The headline we all expected

We also would have accepted "Arkancide"

As inevitable as the dawn:

Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced millionaire who was facing federal sex trafficking charges, died by suicide early Saturday in his Lower Manhattan prison cell, three law enforcement officials told ABC News.

Epstein hanged himself, law enforcement sources said. He was transported in cardiac arrest at 6:39 a.m. from Metropolitan Correctional Center to New York Downtown Hospital, according to sources.

We got a sneak preview of some of Epstein's clientele yesterday:

On Friday, a federal appellate court in New York unsealed around 2,000 pages of documents from a now-settled civil defamation case between Virginia Roberts Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein associate.

Giuffre accused Maxwell of recruiting her while she was working as a locker-room attendant at Mar-A-Lago in 2000 and bringing her to Epstein's home for a massage. She claims that she eventually became a teen sex slave to Epstein, and a victim of sex trafficking, beginning at age 17, at the hands of both Epstein and Maxwell.

The newly-unsealed documents showed that Giuffre alleged that Epstein and Maxwell directed her to have sex with, among others: Prince Andrew; criminal defense attorney Alan Dershowitz; former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson; former Senator George Mitchell; a well-known prime minster, who she wouldn't name; and a foreign man who was introduced to her as a "prince."

Dershowitz has denied everything, in forceful terms. Mitchell and Richardson deny the allegations in the linked article from ABC. It's likely coincidental that Richardson and Mitchell's political party isn't mentioned in the article, because why would that matter, right?

The rumors that have long simmered, and that matter most of all, concern Bill Clinton, famous for his horndoggery and credibly accused of untoward behavior by many other women.

It will be interesting to see if the prosecutors decide to redouble their efforts against Maxwell in order to get the story out. Had Epstein been Scott Walker, it all would just mysteriously leak out to the press. But he wasn't, so the story may end here. We'll see.

Under the Hood, or Perotmandias

Ross Perot, RIP:

Ross Perot, a self-made billionaire business magnate who twice ran as a third-party candidate for president, died Tuesday at his home in Dallas surrounded by family.

He was 89.

"In business and in life, Ross was a man of integrity and action," a statement from his family said. "A true American patriot and a man of rare vision, principle and deep compassion, he touched the lives of countless people through his unwavering support of the military and veterans and through his charitable endeavors."

I suppose that's true enough. At the time, particularly in 1992, he was seen as the guy who siphoned off enough votes from George H. W. Bush to allow Bill Clinton into the White House. That's debatable, and frankly not that interesting. The Bushes present their own issues.

Once Perot lost his second race, back in 1996, we didn't hear much from him any more. I don't see that the issues he was most concerned about have been addressed. Government has grown under Clinton, W, Obama, and Trump. Perot's concern about the national debt? Pshaw. Perot liked graphs. Here's one:

Spending fools

These debts will never be repaid, of course. You can blame presidents for spending, but Congress holds the power of the purse and it hasn't mattered one bit -- they all spend like there's no tomorrow. Tomorrow will arrive eventually. But the reckoning? Who knows?

As for Perot, he's as relevant now as any of his other third-party predecessors were. He might as well be Fighting Bob La Follette or Strom Thurmond in his Dixiecrat phase. We don't have anyone who is seeking to repair our government any more. Trump is simply trying to forestall worse ideas than what we've seen and endured already.

Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Epstein's Mothership

Jeffrey Epstein is in the dock again. The Trump haters are hoping Trump is implicated. The Clinton haters figure he's finally going to get his. Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz. . . all manner of big shots are implicated, or they aren't.

The stories have been going around for a long time. Epstein, a wealthy financier, apparently had a long career of procuring and violating teenage girls. He had a private plane and a private island. The plane was called the "Lolita Express." He was in the dock in 2008, but he got a plea bargain orchestrated by the man who is now Labor Secretary, Alexander Acosta.

How will it play out? A few guesses:

• Trump is implicated because he apparently flew on Epstein's plane one time. Bill Clinton flew on Epstein's plane 26 times. Flying on the plane doesn't prove either man diddled a teenager. While it's safe to assume both men will have their names dragged through the mud, it's unlikely they will be in the dock themselves.
• However, if the Trump haters think they can bring Trump down on this one, they won't hesitate to do so, and if it means Bubba goes under the bus (or the landing gear, so to speak), they won't hesitate there, either. The Clintons are no longer useful.
• Acosta may be in deep water, too. Paul Mirengoff at Powerline has been beating that drum for a long time. Acosta's departure wouldn't be a big loss, especially if Trump goes bold and puts Scott Walker in the seat. That confirmation hearing would be a whole lot of fun.

This seems like news

Funny you're not seeing it anywhere beyond The Hill:

Before the Obama administration approved a controversial deal in 2010 giving Moscow control of a large swath of American uranium, the FBI had gathered substantial evidence that Russian nuclear industry officials were engaged in bribery, kickbacks, extortion and money laundering designed to grow Vladimir Putin’s atomic energy business inside the United States, according to government documents and interviews.

Federal agents used a confidential U.S. witness working inside the Russian nuclear industry to gather extensive financial records, make secret recordings and intercept emails as early as 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised an American uranium trucking firm with bribes and kickbacks in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, FBI and court documents show.

They also obtained an eyewitness account — backed by documents — indicating Russian nuclear officials had routed millions of dollars to the U.S. designed to benefit former President Bill Clinton’s charitable foundation during the time Secretary of State Hillary Clinton served on a government body that provided a favorable decision to Moscow, sources told The Hill.

I thought Trump was the one colluding with the Russians. Huh. And there's more:

The investigation was ultimately supervised by then-U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein, an Obama appointee who now serves as President Trump’s deputy attorney general, and then-Assistant FBI Director Andrew McCabe, now the deputy FBI director under Trump, Justice Department documents show.

Both men now play a key role in the current investigation into possible, but still unproven, collusion between Russia and Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election cycle. McCabe is under congressional and Justice Department inspector general investigation in connection with money his wife’s Virginia state Senate campaign accepted in 2015 from now-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe at a time when McAuliffe was reportedly under investigation by the FBI. The probe is not focused on McAuliffe's conduct but rather on whether McCabe's attendance violated the Hatch Act or other FBI conflict rules.

The connections to the current Russia case are many. The Mikerin probe began in 2009 when Robert Mueller, now the special counsel in charge of the Trump case, was still FBI director. And it ended in late 2015 under the direction of then-FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired earlier this year.

Seems convenient, doesn't it? Have the people who should be under investigation investigating something else. If Trump wants to stir the pot, he ought to retweet this story. Other than conservative comment sites, the only newspaper that seems to have the story is the New York Post. I strongly encourage you hit the link and read the piece from The Hill.

If I Were a Rich Man

Here's a blast from the past:

Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign is raising questions about the timing of the FBI’s release Tuesday of records on a 15-year-old investigation into President Bill Clinton’s pardon to fugitive financier Marc Rich.

The FBI posted the 129 pages of records in its online Freedom of Information Act reading room in apparent response to a FOIA request seeking information on FBI inquiries into the Clinton Foundation.

The timing is odd, for sure, but it's a useful reminder of who the Clintons are and how they operate. Rich was a fugitive from justice when the pardon came. The suspicion at the time was that Rich's wife, Denise, made donations to the Clintons in order to procure the pardon. More from the linked article:

Despite the lack of major revelations in the documents, which constitute only a part of the FBI’s files on the inquiry, the atmospherics in the records are unhelpful to the Clinton campaign. The records repeatedly refer to the probe being handled by the “Public Corruption Unit” and make clear that the FBI was examining claims that Denise Rich’s Democratic Party “donations may have been intended to influence the fugitive’s pardon.”

“It appears that the required pardon standards and procedures were not followed,” the internal FBI memos said.

We knew that at the time. Bill Clinton had the right to pardon Rich, so in the end the investigation didn't really go anywhere (fun fact: the official who closed the case was James Comey), but the stink of it has never really gone away. I would not be surprised if a few more blasts from the past are forthcoming. For the moment, this election seems to be more of a referendum on Clintonworld than it is about Trump. That's may change -- I imagine the Clintons have at least one more oppo dump for The Donald -- but as long as the focus remains on how the Clintons operate, it's going to be a problem for Hillary.

Don't look back

This is not the look of a man feeling particularly serene:

Spotcheck Billy got down on his hands and knees

Can't be too comfortable when your accusers are in the audience:

But you got me in a squeeze play on the cheesy side of town

If I were Donald Trump, and I thank my lucky stars every day I am not, I would put these women on camera at every opportunity. I don't know if it will Trump's chances to win the election, but at this point the Clintons need to have their feral noses rubbed in the dirt and wreckage they have left in their wake. Trump is a horrible, often thoughtless person. The Clintons are horrible by design.

As for the debate itself, on balance I think Trump won. As usual, he was bordering on the demented in some of his statements, but he did get to a larger truth about his opponent yesterday. In particular, his threat of bringing in a special prosecutor was smart. There's a sense out there that Hillary is getting special treatment. By now I think most people understand who the Clintons are, but they'd rather not think about it much. There's exquisite irony in Trump forcing voters to consider their consciences before casting a ballot for  Hillary Clinton, but it's the right thing to do.

A few other brief observations:

• Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz were dismal, especially in the stretch where Raddatz decided she needed to debate Trump on military options. Viewers take notice of things like this and it feeds into Trump's narrative.
• As for Hillary Clinton's performance, give her credit for not taking the bait a few times. She is disciplined when the situation requires it. Still, we got glimpses of her Nurse Ratched persona a few times and, if she gets a less solicitous debate moderator in the final debate, she might let the mask slip.
• Did Trump save his campaign last night? Probably not, but he certainly made life more uncomfortable for the long line of politicians on the Republican side who disavowed him over the weekend. If you're Paul Ryan or Kelly Ayotte, what do you do now?

On Trump

Thoughts on the latest scandal scandal scandal SCANDAL SCANDAL! SCANDAL!!

• If Donald Trump had any wit, he'd start referring to his penis as Quemoy or Matsu.
• It took 32 years beyond the predicted date, but the Junior Anti-Sex League is here. For people who are obsessed with sex as much as modern liberals, they sure are a bunch of intermittent Puritans.
• It personally took me a while to realize this, but a gentleman doesn't discuss his sex life. For the most part, people who discuss their sex lives in detail don't actually have one. Trump would be an exception on both scores. Extreme narcissists are a breed unto themselves and are rarely gentlemen.
• For months, certain commenters here have asked me why I still consider myself #NeverTrump. It's because of crap like this. Defending the indefensible is a mug's game.
• I'm not particularly offended by what he said; back in the day, I heard worse on a daily basis. Although I don't remember saying anything as foul as what Trump said, I wouldn't swear I didn't, especially after I'd had a few adult beverages. But I stopped acting that way a long time ago. Trump never did and he's spent most of his adult life in proximity to microphones. He's probably said worse and we're likely to hear it before Nov. 8.
• A comment on Althouse's blog sums up the current state of play accurately:  "Any girl with a story to tell about Bill Clinton knows by now to keep her mouth shut. On the other hand, any girl with a story to tell about Donald Trump will be honored and richly rewarded. They're both players but the game is rigged in Clinton's favor." As usual, you can complain about the double standard all you want, but your complaints won't make the double standard go away. 
• So what is the actual standard? Republican sexuality is bad -- it's pretty much axiomatic. No one really gave a damn about Trump's horndogging, except in a Page Six, do you believe what Trump did this time? sense, until he began describing himself as a Republican. Trump likely didn't understand that when he was running his mouth 11 years ago, but he understands it now. Back in 2005, it wasn't disgraceful. It was marketing. Not any more.
• As always, the tape hit at the same time as another revelation of Clinton perfidy arose, but this time one that implicates St. Barack's minions. Can't have that, so we need to have the locker room banter on Page One. At some point, the historians may tell us some of the stories we really need to understand, assuming we still have historians in the future. We will only get glimpses of the truth for the moment.
• Unless the biochemical engineers in her employ screw up the titration and she dies onstage tomorrow at Washington University in St. Louis, Hillary Clinton is going to be president. The only consolation is she's going to reap a hell of a whirlwind. Everyone knows she's a monster and the Gods of the Copybook Headings will be visiting in due course.

Fella needs a hobby

Colin Powell on Hill and Bill:

Colin Powell wrote in a jaw-dropping e-mail that he doesn’t want to vote for his pal Hillary Clinton because she’s a greedy defender of the status quo whose husband is “still ­d–king bimbos at home (according to the NYP)” — the New York Post.

“I would rather not have to vote for her, although she is a friend I respect,” the former secretary of state wrote Democratic donor Jeffrey Leeds on July 26, 2014.

“A 70-year person with a long track record, unbridled ambition, greedy, not transformational, with a husband still d–kng bimbos at home (according to the NYP),” reads the explosive e-mail obtained by the Web site DCLeaks. Hillary is actually 68.

If they get back in the White House, I'm going long on Clorox.

Epistemology

Let's start with a definition:

What do you know?

I saw about the last ten minutes of Bill Clinton's speech last night at the DNC convention in Philadelphia. Our protagonist had to undertake an epistemological task. His goal was to tell us that everything we've recently heard about Hillary is, well, a lie:

Now, how does this square? How did this square with the things that you heard at the Republican convention? What’s the difference in what I told you and what they said? How do you square it? You can’t. One is real, the other is made up.

You just have to decide. You just have to decide which is which, my fellow Americans.

So how do you decide? Well, you can certainly look at the veracity of the fellow asking the question:

And you can look at the veracity of the person he is vouching for:

I suppose you could believe the Clintons. If you do, I'd suggest another definition is in order:

It's a growth industry in Philadelphia these days

The Clintons have been on the stage for a quarter century. A recently departed moral philosopher explained them well:

A quality investment

Seems like money well-spent:

When former presidents and other dignitaries traveled to California to wax nostalgic on the speaking circuit, they may have been demanding, but none insisted on being flown from San Francisco by private jet to a venue just 70 miles down the freeway.

That was before Bill Clinton came along.

A great deal:

Clinton would demand in his contract to be shuttled by private jet from San Francisco to UC Davis, where he spoke at the Mondavi Center. The center had to appeal to its network of donors to find someone able to fly him the 70 miles, something it had never done and hasn’t since. “That is the one and only time,” said Jeremy Ganter, director of programming at the Mondavi Center.

The center also found itself, along with the other event hosts on that Clinton swing, in the awkward position of having to pay some oddly large expenses.

Fearful that their costs would get out of hand, the event organizers worked with the Fairmont to discreetly view the charges being rung up by Clinton and his entourage on each of the five days they stayed there. Assurances from the Harry Walker Agency that they were “reasonable expenses for a president traveling on the road for week” and that “we have never had a client complain” provided little comfort to the event hosts.

They ultimately got socked with the $1,400 hotel phone bill and $700 dinner for two.

I'm guessing it's not cheap to eat in San Francisco, but $700 for dinner seems a bit much. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. There's plenty more at the link.

By the time I get to Phoenix

Seriously, how in the world can this particular interaction be acceptable?

Amid an ongoing investigation into Hillary Clinton's use of email and hours before the public release of the Benghazi report, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch met privately with former President Bill Clinton. 

The private meeting took place on the west side of Sky Harbor International Airport on board a parked private plane. 

Former President Clinton was visiting the Phoenix area and arrived to Sky Harbor Monday evening to depart.

Sources tell ABC15 Clinton was notified Lynch would be arriving at the airport soon and waited for her arrival.

 As you can imagine, Lynch tried to pretend it was just a "how's your family" meeting, but if that were true, it could have taken place in a public venue and it wouldn't have required a half hour. There is simply no way in hell that Mrs. Clinton's conduct in office wasn't a point of discussion. Everyone knows it, but we're not going to hear a word about this beyond the local reporting. The stench will linger, but we'll be told it's Chanel No. 5.

State of play

There is a downside to being #NeverTrump -- in this cycle, it means you have less to write about. We've made our case concerning the qualifications of The Donald. He would be a horrible president. People don't seem to care. Now that the Washington Post has come up with a poll showing Trump leading Hillary Clinton, it's become evident that logic and reason aren't in the saddle.

It's not particularly tough to understand how this is possible. Hillary Clinton is a terrible candidate. It's amusing to watch my lefty pals on social media pretend otherwise. They know it in their bones; she has nothing to offer except a connection to a time gone by. And because Trump understands how to attack people, he's made the correct strategic decision in going after Bill Clinton first. I imagine the Democratic high command is in a panic right now.

Submitted without further comment

Victor Davis Hanson:

Another dilemma hinges not on the omnipresence of crudity but on how one prefers to have it presented — delivered in a chartreuse monster truck, or by Tesla? One is the gutter sort — besmirching John McCain’s war record, or fibbing about releasing tax returns, or bragging about rank adultery; the other is dressed up with sonorous cadences about why you must be the first presidential candidate to reject campaign-financing-reform rules in the general election, when you vowed you would be the most transparent candidate in history (as you hid both your medical records and your university transcripts and became Wall Street’s most endowed cash recipient).

When Obama later was forced to admit that his autobiographical memoir was mostly fiction, or when Bill Clinton was revealed to have jetted around with convicted sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, or when Obama invites as an honored White House guest a rapper whose latest album cover glorifies homies on the White House lawn gloating over the corpse of a white judge at their feet, I think we long ago eroded any notion of presidential decorum. The honest and quite legitimate argument against Trump on this count is the one we never hear: that instead of offering a corrective to the present crudity, he might continue to erode the dignity of the office in the manner of Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Even Trump, however, could hardly do more damage with the Iranians than did Obama’s in-house wannabe novelist, Ben Rhodes, who, in the twilight of his one and only policy career, now brags how he misled the Congress and the public by easily salting the media field with phony nuggets of expertise and punditry. The point is that we are worried about Armageddon on the Trump horizon while we are living amid the Apocalypse.

Read the whole thing.

Don't Mess With Bill

Getcha popcorn:

In a prolonged exchange Thursday afternoon, former President Bill Clinton forcefully defended his 1994 crime bill to Black Lives Matter protesters in the crowd at a Hillary Clinton campaign event.

He said the bill lowered the country's crime rate, which benefited African-Americans, achieved bipartisan support, and diversified the police force. He then addressed a protester's sign, saying:

"I don't know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children," Clinton said, addressing a protester who appeared to interrupt him repeatedly. "Maybe you thought they were good citizens .... You are defending the people who kill the lives you say matter. Tell the truth. You are defending the people who cause young people to go out and take guns."

He seemed to be channeling Prince, who got there in '87, as I recall:

At home there are seventeen-year-old boys and their idea of fun
Is being in a gang called 'The Disciples'
High on crack and totin' a machine gun

It's not exactly time for a Sister Souljah moment, because the matter is more delicate for Hillary. As election results in Wisconsin and other states in recent weeks have indicated, Bernie Sanders is making a lot of headway among certain segments of the traditional Democratic coalition, so the Clintons need a big share of the African-American vote to compensate for erosion among the gimme free college crowd. So does it make sense to make peace with Black Lives Matter? Or must the Big Dog's record be defended first?

Yep. Getcha popcorn.

Standing room only on the fainting couches

Let's stipulate that no one really wants to think about Donald Trump's, ahem, private parts, other than his wife. Let's also stipulate that it would have been better for everyone concerned if The Donald would have let the topic pass without further comment.

Now that we've said that, can we please, please stop with the fainting couch responses that we've reached some sort of cultural nadir because a presidential candidate really ought to have a two-drink minimum? How long have we been making these sorts of jokes? Well, Bill Clinton was the subject of a million of them, but you can go back further than that. Here is an image from an episode of Saturday Night Live that aired on December 2, 1978:

It's short, it's sweet, and everybody wants to see it

That's Dan Aykroyd playing Richard Nixon, proposing a comeback campaign for president and showing his aide (Walter Matthau) a prototype bumpersticker. I remember watching that episode well, as I was a teenager and didn't have anyplace in particular to go that evening. But it goes back even further than that. Jimmy Carter famously discussed his own libidinal urges with Playboy magazine in the run up to the 1976 election, which he further discussed in a debate with President Gerald Ford. And Lyndon Johnson. . . well, let's just say he had a healthy regard for his own equipment. We could go further back than that (hello, Grover Cleveland!), but you get the point.

Let's just say this -- if you are a fan of Bill Maher, or Jon Stewart, or anyone else who talks about politics while working blue, and you are saying that what Trump said is scandalous, just stop it, because you have no credibility.