"A new batch of State Department emails released Tuesday showed the close and sometimes overlapping interests between the Clinton Foundation and the State Department when Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state.

"The documents raised new questions about whether the charitable foundation worked to reward its donors with access and influence at the State Department, a charge that Mrs. Clinton has faced in the past and has always denied.

"In one email exchange, for instance, an executive at the Clinton Foundation in 2009 sought to put a billionaire donor in touch with the United States ambassador to Lebanon because of the donor's interests there."

"The Obama administration is entering its final months, but it's never too late to further diminish US influence and discomfit our allies.

"President Obama is considering adopting a policy of No First Use, i.e. declaring that the United States would never use nuclear weapons except after a nuclear attack on itself or its allies. From Obama's perspective, this change would have the dual advantage of being something the president can legitimately do on his own while also representing a radical departure in the country's nuclear doctrine. ...

"[T]here is nothing to recommend No First Use unless you are a lame-duck president heedless of strategic reality and looking to make a gesture of anti-nuclear righteousness."

"In the past year 31 suspected ISIS terrorists have been arrested by American law enforcement, and three attacks have taken the lives of 63 people and wounded an additional 81 civilians.

"The suspected terrorists have been arrested for crimes ranging from planning to travel overseas to join ISIS fighters to soliciting the killing of American soldiers. Those arrested range from a 15 year old too young to be named to a former Army National Guardsman.

"The arrests almost all share one thing in common: the involvement of a FBI confidential informant."

"The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on July 29 struck down North Carolina's 2013 voting law, which included a voter identification requirement and reduced the number of days before Election Day on which people could vote.

"It is perfectly reasonable for a state to demand that voters show ID at the polls, but the court decision and others recently handed down in other states suggest a systematic campaign is underway to discredit this basic truth. The principal weapon used in this campaign is the Left's favorite: racial discrimination. ...

"There is no evidence that those who lack ID are concentrated in any minority population. That's one reason why ID laws did not reduce black turnout in any of the many states, including North Carolina, which recently introduced them. Nor did those ID laws in effect before 2008 prevent record black turnout in the states where they had already been enacted. ...

"ID requirements are much less dangerous to democracy than a lack of them. If those who vote don't have to prove they are citizens and entitled to do so, the result in tight races will be skewed. In fact, it's reasonable to suppose that many of those most fanatically opposed to vote ID laws are primarily concerned that a useful cover for voter fraud will be eliminated."

Read entire article here.

"Last week, William Binney, a 30-year career official at the National Security Agency (NSA) turned whistleblower, revealed the unthinkable. Mr. Binney, who devised the software that the NSA has used to capture the contents of emails and cellphone conversations of all in America but resigned from the NSA because of the unlawful and unconstitutional manner in which the software was used, told a Philadelphia radio audience that the DNC hacking was most likely done by NSA agents.

"Why would the NSA hack into DNC computers, and why would the NSA leak what its agents saw? ...

"The intelligence community's antipathy toward Mrs. Clinton has two general sources. One is her misuse of emails containing state secrets. Among the top-secret emails that the FBI discovered on Mrs. Clinton's non-secure private servers were some that revealed the names of U.S. intelligence agents operating undercover in the Middle East. Because Mrs. Clinton emailed secrets to others who the FBI found were hacked by hostile foreign intelligence services and because she used a non-secure mobile email device while inside the territories of hostile governments, her 'extremely careless' use of her emails resulted in the termination of the undercover work of those whose cover she caused to be revealed. Many in the intelligence community also suspect that in some cases, U.S. undercover agents lost their lives because Mrs. Clinton failed to keep their identities secret."

"As U.S. armed forces attack ISIS in Libya, WikiLeaks is poised to remind us that ISIS is in Libya -- indeed, that ISIS is ISIS -- thanks to disastrous policies championed by Hillary Clinton as President Obama's secretary of state. Also raised, yet again, is the specter of Mrs. Clinton's lying to Congress and the American people -- this time regarding a matter some of us have been trying for years to get answers about: What mission was so important the United States kept personnel in the jihadist hellhole of Benghazi in 2012?

"Specifically, did that mission involve arming the Syrian 'rebels' -- including al-Qaeda and forces that became ISIS -- just as, at Mrs. Clinton's urging, our government had armed Libyan 'rebels' (again, jihadists) to catastrophic effect?

"It has been less than two weeks since WikiLeaks rocked the Clinton campaign on the eve of the Democratic convention by leaking hacked e-mails illuminating DNC efforts to rig the nomination chase in Clinton's favor. Now the organization's founder, Julian Assange, has announced that WikiLeaks is soon to publish highly sensitive government e-mails that demonstrate Hillary Clinton's key participation in efforts to arm jihadists in Syria. Just as in Libya, where Mrs. Clinton championed the strategy of arming Islamist 'rebels,' the Syrian 'rebels' who ultimately received weapons included the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. ...

"Clearly, we should not take Assange's word for what is to be gleaned from the hacked records, which he says include some 17,000 e-mails 'about Libya alone.' Let'€™s see if he has what he says he has."

"Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton completed no security briefings or courses on the proper handling of classified materials and how to conduct secure communications while at the Department of State, according to new Obama administration legal filings before the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.

"The surprise admission was released late Friday and could reignite the controversy over Clinton's 'careless' handling of classified materials as asserted by FBI Director James Comey, which has already been a central part of the presidential race.

"The revelation also could renew calls for the Department of State to strip her of her security clearance. The co-founder of at least one retired military officers organization has called for a suspension of her clearance."

"A favorite National Review chengyu is 'tallest building in Wichita,' which is derived from William F. Buckley's response to Gary Wills's claim that Lillian Hellman, the blacklisted Hollywood Communist, was 'America's greatest living female playwright.' That'€™s a lot of modifiers separating 'greatest' and 'playwright.'

"Hillary Rodham Clinton is without a doubt the greatest current female American major-party presidential nominee.

"It is dumb but, for whatever reason (it isn't entirely ununderstandable), we place great significance on those qualifiers, which is why that endless parade of witless cow-eyed hacks participating in and reporting on the Democratic National Convention beamed so dopily about the fact that an American political party had nominated as its presidential candidate a person with a genital configuration common to slightly more than half of the human race 37 years after Margaret Thatcher became the British prime minister, 47 years after Golda Meir became the Israeli prime minister, 50 years after Indira Gandhi became the Indian prime minister, 18 years after Ruth Dreifuss became president of Switzerland, etc."

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"Dressed symbolically all in white (as though she were a bride or a monarch enjoying her privilege du blanc), she delivered a speech that was one part It Takes a Village and eleven parts old State of the Union speeches from Barack Obama and her husband. Her presentation was her usual hectoring -- she is not capable of speaking in another mode -- and one of her themes was the superiority of collective action to atomistic individualism, as though she were running against Ayn Rand rather than Donald Trump. She decried 'mean rhetoric' and then said that people who operate their businesses in ways that displease her are unpatriotic. She suggested that pillaging high-earning individuals and companies with confiscatory taxes could fund an endless goody bag of patronage for her constituents.

"I.e., the usual Hillary."

"After two days of tacking entirely left, Democrats finally tried to reach out Wednesday night to undecided voters -- and had to contend with Bernie Sanders Democrats who booed down former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and sought to interrupt VP candidate Tim Kaine and current VP Joe Biden with chants against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

"Those boos and interruptions were meaningful because their purpose was precisely to warn Hillary Clinton against any pivot to the center -- to threaten her with the possibility that the slightest betrayal of the Sanders agenda might lead a significant number of the 13 million Sanders voters to stay home, or vote for third-party candidates or even Donald Trump."