"President Barack Obama's former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) believes Hillary Clinton should drop out of the presidential race to clear the way for the probe of her private email server by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

"In an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn (Ret.) said he thought the former Secretary of State should leave the Democratic presidential race: 'I think Hillary Clinton, for the good of the country, should step down and let this FBI investigation play out.' ...

"'This is unbelievable,' Flynn said. 'I don't think anybody should be talking about her being potentially the next President of the United States.'"

"The Supreme Court halted the EPA's major anti-global warming initiative late Tuesday evening, dealing a major blow to President Obama's hopes of overseeing a green energy transition in his final year in office.

"The 5-4 decision by the court puts the Environmental Protection Agency's regulation on hold while a lower appeals court hears states' challenge to the rules.

"More than two dozen states sued to stop the rules, which were intended to control greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants. ...

"While Tuesday's stay isn't a ruling on the actual merits of the EPA's regulations, energy industry backers said it suggested a majority of the justices are skeptical of what Mr. Obama did."

"Watching last Thursday's debate between Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, one might have thought a Republican had been in the White House for nearly eight years.

"Hearing their complaints about the economy (bad), discrimination (rampant), health care (too many without it), unemployment (too many not working or working at low-paying jobs), it appeared hope had died and change is all we have left in our pockets.

"To hear these two ultra-liberals tell it, we are a horrible, miserable, evil nation. We are bigots, we are greedy because we won't surrender more of our income to the government gods, we hate anyone who isn't white, male and heterosexual, and we want to deport everyone who isn't a Christian.

"I wouldn't want to live in a country like that, would you? But that is not who we are. It is only who Democrats think we are."

"The Pentagon is ordering the top brass to incorporate climate change into virtually everything they do, from testing weapons to training troops to war planning to joint exercises with allies.

"A new directive's theme: The U.S. Armed Forces must show 'resilience' and beat back the threat based on 'actionable science.'

"It says the military will not be able to maintain effectiveness unless the directive is followed. It orders the establishment of a new layer of bureaucracy -- a wide array of 'climate change boards, councils and working groups' to infuse climate change into 'programs, plans and policies.'"

"As most of the political world has been focusing on the presidential race, Obamacare has gotten off to a rocky start in 2016. This could be a major drag on Democrats come November.

"On Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that fewer than 13 million individuals signed up for Obamacare plans for 2016. ...

"This is significantly lower than the 21 million individuals the Congressional Budget Office initially projected the law would signup in 2016, below the downwardly revised 13 million CBO projection, and effectively flat from a year ago. ...

"This means that for the months, weeks, and days leading up to the election, the Democratic presidential nominee and all of the party's Congressional candidates are going to have to contend with news of sky-rocketing rates coming from Obamacare as insurers struggle to make the business profitable. Considering that Republicans owe their current House and Senate majorities to Obamacare, this should be a scary thought for Democrats."

"During the Cold War, the Soviet Union funded 'peace movements' throughout the west - because for the Soviets 'peace' meant 'the absence of opposition'.

"In our time the new peace movement is Islam. And so we are told today, from the podium of a mosque with 'extremist' 'links', that the very word Islam means 'peace'. Actually, it means 'submission' - ie, the absence of opposition.

"The only difference between then and now is that instead of being chanted by scrofulous hippies protesting outside a Nato air base the old line's being peddled to us by the President of the United States. Odd."

"[W]e have a situation in which (a) Obama knowingly communicated with Clinton over a non-government, non-secure e-mail system; (b) Obama and Clinton almost certainly discussed matters that are automatically deemed classified under the president's own guidelines; and (c) at least one high-ranking government official (Petraeus) has been prosecuted because he failed to maintain the security of highly sensitive intelligence that included policy-related conversations with Obama. ...

"Law enforcement investigations are supposed to proceed independent of political considerations, but I'd wager few people believe the decision whether to indict Mrs. Clinton will be made by Attorney General Loretta Lynch alone. It will be the president's call. In making it, he may face a profound conflict of interest. A prosecution of Clinton might expose that Obama engaged in recklessness similar to Clinton's, albeit on a far smaller scale. Moreover, Clinton would likely argue in her defense that the president, who is ultimately responsible for safeguarding classified information, not only authorized Clinton to use private e-mail but knowingly used it himself in order to communicate with Clinton."

"Iowa Democrats showed on Tuesday night that they are far from convinced that Hillary Clinton should be president.

"As Donald Trump was handily beaten by Sen. Ted Cruz on the Republican side of the ledger, and was in danger of being pushed into third place by Sen. Marco Rubio, Clinton found herself deadlocked with 74-year-old socialist Bernie Sanders. ...

"She blew a 50-point lead in the Hawkeye State against an elderly extremist whom the Democratic establishment see as far from an ideal champion of American progressivism. ...

"Clinton may well win the Democratic nomination. But her supporters in every state have good reason to be unenthusiastic about her, just as Iowans were on Monday night."

"Spin and puffery have a long history in politics, but something has snapped in our culture that we no longer even expect our leaders to talk straight. We have become immune to lies and the liars who tell them.

"I blame it on the Clintons. Their survival despite a quarter-century of shameful dishonesty has lead the way in lowering the bar for integrity in public life. ...

"We would have better politics and be a better country if we had stopped the Clintons years ago. It was obvious before his election that Bill Clinton was a stranger to truth, and it soon became obvious that Hillary was no better. ...

"In a world that prized truth, she couldn't be dog-catcher. In our world, she could be president."

"Despite what all the best and the brightest assured us was inevitable, the Republican party is in its strongest electoral position since the presidency of Herbert Hoover. It enjoys majorities in both houses of Congress, and commands a large majority of the state legislative houses and governorships. Conservatives have won important debates and political victories on everything from taxation to free speech to foreign policy. Those conservatives who complain that the Right hasn't accomplished very much forget where the country was in 1955 when National Review was founded and central planning was assumed by all the right people to be the model of the future, or where the country's domestic policies stood in 1980 or its national-security policies in 2000. ...

"[R]egardless of what happens on Election Day 2016, we will wake up in a world in which property rights need to be secured, free trade protected and expanded, government limited, the rule of law honored, children reared, citizenship cultivated, and enemies defeated. These are among what Russell Kirk called 'the permanent things,' and the defense of them, which we call 'conservatism,' is the permanent burden of free people. That isn't going anywhere."