A Few Comments On Hillary's Big Speech

I tried to watch Hillary's acceptance speech on Thursday night, but I could only stomach about half of it.  Which is just as well, because in the oral delivery, all I could focus on was the hectoring humorlessness of it all.  And you already know how hectoring and humorless Hillary is, so you don't need me to tell you about that.  (To my surprise, some people -- my wife among them -- even seem to find Hillary not to be hectoring and humorless at all.  There's no accounting for taste.)  Anyway, if the goal is to focus on the substance, it's better to wait for the full text and have it in front of you when you comment.

Of course, that's assuming that the speech had at least some substance.  This one has the look that someone went through it and scrubbed out of it any hint of any kind of a definitive statement with a meaning sufficiently precise that a commenter could criticize it.  Really, how could someone utter this many meaningless platitudes is one short speech?

But even amidst the torrent of meaningless platitudes, it is possible to discern a political vision in this speech:  It is a vision where government -- the federal government of the United States -- has the solution to every human problem, big, small and medium.  A vision where the government can eliminate all down side risks from life by just spending a little more of the free money from the infinite credit card.  A vision where the fundamental role of the politician is to promise goodies to pass out to buy the votes of the electorate.  And a vision where we pretend that essentially everybody but a few bogeymen ("Wall Street, corporations, and the super-rich") can be a net gainer from the government handout game.  

• There aren't enough good-paying jobs in the country?  We'll create them with a big blowout of federal spending!  ("In my first 100 days, we will work with both parties to pass the biggest investment in new, good-paying jobs since World War II.  Jobs in manufacturing, clean energy, technology and innovation, small business, and infrastructure.") I previsouly noted here that every idea on Hillary's website for "creating jobs" consisted of the federal government spending taxpayer money to hire people.
• Existing jobs don't pay enough money?  The federal government will decree that employers will have to pay more!  ("If you believe the minimum wage should be a living wage . . . join us.")
• College costs too much?  We'll make it free!  ("Bernie Sanders and I will work together to make college tuition-free for the middle class and debt-free for all!")  You're burdened by student debt?  We'll "liberate" you from it!  ("We will also liberate millions of people who already have student debt.")
• You didn't save enough for retirement?  Don't worry -- we're going to have a big expansion of Social Security!  ("If you believe we should expand Social Security . . . join us.")  Has she heard that Social Security is basically already broke and headed for bankruptcy at the current level of spending?  If so, that didn't get any mention in this speech.
• "Affordable" health care is of course another top priority.  ("If you believe that every man, woman, and child in America has the right to affordable health care . . . join us.")  No specifics, though.  Is she aware that a previous plan of Democrats to create "affordable health care for all" required a federal takeover of a seventh of the economy and vast new spending, but it has actually made health care less affordable for all except those getting government handouts to cover their premiums?  No mention of that here.  Anyway, why is it a problem for the government to just pay everybody's health care premiums?  
• Is there any human problem or issue that is too personal, too local, too intimate to justify the involvement of the behemoth U.S. federal government to solve it?  How about taking care of children?  No, in Hillary-world, that is a core function of the federal government as well.  ("[I]f fighting for affordable child care and paid family leave is playing the 'woman card,' then Deal Me In!")

And when she talked about things other than massive new government spending programs, it didn't get any better.  I'll take a couple of examples:

• "I believe in science. I believe that climate change is real and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying clean energy jobs."  Apparently Hillary thinks that science is a belief system, rather than a process by which hypotheses are tested against data from the real world.  That's rather a fundamental thing to get completely wrong in somebody seeking the presidency.  And even more fundamental is that she does not understand that "creating . . . good-paying clean energy jobs" with government subsidies is a form of impoverishment of the people.  Supposedly, the strongest selling point that this woman has is her "competence."  Now, I'm not saying that everybody running for the presidency should have a Ph.D. in economics -- far from it.  (Lord help us, that would get us Krugman!)  But it's just basic competence for the job to understand that government subsidies for expensive versions of things that the private sector can produce more cheaply without subsidies impoverishes the people.  Could somebody really be "competent" and not understand something so obvious and so fundamental to the job?
• And finally, this doozy:  "[W]e need to appoint Supreme Court justices who will get money out of politics . . . .  And we'll pass a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United!"  Omitted from the speech: "But of course the Clintons get to keep the $2 billion donated to the 'Foundation' and the $153 million for their speeches, essentially all of which came from people with interests before the government."  And why not leave that out?  I can get away with it!  Did you notice a single mainstream media outlet criticizing me on this point?  True, but at some point this becomes insulting to the intelligence of the listener.

OK, the other candidate is pretty bad too.  But could he really be this bad?

Government 101: How To Get Yourself More Money By Failing

At this blog, we have repeatedly pointed out the most fundamental difference between private and government endeavors:  In private endeavors, when you fail, you lose your ability to get more investors and keep going, and you go out of business.  In government endeavors, when you fail, you proclaim that you just need more money to accomplish the mission.  Somehow, the citizens, through their legislators, always fall for it.  So you get more money, and you grow your staff and your budget.  In fact, the best way to assure the growth of your organization is to fail, and you can grow even more if your failure is even worse.  As a result, no government bureaucracy ever fixes the problem that it was created to fix; indeed, all the problems at which the government throws money always and inevitably grow worse over time.  Extreme examples of this phenomenon covered at this blog have included the poverty scam and the food insecurity scam.

For today, let's consider the War on Drugs.  The War on Drugs was officially launched in about 1970, during the first term of President Nixon.  In the intervening 46 years, as far as I can see, no progress of any kind has been made (unless you count well over a million people behind bars at any given time as "progress").  Sure, usage of some specific drugs has waned marginally (cocaine is an example), but only because other drugs have emerged and become suddenly popular.  A few years ago there was a surge in usage of crystal meth.  Today the surge is in opioid pain killers.  For marijuana, the authorities basically seem to have given up after decades of jailing millions of people.  Overall?  From the government's drugabuse.gov website:

Illicit drug use in the United States has been increasing. In 2013, an estimated 24.6 million Americans aged 12 or older—9.4 percent of the population—had used an illicit drug in the past month. This number is up from 8.3 percent in 2002.  

And what are we spending to achieve these stellar results?  Drugpolicy.org has a collection of statistics here.  They put annual spending (all levels of government) at about $51 billion.  Most goes to law enforcement, but large chunks also go to things like prevention and treatment.  For a post a few days ago I found a figure of over $12 billion annually for just the federal piece of prevention and treatment.  And the costs are not just direct expenditures.  The drugpolicy.org compilation has other statistics that include: 1.6 million annual arrests for drug law violations and $46 billion of government revenue foregone (from potential legalization).

Yet, with this enormous ongoing effort, suddenly in the last couple of years an unexpected epidemic of abuse of opioid painkillers has exploded upon the scene.  Here is a "facts and figures" sheet from the American Society of Addiction Medicine.   According to that document, use of prescription opioid painkillers surged by a factor of four between 1999 and 2008, after which use of heroin began a 37% per year surge from 2010 to 2013.  The two are related because, once addicted to the painkillers, users report that they switch to heroin because the prescription opioids are "more expensive and harder to obtain."  Overdose deaths from opioids (both the painkillers and heroin) reached 47,055 in 2014.

Of course, even as this was happening, the very drugs whose use was surging were primary and specific targets of the Drug War.  The painkillers have long been subject to very tight restrictions on doctors in their ability to prescribe.  Heroin has been absolutely illegal since the onset of the War.  We are paying $51 billion per year to employ thousands upon thousands of government functionaries specifically to keep the buying and usage of these substances under control, and instead the buying and usage of some of the very most dangerous drugs has surged on their watch.  They have had an epic, total and undeniable failure -- a disaster.

And of course you know the response of the government Blob to this epic disaster.  This is the most fabulous opportunity in a generation for us to hit the suckers up for more money to grow our staffs and our budgets!  We can just say that we need lots more money to address this epidemic!  And with thousands of families grieving over the loss of their promising teenagers and twenty-somethings to this epidemic, who will be uncouth enough to point out that we already were blowing $51 billion per year without even being able to see this epidemic coming?

As always, Congress has just rolled over and paid up.  We now have the brand new "Comprehensive Addiction and Recovery Act of 2016," signed into law by President Obama on July 22.  It's the usual: lots more money for lots more programs, without the slightest bit of accountability for prior failures.  There's a new "task force on pain management," new "awareness campaigns," new "community-based enhancement grants to address local drug crises," new "information materials," new "military emergency medical training to assist veterans," a new "FDA opioid action plan," new "improving access to overdose treatment," new "NIH opioid research," etc., etc. etc., etc.  In layman's terms, they're throwing another approximately $700 million per year at the problem and hoping that this time it will accomplish something.  (It won't.)

And in this process, did anyone so much as take a look at the $51 billion currently being spent on total failure to see if any part of that ought to be cut out as useless waste?  Of course not.  That's just not how this process works.  A couple of days ago the Federalist Society sponsored a panel on this new law, to which I listened in, and at the conclusion I asked that question:  if the prior spending had not been effective to prevent this problem from arising, what part of that prior spending (all of it?) should be eliminated as wasteful?  It was as if nobody had ever thought of the question.  Accountability for prior failure is just not part of the dynamic here.  Failure is how you grow your budget!  Everybody knows that!

How To Keep The Poor Poor, European Greens Edition

In the area of the ongoing progressive campaign to keep the poor poor, I tend to focus mostly on issues that hit close to home:  things like policies designed to jack up the price of energy in the name of "saving the planet"; policies designed to confine the poor into lifetime poverty warehouses known as "affordable housing"; policies designed to make young minority adults unemployable by making it illegal to hire them at a wage that any employer is willing to pay; and so forth.  All of these issues are currently playing out on my home turf in New York City.  But for today, I'll look at one farther afield: the apparently successful (at least for now) efforts of European Greens to stifle a major initiative to raise agricultural productivity in Africa.

If you study economic history at all, you know that there has been a great enrichment of people that has occurred in the Western countries over the last century or so, multiplying average real incomes by factors of ten and more and lifting the large majority of the people out of the poverty in which they previously suffered.  And you also know that one of the largest, if not the largest, contributors to that great enrichment has been the enormous technological transformation of agriculture.  People often refer to this change as the "mechanization" of agriculture, but mechanization (that is, the change from using draft animals to using machines like tractors and harvesters) is only one part of the transformation.  Other major factors in the transformation of agriculture include new and hugely improved seeds, fertilizers, weed killers, pesticides, and more.  As a result of all the technological advances in agriculture, countries like the United States have gone from having well more than half the population involved in the primary production of food, to today, when the comparable figure is under 2% of the population.  That has freed tens of millions of people from formerly backbreaking and minimally-paid agricultural labor to work at things like writing computer programs in cushy offices and earning many times the income.

Now, I do not mean to suggest that the process by which the United States and other Western countries went from Point A to Point B was easy.  The opposite.  Millions were forced off farms and into cities by powerful economic forces, including low prices for agricultural commodities that left farmers struggling to survive.  Millions lost their farms through bankruptcies and foreclosures and ended a lifetime in farming with nothing.  Still, nobody would remotely suggest today that we should go back to having half the population working in agriculture, with the attendant diminution of our living standards by at least half -- representing the production of the half of the population that we would no longer have producing other things.

But then, how about Africa?  There is some mechanized agriculture in Africa today, and there is some use of the new seeds and fertilizers, but by and large African agriculture is about where American agriculture was a century ago.  Tens of millions of people work the land in very, very, very low productivity jobs.  If Africans are to achieve average incomes anything like those of Americans or Europeans, a huge piece of that must necessarily come from transforming their agriculture in much the way that we transformed our agriculture.  Not necessarily exactly the same way -- indeed, they may well come up with some advances that we never thought of -- but definitely they must transform their agriculture in ways that overall increase agricultural productivity by a couple of orders of magnitude and free up the bulk of the population to do other things.

Which brings me to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.  This was a big initiative launched a few years ago (2012) by the G-8 to get lots of public and private entities involved to work on improving agricultural productivity in Africa.  Here is their website.  The initiative was actually launched at a summit held in the U.S. at Camp David and involving Barack Obama personally.  Here is the Fact Sheet on the initiative put out by the White House at the time of the summit.  As the Fact Sheet states, a big part of the initiative was the effort to get private capital involved in improving agricultural productivity.  Another significant piece was to encourage land titling and improved property rights.  These can't have been Obama's favorite parts of the initiative, but to his credit, he went along.

Now, my own view is also that the NAFSN had plenty of flaws.  In essence, it is one of those big "Public Private Partnerships" -- and getting into partnership with the corrupt African governments has caused many good intentions to founder.  But, for once in the international aid arena, NAFSN seemed to be getting many of the big things right, at least if the goal was to advance agricultural productivity in Africa.  Private land ownership and private investment are the two big ones.

And now to the latest from the European Parliament.  The Parliament's Committee on Development commissioned a report on the NAFSN, to be prepared by one Maria Heubuch, a member of the Parliament and of the Green Party.  I can't find much about the process of how such reports come to be undertaken, but this post from risk-monger.com ("How to Starve Africa") attributes the initiative to the Green Party and to "countless environmental NGOs."  The draft report is here.  Apparently the initial draft issued back in January, but it just came before the Parliament in June.

Here is the comment from risk-monger.com:

The report tabled by Green MEP, Maria Heubuch, is as vile as it is selfish in its neo-colonialist demands to impose peasant agriculture on a continent trying to develop and feed itself. The Greens are demanding that the European Union not be involved with the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition which is donating billions to create a green agricultural revolution in ten of the poorest African countries. Many identify what has been achieved in Asia today as due to the World Bank’s investments in agricultural technologies in the 1960s and 70s and what is sorely lacking in Africa today.

The report itself is too long to quote much of it here, but I'll give you some flavor:

[The Reporter] . . .

3. Notes with concern that NAFSN promotes intensive agriculture that heavily relies on chemical fertilisers and hybrid seeds, with consequences affecting local communities such as soil erosion, ecological and health risks and biodiversity loss;

4. Warns against replicating in Africa the Asian ‘Green Revolution’ model of the 1960s and ignoring its negative social and environmental impacts; recalls that the SDGs include the goal of promoting sustainable agriculture, to be achieved by 2030;

5. Urges the EU Member States to strive to transform NAFSN into a genuine instrument of support for family farming and local economies in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), recalling that family farmers and smallholders produce about 80 % of the world’s food and provide over 60 % of employment in SSA. . . .  

Yes, they actually think it's a good thing that "family farmers" constitute 60% of employment in sub-Saharan Africa, and by God they are going to keep it that way!  Also pervading the report is patent horror at the prospective involvement of large multi-national agribusiness corporations.  For example:

Instead of supporting NAFSN’s model of ‘modern’, ‘business-oriented’ agriculture based on large-scale industrial farming, your rapporteur, in line with recommendations of UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food and the 2009 International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), calls on African governments to invest in family farming and agroecology. 

There's plenty more.  In many pages of bureaucrat-speak, the basic message is, we think Africans should remain forever on the edge of starvation in peasant agriculture, for the sake of the environment.

The European Parliament took up the Heubuch report on June 8.  Again, according to the post at risk-monger.com:

[I]n the European Parliament in Strasbourg, MEPs voted “overwhelmingly” by 577 MEPs, with only 24 against and 69 abstentions to accept the Green Party’s Heubuch Report and demand that the European Union stop funding the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition.

They just have no concept of morality, at least as I understand the term.  Just one more reason why the Brits are doing well getting out of there.      

Those Evil Saboteurs And Wreckers

I generally have substantial faith in the wisdom of the people.  Certainly, as voters they have done a fairly good job over the years in this country of (mostly) rejecting extremist candidates and overly emotional pleas (although they have been too generous in allowing the growth of the incompetent administrative state).  But there is one variety of demagoguery that large numbers of people regularly fall for, and that is the line that all of our problems are caused by some evil cabal of people who are not like us.

I trace the appeal of this kind of demagoguery to the zero sum vision of the world that I think is fundamentally wrong.  As with most issues in the political arena, there are two basic visions of how things work that inform the divide.  In one vision, wealth springs into existence magically, through no one's effort or work, and if wealth is inequitably distributed, then the wealthy must have gotten it corruptly, through theft or political influence.  Life is just a zero sum game in which political power and influence, if not outright stealing, determine who gets what from the finite pie.  In the other vision, the pie can grow and wealth can be created through a mix of work and effort with risk taking and some luck; a system of voluntary transactions gives outsize rewards to those who make the greatest contributions to growing the pie. 

Anyway, it doesn't take too much looking to find lots of examples of the zero-sum vision of the world, and the associated accusations that those doing well must be some evil cabal acting improperly.

For Hitler, of course, it was the Jews.  Many have speculated over the years as to where Hitler may have gotten the idea that this small group could have been responsible for all of Germany's woes at the time.  (In the 1930s, Jews constituted less than 1% of the population of Germany, about 500,000 people out of over 60 million.)  This article has the theory that the source of Hitler's Jew hatred was what he called the "Dolchstosslegende," or "stab in the back" by a group of Jews that supposedly cost Germany the victory in World War I.  Maybe.  Even more remarkable is that millions of people bought into Hitler's theory.

For Stalin it was the "wreckers and saboteurs."  He started using that term in the context of his first five-year plan (1928-32), whenever anything didn't go according to the plan -- which things regularly did not.  By the time the third such plan got underway in 1937-38, there were so many "wreckers and saboteurs" that some 2 million people were summarily executed.  Somehow, it never made the Soviet economy work very well.  Of course, Stalin never had to win a popular election.

In today's Chavista/Maduroista Venezuela, the term in favor is "hoarders and speculators."  As more and more of the economy has been nationalized by expropriation, food and basic consumer goods have disappeared, and the people have gradually been reduced toward starvation.  Clearly, this cannot be caused by the government's own incompetence and pursuit of socialist policies of nationalization, price controls and redistribution.  Plenty of the alleged "hoarders and speculators" have been arrested, and the linked article reports on a new law last year imposing criminal sentences of up to 10 years for black market activities.  No word though on mass executions -- yet.

We don't have anything like this in the United States -- do we?  For the left wing of today's Democratic Party (which increasingly is the Democratic Party) the official demons are the evil bankers.  The narrative, via Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, is that "greed" and "corruption" on the part of bankers caused the recent financial crisis, and more generally that the bankers' taking all the money for themselves is what keeps the middle class down.  (By the way, there's a heavy predominance of Jews among the top ranks of successful investment bankers and related financial professionals like private equity and hedge fund executives.  Nobody in the left-wing press seems to mention this fact when they talk about "code words" for racism.)  Anyway, wasn't the 2000 page 2010 Dodd-Frank law supposed to fix the unfair transfer of wealth to the evil bankers by putting in place every new regulation that every Democratic Party operative could even think of?  No, we've now moved past that.  Bankers are still getting rich -- obviously we must need another one of these multi-thousand page behemoths.  But could it be that bankers become wealthy not because they steal the money, but because they add wealth to the economy's pie by, for example, creating a somewhat liquid market in whole companies which did not previously exist, or by forcing big efficiency gains on stodgy corporate managements through activist private equity investments?  Don't look to a Warren or a Sanders to even understand what I am talking about.

And where is Hillary on this?  Without doubt, the bankers of Goldman Sachs, et al., think that they have paid her sufficient protection money that she will not go after them when she takes power.  Good luck with that guys.  The baying wolves are out.  Under attack from Bernie Sanders for being a tool of the big bankers, Hillary at a debate in April said that she was the one who had "called out the bankers" for their bad conduct.   Does anyone think that a Sanders or a Warren, or at least some of their acolytes, will not get significant positions in a Clinton administration?

We hope to look to the Republican Party to offer the vision of a growing-pie economy where high income is a proper reward for adding to wealth creation.  Unfortunately, Donald Trump is not the man for this.  He too appears to have a vision of a zero sum economy where bogeymen are stealing all the money.  In this case, the chosen bogeymen are the even more unlikely suspects of China and Mexico.  He rails against NAFTA and against the admission of China to the WTO as "bad trade deals" as if the U.S. government by these actions somehow set the terms of trade between and among the U.S., China and Mexico.  In fact, of course, trade between the U.S. and China, and between the U.S. and Mexico, takes place on terms that are voluntarily negotiated by private parties.

Well, at least Trump's demonization is of foreigners, and therefore doesn't suggest a future where domestic bad guys are vilified, persecuted and even executed.             

Free Speech For Me But Not For Thee

A couple of weeks ago Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg gave several media interviews that then rightly brought her a torrent of criticism.  In the portion that drew the most attention, she rather un-judicially stated a preference for one candidate over the other in the midst of the current presidential campaign.  But in other parts of the interviews that you may not have noticed, she engaged in even more inappropriate conduct by indicating in advance how she would rule on various issues likely to come before the Court.  Basically, she said in so many words that she has already pre-judged pretty much all of the most important issues likely to come before the Court any time soon, and don't waste your breath trying to persuade her otherwise.  OK, we already knew that, but do you have to be quite so explicit?  In one of her most over-the-top statements, she is quoted by Adam Liptak of the New York Times on July 10 as having said "I’d love to see Citizens United overruled."

Most readers here probably have heard of Citizens United, but for those who don't know the specifics, here's the gist.  A corporate entity by that name made a movie called "Hillary: The Movie," critical of Hillary Clinton, and wanted to exhibit it, and promote it with advertising, in the windows immediately preceding various of the 2008 presidential primaries.  The so-called Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (often referred to as McCain-Feingold) had a provision that explicitly prohibited the spending of corporate funds for such "electioneering communications" by corporate entities in those time windows.  Citizens United brought suit seeking to enjoin the Federal Election Commission from enforcing that provision as a violation of the First Amendment.  The lower court denied the injunction under the terms of McCain-Feingold, but the Supreme Court reversed and invalidated the relevant provision as unconstitutional.  Justice Ginsberg joined a dissenting opinion.

There are probably very few issues on which Hillary Clinton and the Notorious RBG disagree, and the desirability of overruling Citizens United is definitely not one of them.  Indeed, as reported here by John Hinderaker of PowerLine, in a speech on July 16, Hillary promised to make the overruling of Citizens United one of her top priorities, and to introduce a constitutional amendment to accomplish that goal within 30 days of taking office (assuming she is elected).  Of course, another view is that overtly political "judges" like RBG have zero respect for precedent that gets in the way of their political objectives.  All Hillary would really need to do as President would be to appoint another couple of RBG's lockstep ideological comrades to the Court, and they would promptly take care of doing away with Citizens United and the rest of the First Amendment as soon as a new case could reach them.  (The Second Amendment would not be far behind.)  

So what's the big problem with Citizens United?  To listen to the narrative of Hillary and her supporters, it's just a question of "getting too much money out of politics."  Does that sound plausible?  Or is that just some spin to justify statutory provisions cynically designed to advantage one side of the political divide and disadvantage the other?  Let's consider some of the current status of "money in politics."

First, the status of the current money-raising race between the two main presidential contenders.  The New York Times has figures in a June 22 article covering candidate FEC reports through April 30.   Hillary had raised $334.9 million, including $238.2 million by her campaign and $96.7 million by super-PACs supporting her.  Trump had raised $67.1 million, including $64.6 by the campaign and $2.5 million by super-PACs supporting him.  And how about current spending level?  Here's a Los Angeles Times article from June 19, reporting that Hillary had launched a $23 million advertising campaign in eight "battleground" states (Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, New Hampshire).  Trump's comparable level of spending in the same states according to the article?  $0. 

Do you think that Hillary might have strong fundraising support from so-called "small donors"?  Don't kid yourself.  The best way of looking at Hillary's campaign fundraising operation is as "protection money" from those with a lot to lose from government predation.  The FEC defines "small donors" as those who give the campaign less than $200.  Below that level, you don't have to report a donor's name.  According to this report from Politifact on March 21 (covering donations through February), Bernie Sanders had raised some 70% of all his individual donations from that category.  Hillary?  19%.  Even Trump was at 22%, and many of the Republicans were well above that.  (Cruz was at 42%.)

But put aside all these officially-reported campaign funds, and consider what else the Clintons have out there -- namely, the "Foundation" and the speaking fees.  According to this CNN report from February, the two Clintons had been paid some $153 million for 729 speeches since 2001 -- an average of a little over $200,000 per speech.  And recognize that everybody knew that Hillary was planning during that time to run for President (let alone that she was a U.S. Senator and Secretary of State for much of the time).  So when they count up the "money in politics," does any of that count?  When Citizens United gets overruled and all the McCain-Feingold restrictions go back into effect, does any of that get restricted?  Of course not.  Even if the people who paid for the speeches were people with issues before the State Department or prospective issues before a future President?  (As just one example, CNN says that at least $7.7 million of the total was from speeches to "big banks," including Goldman Sachs and UBS.)  Doesn't count.  How about if someone pays Bill Clinton $250,000 to give a speech even after Hillary has become a candidate?  Daily Caller on May 17 claims to have identified $2.7 million of such.  Also doesn't count. 

And then there's the Foundation.  According to the Washington Post from February 2015 here, the Foundation raised close to $2 billion from 2001 to 2013.  (Funny, I haven't seen anything more on this from the Post more recently.)  That's paid for lots of the Clintons' travel and lifestyle, and kept their names in public, plus kept a whole proto-campaign organization together and ready to go.  Lots of the money has come from the likes of Middle Eastern oil interests and other foreign potentates who are specifically prohibited from contributing to American political campaigns.  Anyway, don't worry, none of this counts either.

Rest assured: whatever further "campaign finance" restrictions Hillary can manage to get through -- whether via a constitutional amendment, a reversal of Citizens United, or some new statute following a new Supreme Court ruling -- it is one hundred percent certain that those restrictions will be specifically designed to disadvantage Mrs. Clinton's adversaries and silence her critics, while somehow missing whatever are her own main sources of funding and support.

The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time -- Part X

It's been a while (since December) since I last wrote a post in this series.  The reason is that nothing ever seems to change.  On the one hand, the proponents of the official government warming line, most notably the bureaucrats at NASA/GISS, continue to make regular announcements that global temperatures have set some kind of new record.  On the other hand, independent researchers continue to point out that government data, available online, contradict the contention of record-setting heat, at least if the data prior to recent "adjustments" is used; the entire apparent increase in temperatures existing in government so-called "final" (post-adjustment) data lies in the unexplained adjustments.  Demands for detailed explanation of the adjustments continue to be made, and the bureaucrats simply ignore those demands.  And of course the "mainstream" media go merrily on reporting whatever NASA/GISS says, without ever asking so much as a semi-intelligent question about such things as the adjustments or the discrepancies between the satellite and "surface" temperature records  Really, it's bizarre.

Anyway, we're just going through another round of same, so I might as well inform you about it.  On Tuesday, NASA/GISS made one of the regular announcements.  It was reported upon by all of the usual "mainstream" suspects, with the usual complete lack of skepticism or curiosity:  the New York Times here, livescience.com here, the Guardian here, USA Today here, Scientific American here ("First Half of 2016 Blows Away Temperature Records"), etc., etc., etc.  Try to find so much as a hint in any of them that they are even aware of the massive adjustments or that they think their readers are entitled to an explanation.  It's just parroting of whatever NASA's Gavin Schmidt says.  From the New York Times:

Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, said that while the first six months of 2015 made it the hottest half-year ever recorded, “2016 really has blown that out of the water.”  He said calculations showed there was a 99 percent probability that the full year would be hotter than 2015.

But, you ask, why the strange timing?  Why make an announcement in mid-July that 2016 has "a 99 percent probability" of being the warmest year, instead of waiting until later in the year (or after the end of the year) when you actually know?  Of course, to people who follow what's going on, it's obvious:  The most recent two months (May and June) have seen the largest two-month drop ever in satellite-measured tropical temperatures, and the second-largest two-month drop in satellite-measured global temperatures.  Go to Roy Spencer's web site for more detail on the latest satellite temperatures.  Spencer describes what is currently going on as "rapid cooling" following the break-up of the 2015-16 El Nino.  In other words, if Schmidt had waited another month or two for his announcement, he would have a big risk of missing his opportunity to influence the election with his apocalyptic statements.

Meanwhile, on July 9 the estimable Tony Heller gave an excellent presentation on the subject of all of NASA's alleged warming being a result of the unexplained adjustments.  You can watch him giving the presentation here; a copy of his slides and charts is here.  It's just data, data and more data.  He has actual temperature records from the 1930s and 1940s showing those years to be much warmer than today.  And he has pdf copies of newspaper articles from the time to back himself up.  And he has NASA charts and Hansen (then-head of NASA/GISS) articles from the 80s and 90s showing no warming to that time.  And then he has the current NASA "final" (adjusted) data.  In the "final" data, the 1930s and 40s temperature records have been made to disappear.  Would you think that somebody from some media outlet -- New York Times, USA Today, Scientific American, et al. -- would at least ask Schmidt a question about this?  It's beyond comprehension.