"For labor unions, the Obama era has been bittersweet. Imagine a man slowly dying in the hospital, who nonetheless exerts immense power over government and receives one enormous gift after another from the president of the United States, and you start to get the picture.

"President Obama's latest giveaway to the unions came as part of the Labor Department's $175 million grant program for 'providing more Americans with affordable access to education and job training opportunities to help grow the middle class.' As the Washington Examiner's Sean Higgins reported Thursday, union training programs will get $25.5 million of that cash -- more than 14 percent, or a share roughly twice as large as union representation in the private sector.

"This gift comes as no surprise. Nor is it by any means the biggest nor the first such favor Obama has provided his political allies in organized labor. Unions may be a weak and dying segment of the electorate, but they nonetheless command large sums of money and wield the muscle power that keeps Democratic candidates strong."

"Fourteen years ago, the United States suffered a shockingly successful surprise attack by a little known Islamic extremist group based 7,000 miles away in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. Since then, a U.S. invasion chased al-Qaeda out of its haven, and targeted strikes eventually eliminated most of its senior leaders, including Osama bin Laden in 2011. The danger from the group that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, has waned.

"Its influence lives on, however, through offshoot extremist groups that have eclipsed al-Qaeda -- none more so than the Islamic State, the lightning spread of which through Syria and Iraq has been marked by medieval barbarity, adapted to the Internet age. ...

"If there's one lesson the nation should have learned from that awful day 14 years ago, it's that the United States cannot afford to ignore a rabidly anti-American terrorist group that has established a haven in a faraway place."

"There's a bigger story hidden inside the New York Times report that 'a special intelligence review of two emails that Hillary Rodham Clinton received as secretary of state on her personal account -- including one about North Korea's nuclear weapons program -- ... contained highly classified information when Mrs. Clinton received them, senior intelligence officials said.' The review was undertaken by the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which presumably originated the material. They concluded that the material had originally been given the U.S. government's highest secrecy classification. Even if one of Clinton's aides stripped the markings (a felony), Secretary Clinton surely knew satellite intelligence and North Korean nuclear deployments are the U.S. government's most highly classified information.

"The media correctly saw the news as political trouble for Hillary, but they missed two other crucial elements of the story. Somebody high up in the intelligence community leaked that story. And Hillary faces far more than political trouble. She's being fitted for an orange jumpsuit. ...

"The intelligence services remember how seriously the Department of Justice dealt with former CIA directors John Deutsch and David Petraeus, who mishandled documents. They will demand equal treatment here. They will keep the heat on by leaking to the press. The Times story shows the faucet is already open. ...

"If Hillary's political troubles keep piling up, she won't make it to the general election. If her legal troubles keep piling up, she's going to wish the next president was Gerald Ford."

"In the matter of his Iran deal, President Obama and his team have spent two months working relentlessly to secure 41 percent -- and now they're claiming an enormous victory even though by any other standards what they've achieved is nothing but a feat of unconstitutional trickery. ...

"To call this a scandal doesn't even begin to do justice to what it is. It really does suggest we are fast turning into a banana republic, whose leaders feel free to spit on a Constitution whose central purpose is to restrain the ambitions of strongmen and their shameful toadies."

"Violent criminals are getting the upper hand as the 'Ferguson effect' takes hold in cities across the country. Less-aggressive policing has emboldened the bad guys, leading to a nationwide spike in murder.

"New data show murder rates have shot up across major cities as police morale plummets. Surveys show police feel 'under siege' by race-baiting politicians and activists, as well as increasingly hostile suspects, and are second-guessing themselves as they respond to crimes. ...

"Cop-bashing doesn't make anybody safer, least of all inner-city residents caught in the crossfire."

"If you're unlucky, you've heard some speeches this weekend about all the great things the Teamsters and the IBEW and the UAW have done for the American worker, and all the things they want to do. Don't believe a word of it. You want to do the American worker a favor, then get rid of the interference -- the taxes, the regulations, and, yes, the dopey antiquated union rules -- that stand between the worker and the factory door. American workers are among the most creative and productive people who have ever lived, and it wasn't a corrupt Jimmy Hoffa protection racket that made them great. They aren't weaklings, and they don't need protection -- not from you, not from Donald Trump, not from Bernie Sanders, and not from James P. Hoffa. All they need is a chance to use the talents and the strength God gave them."

"I doubt a Biden-Warren ticket will happen, but it remains the only threat to Clinton outside of some Justice Department prosecutor showing the same zeal in going after Hillary Clinton as the administration did in going after David Petraeus.

"Otherwise the Democrats remain lashed to Clinton. Their only hope is that the Republicans self-destruct in a blaze of intraparty warfare. Something for which they are showing an impressive talent."

"Those who reject the proposition that 'all lives matter' have chosen payback as their guiding principle and have consigned the call of Martin Luther King for a color-blind society to the dustbin of history. Americans yearning for a similar leader won't find him in Barack Obama, whose presidency has cultivated racial resentment and anger. The model they seek is reflected in the love and kindness of the black Christians of North Charleston, S.C., who, when their loved ones were murdered by a white man with hate in his heart, responded with forgiveness. Only their conviction that humankind is one family has the power to forge a nation unified."

"While she was secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote and sent at least six e-mails using her private server that contained what government officials now say is classified information, according to thousands of e-mails released by the State Department.

"Although government officials deemed the e-mails classified after Clinton left office, they could complicate her efforts to move beyond the political fallout from the controversy. They suggest that her role in distributing sensitive material via her private e-mail system went beyond receiving notes written by others, and appears to contradict earlier public statements in which she denied sending or receiving e-mails containing classified information."

"Government officials need some modicum of privacy to get work done. But this Administration's evasion goes way past a reasonable standard of conduct. Why shouldn't the public conclude that officials serving in the Obama Administration are flouting the disclosure system because they are engaged in practices they wish to hide from public knowledge and debate?

"President Obama favors government by executive order. How about this one: A Presidential directive requiring every appointee and bureaucrat to attest to the existence of any private email, texting or instant-messaging systems being used for government work. All off-the-reservation documentation must cease. Private email is for personal needs.

"The chances of this happening are nil. Opacity has served the Obama Administration's political purposes if not the country. A sunnier day will have to wait until 2017."