Hillary Blames Fracking For ‘Tragedy’ In Coal Country…

Weasel Zippers

"Nothing to do with Obama’s policies.

"Via Washington Examiner:

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton on Monday blamed natural gas and fracking for the “tragedy” being experienced in coal country.

“It is a complicated problem,” Clinton said. “Some people want to make it all political, but there are market forces, there are global challenges, there’s also the upswing in fracking … which has proved to be a very serious competitor to coal.”

Clinton made the comments while touring through Kentucky, and later West Virginia, as part of a tour to demonstrate her plans for revitalizing Appalachia ahead of primary elections there later this month. Thousands of jobs have been lost by the coal industry in the last year, with a number of companies filing for bankruptcy protection in the Mountaineer State alone.

The shale boom has dramatically increased natural gas supplies, making the U.S. one of the largest oil and gas producers in the world. The increased supply has caused the price of natural gas to drop dramatically, causing more utilities to switch from using coal to using more natural gas to supply the nation’s electricity.[…]

She is using the stops to emphasize her plan to create a $30 billion “Marshall Plan” to revitalize and bring jobs to the region, making the comparison between helping coal country and rebuilding Germany after World War II.

Keep reading…

Full article here.

More Biden Failure in Iraq

Max Boot

"When it comes to Iraqi politics, Joe Biden seems to have the reverse­Midas touch: Everything he touches turns to muck. 

"Given the Iraq portfolio by President Obama, Biden made his mark in 2010 by putting the U.S. firmly behind the reelection as prime minister of the Shiite sectarian Nouri al Maliki even though Ayad Allawi, a non­sectarian leader, had won more votes. In charge once again during negotiations over the Status of Forces Agreement, Biden didn’t secure a treaty to keep U.S. forces in Iraq in 2011. The result: With the U.S. gone, Maliki’s sectarian vendetta was unleashed against Sunnis, leading them into the arms of ISIS. 

"Last Thursday Biden returned to the scene of the crime in a show of support for the new American Backed(sp) leader, Haider al Abadi, who replaced Maliki in September 2014. A senior official traveling with the vice president said the visit was a “symbol of how much faith we have in Prime Minister Abadi.”

" Within days, thousands of Muqtada al Sadr’s followers had overrun the seat of Iraq’s government, revealing Abadi’s impotence–and also the hollowness of a U.S. policy based on supporting him. " . . .

The primaries in living color

What to Expect in the Indiana Primary Tonight

PJ Media

. . . "The Hoosier State will bind 57 delegates on Tuesday: 30 delegates to the state-wide winner and 3 each to the winner in the state's nine congressional districts. Even a small win in Indiana translates into a large delegate win, and of the remaining states only California would net more delegates. In order to stop Trump from reaching the 1,237 delegates he needs to clinch the nomination, Cruz (or John Kasich) would have to win Indiana or win California big.

"Conventional wisdom suggests that Indiana would be a great state for Cruz. The Hoosier State has the largest share of evangelical Protestants of any state yet to vote, at 31 percent (9 points higher than Wisconsin, Cruz's great triumph last month). In the 2012 Republican primary, voters toppled Sen. Richard Lugar in favor of Tea Party challenger Richard Mourdock (who then lost the general election due to an off-color pro-life comment). Like Wisconsin, Indiana has a robust population of well-educated, high-income conservatives.

"But those who know Indiana better have pegged it for Donald Trump." . . .

Hillary’s Turn: Gets Ripped By Laid Off Coal Worker At West Virginia Roundtable.

After this, imagine! Hillary, from the Obama administration, actually apologizes to an American! See below this article.

The Lid  "Earlier today we reported that former president Bubba Clinton got booed during a Sunday campaign stop in West Virginia.  On Monday it was Hillary’s turn.  It seems that the people of West Virginia have not forgiven Ms. Clinton for bragging how she was going to take away their jobs. Back in March, Hillary Clinton infamously stated on CNN that, “We have to move away from coal,” and she promised if elected she was, “going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

"At a roundtable in West Virginia this afternoon, Bo Copley, a 39-year-old father who lost his job as a foreman in the struggling coal industry handed the Democratic candidate a picture of his kids as he confronted Clinton asking, how she could pledge to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business and “then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend?”  (Emphases in the original. TD)

These are the words of the woman who said the Mohammed video caused the Benghazi attacks.

Here are her previous words:

Hillary apologizes in West Virginia for saying, 'We're going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business'

"In what Monica Alba of NBC News called “a rare candid moment” (I love it that even NBC News acknowledges Hillary is such a phony), Hillary Clinton“apologized to a man who confronted her over comments made earlier this year about putting coal miners "out of business.' ”

. . . 

"Shohsanna Weissman points out at the Weekly Standard that Hillary actually reversed herself and now says she wants coal jobs:" . . .

Video here.
. . . 

. . . "Hillary is a captive of green extreme, consisting of religious fanatics and crony capitalists, so she can’t actually reverse the policies that are destroying the coal industry. All she can do is more skillfully employ euphemisms to try to deceive people she thinks of as gullible."

West Virginia was not kind to husband Bill either.

How to Explain the Necessity of Jesus' Death to Muslims

PJ Media

"I have been in a few face-to-face debates with Muslims, and all of them were polite and respectful. One question from my Muslim friends kept popping up, however: "Why did Jesus have to die on the cross for our sins? If we sin, God just forgives! He does not need for someone to take our place." Muslims have told me that this substitutionary sacrifice is actually very unfair of God. God would never let a righteous man die for the guilty. They illustrate it this way: "Would God allow an innocent baby to die for the crimes of murderers? Of course not! So, it would be immoral for God to send a righteous man to pay for others' sins."

"The Quran states very clearly that Jesus did not die on the cross: "They declared: 'We have put to death the Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, the apostle of God.' They did not kill him, nor did they crucify him, but they thought they did (Surah 4:157-158)." And it says that one person cannot bear the burden of another (Surah 6:164), so a human cannot die for the sins of others. (However, elsewhere in Surah 29:12-13 it says others, such as Christians and Jews, will be punished for the sins of Muslims. So, the Quran does teach that at least some will be punished in the place of others.)

"To answer this I begin with the question . . ."

Zone Rouge: An Area of France So Badly Damaged By WW1 That People Are Still Forbidden To Live There

Brilliant Maps

"While WW1 ended nearly a century ago, its scars can still be found across Northern France and Belgium. Zone Rouge (French for Red Zone) is perhaps the ultimate example of this.

"At the end of the war in 1918, the French government isolated the areas in red above and forbade activities such as forestry, farming and even the building of houses from being performed inside them.

"In total the non-contiguous areas took up 1,200 sq km (460 sq mi) (roughly the size of New York City).

"The primary reason the areas were declared no-go zones was that they had seen some of the worst fighting during the war, particularly during the Battle of Verdun in 1916. The areas were environmentally devastated and contained large numbers of unexploded ordnance along with human and animal remains that further contaminated the environment." . . .

. . . "A blog post really can’t do this topic much justice so I highly recommend learning more from the following books:

• The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916
• Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War
• A World Undone: The Story of the Great War, 1914 to 1918
• Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Corporal Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914-1918
• Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

The White House Correspondents Dinner

Stand Up Tragedy The cartoon is a good bit over the top to include it all here, but here are the three middle panels of the nine:

C-List Comedian Reduces the Obama Presidency and Legacy to a Racist Slur   . . . "The office of the presidency has been devalued now to the point of moral, ethical, and legal bankruptcy, and it was just epitomized by the way a comedian with a tiny, tiny audience addressed the president of the United States. And the president, smiling, laughingly accepted it.

"Saying what nobody else can say. Saying something that I couldn't say. Nobody else in polite society or anywhere else in the media could say it without all hell raining down on them, and in some cases there would be serious efforts to have whoever said it, even if quoting it, removed from his position in broadcasting.  "Yo, Barry, you did it! You my [slang N-word]."  And there's Obama laughing and people saying, "Well, Obama's gotta do that. That's a classy move for Obama to make."  Stop and think about this.  Stop and think." Video: Wilmore's routine

White House press secretary defends Larry Wilmore’s use of the ‘n-word’ in addressing President Obama   . . . "Ryan noted that there was "an eerie, awkward silence and quietness" in reaction to the comment, and many guests "were appalled. Even members of the Republican Party, black Republicans, were upset.' " . . 
The UK Guardian even chimed in on the issue:
"When Larry Wilmore said the N-word to President Obama, I felt black pride" Rebecca Carroll   . . . "But as an adult and the parent of a 10-year-old son, I still don’t use it or want to hear it.

"The obvious reason is that I never heard it spoken to me lovingly. The only context I know for that word is one in which I am being intentionally degraded by white people. The next time I heard it, after the playground, was in high school, when my boss at the local oil company called me a lazy n---er under his breath after I refused to clean the bathroom right after he’d used it." . . .

In fairness, Wilmore also took on Al Sharpton. Some time back, of course.   . . . "Sharpton’s anger at the lack of black nominees for the Oscar nominations and his statement that he planned to call an “emergency meeting” in Hollywood to discuss it caused Wilmore to complain: “Sharpton? Again? I mean, no one else can represent us?

“ 'Al! Al! Al! Slow down, man! You don’t have to respond to every black emergency. You’re not black Batman — a racial fire chief,” Mediaite reported." . . .

Jason Riley Is the Latest Conservative to Be Disinvited from a College Campus

Peter Wood and Rachelle Peterson   "The higher-education disinvitation sweepstakes continue. Virginia Tech has just disinvited Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute senior fellow. Riley had been asked to deliver the BB&T Distinguished Lecture at Virginia Tech’s Pamplin College of Business. But late last week he received an e-mail from the faculty member who arranged the lecture informing him that the head of the Finance Department, the J. Gray Ferguson Professor of Finance, Vijay Singal, had vetoed the invitation. We obtained a copy of this e-mail. 

"Why? Mr. Riley, who is black, has attracted some negative attention since his publication in 2014 of Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed. Professor Singal feared that whatever controversy Riley had attracted so far would be amplified once he set foot on Virginia Tech’s campus. He imagined there would be amplified controversy over Riley’s speech because Virginia Tech is still reverberating from the last BB&T Distinguished Lecture, delivered by Charles Murray on March 25. 

"That event was widely noted because of the exceptionally clumsy way that Virginia Tech president Tim Sands handled it. Sands sent an “open letter” to the Virginia Tech community on March 10, ostensibly upholding the invitation to Murray but doing so in such poison-pen language that he practically wrote the placards for the protesters. . ."

Cleveland is spending $20 million on riot and security gear for the Republican convention

VOX  . . . "The Republican convention might have an especially contentious atmosphere

Groups protesting the Republican Party are expected to show up, much as they have at every RNC. However, this year's inflammatory campaign rhetoric and a potentially rare contested convention could make for bigger and more violent protests than in recent years.

Already during primaries this year, violent protests have broken out at campaign stops across the country, most notably at rallies for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.

. . . "The Cleveland Police Department is currently under Justice Department oversight after a 2013 DOJ probe revealed numerous problems, including unnecessary and violent confrontations with citizens.

" 'They will be facing one of the most complex incidents that they will ever face," Jonathan Smith, a former Justice Department lawyer who supervised the investigation into Cleveland, told the Marshall Project in reference to the convention. "You would want a department that has systems that are in place where there is better accountability and better supervision."

" 'I’m really concerned all hell is going to break loose," James L. Hardiman, a vice president of the Cleveland NAACP, told the Los Angeles Times. "The big concern is injury to people, damage to property, indiscriminate arrest. The people who actually live here — what are we going to be left with at the end of the day? ' "

Democrats Get a Taste of Obama’s Arrogance

Jonah Goldberg  

. . . "Meanwhile, poor Barack Obama, while not always without fault in Milbank’s eyes, is the grown-up, the good guy trying to do good things amidst a mob of malcontents and ideologues. 
RELATED: A Third-Class Temperament 

"That is, until this month. President Obama wants to get a trade deal passed. He needs Democrats to do it. But, Milbank laments, Obama’s blowing it. 

“ 'Let’s suppose you are trying to bring a friend around to your point of view,” Milbank writes. “Would you tell her she’s emotional, illogical, outdated, and not very smart? Would you complain that he’s being dishonest, fabricating falsehoods and denying reality with his knee-jerk response?” “Such a method of a persuasion is likelier to get you a black eye than a convert,” Milbank notes. “Yet this is how President Obama treats his fellow Democrats on trade . . .”

" Yes, well, true enough. But lost on Milbank is the fact that this is precisely how Obama treats everyone who disagrees with him. When Obama — who ran for office touting his ability to work with Republicans and vowing to cure the partisan dysfunction in Washington — treated Republicans in a far ruder and shabbier way, Milbank celebrated." . . .

Why would the U.S. want to be like Denmark? Point and counterpoint

Background: 5 Simple Office Policies That Make Danish Workers Way More Happy Than Americans

. . . "I'm not trying to paint Danish companies as utopias for workers and their American counterparts as tyrannical hellholes. There are bad Danish workplaces and stellar American ones—Zappos and Google are two that I've personally visited and studied.
"But studies have uncovered a number of systemic and cultural differences between the two nations that serve to explain why Danish workers are on average so much happier than American ones." . . .

Sierra Rayne   "Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait asks, "If we want to be like Denmark, whom do we tax?"

Turning into Denmark would be sheer folly for the United States, or almost any other OECD nation.

"We'll start with real per capita GDP.  It is 22% higher in the U.S., meaning that being like Denmark would involve giving up a substantial portion of the average individual national wealth.  That doesn't seem wise.

"Denmark's real per capita GDP is lower now than it was in 2004.  A decade of darkness.  Make that a decade and a half: since 2000, its real per capita GDP has increased – in total – only 2.6%.  As anemic as the American growth rate is, it is fivefold faster than Denmark's.

"Denmark has a far higher rate of assault than the U.S. (i.e., the Danes are very violent), and its violent crime rate is headed through the roof.

. . . 

"The U.S. wins by a long shot on housing, income, and health, and it's a tie on jobs – all the objectively measurable points that matter.

"And to achieve this victory, the all-in average personal income tax rates at average wage in the U.S. are upwards of half the rate the Danes are suffering under.

"Want to pay much more to be much poorer?  Move to Denmark."

On Denmark:  
Denmark considers tax on beef, other red meats to combat climate change

. . . dean of the London Business School, first raised the possibility that Denmark might be a model for the United States

Nordic Countries Do Actually Soak The Rich   . . . "The upshot of this is that, unlike the US, there isn't a sizeable reservoir of taxable income being grabbed down at tops of the wage distribution. This means that they necessarily have to "tax the middle class" more because that's where the money is. This is less true in the US. To eventually get to Nordic tax levels, you certainly have to bring in the VATs and bring in higher tax wedges in the middle-income zones. But in the short-term, you could up the US tax level quite a bit by only tapping the excess taxing capacity at the top of the wage distribution."

Sanders calls Denmark a model  . . . " The most generous tax-and-transfer systems in the world — such as in Denmark, a country Sanders has cited as a model — do not tax the rich all that much more heavily than the United States does. The main difference is that they also tax the middle class heavily, and redistribute the proceeds further down the income scale."  (Emphasis mine, TD)

U.S. Household Net Worth Hits Record High   . . . "But the rebound, while powerful, has been tilted in a way that limits the upside for the broader U.S. economy and is increasingly leaving behind many middle- and lower-income Americans."   This is after eight years of Obama's Democrat rule.