is abandoning the effort to uproot
the Islamists from central and western Iraq and mustering all its Shiite
military assets, such as the Badr Brigade, to defend the Shiite south -
the shrine towns of Najef and Karbala, Babil (ancient Babylon) and
Qadisiya – as well as planting an obstacle in the path of the Islamists
to Iraq’s biggest oil fields and only port of Basra." . . .
Health insurers are proposing to raise Obamacare rates
more than in the past — some by more than 70 percent — now that they are
finally equipped with all the information they need to price those
plans. Plans wanting to raise rates by at least 10 percent next year posted
the proposed increase online Monday, as required by the 2010 healthcare
law. Insurers are allowed to raise rates each year, but they must
publish significant increases ahead of time. Insurers have sold plans in the law’s new insurance marketplaces for
two years in a row. But the difference in 2016 is that for the first
time, they have a full year of claims data from enrollees that tells
them how high or low to set the price tag. . . . While plans and rates vary by state, a look at rate increases
published Monday on healthcare.gov shows many hovering around 10 to 30
percent in many states. But there’s also a sprinkling of even bigger hikes. Blue Cross wants
to raise its most expensive “platinum” plan in Alabama by 71 percent
next year. Aetna wants to charge 59 percent more for one of its small
group plans in Virginia. Time Insurance Co. is proposing a 64 percent
hike for an individual plan in Georgia.
IBD Editorials"Economy: They must be getting pretty desperate in the White House economic shop these days. When the revised GDP numbers showed a first-quarter decline of 0.7%, they started blaming the estimates themselves.
"On the list of excuses for President Obama's ongoing failure to produce decent economic growth, we hadn't heard this one: A "seasonal adjustment" problem at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which compiles the GDP estimates.
"White House chief economist Jason Furman says that, despite its seasonal adjustments, the BEA might not be accurately accounting for the effect of winter weather on growth."
This next bit of ingenious snark may hit much closer to the way things could actually be. Whoever did this is as good as the people who do the "Hitler finds out..." videos. TD
George Will "Commencement season brings a respite from the sinister childishness rampant on campuses. Attacks on freedom of speech come from the professoriate, that herd of independent minds, and from the ever-thickening layer of university administrators who keep busy constricting freedom in order to fine-tune campus atmospherics.
"The attacks are childish because they infantilize students who flinch from the intellectual free-for-all of adult society. When Brown University’s tranquility of conformity was threatened by a woman speaker skeptical about the “rape culture” on campuses, students planned a “safe space” for those who would be traumatized by exposure to skepticism. Judith Shulevitz, writing in the New York Times, reported that the space had “cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies.”
"The attack on free expression is sinister because it asserts that such freedom is not merely unwise but, in a sense, meaningless." . . .Read more
Chris Rock Explains Why He Doesn’t Want to Perform on College Campuses . . . " Just as college campuses are meant to be “marketplaces of ideas”
generally, they should be places where comedians and other performers
are especially able to play with new acts. It’s disappointing to see
that this is not so, and that the atmosphere for freedom of speech and
comedy in particular on campuses has gotten bad enough that noted
comedians are avoiding student audiences altogether. That is a real loss
for them—after all, everybody could use a laugh." . . .
Rand Paul Slams Establishment Republicans, Declares Victory Over NSA . . . “The president has been told in no uncertain terms—and by the end of the week this will be in writing—that he can no longer illegally collect all of Americans’ phone records and keep them in Utah,” Paul said." . . .
Legal Insurrection
"Yesterday, I posed the conundrum of Rand Paul as an investment for major donors. From my perspective, the ratio of risk to reward tilts too heavily toward the former, and is a major cause of Paul’s fundraising troubles. I floated the idea that, contrary to some commentary from the pro-Paul camp, these troubles aren’t necessarily due to policy differences, but are a direct result of just how different Paul is from other candidates on a personal level.
"One of my commenters decided to keep it 150% more real when he said, Let me make this simple–he’s a jerk.
. . .
"Yesterday, Paul proved just how true that platitude rings when he accused his colleagues and peers on the Hill of “secretly wanting there to be an attack on the United States” out of spite over policy differences.
(Emphasis mine)
. . . "People here in town think I’m making a huge mistake. Some of them, I think, secretly want there to be an attack on the United States so they can blame it on me.
"Seriously, man?"
. . . "I’ve heard a lot of garbage come out of the mouths of politicians, but nothing—literally nothing—pisses me off more than an “I bet you hope everyone DIES” tantrum.
I
"t’s lazy. It’s cheap. It detracts from your point—which I can’t imagine he would want unless achieving a Constitutionally-friendly method of conducting surveillance wasn’t really the point of this whole thing."
We've had to put up with Obama's straw-man attacks for six years, and now this?
"Seems like Rand Paul always goes too far. He could have made a perfectly respectable argument that the NSA’s metadata program is illegal because it exceeds the Patriot Act’s authority. Instead he speciously insists that the Patriot Act shreds the Fourth Amendment and the program is akin to Nixon-era “domestic spying.”
"He could also have made a perfectly respectable — I would say, irrefutable — argument that there was strong bipartisan support for some reckless policies that significantly contributed to the rise of the Islamic State — the jihadist organization that now controls much of Iraq and Syria. Instead, the Kentucky Republican speciously claims that “hawks” in his own party “created” ISIS.
"ISIS is a creation of Islamic-supremacist ideology, which is drawn directly from Muslim scripture. Part of the reason that Senator Paul is no improvement over the Republicans he often derides is that he is just as wrong as they are about the threat we face.
" In their infatuation with Muslim engagement, Beltway Republicans imagine a monolithic, smiley-face Islam — a “religion of peace” that seamlessly accommodates Western liberalism . . . except where it has been “hijacked” by “violent extremists.” Indeed, long before President Obama came along, it was the Bush administration that endeavored to purge terms like “jihadism” from our lexicon, even assuring us: “The fact is that Islam and secular democracy are fully compatible — in fact, they can make each other stronger.” Read more
This is not materially different from the “blame America first”
cast of mind that Jeanne Kirkpatrick diagnosed and Barack Obama
instantiates. Nor is it far from the mindset that blames Pamela Geller
or Charlie Hebdo when Islamists respond to mere taunts with lethal
violence — as if sharia gives Muslims a special mayhem dispensation that
American law must accommodate.
“ 'She’s absolutely unqualified to run this country,” stated Willey. “Just look at something as simple as her judgment. … I question her judgment on a number of issues when it comes to being the president. She enabled his behavior. It’s as simple as that. She looked the other way. She might throw a tantrum, but she enabled it to happen again and again and again and again. Then she chooses to go after the women that he hooked up with to ruin them again and again and again and again. That’s how it works. I don’t see how anybody can respect a woman like that, especially another woman. She is the worst role model for a wife and a mother and a politician, anything. … She is a hypocrite.'" . . . Dead man warns: Don't vote Hillary"Family uses obituary to blast Clinton candidacy" And the dead are Democrat voters!
Bill Clinton Accuser Resurfaces . . . . . . "Based on the intimate knowledge she claims to possess about the former first couple, Jones recently shared several reasons she thinks Hillary Clinton would make a terrible president. . . . “ 'If she is for the everyday person,” Jones wondered, “why did she not
stand up for the women when she knew what her husband did? There is no
way that she did not know what was going on, that women were being
abused and accosted by her husband. She knew what was happening and just
to ignore it – it was a political relationship and suited them both.” "The couple has a “history of not being truthful,” Jones continued,
adding that she believes Hillary Clinton is viewing her presidential bid
as “an ego thing.”
"Jones is the second Bill Clinton accuser to publicly criticize Hillary in recent months. As Western Journalism reported in April, Kathleen Willey insisted she would be an inept and untrustworthy president." . . .
"Retiring CBS journalist Bob Schieffer made what is perhaps the understatement of the year when he said of the media that "maybe we were not skeptical enough" of Barack Obama when he burst on the political scene in 2008. . . . "Skepticism of Obama back in 2008 would have been nice, but I think most Republicans would have settled for a little fairness in coverage – especially of vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. And, of course, despite mountains of [evidence]that Obama is an incompetent, radical demogogue(sp), he is still getting the benefit of glowing coverage by a fawning media.
Vanity Fair’s 22-page cover story features stunning Annie Leibovitz photos of Caitlyn Jenner, formerly known as Bruce, along with revealing new details. Here’s a preview of the story.
. . "Bissinger speaks extensively with Jenner’s four children from his first two marriages—Burt, 36, and Cassandra, 34, with first wife Chrystie, and Brandon, 33, and Brody, 31, with second wife Linda—and describes an insensitive father who had been absent for years at a time. Jenner openly acknowledges mistakes made with them as Bruce, and expresses genuine regret. Says Burt, “I have high hopes that Caitlyn is a better person than Bruce. I’m very much looking forward to that.' ”
"In the month of May, 35 trillion gallons of rain fell on the great state of Texas, creating some significant flooding problems (and the construction of a few Arks), but also replenishing the state's previously low reservoirs.
"Being a generous state, Texas would love to share some of this abundance of water with the increasingly thirsty liberals in California who suddenly seem very enthusiastic about the creation of ugly, environmentally destructive pipelines if it means they won't have to drain their hot tubs or boycott their bidets.
"Sadly, no such pipeline is being seriously proposed, and not just for the reason cited in the cartoon. Rather, Hope n' Change is pretty sure that this president would never sign legislation which would expose Americans to the very real possibility of job creation."
