When socialists run out of other people’s money, everything falls apart. In Venezuela, socialism is killing babies:
By morning, three newborns were already dead.
The day had begun with the usual hazards: chronic shortages of antibiotics, intravenous solutions, even food. Then a blackout swept over the city, shutting down the respirators in the maternity ward.
Doctors kept ailing infants alive by pumping air into their lungs by hand for hours. By nightfall, four more newborns had died.
“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.
Also this: “At the University of the Andes Hospital in the mountain city of Mérida, there was not enough water to wash blood from the operating table.” With a picture to match.
Is this the point where the bankrupt socialist regime changes course and implements economic reform? Of course not. “Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced a sweeping crackdown Saturday under a new emergency decree, ordering the seizure of paralyzed factories, the arrest of their owners and military exercises to counter alleged foreign threats.”
Naturally the democratically elected opposition refuses to knuckle under to Maduro’s unconstitutional decrees.
“Opposition leader Henrique Capriles also said the army must decide whether it is ‘with the constitution or with Maduro,’ a day before nationwide protests demanding the president’s ouster through a referendum.”
The Atlantic offers up a photo essay on how little food Venezuelans have to eat. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
The government doesn’t just control the oil industry, imposing windfall taxes as high as 50 percent on the few private sector projects that remain. The government has nationalized rice mills, large producers of agricultural products, and expropriated millions of acres of farmland; it has acquired some banks and shut down others; nationalized the cement sector; tried to nationalize gold miners; nationalized the country’s largest steel mill and the country’s largest telecommunications company; expropriated the nation’s largest power producer (remember those rolling blackouts?), and more.
People close to the regime have benefited from many of those deals. Corruption has skyrocketed since the beginning of Venezuela’s “Bolivarian revolution.” According to the Cato Institute, $22.5 billion in public funds have been transferred from Venezuela to foreign accounts with no plausible explanation. Relatives of President Nicolas Maduro have been implicated in drug trafficking, with suspicions of drug money used to finance his campaign.
Oh, and Venezuela’s capital has earned the distinction of being the murder capital of the world.
All of these tragedies were avoidable. They are all the result of a mentality that sees only nails for the hammer of government control. Chavez and Maduro kept saying that everything that was wrong with Venezuela was the fault of markets and that if the government either eliminated or regulated those markets, things would get better. They implemented their agenda and it has been a disaster. This socialist brand of economic authoritarianism had the predictable consequence of political authoritarianism, corruption, and a breakdown of the rule of law.
How many more babies have to die before Venezuela abandons its failed socialist experiment?
Today Kentucky and Oregon have Democratic Presidential primaries, make it possible that “inevitable” Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton could suffer two more losses.
Here’s a roundup of Presidential race links:
“If Hillary does win, if after a string of state losses, after a blundering, scandal-plagued, email-tormented, Benghazi-haunted campaign she limps, staggeringly and breathlessly, across the finish line ahead, where, really, is she? Where’s her party? The Democrats are playing against the laws of cause and effect. Hillary’s campaign is dead, and she’s winning. Bernie’s is alive, and he’s losing.”
Trump’s strength in Appalachia: “Of the 420 counties seen as sharing a culture that transcends state lines, Trump won all but 16, including a sweep of western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio and the western uplands of Virginia with potentially profound ramifications for the general election.”
Why Trump can win. “Hillary Clinton also seems to quietly dislike (a) people, and (b) America, and you don’t need an advanced degree in election analytics to know this is not good.”
Burlington College closes due to huge debt incurred under leadership of Jane O’Meara Sanders, Bernie Sanders’ wife. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
Liberal billionaire Tom Steyer, who wasted millions to no effect in 2014, wants to do the same in 2016. Tiny problem: Lots of unions object to his job-killing green politics and refuse to pony up. (Hat tip: Powerline.)
There’s so much news about the corrupt dealings of the Clinton Clan popping up that I need to do a separate roundup.
First up: Clinton Global Initiative money going to one of Bill Clinton’s “special friends“:
The Clinton Global Initiative, which arranges donations to help solve the world’s problems, set up a financial commitment that benefited a for-profit company part-owned by people with ties to the Clintons, including a current and a former Democratic official and a close friend of former President Bill Clinton.
The $2 million commitment was placed on the agenda for a September 2010 conference of the Clinton Global Initiative at Mr. Clinton’s urging, according to a document from the period and people familiar with the matter.
Mr. Clinton also personally endorsed the company, Energy Pioneer Solutions Inc., to then-Energy Secretary Steven Chu for a federal grant that year, said people with knowledge of the endorsement.
Snip.
Energy Pioneer Solutions was founded in 2009 by Scott Kleeb, a Democrat who twice ran for Congress from Nebraska. An internal document from that year showed it as owned 29% by Mr. Kleeb; 29% by Jane Eckert, the owner of an art gallery in Pine Plains, N.Y.; and 29% by Julie Tauber McMahon of Chappaqua, N.Y., a close friend of Mr. Clinton, who also lives in Chappaqua.
So just who is Julie Tauber McMahon? Since 2014, many Clinton watchers have tabbed McMahon as “Energizer,” the Secret Service code-name given to Bill Clinton’s “attractive, busty” blonde mistress.
Paying off your mistress’s for-profit company with charity dollars isn’t exactly standard accounting practice.
After more than a year of research, a Wall Street analyst is arguing the Clinton Foundation’s books are riddled with financial inconsistencies that rise to the level of “fraud.”
Charles Ortel, who gained recognition for correctly identifying problems with General Electric’s financial statements in 2008, has prepared 40 reports highlighting discrepancies that he said proves the Clinton Foundation has covered up cash flow since 1997.
The financial whistleblower said his 15 months of research revealed gaps in the amount of money donors claim to have given and the amount of money the foundation claims to have received.
From 2000 until now, the Clintons were on their very best behavior, to preserve Hillary’s electoral viability.
In that period, they created a sham charity for personal enrichment and to pay off their cronies they could get government jobs for and put American secrets online for the Russian and Chinese and Iranian intelligence agencies to pilfer.
That was the Clintons at their finest.
What happens when they no longer have to care about the law at all?
A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation reveals that Bill and Hillary Clinton received at least $100 million from autocratic Persian Gulf states and their leaders, potentially undermining Democratic presidential candidate Hillary’s claim she can carry out independent Middle East policies.
As a presidential candidate, the amount of foreign cash the Clintons have amassed from the Persian Gulf states is “simply unprecedented,” says national security analyst Patrick Poole.
“These regimes are buying access. You’ve got the Saudis. You’ve got the Kuwaitis, Oman, Qatar and the UAE. There are massive conflicts of interest. It’s beyond comprehension,” Poole told TheDCNF in an interview.
Overall, the Clinton Foundation has received upwards of $85 million in donations from five Persian Gulf states and their monarchs, according to the foundation’s website.
And all this news is popping up just when the Clinton Cash documentary is about to debut at Cannes:
A few more Clinton Corruption tidbits:
Speaking of Bill Clinton, records show he took at least 26 trips aboard registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
Flashback: This piece, where the late Christopher Hitchens nails the sleazy antics of the Clintons, remains as relevant as ever:
What do you have to forget or overlook in order to desire that this dysfunctional clan once more occupies the White House and is again in a position to rent the Lincoln Bedroom to campaign donors and to employ the Oval Office as a massage parlor? You have to be able to forget, first, what happened to those who complained, or who told the truth, last time. It’s often said, by people trying to show how grown-up and unshocked they are, that all Clinton did to get himself impeached was lie about sex. That’s not really true. What he actually lied about, in the perjury that also got him disbarred, was the women. And what this involved was a steady campaign of defamation, backed up by private dicks (you should excuse the expression) and salaried government employees, against women who I believe were telling the truth. In my opinion, Gennifer Flowers was telling the truth; so was Monica Lewinsky, and so was Kathleen Willey, and so, lest we forget, was Juanita Broaddrick, the woman who says she was raped by Bill Clinton.
The Convention began on a negative note when controversial temporary rules were adopted. Sanders supporters had been worried about these rules for weeks and had collected delegate signatures to seek changes to the rules. According to Jordan Chariton of The Young Turks, this rule change involved going with the delegate count from the first tier vote and ignoring the delegate count from the second tier, which Sanders had won.
A vocal vote was held to determine if these temporary rules should be adopted as permanent. The rules were voted on through a vocal “aye” or “nay,” led by Roberta Lange, the party’s chairwoman. The video above shows the voice vote, which doesn’t clearly show a majority…If it’s not clear who gets the majority, then the convention is supposed to have a “vote of division of assembly,” reported Jason Llanes, who stayed at the convention all day, reporting live from Periscope. A division of assembly vote involves having people stand on either side of the room to indicate their vote, he said.
Lange, however, announced that the “ayes” won and that her decision could not be contested. The vote was taken at 9:30 a.m., while many delegates were still in line.
And if you don’t believe the report, take a look at the video yourself:
By the way, Roberta Lange is a Democratic Party superdelgate, though oddly enough, one that hasn’t officially pledged to Hillary. I don’t think there’s any question who she’s supporting now, is there?
Some Hillary supporters have basically responded by saying: Hey, the rule change only gave Hillary one extra delegate! Get over it! Oddly enough, the fact that Team Hillary would cheat so blatantly when the stakes were so low does not exactly fill me with confidence.
I’m seeing a lot of Sanders supporters saying that this has pushed them over the edge into supporting Donald Trump in November if Clinton is the Democratic party nominee.
Hillary Clinton’s election machine has dropped the facade of even pretending to care what actual voters think. In Nevada, they all but told Bernie Sanders supporters “Fuck you. We’re rigging it for Hillary and you can’t stop us.”
Team Clinton began the steamrolling by counting the delegates while Team Bernie was still in the registration process….
The convention began with secret meetings within the rules committee and a quick collection of delegate counts prior to all of the attendees and Delegates actually having an opportunity to be present on the floor. Bernie Sanders supporters demanding delegate recounts, and requesting a re-vote.
This was followed by Bernie Sanders supporters becoming angry over a voice vote that adopted a set of temporary convention rules as the permanent rules. The rules committee denied points of order brought up by the attending Bernie Sanders supporters. The Bernie voters were shut down and not allowed to have their voices heard.
The only question now is: What wouldn’t Hillary do to steal this election?
Hillary Clinton and her sycophantic media have declared the Democratic presidential race over. Clinton has stopped spending money on primary advertising and her proxies have called for Bernie Sanders to drop out.
Evidently Sanders hasn’t gotten the memo. Last night he beat Clinton by 16 points in the West Virginia primary. Sanders is less than 300 pledged delegates behind Clinton, and says he’ll continue the fight all the way to the Democratic National Convention.
And a lot of Sanders supporters seem very, very bitter over Clinton’s dirty tricks and corruption, possibly far more than I’ve ever seen on the Democratic side of the race, at least since 1972 or so. Which may be the reason “a third of those who voted in West Virginia’s Democratic primary say they plan to back Trump in November, according to NBC News exit polls. Sanders won those voters by a wide margin. In fact, 39 percent of Sanders voters said they would vote for Trump over Sanders in the fall. For Clinton, nine percent of her voters say they plan to come out for Trump in the general election.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Other polls are also showing a tightening race. “A Harvard poll finds Clinton ahead only 46 percent to 40 percent nationwide and 45 to 41 in swing states; Quinnipiac finds Clinton leading by one point in Florida, leading by one point in Pennsylvania, and trailing by two points in Ohio.”
A big reason is the top-heavy nature of income tax receipts. “Nearly half of the state’s personal income tax revenue comes from the top 1 percent of earners — 150,000 individual tax returns. And personal income tax revenue is 65 percent of total revenue, which means the One Percent provides 33 percent of the state’s total revenue.”
Here’s a handy comparison of Texas vs. California debt ratios using a number of different metrics. You can also look at several different metrics with the general pension tracker tool, put together by the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. (Hat tip: Pension Tsunami.)
“During the Great Recession and since, Texas has been America’s jobs engine, creating 34 percent of all U.S. civilian jobs during the last eight years in a state with less than 10 percent of the nation’s population.”
“In 2014, a study by the conservative American Enterprise Institute found that full-career state workers in five states — California, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas and West Virginia — earned more in retirement income than in their final salary.” I’m pretty sure Texas salaries on average were significantly lower than California’s, and that there were less of them…
Not to go all public servicey on you, but don’t drink and drive. Especially if you have children in the car.
Call Greg Redux: Billings lawyer Michele Lynn Braukmann arrested with a .247 blood alcohol content (BAC), an open bottle of vodka and three kids in the car, tells officer not to arrest her because she has “the police chief on speeddial.”
And this supergenius was found slumped in his car with a BAC of .604 and two kids in the car. Keep in mind that any BAC above .4 is potentially lethal from the alcohol poisoning alone. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades.)
Also, don’t drink and steer, like this Louisiana fisherman sentenced to 20 years for steering his commercial fishing boat into a dock, his fourth DUI offense.
I expected to spend the weekend at the Levitation Music Festival here in Austin, but it got cancelled when it looked like t was going to be rained out. However, I did see a makeup show by Slowdive, which was the biggest reason I was attending anyway.
Scott Adams: “I give Clinton a 50% chance of making it to November with sufficiently good health to be considered a viable president.”
It’s good for the sake of the world that Islamic State fighters are no-talent assclowns. Maybe they should have drilled them more on military tactics than reciting the Koran. See how many basic military squad function mistakes you can count them making in this video.
“More than two decades ago, we heard the ‘misplaced fears’ and predictions of shootouts in the streets of Texas because of the CHL law. It didn’t happen — and it won’t happen because of SB 11, either.”
Rabid Puppies dominate the Hugo nominations again. The science fiction establishment was given the opportunity to address Sad Puppies concerns, but instead they continued to doubled down by backing the Social Justice Warriors at every turn. This has turned Sad Puppy voters into Rabid Puppy voters. The 2015 Hugos: “There are problems, but Vox Day is an odious troll.” The 2016 Hugos: “You know what? Fuck them. They deserve Vox Day.”
Hillary Clinton, with her slender elected delegate and huge superdelegates leads over Bernie Sanders, is the presumptive Democratic nominee. She got there in large measure with the fundraising infrastructure her husband built for his successful presidential run, a veritable stranglehold over the DNC apparatus and a naked willingness to pander to just about every faction in the Democratic Party’s coalition.
But there’s also growing evidence that Clinton had another advantage over Sanders: Her willingness to use dirty tricks and outright fraud to secure the nomination.
The Sanders campaign has argued that the “Hillary Victory Fund, a joint-fundraising committee for the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and 32 state Democratic Parties, may have committed ‘breaking campaign finance laws serious apparent violations’ of campaign-finance laws.”
There’s at least some circumstantial evidence Democratic Party operatives have been manipulating actual vote totals in various venues to put Hillary on top. Take, for example, these screen shots that show Sanders leading certain counties in this week’s primaries in early returns, with subsequent updates that not only show Hillary leading, but actually show fewer Sanders votes than the last update. Just glitches? Maybe. But it’s mighty strange that every single election night “glitch” in Democratic primaries has seemed to favor Hillary.
Don’t think that Hillary’s dirty tricks campaign will end at the primary. Clinton toady and current Virginia governor Terry McAuliffe issued an executive order giving over 200,000 ex-felons the right to vote in a naked attempt to deliver Virginia to Clinton in November.
The fact that Clinton would resort to dirty tricks, even going in as they heavy favorite, should surprise absolutely no one who has paid attention to career over the years.