This old graphic came to mind today. No idea why… pic.twitter.com/oRij8zs78t

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) March 5, 2015

The Once and Current Speaker?

If you’d ever doubted that there’s really only one party in Washington — the Insider Party — then doubt no more:

Tea Party Republicans contemplating a bid to oust Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) shouldn’t count on Democrats to help them unseat the Speaker.

And without their support, there is no chance to topple Boehner in this Congress.

A number of right-wing Republicans, long wary of Boehner’s commitment to GOP efforts attacking President Obama’s policy priorities, have openly considered a coup in an attempt to transfer the gavel into more conservative hands.
But Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they’d rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing to reach across the aisle in search of compromise.

I would have phrased that last bit more along the lines of a new Speaker being “actually willing to pursue a conservative agenda,” but maybe that’s just me.

Today’s is a video edition, and don’t forget to take any prescribed blood pressure medication and/or cocktails before viewing.

Consumer spending is down, initial jobless claims are up, and Marc Cuban says we’re in a tech bubble “far worse” the the DotCom Bubble of 2000:

“If we thought it was stupid to invest in public Internet websites that had no chance of succeeding back then, it’s worse today,” he wrote in a blog post detailing the risks facing the current crop of angel investors and crowdfunders (more on that below).

He’s not alone in his fear-mongering. While retail investors are all-in, equity-wise, as are corporations, prophets of doom are counting the moments until the cards fall in the public markets, as well. The thing is, they’ve been counting them for years now. Check out the chart of the day for how long it’s been since we’ve felt a serious pullback. Spoiler alert: almost three years.

Doug Kass, president of Seabreeze Partners, has been anticipating some weakness for a while now, and he’s positioned himself to turn a profit when that day comes.

The difference between the last two bubbles and today is, we weren’t already sitting on $18,000,000,000,000 worth of debt, interest rates weren’t already at zero, labor participation was increasing not decreasing, and the Fed hadn’t already expanded its balance sheet by multiple trillions.

I really want to be wrong about this, but it’s difficult not to fear the worst.

So beautiful, so tragic:

An ancient ocean on Mars once held more water than the Arctic Ocea on Earth, NASA scientists say, according to a press release from the W.M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Scientists measured water in the Red Planet’s atmosphere using the most powerful telescopes on Earth, which includes the telescope at the observatory. Their findings will be published in the journal Science on March 6.

Scientists estimate that the young planet Mars had enough water to cover its entire surface in about 450 feet of water, but it is more likely that the oceans covered half of the planet’s surface and reached depths greater than a mile in some areas.

The tragic part is that the same study posits that 87% of that early Martian water was lost to space.

One of the Vice President’s money men is perking up on news of Hillary’s woes:

In the two days since The New York Times first reported on Clinton’s e-mails, many Democrats have come to Clinton’s defense. Clinton allies have argued that the story, which has Washington and cable television news atwitter, will not influence the way regular voters view Clinton months from now when they cast ballots.

But Harpootlian — who has been an active and outspoken booster of a Biden 2016 candidacy — said the foundation donations and e-mail stories have sparked chatter among South Carolina politicos about drafting other candidates into the Democratic primary. Referencing Biden specifically, he said, “I’ll tell you this: He ain’t got no e-mail problems. He ain’t got no foundation problems. What you see with Joe is what you get. There’s nothing hidden there.”

Harpootlian added, “The chatter down here is, ‘Is this the best we can do?’

Oh please oh please oh please let Harpootlian have it right when he says Hillary is “going to die by 1,000 cuts on this one.” The more cuts and the longer it takes, the better.

Ideally, Clinton will be just wounded enough to draw in Biden, plus Elizabeth Warren, plus Jim Webb, and of course Martin O’Malley. That would accomplish two lovely goals. The first would be another Midget Race comparable to the GOP in 2012 or the Democrats in 1988 — and as a professional political watcher, nothing could be more entertaining. Secondly, a wounded-but-not-dead Hillary would bring out the long knives of her opponents and the absolute worst behavior from her and her campaign.

We all know Clinton can be mean, carping, paranoid, and shrill. She just needs a little prodding to being it all out. And the best people, for purely political reasons, to do that prodding would be members of her own party.

Netflix got in bed with the Devil and — surprise! — the offspring is unwanted:

[Netflix CFO David] Wells, at least, expressed second thoughts on the Title II issue. On Wednesday, Wells — speaking at the 2015 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference — said the company wasn’t happy with the FCC move. He said that, while the streaming-video company wanted to see “strong” net neutrality measures to ensure content providers would be protected against ISPs charging arbitrary interconnection fees, Netflix would have preferred a lighter regulatory touch.

“Were we pleased it pushed to Title II? Probably not,” Wells said at the conference. “We were hoping there would be a non-regulated solution.”

Google is backing off, too, apparently surprised by the extent of the FCC’s power grab.

They were warned. Repeatedly. And now we all get to reap what they helped sow.

So it’s come to this:

The Senate majority leader has decided to delay a Tuesday vote legislation that would allow Congress to approve or reject any nuclear agreement that global powers reach to scale back Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He informed the Senate Republican Conference of the decision on Thursday afternoon following Senate Democrats’ decision to vote against advancing the bill before March 24.

“It is clear that Senate Democrats will filibuster their own bill—a bill they rushed to introduce before the White House cut a deal with Iran. So, instead, the Senate will turn next to the anti-human-trafficking legislation while Democrats decide whether or not they believe they and Congress as a whole should be able to review and vote on any deal the President cuts with the leaders of Iran,” said Don Stewart, a spokesman for McConnell.

The Senate Democrats are happy to throw America’s national security — and Israel’s existence — under the bus, just to provide political cover to President Look At Me Look At Me.

Never forget this betrayal.

We begged the Powers That Be to open up Bill’s final segment to non-members — and they did.

Comment from Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Reader™ Formerly Neil:

As far as I can tell, for any income below about $95K, ACA requires a family of four to pledge every penny of disposable income (after taxes, mortgage, food, car payments, gas, etc.) to the healthcare industry (in premiums and deductible). The subsidies go up and down based on income, the premiums and deductibles trade off, but every model I’ve worked out says that the subsidies are just enough that my first sentence remains true.

Personally, I recently decided to stave off the inevitable for a few years by going with one of the “health sharing ministries”. I’m not yet sure how it’s going to work out. It’s not radically cheaper, because it’s not tax-deductible to my small business, but there’s no restrictive network and it has some other advantages.

Congratulations, American Middle Class — you are now wholly-owned subsidiaries of the Democrat-Insurance Complex.

“I always get the IRQ and IRC mixed up, Mrs. Clinton.”

Gawker talked to a security expert about clintonemail.com:

“It is almost certain that at least some of the emails hosted at clintonemails.com were intercepted,” independent security expert and developer Nic Cubrilovic told Gawker.

Within the instant classic “ClintonEmail.com” domain, it appears there are three separate servers. The domain’s blank landing page is hosted by Confluence Networks, a web firm in the British Virgin Islands, known for monetizing expired domain names and spam.

But the real worry comes from two other public-facing ClintonEmail.com subdomains, which can allow anyone with the right URL to try to sign in.

One is sslvpn.clintonemail.com, which provides a login page that apparently uses an SSL VPN—a protocol that allows your web browser to create an encrypted connection to a local network from any internet connection—to users to access their email. That sounds secure, and under the right circumstances, for regular users, it can be.

You’ll want to read the whole thing, which is frightening as hell — especially when you consider how fruitless even our lousy diplomatic efforts have been. Why, it’s almost as though someone has been reading our mail.

I’ll also add that “regular users” does not include the kind of professional hackers hired by foreign governments to try and read our mail.

UPDATE: ‘Nuff said.

See my last RT. What if Hillary's compromised email servers had Intel about Ambassador Steven's schedule?

— RB (@RBPundit) March 5, 2015

Let's pretend @HillaryClinton was a car salesman who was always leaving keys out on dashboards. Would you promote her to manager?

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) March 4, 2015

I don’t know what “concentration of work” means, but it sure sounds impressive.

It can be better at providing intel than the NGA is:

Hundreds of billions of dollars has been spent on photo satellites since the 1960s, and the troops always seem to get leftovers, if anything and usually too late to be of any use. Yet the satellite people regularly conned Congress out of more money so they could build more satellites, and neat systems that would get the satellite imagery “to the troops.” The goods never arrived, or never arrived in time. Generals gave angry testimony before Congress about this non-performance after the 1991 Kuwait War. The satellite people seemed contrite and said they would make it right. If given the money to do it. They got the money and the troops got nothing.

Then the troops got access to Google Earth in 2005 and saw firsthand what they have been missing. To make matters worse the software Google Earth uses to get the job done was first developed for the NGA. But the way the NGA operates you had to worry about security considerations and all manner of bureaucratic details before you could deploy a useful tool so they really couldn’t use the Google interface on a wide scale. Mention that the troops in question are fighting a war and the NGA will point out that you still have to deal with security and keeping the paperwork straight.

Soon after 2005 the troops were beating NGA over the head with Google Earth and Congress took notice. However, NGA bureaucrats were close at hand and the angry troops are far away. Progress was still slow. But at least the troops had Google Earth.

The bad guys get to use Google Earth, too, which makes it imperative that NGA isn’t allowed to stand in the way of our troops using it.

Anyway, read the whole thing which has some unreported information on the state of our spy satellite program and Google Earth’s unintended consequences.

That’s what Jonah Goldberg thinks:

It’s a bigger problem than it might seem. Walker planned on defining himself to the country on his timetable. With that plan in ashes, he’s facing a liberal news corps and a Republican field of competitors hell-bent on defining Walker if he won’t. From the media, that means lots of questions about President Obama’s religion, Walker’s views on evolution and other ridiculous gaffe hunts.

Walker has been “punting” — his word — on such questions, but also on more serious topics. That is a fine tactic when few are paying attention. Other candidates have been punting on various issues too, but no one knows or cares because they aren’t the front-runner. When you’re in the spotlight, punting stops being a way to avoid giving an answer and instead it becomes the answer.

Walker is in danger of being the guy known for not having a good — or any — answer to tough questions. That’s particularly poisonous for him, given that he is running on leadership and truth-telling.

Reading that, the first thing to pop into my mind was Allahpundit’s smart piece from Wednesday, explaining that Emailgate just won’t make any difference:

The point about how early it is in the campaign and consequently how little people will remember about this by election day 2016 is right on. A few righties on Twitter yesterday were kicking around the theory that Team Hillary exposed the private e-mail account themselves, just so that they could get this out there now, take their beating for a week, and then let the media forget about it. I doubt that’s right — if they wanted to leak this, they wouldn’t have handed the credit for it to Trey Gowdy’s Benghazi committee — but they would have leaked it eventually, likely sooner than later, knowing that voters have short memories about most scandals. That’s especially true for Bill and Hillary, whose brand already has plenty of scandal built in. If you vote for Her Majesty in 2016, you do so with absolute assurance that her administration will be one ethical clusterfark after another because that’s who the Clintons are and that’s how they roll. If you’re okay with that then by definition you’re okay with her conducting America’s diplomacy off the books. If you’re not okay with that, and you shouldn’t be, then you probably gave up on the Clintons sometime around 1995. The only reason there’s a bipartisan flavor to the current outrage over her e-mail corruption rather than unified wagon-circling on the left is because there’s still hope among progressives that Elizabeth Warren can be convinced to run. They’ll add some blood in the water if they think it might attract Warren. Once she’s definitely out, though, they’re out of the Clinton ethics-watching business too.

Here we have a genuine scandal involving a presidential contender who broke the damn law, committed what is arguably a felony as Secretary of State, which is just the most recent in a career built on lies, scandal, insider trading, character assassination, and ready foreign walking money. And yet Allahpundit is almost certainly correct in his estimation.

In Walker’s case the “scandal” is that he failed to have properly canned answer for a Complicit Media whose only genuine interest in Republicans is how best to make them look bad. And yet Jonah is almost certainly correct in his estimation. I’d also add that even if Walker’s missteps (ha!) don’t actually derail his nomination, the press will make sure this non-scandal constantly dogs him all the way to Election Day.

While you ponder just how rigged this game is for anyone but Democrats, I’ll leave you with a line of questioning which the Complicit Media would never bother Hillary with, as she proceeds unmolested to her coronation.

Truth: after Hillary 'homebrew server' E-mail revelation, it must be taken as ASSUMED that hostile foreign intel had access to her e-mail.

— Jeff B@AoSHQDD (@EsotericCD) March 4, 2015

Enjoy the ironic lapel pin.

Here’s some hard-hitting stuff concerning President Look At Me Looking At Me, and this time the author is not Ron Fournier. Here you go:

The Obama administration does not suffice with condemning Netanyahu’s visit. Obama has announced that he will not meet with Netanyahu on the grounds that he does not meet with state leaders a short while before elections take place in their countries, [though] elections in Israel will take place weeks after the visit!! Likewise, American Vice President Joseph Biden, whose presence at Netanyahu’s speech in Congress is expected by virtue of his constitutional role as Senate president, announced that he would be on a trip abroad [on the day of] Netanyahu’s speech!! U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry also said he would be in Switzerland meeting with the Iranians on the nuclear dossier and therefore would not be able to attend Netanyahu’s speech!! What angers the Obama administration even more is that Netanyahu refused an official request by several Democratic Congressmen to meet with him during [his] visit!!…

I will conclude by saying the following: Since Obama is the godfather of the prefabricated revolutions in the Arab world, and since he is the ally of political Islam, [which is] the caring mother of [all] the terrorist organizations, and since he is working to sign an agreement with Iran that will come at the expense of the U.S.’s longtime allies in the Gulf, I am very glad of Netanyahu’s firm stance and [his decision] to speak against the nuclear agreement at the American Congress despite the Obama administration’s anger and fury. I believe that Netanyahu’s conduct will serve our interests, the people of the Gulf, much more than the foolish behavior of one of the worst American presidents. Do you agree with me?

The godfather of the prefabricated revolutions in the Arab world? Can you think of one American pundit, no matter how crazy, who might go out on that limb?

Me neither — the author is Saudi columnist Ahmad Al-Faraj. And it’s OK because I couldn’t have named him either without the link from Don Surber. Surber adds:

I dislike the House of Saud, which despite great wealth and education is an 11th century caliphate practicing sharia law. But Ahmad Al-Faraj, a columnist with the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, ripped Barack Obama over the Benjamin Netanyahu speech, an indication that even the Saudi Arabians get what the stakes are in Iran.

Of course the Saudis get it: Iran is a big scary neighbor in pursuit of nuclear weapons. But I’d go further and say Obama gets it too — it’s just that his interests align with the big scary neighbor.

@mchastain81 It's cool. Just a NATO ally signing secret nuclear deals with Vladimir Putin.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) March 4, 2015

I wish that Tweet were a joke, but even if it were it would be a seriously unfunny joke. Here’s the story from Ukraine Today:

The details of a deal with Russia to expand Hungary’s only nuclear power plant will remain secret for the next 30 years. The two countries agreed to keep the details of the agreement classified due to what they are calling security reasons.

Observers, such as Transparency International, say the agreement is illegal because it seeks to hide information about public works deals.

Under the agreement, Russia will supply around USD 11 billion to finance most of the constrution of two new reactors for the Paks nuclear power plant.

It’s all very technical, I’m sure we wouldn’t understand [cough, cough].

You might remember a few months ago, I went into Serious History Geek Mode and wrote a lengthy article about the history of Sub-Carpathian Ruthenia — a tiny bit of Europe long fought over by Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Hungarians, Slovaks, Czechoslovaks, and maybe briefly by even the Moldovans and the Turks. The impetus for that admittedly niche column was a story about Moscow and Budapest working together to distract Kyiv from the action on its eastern front:

In its efforts to promote secessionist ideas among the half-million-strong Rusin community along Ukraine’s Western border, Moscow is simultaneously pursuing three goals. First, it is forcing Kyiv to divert its attention from Russian aggression in the east to another theater, thus limiting the ability of Ukrainian forces to counter what Moscow is doing in Crimea and Donbas (eastern Ukrainian region encompassing the provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk). Second, it is cementing an ever closer relationship between Vladimir Putin and the increasingly pro-Moscow Hungarian government of Viktor Orban, a government that presents itself as a defender of the Rusins against Ukrainians. And third, Moscow is suggesting that if Kyiv continues to resist, Russian forces could dismember Ukraine to the point that it would be a landlocked republic with no direct access either to the Black Sea or to the countries of Central Eastern Europe.

I’ll remind you that Hungary is a member of the European Union and ostensibly a NATO ally. And yet there’s been talk — and action — for months that the country is leaning pro-Moscow.

This is just one of the many pieces of rotten fruit resulting from six years of President Look At Me Looking At Me leading from his behind.

It looks like Ohio tried to use some tax trickery [PDF] to fund ♡bamaCare!!! Medicaid expansion in the Buckeye State:

The key revenue stream in question is the state sales and use tax as applied to Medicaid managed care organization (MCO) premiums. The state takes advantage of a loophole in the Medicaid funding system through which taxing these premiums provides revenue to the state and increases the amount of federal grant money that Ohio receives. Thus far, this tax loophole has cost the federal government hundreds of millions of dollars, and allowed Ohio to reduce its share of total Medicaid expenditures and spend even more. But that loophole is about to close.

A recent investigation by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Health and Human Services (OIG) should warn states like Ohio currently using the loophole to fund expansion. Responding to OIG, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) stated it intention to bring wayward states into compliance. This means that Ohio will likely need to abolish its sales tax on Medicaid MCO premiums, and lose the critical revenue it provides.

The link is from Kristina Ribali and she explains things further:

It’s a slick system. So slick, in fact, that other states have tried it. For instance, Pennsylvania tried it and got a whopping $1.76 BILLION in extra federal grants over a three year period. The only problem – it’s illegal. In fact, this was already decided before Ohio tried it.

The Buckeye Institute’s President, Robert Alt, urged Ohio state lawmakers to pass a budget without Medicaid expansion. The testimony was successful, but Governor Kasich bypassed the State House and expanded Medicaid anyway via the Controlling Board – complete with this sketchy funding mechanism.

This is just going to kill whatever is left of Kasich. He made his name as a principled small-government conservative, almost libertarian, then threw that out when he saw the gleaming gobs of reverse-Danegeld hiding the manure pile known as ♡bamaCare!!!. Whatever remains of his reputation could be forever tarnished by this illegal funding gimmick.

I really used to like and respect him, too.

This is a very big deal:

A week before becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton set up a private e-mail system that gave her a high level of control over communications, including the ability to erase messages completely, according to security experts who have examined Internet records.

“You erase it and everything’s gone,” Matt Devost, a security expert who has had his own private e-mail for years. Commercial services like those from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. retain copies even after users erase them from their in-box.

Although Clinton worked hard to secure the private system, her consultants appear to have set it up with a misconfigured encryption system, something that left it vulnerable to hacking, said Alex McGeorge, head of threat intelligence at Immunity Inc., a Miami Beach-based digital security firm.

It’s a foregone conclusion in my mind that for perhaps as long as four years, foreign powers were reading the Secretary of State’s official emails.

UPDATE: And then there’s this.

More here from Kyle Becker.

I’m sorry this page has turned into HillaryScandalPundit today, but we must return one more time to that well. This time it’s Frank Bruni asking if Hillary Clinton has a political death wish:

She and Bill have lived their entire political lives under fire, some of it deserved, some of it not. It’s as if they decided at a certain point that they’d never get a fair shake and should cut the corners that they could and behave as they wished. Their foes would storm the gates regardless.

But there are times when the Clintons are their own worst enemies.

Insistent that his persecutors would find sexual misdeeds even where none existed, Bill gave them a blue dress and Monica Lewinsky.

Aggrieved by the way her detractors saw her as haughtily above it all, Hillary decided on an approach to emails as secretary of state that has made her look haughtily above it all.

Is that entitlement? Or hubris?

An inability to change? Or a refusal to?

I approached someone who knows the Clintons well, asked how to make sense of this and got an answer that echoed observations about them from the past: “They’d rather seek forgiveness than permission.”

You get exhausted just briefly considering another eight years of a Clinton White House.

I’m all out of forgiveness, too, and sometimes get the feeling I’m far from alone.

Even the leftwing folks at The Guardian see trouble ahead for Hillary Clinton because of Emailgate:

It leaves Clinton vulnerable to at least three lines of criticism: that she potentially broke fundamental rules governing the handling and security of state secrets; that she skirted around guidelines put in place to ensure historical accountability and transparency within high public office; and the political attack that she must have had something to hide.

Potentially breaching rules relating to state secrets
Perhaps the most serious accusation facing Clinton is that she may have breached one of the fundamental tenets of classified information. J William Leonard, former director of the body that keeps watch over executive branch secrets, the Information Security Oversight Office, told the Guardian that if Clinton had dealt with confidential government matters through her personal email, that would have been problematic. “There is no such thing as personal copies of classified information. All classified information belongs to the US government and it should never leave the control of the government.”

Tell that to Sandy Berger’s pants.

On the off chance you thought Zero Tolerance lunacy was limited to this country, here’s the heartwarming story of a 26-year-old American woman now sitting in a Japanese jail after her mother sent over her Adderall prescription:

Carrie Russell, a graduate from Western Oregon University, was reportedly diagnosed with attention deficit disorder at age 7. She is now jailed outside of Nagoya after her friends witnessed five plain-clothed police officers arrest her Feb. 20 at a restaurant in Tokyo, nearly 300 miles away, the Oregonianreported.

Her adoptive parents, John and Jill Russell, learned of the arrest the next day from their daughter’s friends. It took U.S. diplomats 24 hours to locate her, because the National Police Agency hadn’t notified the embassy of her arrest, a step typically taken when Japanese police detain an American, the Oregonian reported.

I hope this gets cleared up quickly and Russell is released, maybe even gets an apology. But the Drug War makes these things inevitable.

In the wake of Emailgate, Bill Scher explains what happens if Hillary Clinton chooses not to run:

“Panic,” says Democratic consultant Chris Lapetina. Indeed, the biggest problem is that the Democratic establishment is apparently so terrified of the idea of a Hillary-less race—and the vicious primary that might result—it’s not even considering contingency plans. Political professionals, like military generals and crisis management experts, know that the way to avoid being blindsided is to prepare for every scenario. But while the Democratic National Committee has to officially remain neutral, much of the extraparty infrastructure has been moving ahead on the presumption of a Hillary campaign.

After Hillary the Democrats have Elizabeth “Fauxcahontas” Warren and Martin “Who?” O’Malley.

I’d panic, too.

Josh Kraushaar is the third person I’ve read saying that former HP CEO Carly Fiorina is actually running for Vice President in 2016. And he’s the second person I know of (Bill Whittle was the first) to say she’s come a long way from her unimpressive bid to unseat California Senator Barbara Boxer in 2010. Kraushaar saw her speak at CPAC and came away with this:

After watching her latest stump speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference, it’s clear that she’s got more potential than many have given her credit for.

She’s an engaging speaker who has articulated a more cogent contrast against Hillary Clinton than any of the other prospective Republicans. She earned one of the loudest applause lines at CPAC on Thursday when she argued that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was speaking before Congress not to offend the president but to warn the world of the dangers of a nuclear Iran.

Most significantly, she was one of the few speakers who actually delivered a speech that was focused against Hillary Clinton—the GOP’s all-but-certain opponent in 2016—rather than dwell on President Obama’s shortcomings.

Think about this for just a moment, and having Fiorina at the bottom of the ticket makes an awful lot of sense.

Need a Spiro Agnew-type attack dog to keep her teeth sunk into Hillary? Fiorina is all that and a woman, neutering at least some of the Left’s cries of “Sexism!” (I say some because you know they’ll cry it regardless.) Fiorina also stands as a woman of actual accomplishment, as opposed to Hillary having ridden her husband’s coattails to fame and fortune and having served as one of our least-distinguished Secretaries of State.

Fiorina’s weakness is of course her tumultuous time at HP and her messy exit from the company. She may very well have saved HP, but she laid off an awful lot of people, and worse yet ruffled an awful lot of feathers — there’s a lot of oppo to be had from her former employees. Like Mitt Romney, she will be hit and hit hard on her record. Unlike Romney, she can be an excellent counterpuncher.

(As an aside, I had a brief conversation with Tammy Bruce on just that topic a year or two ago, between taping Trifecta segments when she was filling in for Bill or Scott Ott. I mentioned what a terrible counterpuncher Romney was during the campaign, and she stopped and thought for a moment and added, “He probably would have been a terrible President.” Politics doesn’t take time off between campaigns, so a sitting President has to be just as good at taking and returning a hit as a candidate. It’s easy to see how the Democrats would have made short work of Romney, even during the so-called honeymoon period.)

So Fiorina would come in as Veep with considerable strengths and just one liability — but it’s almost impossible for me to see how any successful business leader could survive the Progressive Hate Machine. What do you think? Would her time at HP hurt the ticket more than her other skills would help?

I'm pretty much pro-anything that makes Nancy Pelosi cry. And if that means swarms of killer bees, then I'm pro-killer bees.

— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) March 3, 2015

Bill Whittle has the Trifecta Triple this week, where one host spends three segments on one topic, and his set asking if America Is Just Too Damn Big is among the best of these I can recall ever taping.

So here’s Part I, and I hope you enjoy the heck out of it.

How bad is Emailgate? Hillary Clinton wasn’t just using a private account for official State Department business, which is totes against the law, she was using her own server:

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

But homebrew email servers are generally not as reliable, secure from hackers or protected from fires or floods as those in commercial data centers. Those professional facilities provide monitoring for viruses or hacking attempts, regulated temperatures, off-site backups, generators in case of power outages, fire-suppression systems and redundant communications lines.

A spokesman for Clinton did not respond to requests seeking comment from the AP on Tuesday.

Of course they didn’t respond.

To anyone who might still miss the Clintons and their adorable antics, all I can say is: Well.

Kurt Schlichter says, “Let’s Destroy Liberal Academia.” And I say, “But of course.” Here’s more:

This is where I must help out the liberal readers operating under the delusion that their self-designed dual major in Otherkin Activism and Post-Modern Self-Actualization gave them the ability to understand simple concepts. The enemy is academia, not education. But except for a few bastions of true learning, like Hillsdale College, the rare instances where modern academia overlaps with actual education are the result of sheer chance.

Understand that the purpose of modern American “education” is not to educate students. It is primarily to provide cushy, subsidized sinecures for liberal administrators and faculty while, secondarily, providing a forum to indoctrinate soft young minds in the liberal fetishes du jour. Actually educating students is hard, and a meaningful education is anathema to liberalism.

So much more red meat, you’ll want to read the whole thing.

In a Gallup poll taken on the eve of his historic speech this morning to Congress, Bibi Netanyahu is more popular with Americans than ever:

Among the 837 adults surveyed nationwide, 45 percent view the Israeli prime minister favorably, while 24 percent view him unfavorably. During Netanyahu’s first stint as prime minister in 1998, 46 percent responded that they viewed him favorably, a statistical tie with the most recent figures.

In 2012, just 35 percent of Americans responded that they saw Netanyahu in a positive light.

This time around, Republicans, independents and even Democrats responded more favorably.

One caveat is that it’s always easier to like a foreign leader who doesn’t have to make any tough domestic decisions which might negatively impact you personally. Of course, a foreign leader also doesn’t really have any base supporters, meaning there’s no real lower limit (other than zero) to how far their popularity can drop.

Those two details aside, do you think today’s speech will hurt or help Netanyahu’s big numbers?