I Remember This...

Pirates

I knew there was something different about them!

Cool Pic!

This Could Have Been My Dad's House!

Pesky Wind

Mother nature can pull funny little tricks sometimes

Seems Pretty Obvious

But maybe not...there seems to be a lot of hate going around!

Dogs Are Cool!

And smart!

A September 11th Perspective

Radical ISLAMIC Terrorists did this.  Of that there is no debate.  The worst attack on the homeland in our history.  Almost 3000 ordinary citizens killed.  They also attacked the Pentagon and wanted to attack the White House, but that plane wound up in a field in Pennsylvania, thanks to heroic action by some great Americans.  That day the attack changed our country.  We've been at war since that day.  The trouble is that most people don't realize it.  They don't feel it.  They live their lives and aren't impacted by events far away. And it's preferable to forget the horror of that day.  So we've played an away game.  We've kept them out, so far, and we've engaged in far flung places on the other side of the earth.  But at some point that will change.  The world is shrinking.  And the threats are growing.  We ignore them at our peril.  But our eagerness to forget the horror has led us to hire (elect) people to lead us who don't have an appreciation of the threat and experience to deal with it.

Since that day we've tried all kinds of things to keep us safe.   We went to war in Afghanistan to root out Al Queda and find Bin Laden and though long and hard, had some successes.  But we took our eye off the ball and became fixated on supposed Weapons of Mass Destruction being stored in Iraq for use by a madman dictator.   So we made the ill-fated decision to take them and him out.  I say ill-fated because with the benefit of historical hindsight, that's really all you can say.  And if you're one of those who has a selective memory, let me remind you that at the time virtually everyone in any decision making position (on both sides of the aisle) believed that the WMD stories were accurate.  And the endless UN resolutions and inspections yielded nothing.  And Hussein had been attacking our forces for almost a decade.  And killing hundreds of thousands of his own people.  So our hand was forced.  But...the intelligence turned out to be faulty and we turned out to not know how to win the peace.  Oh we won the war.  We achieved our objectives.  But we were terrible at administering the peace.  As a result, it took years, considerable treasure and too many lives to come to stability.  It's not a big surprise that we didn't have the right people in place to ensure success in Iraq.  That has happened many times in our history.  Ask Lincoln.  Or Eisenhower.

But we did achieve some level of stability after the surge and had a plan for Iraq.  But that went out the window when the current CinC decided that it was politically expedient to leave.  So we left and a vacuum resulted. And like Iraq, we've retreated from virtually every theater in the world, especially the Middle East.  Our exit from Iraq with no plan has resulted in chaos.  We refuse to arm the Kurds who are the only force in the region capable of fighting against the scourge of ISIS.  We've allowed ISIS to strengthen and expand their reign of terror, especially against Christians.  The atrocities that have been documented are unspeakable.  As a civilized country and supposed leader of the world, that we are standing by and doing nothing is shameful.  Make no mistake, ISIS is a product of our CinC and his policies.  Full stop.  At least during the Nazi reign of terror and genocide we were at war and didn't have the knowledge that we have today.  Imagine if we had stories of Jews being gassed and burned alive and doing nothing.  But while ISIS beheads, we ruminate.

We have turned our back on Afghanistan and that country will surly descend into tyranny and 7th century style repression again.  Someday we will hear of the atrocities being committed in that country and there will be a cry that we must do something.  We've drawn so many red lines in the sand that I've lost count.  We made a terrible but containable situation in Libya much worse.  That country, along with Tunisia, is dangerous, lawless, and chaotic.  Our once trusted and reliable ally, Egypt, has nearly fractured under the repression of the Muslim Brotherhood, who we backed!  It's working it's way back, but it will be years before we can expect to count on them.  And they are turning to Russia for help.  Yemen, a country touted by the administration to be on the rise, is a nightmare of terrorism.  And there is Syria.  The mess of messes.  We refuse to do anything while Assad gasses and slaughters his people.  We wring our hands because we don't know who the good guys are.  But we do nothing to at least try to help.  And we've all seen the mass exodus of refugees from Syria to Europe.  It's tragic.  And it's going to get a lot worse.  Meanwhile, what friends we do have left in the Gulf States are wondering what our intentions are.  They are scared to death of Iran and don't see the U.S. as any sort of ally against them.  It appears that we have no discernible strategy except capitulation.  The people in power have moved from crises to crises and have made the wrong call in nearly every instance.  Most of these people were political operatives thrust into a job in national security.  Their response is to launch air strikes from both manned and unmanned aircraft.  Think about that.  Make no mistake, the strikes are as precise as they can be.  But they are still dependent on intelligence and there is always collateral damage.  So we are not at war, we have no strategy, and we're launching missiles into villages in the Middle East.  Winning hearts and minds!  And finally we have largely turned our back on Israel.  Our greatest friend and the only democracy in the region.  The Prime Minister comes to Washington DC to address Congress and the President boycotts it.  What is going on?

And that's just the military picture.  What has the State Dept done?  Well, the stories of reluctance of their employees to fill posts in the Middle East are legion.  And remember Bengazi?  I don't need to focus on that fiasco, you've heard it.  The stand up of the Department of Homeland Security, while having some problems, has done a reasonable job in keeping us safe.  The current CinC has ignored immigration laws so we don't know who has infiltrated the country who wish to do us harm.  But even further, he has issued executive orders that make the border more porous and ineffective.  His illegal actions have actually moved me, and I suspect guys like me, to become more concerned and conservative on the issue of immigration.  I've written previously that this issue desperately needs to be attacked and solved.  But this is just another issue that the President and Congress can't work together on.  And that's the issue.  Our political class is dug in.  They can't and won't get together.  We've got to find and hire people who will work together.  On immigration, it will require compromise.  And standing up to special interest groups.  Here's one statistic I heard this morning.  40% of the Southwestern border is uncontrolled.  40%.  Think about that.  That's about 1100 miles.  And we have no idea who is coming across it.  The former Secretary of State and putative Democratic Presidential nominee has been found to be so lacking in security awareness that she had Top Secret emails on her personal server and may have erased others.  So we'll never know how much damage she's done.  But one thing is certain, she has done damage.

So now we are making a deal with the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei, a Radical ISLAMIC Terrorist.  Google him and take a look at some of his fanatic rants against us.  This deal will lift sanctions giving them $150B to fund Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Radical ISLAMIC Terrorists.  Oh yeah...it also gives Iran a path to obtaining a nuclear weapon.  But don't worry, it won't happen for 10 or 15 years.  The current crowd will be long gone by then.  But it will happen.  And their primary stated goals are (1) destroy Israel and (2) death to America.  The reasoning for the deal is that it's either this or war.  I guess the administration has never heard of the Cold War.  Containment, sanctions, isolation, pressure, time...those all work to some extent.  And they are better than capitulation.  And there is this.  Obamacare was passed (crammed down our throats) with not one Republican vote.  A program that impacts one-fifth of our economy was implemented (badly) with no compromise or discussion.  But this deal is different.  National Security issues should be decided with bi-partisan support.  The old saying is that the differences should stop at the water's edge.  Not everyone will be on board, but there should be consensus.  This Iran deal has no support from the Republicans and many Democrats are against it.  In fact, the majority of both houses of Congress are against it.  But even if they vote against it he has enough support to sustain his veto.  But is that how we want what is perhaps the most consequential national security agreement in decades to be approved?  By a veto proof minority?  And the majority of the American people are against it.  That's been confirmed by every poll.  But still he plows ahead.  Just like ISIS is the result of his naivety and recklessness, this Iran deal will be laid at his feet also.  But he'll be long gone.  He'll be raking in the dough making speeches, playing some golf, and continuing to tell everyone how great he is.  Wonder what he'll think when the bomb explodes above Tel Aviv.  Or an ICBM Iran bought from Russia carries a nuclear bomb into one of our coastal cities? 

Meanwhile, our government has implemented a terrible budgetary scheme called sequester to limit the Defense budget and by default reduce our capability.  We are very near to having a hollow force, if not there already.  We don't have enough capability to be a leader in the world and the equipment we do have is either near high time or not designed to fight today and tomorrow's battles.   And while the mess in the Middle East is scary, the rise of Russia and China is scarier.  Russia is flexing her muscles on all fronts.  They are moving on Eastern Europe, they are moving on the mineral rich Arctic, they are establishing bases in the Middle East, they are selling weapons to everyone who has a buck.  China is literally building islands in the South China Sea to establish sovereignty of that very strategic waterway.  They are revamping and modernizing their military.  Both countries have overtly stated their intent to be the leader in cyber-warfare.  And on and on and on.  While they arm, expand, and rise, our CinC's focus is that climate change is our greatest national security threat.  Climate change...the naivety is breathtaking...and could be disastrous.

As though none of that mattered, our focus seems to be on what divides us.  We are enamored with identity politics that aims to stereotype people into buckets of race, class, sex, region, religion, etc and thereby sending us all to our corners.  Our government has become a bloated, burdensome, rule-laden behemoth.  The burgeoning debt, entitlements out of control, daily and weekly scandals, all seem overwhelming.  It reaches into the our lives at every turn.  The number of people not working, not looking for jobs, and living off the government is higher than it's been in decades.  Respect for authority, doing the right thing, and abiding by the law is under attack.  Our education system, like so  many other things, seems mired in special interests.  We are more focused on inequality than on opportunity.  We've lost the idea that no matter who you are or where you're from, there is an opportunity here to rise up.  We seem to be culturally coming apart at the seams.

But here's the good news.  We are an optimistic people.  Most of us anyway.  More still believe in the dream than don't.  More still think we're the land of the free and the home of the brave.  There are brave, dedicated, experienced people who want to take up the mantle of leadership.  So on this anniversary of 9/11, while I'm nervous about the future and worried about the world that my Grandchildren will find themselves living in, in the end I'm optimistic.  But as we move into the election next year, take a serious look.  Decide who has the experience, the will, the personality, the fortitude to lead us.  Because this could be one of those monumentally important elections!  And if we've learned anything during the reign of the current regime...elections have consequences!!

Good Question!

Sense of Humor

Most flight attendants I've ever seen wouldn't have a sense of humor like this.  And hardly any look this good!

Cool Pic

Best Magazine Cover Ever!

Back To School!!!!

Dogs Are Cool!

Computer Help

I don't need the help today but someday I might.  Good sentiment to remember!

Motivation Monday

Hillary

So she finally sat down for an interview!  With Andrea Mitchell of all people.  Now Andrea has been around a long time and is an established reporter.  But she is clearly a sycophant to the Clintons.  She is clearly sympathetic to the power crowd.  Oh she asked a few questions that weren't softballs, but generally provided Hillary a platform to spin her story.  You can see it here.

But there is an interesting explanation about her email that caused my bullshit flag to raise pretty high.  Here it is:

She explained that she had used a personal email account as a senator from New York and didn't spend much time considering alternatives when she became secretary of state in 2009. "I did all my business on my personal email [in the Senate]," Clinton said. "I was not thinking a lot when I got in [to the State Department]. There was so much work to be done. We had so many problems around the world. I didn't really stop and think what kind of email system will there be."
"This was fully above board, people knew I was using a personal email, I did it for convenience. I sent emails that I thought were work related to people's dot gov accounts," she added.

So there was "so much work to be done".  There were so many problems (because of Bush don't you know).  She just couldn't stop and think about her server.  But wait a minute...any government employee I don't care who they are gets an indoctrination to the job.  They are told all kinds of rules and regulations.  For someone like SecState it's probably tailored and one-on-one, but it happens.  And part of that is getting a .gov email address.  So if she was so busy, if there were so many things going on, if she had to solve enormous problems, how is it that she took the time to decline the .gov email address and decided to continue to use her server knowing that as SecState almost every communication she had would be classified.  It's reverse logic.  Doesn't make sense.

The First Culling of the Herd

You've heard of Kim Davis.  She's the County Clerk in Kentucky who refuses to issue marriage licenses to gay couples because of her religious beliefs.  I had an initial post about this and you can read it here.  To me and most law abiding citizens she is clearly in the wrong.  The Supreme Court has spoken.  Gay marriage is the law of the land.  Ms Davis is a governmental official.  She has an obligation to uphold the law.  Full stop.  If she can't she should resign.  She can't be fired because she's an elected official.  And the voters in Kentucky are unlikely to impeach her.  But there is some other nefarious stuff going on.  She inherited the job from her mother.  Her son is a deputy.  She has been married 4 times and only recently had her religious conversion.  So I suspect she's thinking about her payday as she sits in jail waiting for this all to be over.

But now the inevitable political fallout starts.  This is an easy opportunity for Republicans to shoot themselves in the foot.  NPR has a summary of their positions (with my opinion added in red):

Presidential Candidates Take Sides On Support For Kentucky Clerk

SEPTEMBER 04, 201512:05 PM ET

Carly Fiorina: "We must protect religious liberties with great passion ... Having said that, when you are a government employee, I think you take on a different role. When you are a government employee as opposed to say, an employee of another kind of organization, then in essence, you are agreeing to act as an arm of the government." No problem

Lindsey Graham: "This Supreme Court case is binding on her actions as a public official in Kentucky." no problem.  but he's irrelevant (as a candidate) anyway.

John Kasich: Asked about the issue by the Washington Post, Kasich said, "I've taken my position on it." A spokesman later said he was referring to his reaction to the Supreme Court's same-sex marriage decision earlier this summer. No problem

Donald Trump: "You have to go with it. The decision's been made, and that is the law of the land." no problem

Jeb Bush: "[Davis] is sworn to uphold the law and it seems to me there ought to be common ground, there ought to be big enough space for her to act on her conscience and for, now that the law is the law of the land, for a gay couple to be married in whatever jurisdiction that is." Jeb trying to have it both ways.  too wishy-washy.  adds to the growing sentiment that he's toast

Ted Cruz: "I stand with Kim Davis, unequivocally." dumb.  will lose him votes 

Mike Huckabee: "I want people to stand up for their convictions." dumb.  will lose him votes

Rand Paul: "I think it's absurd to put someone in jail for exercising their religious liberty." dumb. will lose him votes

Bobby Jindal: "Even rich New Yorkers should oppose jailing Christians for their religious beliefs." dumb. will lose him the few votes he has

Scott Walker: "In the end, this is the balance that you gotta have to have in America, between the laws that are out there, but ultimately ensuring that the Constitution is upheld ... I read that the Constitution is very clear that people have freedom of religion — you have the freedom to practice religious beliefs out there, it's a fundamental right." like many things he says, it's incoherent

The candidates all have to take a stand on various issues of the day.  This is one of them.  It can be a bit of tightrope.  But it seems to me that this is one of those issues, whether they know it or not, that will start to winnow the field.  Several of these guys are seriously out of step with the majority of Americans.  

Thomas Sowell

I've been reading things by Thomas Sowell for a while and to me he usually makes a lot of sense.  Of course, as I've said before, I tend to come down on the conservative side of things.  So if you're not of that persuasion you probably don't agree and therefore don't read his stuff.  Most people only listen to what they agree with.  I try to read and listen to a wide variety of things so I'm not just getting one side.  But I think I'm in the minority.

Anyway, Mr Sowell is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution up at Stanford.  I know, I know...it's got a conservative bent.  Live with it.  He is an economist and a commentator on our culture and times.  He in particular has commentary on the state of race relations and racism in our country.  Like I said, I usually find something pretty compelling about his writing.  This week the WSJ has an interview with him in it's Saturday addition (BTW the Saturday addition of the WSJ is well worth reading!)  I'm copying the whole thing below rather than providing a link.  It's a bit long, but his thoughts in this piece are really good.  And as always, they make one think.  And decide...do you believe the truth or what you want to believe?  (The highlighting/underlining is mine)

The March of Foolish Things

The conservative sage on the decline of intellectual debate, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and what the welfare state has done to black America.

By 

KYLE PETERSON

Sept. 4, 2015

Stanford, Calif.

Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”

The paradox is that serious economic discussion enjoys a wider platform than ever before. One of the great bounties of the Internet is the trove of archival news and debate footage that has been dumped onto YouTube and other websites. Anyone with a modem can now watch F.A. Hayek discussing, in a soft and dignified German accent, the rule of law with Robert Bork in 1978. Or Milton Friedman at Cornell the same year, arguing matter-of-factly about colonialism with a young man in a beard, sunglasses and floppy sideways hat.

There is plenty of old footage of Mr. Sowell floating through the ether, too, and if one watches a few clips—say, his appearance on William F. Buckley, Jr.’s “Firing Line” in 1981—two things stand out. The first is how little Mr. Sowell has changed. The octogenarian who sits before me in an office at the Hoover Institution, where Mr. Sowell has been a senior fellow since 1980, has a bit of gray hair and a different set of glasses, but the self-assurance and the baritone voice are the same.

The second thing that strikes is how little the political debate has changed. Maybe economics isn’t merely a dismal science, but a futile one.

Take the minimum wage. In 1981, a year in which the federally mandated hourly pay rose to $3.35 from $3.10 (in today’s dollars that would be to $8.79 from $8.14), Mr. Sowell argued on “Firing Line” that the minimum wage increases unemployment by pricing unskilled workers—young minorities in particular—out of the job market. It’s the same point he makes today, as activists call for a minimum wage of $10.10, or even $15.

“When looking back over my life, I think of the lucky things that happened to me. And one of the luckiest ones, I just realized recently, is that when I left home as a 17-year-old high-school dropout, the unemployment rate among black 17-year-old males was in single digits,” Mr. Sowell says. “In 1948, the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 was 10 years old and it hadn’t been changed. And there was huge inflation, and so it was as if there was no minimum wage.” He got a series of jobs—delivering Western Union telegrams, working in a machine shop—that put him on the right path.

Which is not to say that life was easy: In his 2002 memoir, “A Personal Odyssey,” Mr. Sowell describes how he once pawned a suit of clothes to buy food—a knish and an orange soda at a little restaurant on the Lower East Side in New York City. “Since then I’ve eaten at the Waldorf Astoria, I’ve eaten in Parisian restaurants and in the White House,” he tells me. “But no meal has ever topped that knish and orange soda.”

Or take “disparate impact,” the idea that different outcomes among different groups—say, that there are more male CEOs than female—is ipso facto evidence of discrimination. The Obama administration has used disparate impact to charge racism in housing, employment and other matters. In the absence of discrimination, the theory goes, people naturally would be dispersed more or less at random. Nonsense, Mr. Sowell says. “In various books I’ve given lists of all the great disparities all over the world, and I recently saw a column by Walter Williams in which he added that men are bitten by sharks several times as often as women.”

Differences in outcome is a matter that Mr. Sowell takes up in his new book, “Wealth, Poverty and Politics: An International Perspective,” out Sept. 8. Its theme, he says, is that “in a sense, there was never any rational reason to believe that there would be this evenness that they presuppose.” Some continents have more navigable rivers and deep water harbors than others. Some cultures value education highly, and some don’t. Underwhelming as the conclusion might sound to those with the urge to reorder society, many disparities arise simply because people are different, and because they make different choices. 

Another problem is that the “disparate impact” assumption misidentifies where group differences originate. He sets up an example: “If you have people in various groups in the country, and their kids are all raised differently, they all behave differently in school, they do differently in school. And now they’re grown up and they go to an employer, and you’re surprised to find that they’re not distributed randomly by income.” It’s “just madness,” he says, to assume “that because you collected the statistics there, that’s where the unfairness originated.”

Mr. Sowell, looking back, can count the lucky breaks that contributed to his own success. As a baby he was adopted into a household with four adults who talked to him constantly. When he was 9 years old, the family left the South, moving from North Carolina to Harlem in New York. A mentor there took him to a public library for the first time and told him how to transfer out of a bad school into a good one. Not everyone has that kind of luck. 

“It is unjust—my God it’s unjust,” Mr. Sowell says. “And yet that doesn’t mean that you can locate somebody who has victimized somebody else.” In human affairs, happenstance reigns.

Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.”

It’s a funny line—and an instance of what sets Mr. Sowell apart: candor and independence of mind. No one can suggest that he doesn’t say what he thinks. In 1987, while testifying in favor of Judge Robert Bork’s ill-fated nomination to the Supreme Court, he told Joe Biden, a senator at the time, that he wouldn’t have a problem with literacy tests for voting or with $1.50 poll taxes, so long as they were evenly and fairly applied. When I ask whether he remembers this exchange, Mr. Sowell quips, “No, Joe Biden is forgettable.”

In our interview he maintains that the 1964 Civil Rights Act should have stuck to desegregating buses and government services, and let market forces take care of integrating lunch counters. Mr. Sowell says that the precedent set by imposing integration on people like Lester Maddox, a segregationist governor of Georgia who also owned a chicken restaurant, has opened a Pandora’s box. “If you say that Lester Maddox has to serve his chicken to blacks, you’re saying that the Boy Scouts have to have gay scout masters. You’re saying—ultimately—that the Catholic Church has to perform same-sex marriages.”

Mr. Sowell is unsparing toward those who purport to speak for American blacks. I ask him about the unrest in Ferguson, Mo. “People want to believe what they want to believe, and the facts are not going to stop them,” he says, adding that black leaders—from President Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder down to Al Sharpton—“do all they can to feed that sense of grievance, victimhood and resentment, because that’s where the votes are.”

What about Ta-Nehisi Coates, the black writer whose new book, a raw letter to his son about race relations in the U.S., is stirring public intellectuals? I read Mr. Sowell a line from Mr. Coates’s 15,000-word cover story for the Atlantic calling for reparations for slavery: “In America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”

“Ah . . . yes,” Mr. Sowell sighs, as if recognizing a familiar tune. “What amazes me is not that there are assertions like this, but that there is no interest in checking those assertions against any evidence,” he says. “One of the things I try to do in the book is to distinguish between what might be the legacy of slavery, and what’s the legacy of the welfare state. If you look at the first 100 years after slavery, black communities were a lot safer. People were a lot more decent. But then you look 30 years after the 1960s revolution, and you see this palpable retrogression—of which I think the key one is the growth of the single-parent family.”

Mr. Sowell says he cannot remember ever hearing a gunshot when he was growing up in Harlem, and he used to sleep on the fire escape to beat the summer heat. He cites changes in black enrollment at New York City’s highly competitive Stuyvesant High School, which he attended. “In 2012, blacks were 1.2% of the students at Stuyvesant,” he says. “Thirty-three years earlier, they were 12%.” 

Here’s the point: Does anyone believe that racism and the legacy of slavery are stronger today than in the 1970s—or for that matter in 1945, when Mr. Sowell enrolled at Stuyvesant? “It’s not a question of the disproportion between blacks and whites, or Asians, but the disproportion between blacks of today and blacks of the previous generation,” he says. “And that’s what’s scary.”

He offers another statistic: “For every year from 1994 to the present, black married couples have had a poverty rate in single digits,” Mr. Sowell says. “Those people who have not followed the culture—the ghetto culture—are doing fine.”

So how can the case for reform be made? Let’s say the Republican presidential nominee has a speech lined up at the historically black Howard University. What should the candidate say? 

Mr. Sowell says he should tell the audience that “one of the worst things for blacks is the minimum wage. The worst thing,” he says, is “the public schools run by the teachers unions who will protect the most incompetent teacher there is, who will fight tooth and nail against your being able to make a choice and go to voucher schools.” Lay out the case, Mr. Sowell says, and “address them as if they’re adults. You’re not going to get 50-plus percent of the black vote. But good grief, if the Republicans got 20% of the black vote it would be a revolution.”

One can only hope that if such a day comes, Mr. Sowell, who has been making these arguments since Barack Obama was a teenager, is around to see it. He says he doesn’t intend to retire. The fifth edition of his 2000 book “Basic Economics” came out last December, and although his newest title isn’t on store shelves yet, he is already mulling a sequel. Mr. Sowell seems as sharp as ever, so I have to ask: Does he feel 85 years old?

Another answer with no hesitation. “Yes. Maybe 95 on some days,” he says, with a deep laugh. “When I think of the things that other people my age are going through, I really should feel so lucky.”

Mr. Peterson is an associate editorial features editor at the Journal.

Hillary

It's getting bad folks.  Copied below is a post from POWERLINE.  As the onion gets peeled, the obvious damage gets worse.  She is in deep shit!

THE INCALCULABLE DAMAGE DONE

A knowledgeable reader writes to comment on my post this morning noting the Clinton email talking points. Our reader raises an angle on the damage done that I have not seen explored elsewhere. I want to pass it on without further comment at this point:

I saw your note on Clinton emails. You and everyone else are missing the real problem and scandal. It is not the emails she saved and turned over to the State Department. It is the erased server, but not for the reasons most people are talking about.

A Secretary of State has broad SCI clearances which means she has access to sources and methods. We know now that HC had classified information on her email server because of what she turned over. What we don’t know is what she didn’t turn over. This creates a massive Counter-Intelligence (CI) problem.

The CI community knows she managed to jump the “air gap” on some information but because she erased the server they do not know the full extend of the jump. If she had turned over the server to the proper authorities the CI community could calibrate the extent of the potential damage. Now, barring a recovery of server data, they cannot. This means that CI has to treat all sources and methods to which the Secretary of State (and others potentially) was exposed as compromised.

Its even worse. By not turning over the server she prevented a forensic examine from determining if she was hacked and by what methods. She undermined any ability to exploit that knowledge to limit damage to US national security or to undermine and prevent a future use of similar hacking tools.

No matter what she says, this action has done irreparable damage to US national security. By not turning over the server she deserves at a minimum to lose her security clearance. Anyone with the level of clearance she had would be attached to a polygraph and debriefed by CI.

The Secretary chose to protect her political viability over the security of the country. Let’s hope for the country’s sake that the FBI can reconstruct her server.