Gotham on the Mississippi

 This amused me:

Police Chief Brian O’Hara said Minneapolis has a “very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality,” according to a New York Post story posted Friday as the city this week approaches the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by police.

O’Hara said he became accustomed to a very Democratic city when he worked in Newark, N.J., but that nothing had prepared him for the “ultra-liberal orthodoxy,” as the Post put it, that he found in Minneapolis. O’Hara was Newark’s public safety director.

“Here it’s very, very ideological and a lot of times it’s like reality and facts can’t get through the filter. It’s a very detached, bourgeois liberal mentality … It’s bizarre," he is quoted as saying to the Post, a tabloid generally considered to be a conservative publication.

Yeah, but you're not supposed to talk about it, Chief O'Hara. I would have thought Commissioner Gordon would have told you that. 

Unsurprisingly, our betters were not amused:

O’Hara’s comments irritated some Minneapolis City Council members. Council President Elliott Payne said progressives in Minneapolis are not a monolith, which he said is hard for some “to wrap your head around, especially for people new to our city’s political ecosystem.”

“Some people come into their politics through a more academic process, others through solidarity, others through lived experience,” Payne said. “No matter how people develop their core values, one should have a deeper understanding of the diverse perspectives of our community before engaging in conversations with New York tabloids.”

Translation - you're not supposed to tell them we're a great herd of independent minds, capisce? 

The irritated members of the Minneapolis City Council are all grifters. They talk about "lived experience" and "solidarity," but that's all a ruse. They get rich from milking the taxpayers and it's a pretty good gig. Devotion to one's rice bowl is a perfectly understandable incentive - the vanguard guards the avant garde and being called bourgeois is an intolerable insult, especially when the audience is likely simps from Staten Island. Why should Payne have to explain his activities to anyone so utterly lacking in nuance? The sniffing is audible.

What remains a mystery is what Donk voters get out of the deal. I have lived in the Twin Cities for more than 30 years and I lived in Chicago before that, and most people in both places recognize that their rulers are scoundrels, but they continually return them to office anyway. I used a Batman reference early on; speaking of cartoonish individuals, Tim Walz and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker are Rocky and Bullwinkle villains, but they win almost by acclimation. And if you try to ask the question in polite circles, you are cast into the outer darkness.

Do you spot the real issue with O'Hara's remarks? The mentality in question isn't detached. It's unhinged. 

Guilty on all three counts

 Derek Chauvin found guilty on all three charges -- manslaughter, 3rd degree murder, 2nd degree murder. A few thoughts:

• I am somewhat surprised Chauvin got Murder Two, but given the enormous fear this region has been feeling ever since this all began, it's not a complete surprise. A jury that did not deliver what the mob wanted was gonna get doxxed and threatened. 
• Chauvin may have a chance at an appeal because of Maxine Waters, but he'd have had a better chance in a state where the judiciary isn't a wholly owned subsidiary of the DFL. This would have gone down very differently across the St. Croix, I think.
• And that's part of what sticks in my craw about all this. I don't hold any brief for Chauvin, who was the bully boy cop from central casting. Police are, at best, a necessary evil, and this dude was not a hero by any means. Having said that, Chauvin was doing what he was asked to do. And that means we should stop asking the Chauvins of the world to do such bidding. All regimes hire rough men to protect the vulnerable, but if we're not serious about protecting the vulnerable any more, and based on the available evidence we aren't serious, we should stop with the bullshit half measures.
• And therein lies the larger question: why are Chauvin, and by extension all police, doing the things they are asked to do? George Floyd might have died that day anyway, given that he had a likely lethal amount of fentanyl in his system. The danger to the public, I suppose, is if he drove off and caused a pileup on the interstate. That's a hypothetical. What officers actually do is more about financial considerations. Many of the tasks police pursue are revenue generation and not public safety. That question is even more relevant in the Daunte Wright case -- he was stopped because of an expired license tab. That's not a public safety issue, but the Wright case became a public safety issue because we ask our law enforcement to do these penny ante shakedowns. And since the cop in that instance had a brain fart and shot the guy, we've been living in fear for weeks.
• Finally, we need to be honest about the precise reasons we live in fear around there. We have seen vast swathes of our city burned and looted and our elected (not be me, mind you) representatives have ceded control of the city to the woke and their grasping acolytes. This town is chock full of grifters and grievance entrepreneurs at all times, but we also now import 'em, too. This screen shot (h/t Mitch Berg) sums things up nicely:

Grievance is lucrative

• Seriously, get back on yer plane and leave us alone, Al. 

Responding to incentives

It's what people always do:

Reality check: The number of residents fleeing Illinois for other states jumped to 93,704 in 2014 from 68,204 the previous year. It increased in 2015 to 106,544, and in 2016 to 109,941. More exodus in 2017 of 114,779 and last year, another 114,154.

Who do you think is leaving Illinois? For the most part, it’s people who have the means to do so.

And why would they be leaving?

Left-leaning politicians bash people like [Tom] Ricketts and want to tax them more to solve budget problems. But remember: Ricketts didn’t vote on those unbalanced budgets, year after year. He didn’t accumulate mountains of debt. He didn’t vote to underfund worker pensions. He didn’t vote to borrow more money instead of cut spending.

The Democrats in Chicago and Springfield did that. So when you hear the wealth-bashing, make no mistake who’s really responsible for the budget mess we’re in. It isn’t the Ricketts family.

Tom Ricketts owns the Cubs. He's got a lot of money, perhaps even as much as J.B. Pritzker, the new billionaire governor of Illinois. And what does Pritzker have in mind?

Pritzker and a Democrat-led House and Senate plan to introduce a graduated income tax proposal that would, at least initially, hit upper-income earners in Illinois. Candidates for Chicago mayor, including Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, have proposed a new tax on million-dollar property transactions. Aldermanic candidates, including Ald. Pat Dowell, 3rd, have floated the idea of a separate city income tax for wealthy Chicagoans. And mayoral candidate Bill Daley is open to a tax on commuters who live outside the city but work in Chicago.

I'm sure that will work nicely. Illinois has been circling the drain for a long time now, but it's worth watching what is happening there. What politicians do there will be coming to Minnesota soon enough.

Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match

This amuses me:

The CD8 DFL had a very long convention on Saturday,  After ten ballots, everyone promised to go to the primary.

Nothing especially unusual htere.

The unusual thing?  The DFL trucked a bunch of Latino activists from the Twin Cities to canvass for the Metro DFL’s chosen candidate.

CD8 is pretty vast -- it extends from the far northern suburbs all the way to the Canadian border. But it's primarily a place where the local politicians that matter are from Duluth or the Iron Range. So, of course you'd want Alondra Cano to pick the candidate. Hit the link for more -- it's Mitch Berg, so you know it will be a fun read.

Weekend wrapup

Sort of a lightning round, I guess:

• Apparently saving John Conyers and Al Franken is more important than defeating Roy Moore; that's the best conclusion I can draw from this weekend's latest political machinations. Sexual misconduct of varying degrees brings the ick factor, but it's not good form for Conyers to end his long career with his pants around his ankles. And, apparently, Al Franken does enjoy the droit du seigneur and can get by with the random grope because his followers were able to manufacture enough votes in 2008 to get him over the top, so to speak. The Dems were hoping to steal a seat in Alabama, but if they have to protect their own people from accusations over their sexual conduct, they aren't going to be able to attack Moore's long past predations. It's a tough gig to go full-on Victorian when your entire party is about smashing conventions most of the time.
• I usually leave the football ranting to Benster, but I am amused at the transparent machinations of College Football, Inc., LLC, in trying to keep a lid on the Wisconsin Badgers. The Badgers don't play a particularly marketable style of football but are nonetheless undefeated, a claim no other team in the so-called Power 5 can make. From what I can tell, the only team in the Big Ten that is allowed to be discussed in polite company is Ohio State, who must stop the Badgers to prevent them from gaining a national audience. It would not do for the vaunted Committee to leave the Badgers on the outside if they win the Big Ten Championship, so something must be done. ESPN has invested a lot of coin in the Southeastern Conference, and their prerogatives must be at the forefront. The Big Ten is in bed with Fox, so a representative that isn't Ohio State is a problem. 
• Must protect precious. Must protect precious.
• Time sells itself to a company associated with the Koch Brothers. It will be interesting to see if we see a change in how Time Magazine (yes, they are still in business) operates now.

Self-marketing

One of the most important, if unwritten rules of Minnesota politics is this -- don't get in the crosshairs of James Nobles: 

A special nonpartisan report on Tuesday found ethical violations by the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) in its use of two luxury suites at U.S. Bank Stadium.

The 100-page review by the legislative auditor also generated a testy four-hour House-Senate committee meeting as well as a sharp defense of the agency by the governor.

Legislative auditor James Nobles released the findings of his investigation into the MSFA’s use for friends and family of two “Norseman Suites” at the new $1.1 billion stadium in Minneapolis. He found the board had violated state law by not keeping records about who had been in the 18-person suites since the building opened on Aug. 3.

If you'll recall, the review came because we discovered last year that the MSFA had been using the suites for "marketing" purposes that seemed only to be giving free tickets to DFL politicians and their friends and families. There's more from the Star Tribune report:

The MSFA’s “misuse of a public resource has damaged its credibility and diminished public trust,” Nobles said. His office often conducts routine financial audits of the MSFA, but in the future “will expand our scope — or conduct supplementary audits — to examine many other aspects of the authority’s performance.”

The review was consistently critical of the MSFA. Records provided to Nobles’ office were sloppy and incomplete, the report said. The auditors had trouble matching who the guests were with who attended games, who had been given free VIP parking passes to the lot adjacent to the stadium and who had reimbursed the authority after the public outcry.

Of course, Gov. Dayton responded in his usual churlish manner:

“I expect a handful of legislators will ignore these accomplishments, and instead deride and impugn the dedicated public officials who made these successes possible. Their attempts to use this single episode to achieve their own political objectives do nothing to benefit the stadium’s operations or advance the public good,” his statement said.

It wasn't a single episode, of course. The MSFA folks used the suites on a number of occasions and would have continued to do so until the practice was exposed. Had the Star Tribune not reported on the matter at the end of November, it's likely that Michele Kelm-Helgen and Ted Mondale, who run the MSFA, would still be doling out the sweet, sweet suite tickets.

Oh, and there's one other revelation that came out. See if you can spot the larger outrage:

In a surprise that wasn’t in his report, Nobles said the MSFA had acquired a third luxury suite for $300,000 annually for the next five years. The so-called cabins and Truss Bar were built by the Vikings at the highest level of the building for $8.5 million. The MSFA will pay $1.5 million over five years to use the suites for the next 30 years — but cannot use them for Vikings games. SMG markets the suites and has brought in $192,000 since the building opened, Kelm-Helgen said.

Is it the extra suite? Nope. Instead, note that SMG, the Pennsylvania-based company that does the day-to-day operational work for the stadium, is in charge of marketing. So why would MSFA need to control two suites for marketing? That's a larger question that has yet to be answered satisfactorily. I suspect Nobles will be looking into that matter eventually.

Pigs in the dining room

A week later, in the afternoon, a number of dogcarts drove up to the farm. A deputation of neighbouring farmers had been invited to make a tour of inspection. They were shown all over the farm, and expressed great admiration for everything they saw, especially the windmill. The animals were weeding the turnip field. They worked diligently, hardly raising their faces from the ground, and not knowing whether to be more frightened of the pigs or of the human visitors.

That evening loud laughter and bursts of singing came from the farmhouse. And suddenly, at the sound of the mingled voices, the animals were stricken with curiosity. What could be happening in there, now that for the first time animals and human beings were meeting on terms of equality? With one accord they began to creep as quietly as possible into the farmhouse garden.

At the gate they paused, half frightened to go on but Clover led the way in. They tiptoed up to the house, and such animals as were tall enough peered in at the dining-room window. There, round the long table, sat half a dozen farmers and half a dozen of the more eminent pigs, Napoleon himself occupying the seat of honour at the head of the table. The pigs appeared completely at ease in their chairs The company had been enjoying a game of cards but had broken off for the moment, evidently in order to drink a toast. A large jug was circulating, and the mugs were being refilled with beer. No one noticed the wondering faces of the animals that gazed in at the window.

-- George Orwell, "Animal Farm"

Now I know why Gov. Dayton said the U.S. Bank stadium would be known as “the people’s stadium.” 

It’s because the big-shot DFLers who have been given access to some of the best seats in two exclusive suites in the Vikings Magnificent Palace are, technically, people.

Calling it “The Special People’s Stadium” just didn’t have the proper populist ring to it.

Those seats, in the rarefied and inebriated air along the 20-yard line, were essentially free to a cabal of party loyalists, until Star Tribune reporter Rochelle Olson called to ask about them.

Sultans of Swag Michele Kelm-Helgen and Ted Mondale then scrambled to collect checks from public officials who took advantage of the chance to watch mediocre football in the house that taxpayers bought. That must have been awkward. The DFL insiders came for the “free lunch” and ended up buying the timeshare.

Still, it was a heck of a deal. The Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority (MSFA) honchos retroactively determined those tickets were worth $132 apiece, and added $68 for food, for a total of $200. The public officials, all DFLers from what I can tell, dug deep for the dough and all was well.

Nice try. If you are not a DFL insider, just try to buy seats anywhere near those boxes for $132 for Thursday’s game against Dallas. The cheapest I found in the entire stadium were for $195, and those closer to the party’s party box were much higher. That didn’t include food or VIP parking.

-- Jon Tevlin, Star Tribune, November 29

The best person in Minnesota government, Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles, has noticed the faces in the window:

The state's top auditor said he's opened a "priority" investigation into the Minnesota Sports Facilities Authority's control of two prime luxury suites in U.S. Bank Stadium. Separately, the state senator who sponsored the bill authorizing the stadium said she's "disgusted" by the lack of transparency by the authority over who uses the suites at Vikings games and other events.

Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles said Wednesday that he had begun an inquiry into the MSFA's "control and use of suites in the U.S. Bank Stadium."

The nonpartisan office conducts routine audits on the financial activities of state agencies and boards and investigates potential wrongdoing.

You don't want to be in the crosshairs of Jim Nobles. So who has been using the suites?

Kelm-Helgen and Mondale said they and the four MSFA commissioners use the suites to host potential clients who are looking to rent all or portions of the stadium, which opened in August. Last week, they released the identities of 12 current and former public officials who reimbursed the authority $200 for their tickets to the suite.

In the past two weeks, reimbursement checks were deposited from Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges and her husband, Gary Cunningham, city attorney Susan Segal and her husband, Minnesota Management and Budget Commissioner Myron Frans (who attended two games and deposited a total of $800) and City Council Member Jacob Frey, who said he was there to talk to X Games officials and doesn't even like football.

Any time of the year, don't you hear? Spendin' cash, talkin' trash
I'll show you a real good time, come on with me, leave your troubles behind
I don't care where you've been, you ain't been nowhere til you've been in
With the in crowd, with the in crowd, in crowd!

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

And that's why Jim Nobles is on the case.

A suggestion I never thought I'd make

The guy who infamously asked "what's the matter with Kansas" is now paying attention to what's the matter with another spot on the map. It's Thomas Frank:

The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign are part of some digital collection amassed by the troublesome Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal: they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.

And Frank is dialed in:

The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.

They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never explain themselves.

Welcome, welcome to the boomtown
All that money makes such a succulent sound
Welcome to the boomtown

It's important to note that, when it comes to bashing the mores of middle America, no one has been more diligent about it than Thomas Frank. I'm not sure why he's now fixed his gaze on the Beltway, but he's calling out people who richly deserve the attention. One more bit:

There are wonderful things to be found in this treasure trove when you search the gilded words “Davos” or “Tahoe”. But it is when you search “Vineyard” on the WikiLeaks dump that you realize these people truly inhabit a different world from the rest of us. By “vineyard”, of course, they mean Martha’s Vineyard, the ritzy vacation resort island off the coast of Massachusetts where presidents Clinton and Obama spent most of their summer vacations. The Vineyard is a place for the very, very rich to unwind, yes, but as we learn from these emails, it is also a place of high idealism; a land of enlightened liberal commitment far beyond anything ordinary citizens can ever achieve.

Consider, for example, the 2015 email from a foundation executive to a retired mortgage banker (who then seems to have forwarded the note on to Podesta, and thus into history) expressing concern that “Hillary’s image is being torn apart in the media and there’s not enough effective push back”. The public eavesdrops as yet another financier invites Podesta to a dinner featuring “food produced exclusively by the island’s farmers and fishermen which will be matched with specially selected wines”. We learn how a Hillary campaign aide recommended that a policy statement appear on a certain day so that “It wont get in the way of any other news we are trying to make – but far enough ahead of Hamptons and Vineyard money events”. We even read the pleadings of a man who wants to be invited to a state dinner at the White House and who offers, as one of several exhibits in his favor, the fact that he “joined the DSCC Majority Trust in Martha’s Vineyard (contributing over $32,400 to Democratic senators) in July 2014”.

There's more, a lot more, if you follow the link at the top of the page. You should click the link and read it all.

Just a reminder

Take it away, Walter Russell Mead:

America’s public pension funds, which manage trillions of dollars in retirement assets for millions of civil servants, are systematically deceiving taxpayers, the politicians, and municipal bond investors with elaborate accounting sleight-of-hand. The “official” numbers show that public pension funds are struggling; the accurate ones show that the looming fiscal time bomb is so explosive that it may be impossible to defuse.

Mead points us to this piece from the New York Times, which has plenty to keep you awake:

When one of the tiniest pension funds imaginable — for Citrus Pest Control District No. 2, serving just six people in California — decided last year to convert itself to a 401(k) plan, it seemed like a no-brainer.

After all, the little fund held far more money than it needed, according to its official numbers from California’s renowned public pension system, Calpers.

Except it really didn’t.

In fact, it was significantly underfunded. Suddenly Calpers began demanding a payment of more than half a million dollars.

“My board was somewhat shocked,” said Larry Houser, the general manager of the pest control district, whose workers tame the bugs and blights that threaten their corner of California citrus country. It is just a few miles down the road from Joshua Tree National Park.

So why would Calpers want half a million dollars?

It turns out that Calpers, which managed the little pension plan, keeps two sets of books: the officially stated numbers, and another set that reflects the “market value” of the pensions that people have earned. The second number is not publicly disclosed. And it typically paints a much more troubling picture, according to people who follow the money.

So what's going on? Back to the Times:

The two competing ways of valuing a pension fund are often called the actuarial approach (which is geared toward helping employers plan stable annual budgets, as opposed to measuring assets and liabilities), and the market approach, which reflects more hard-nosed math.

The market value of a pension reflects the full cost today of providing a steady, guaranteed income for life — and it’s large. Alarmingly large, in fact. This is one reason most states and cities don’t let the market numbers see the light of day.

If you keep two sets of books in the private sector, it's usually called fraud. More, a lot more, at the link, including a few unpleasant surprises for the municipal bond market.

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.

Nothing to see here, move along

I've been told that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats hate money in politics. I'm thinking it's more love/hate:

If there were a moment in this presidential race when Hillary Clinton could act on her stated outrage over the obscene amount of money in politics, it is probably now, having eclipsed her rival Donald Trump in terms of cash in the bank and blocked off his most direct paths to victory.

But Clinton isn’t tapping the brakes. She is instead on an extended tour through the nation’s elite enclaves — from Laguna Beach to the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard to Magic Johnson’s house in Los Angeles – in an unrestrained fundraising blitz that makes even some supporters chafe.

The price of entry at several of the stops, such as Monday’s dinner at the Beverly Hills home of entertainment mogul Haim Saban, is $50,000 per person. On the Vineyard on Saturday, Clinton netted roughly $2 million at a single cocktail party, then darted off to a small dinner event at a billionaire’s home that generated another $1 million.

The linked article from the Los Angeles Times tells you a lot, including the hypocrisy involved:

Over-the-top fundraising can also make for poor optics as the Democratic nominee struggles to overcome voter anxiety about her trustworthiness and decades of donor controversies involving the Clintons, from the selling of overnight stays in the Lincoln Bedroom during her husband’s administration to six-figure payments for secretive speaking engagements with Wall Street investment firms.

Sixty percent of voters in a Washington Post-ABC News poll this month said they do not see her as honest. The immense cash infusions are now coming to a candidate who regularly says some variation of what she did at a community college round table in Iowa recently: “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccountable money out of it once and for all.” 

Not until the Clintons have all of it, though. Meanwhile, don't you worry your pretty little heads about anything. All that money the Clintons are sloshing around in, it's none of your concern, citizen.

Toll booth

The expressway to Hillary Clinton has a toll booth:

More than half the people outside the government who met with Hillary Clinton while she was secretary of state gave money — either personally or through companies or groups — to the Clinton Foundation. It's an extraordinary proportion indicating her possible ethics challenges if elected president.

At least 85 of 154 people from private interests who met or had phone conversations scheduled with Clinton while she led the State Department donated to her family charity or pledged commitments to its international programs, according to a review of State Department calendars released so far to The Associated Press. Combined, the 85 donors contributed as much as $156 million. At least 40 donated more than $100,000 each, and 20 gave more than $1 million.

The linked report from the Associated Press contains some excellent reporting, although it goes out of its way to make it sound as though nothing untoward is happening. An example:

In another case, Clinton was host at a September 2009 breakfast meeting at the New York Stock Exchange that listed Blackstone Group chairman Stephen Schwarzman as one of the attendees. Schwarzman's firm is a major Clinton Foundation donor, but he personally donates heavily to GOP candidates and causes. One day after the breakfast, according to Clinton emails, the State Department was working on a visa issue at Schwarzman's request. In December that same year, Schwarzman's wife, Christine, sat at Clinton's table during the Kennedy Center Honors. Clinton also introduced Schwarzman, then chairman of the Kennedy Center, before he spoke.

Blackstone donated between $250,000 and $500,000 to the Clinton Foundation. Eight Blackstone executives also gave between $375,000 and $800,000 to the foundation. And Blackstone's charitable arm has pledged millions of dollars in commitments to three Clinton Global aid projects ranging from the U.S. to the Mideast. Blackstone officials did not make Schwarzman available for comment.

Schwarzman is a major donor to Republicans, but he pays to play and Blackstone is a major player, much to the chagrin of many of Hillary's pals on the Left. And his top deputy at Blackstone, Hamilton James, is a big donor to Democrats. At the level these guys operate, you have to pay to play, and they do.

And then there's this guy:

[. . .] Claudio Osorio. He’s a Clinton Foundation donor who leveraged his “generosity” to get $10 million from the government with help from the Clinton State Department. Osorio is now serving a 12-year prison sentence after scamming the government out of millions and cheating his investsors.

Osorio was supposed to be building houses in Haiti. Didn't happen. Why did he get hep from State?

Why might Hillary Clinton be willing to steer resources to this crook’s project? For one thing, Osorio had hosted a fundraiser for Hillary at his Star Island mansion.

For another, Osorio was a Clinton Foundation donor, contributing between $10,000 and $50,000 to the organization, according to Goodman. In addition, he had hired Clinton’s 2008 finance director Jonathan Mantz to lobby OPIC for the loan request.

Less than 24 hours after Tabernacki, the OPIC official, wrote her memo citing Osorio’s Clinton connections, OPIC approved a $10 million loan. It approved the loan just two weeks after the company proposed the project. Officials told Goodman that the process usually takes months or years.

But not when you have friends in very high places.

With 15,000 more emails to catalog, we'll learn more. A lot more. Whether we'll learn it before November 8 is the question.

Email is forever

The drip, drip, drip continues:

A judge ordered the U.S. State Department on Monday to review for possible release 14,900 of Hillary Clinton's emails and attachments that the FBI found when investigating her use of a private email server as secretary of state.

The judge also scheduled a Sept. 23 hearing on when to release the emails, a deadline that raises the possibility some will become public before the Nov. 8 presidential election between Democrat Clinton and her Republican rival, Donald Trump.

It's going to come out one way or another.

Questions about her email practices as secretary of state have dogged Clinton's White House run and triggered a Federal Bureau of Investigation probe that found she was "extremely careless" with sensitive information by using a private server but recommended against bringing charges.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner told reporters it was still reviewing the 14,900 documents and it was unclear how many were personal or work-related. He also said it was unclear how many may duplicate those already released but that there were "likely to be quite a few" not previously disclosed.

Well now. I don't doubt there will be "quite a few" emails and that quite a lot of them will be embarrassing. The question will be whether there's a smoking gun. It doesn't really matter how the bureaucratic turf war between State and Justice is resolved, because it's the other actors on the stage, who aren't part of the government, who will decide what we know and when we know it.

Meanwhile, what we know is embarrassing enough:

When Crown Prince Salman of Bahrain requested a meeting with Clinton, he was forced to go through the Clinton Foundation for an appointment. Abedin advised Band that when she went through “normal channels” at State, Clinton declined to meet. After Band intervened, however, the meeting was set up within 48 hours. According to the Clinton Foundation website, in 2005, Salman committed to establishing the Crown Prince’s International Scholarship Program for the Clinton Global Initiative. And by 2010, it had contributed $32 million to CGI. The Kingdom of Bahrain reportedly gave between $50,000 and $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation. And Bahrain Petroleum also gave an additional $25,000 to $50,000.

That's a lot of palms to grease. But there were others:

Another email exchange between Abedin and Clinton shows a special favor for a top donor: a 15-minute meeting with Clinton, who delayed a plane to accommodate the big contributor.

“Danny abraham called this morning. He is in dc today and tomorrow and asked for 15 min with you. Do u want me to try and fit him in tomorrow?” Abedin wrote in a May 4, 2009, email to Hillary Clinton.

“Will the plane wait if I can’t get there before 7-8?” Clinton asked Abedin.

“Yes of course,” she replied.

Abraham, the Slimfast billionaire, donated between $5 million and $10 million to the Clinton Foundation.

That's a lot of Slimfast. It's going to be an interesting few months.

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.

The dilemma

Victor Davis Hanson:

Never Trumpers, then, face a sort of existential quandary: The more they attack Hillary Clinton, the more it becomes surreal to attack simultaneously (and far more frequently) Trump, who has attacked Clinton in a fashion never before seen in her long political history. And if Never Trumpers insist that the two candidates are of equal odiousness, what then is the point of daily reiterating their oppositions: On Monday attack Trump, on Tuesday Clinton, on Wednesday Trump again? Very quickly the message is received that the two are equally terrible people and therefore the election should not warrant any more commentary or interest, given that any outcome will be wretched. The logic of Trump voters trashing Clinton and Clinton voters trashing Trump is obvious; but what is the rationale of trashing both, other than a sort of detached depression that does not wear well in daily doses?

I write more about politics than anything else, although I really don't enjoy politics very much. If it were up to me, the politicians would all go away and leave us all alone. It's not up to me, though, so all of us end up in the arena, whether we choose to be or not.

The stench and corruption of the Clintons must be addressed. Every time I see Bill Clinton on television, he reminds me more of Noah Cross, the odious character played by John Huston in the movie Chinatown. There's always a threat hiding behind every statement. And Hillary Clinton is worse. The Clintons are evil in an almost existential way.

But do you simply call out the Clintons when their opponent is odious in dozens of different ways, or do you have a duty to call out both of them? As Hanson suggests, it's a rhetorical dead end. And it's a box for a largely political blogger.

Hacking and grifting

If this is true, it's a big problem for the Clintons, and for all of us really:

The Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation was among the organizations breached by suspected Russian hackers in a dragnet of the U.S. political apparatus ahead of the November election, according to three people familiar with the matter.

The attacks on the foundation’s network, as well as those of the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, compound concerns about her digital security even as the FBI continues to investigate her use of a personal e-mail server while she was secretary of state.

Clinton Foundation officials said the organization hadn’t been notified of the breach and declined to comment further. The compromise of the foundation’s computers was first identified by government investigators as recently as last week, the people familiar with the matter said. Agents monitor servers used by hackers to communicate with their targets, giving them a back channel view of attacks, often even before the victims detect them.

The whole point of Hillary Clinton's efforts to maintain a homebrew server for her communications was to keep the prying eyes of inspectors general and others seeking to scrutinize her dealings. It's worth remembering that, around the time of the public disclosure of the homebrew server, Mrs. Clinton directed that up to 30,000 "personal" emails be removed from the server. The claims we heard at the time included the preposterous idea that the removed emails were about Mrs. Clinton's yoga schedule, or wedding planning for her daughter, and the like. It's far more likely that much of the email traffic that was deleted involved dealings between Mrs. Clinton and her family's foundation, which received many millions of dollars from nations who had business with Mrs. Clinton and the federal government. A handy chart:

Follow the money, as always

None of these numbers are in dispute. What we don't know is Hillary Clinton's personal involvement in these transactions, and if there is any impropriety involved. She knows the answer and, if the Foundation has been breached, you can safely assume the Russian government, among others, knows the answer. If she has something to hide, the Russians will have a huge amount of, ahem, leverage in dealing with Mrs. Clinton, should she manage to get into the Oval Office.

At bottom, the overarching issue with the Clintons has always been their penchant for grifting. We need honest leadership in Washington and returning the Clintons to power is hardly the way to bring that about.

Home Truth

Michael Goodwin, explaining the stakes:

Assuming [Hillary] Clinton never has to offer a defense to the e-mails and server beyond the tortured lies she’s told in public, Americans must decide whether she, like her husband, is too big and popular for ordinary standards of justice.

If she becomes president despite the high probability that she committed the same crimes that have sent others to prison or infamy, it will be certain that we have cut our roots to the Founders, and that John Adams was wrong.

“We are a nation of laws and not of men,” the second president said. Not anymore. We would now be a nation whose laws are void if your name is Clinton.

As before, there would be copycats in politics, business and society at large, but who would stop them and declare that the laws matter? There would be nobody left.

Once the people say integrity is optional, the nation is lost. An America that gives up on integrity would not be America anymore.

I would argue that ship has already sailed. I'd love to be wrong.

Fly the Friendly Skype

Climate saviors strike again:

President Barack Obama may warn that carbon dioxide is causing global warming, but his flight to Paris to join other world leaders at the United Nations climate summit emitted more CO2 than driving 72 cars for a year.

Obama’s Paris jaunt will send more CO2 into the atmosphere than 31 American homes‘ energy usage for an entire year. The president’s trip is equivalent to burning 368,331 pounds of coal or 797 barrels of oil, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon footprint calculator.

On the bright side, I'm reasonably certain he'll use Air Force One several more times to make his points about profligate energy use.

The same rule applies -- once our climate betters start using Skype for their meetings, I'll start believing that they are serious about the topic.

A big tree totters in the Obamacare forest

Things aren't going well for Obamacare, nor for the companies who are part of it. And now the biggest one of all is making noises:

The biggest U.S. health insurer said it has suffered major losses on policies sold on the Affordable Care Act’s exchanges and will consider withdrawing from them, adding to worries about the future of the marketplaces at the heart of the Obama administration’s signature health law.

The disclosure by UnitedHealth Group Inc., which had just last month sounded optimistic notes about the segment’s prospects, is the latest sign that many insurers are finding the new business unprofitable, despite an influx of customers that has helped swell revenues.

It's big news if UHG is thinking about getting out, but the key player to watch is Blue Cross/Blue Shield. UHG's primary business involves group plans for employers and while they are a significant player in the market, BC/BS is much more important. Having said that, these comments should cause you to raise your eyebrows:

UnitedHealth Group Chief Executive Stephen J. Hemsley said the company isn’t willing to continue its losses into 2017. UnitedHealth has already locked in its exchange offerings for 2016, but it is pulling back on marketing them during the current open-enrollment period to limit membership, which it said last month totaled around 550,000.

The company will make market-by-market determinations in the first half of next year about whether it will continue selling products on the exchanges.

“We can’t sustain these losses,” he said. “We can’t subsidize a market that doesn’t appear at this point to be sustaining itself.”

And the reason it's not sustaining itself? Don't tell me, lemme guess:

Mr. Hemsley emphasized problems with consumers “coming in and out of the exchange system to use medical services,” or essentially signing up for health plans when they need to cover health expenses—an issue also highlighted by other insurers.

If it's possible to game the system, people will do it. And why wouldn't they? The law makes it possible, which is why, for some people, it makes more sense to pay the individual mandate fine and sign up for insurance only when you need it. Heckuva plan, folks.