• Something More Serious Wrong with Clinton?  By Richard C. Young
• The Truth About Neocon Pence and Interventionist Kaine  By Richard C. Young
• Cato Institute: Top 5 States: Freedom in the 50 States  By E.J. Smith
• $12 Million Lawsuit—Katie Couric’s Anti-Gun Documentary  By Debbie Young
• ISIL Leaders Being Killed, and Resources Drying Up!  By Richard C. Young
• School Choice for Every Disadvantaged Student—Amen  By Debbie Young
• Is There a Noninterventionist Case for Conscription?  By Justin Logan
• “I’m Not the Victim Hillary Needs Me to Be”  By E.J. Smith
• Trump vs. Clinton: Lawn Sign Shocker in New England  By Richard C. Young

Isn’t Hillary Clinton much sicker than she has disclosed? Rod Dreher, writing at The American Conservative, makes just such a case.

Hillary Clinton had a strange, scary health episode in which she could not stand, and went stiff before collapsing forward into her van. It went from “no big deal” to “you are sexist for saying it’s a big deal” to “she’s got pneumonia, let’s move on.”

That woman might have pneumonia, but there is something much more serious wrong with her. Who ya gonna believe, spinning liberals, or your lyin’ eyes?

Her fainting on Sunday also strikes a resonant chord, for reasons David Goldman cites in his first paragraph. The Clintons lie. That’s what they do. Their pattern is:

1. It didn’t happen.
2. OK, it happened, but it wasn’t a big deal, and we’ve got to get back to work doing the business of the American people.
3. Only haters say it’s a big deal.

At some point, probably very soon, we are going to find out that Mrs. Clinton is much sicker than she has disclosed, and that she has known this for quite some time.

The State Department document (see the whole thing here) reports the results Clinton adviser Jacob Sullivan found from his research on the drug Provigil, a controlled drug used to treat symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer’s. Basically, it keeps you awake without being addictive.

Why would Mrs. Clinton have Jake Sullivan, her deputy chief of staff and a top foreign policy expert, research this drug? It is certainly possible that the Secretary of State was exhausted from her busy schedule, and needed a little help, especially when flying back and forth on overseas trips. But it is reasonable to ask if a Secretary of State who was so tired she needed a drug to keep going has the stamina to be president under any circumstances. More important, it is reasonable to ask, in light of Sunday’s health scare, if there is something more serious wrong with her. Does she have Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, or some other condition like it?

The fallout over Hillary Clinton’s health concerns

Whether it is Clinton (disaster) or Trump (despair), Americans are in for a bigger, more intrusive, fiscally irresponsible, hawkish government.

In 1778 (nine years before the Constitution), in the third year of America’s independence, John Hancock, Sam Adams, Eldridge Gerry, Roger Sherman, John Dickinson, and Richard Henry Lee, among others of our country’s early Founders, signed the original Articles of Confederation.

The Articles called for a perpetual union between the 13 states. Each state was to retain its “sovereignty, freedom and independence.” The states entered into a league of friendship with each other, for their common defense and for the security of their liberties.

No “body of forces’ was to be kept up by any state in time of peace.

Our small central government, states rights centric Founders were not interventionists in the affairs of other countries.

How far America has come from our early Articles of Confederation.

Writing at The American Conservative Kelly Beaucar Vlahos takes a look at today’s primary party vice- president candidates.

So what of Trump’s and Clinton’s vice-presidential picks? For starters, they are both hawkish.

Indiana Gov. Mike Pence was an apt pupil of Bush and Cheney during the neoconservative years, voting for the Iraq War in 2002 and serving as one of David Petraeus’s cheerleaders in favor of the 2007 surge. He has since supported every intervention his fellow Republicans did, even giving early praise to Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration for the 2011 intervention in Libya.

On the other side, Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine is as far from the Bernie Sanders mold as they come: a centrist Democrat who supports a muscular, liberal-interventionist foreign policy, and who has been pushing for greater intervention in Syria, just like Hillary Clinton.

I doubt the founders would have found much to support here, at least as Vlahos outlines things.

Will Pence, Weld, or Kaine be the stronger VP?

The scholars at Cato Institute have narrowed down the Top 5 freest states in America.

Katie Couric and her colleagues are being sued for $12 million by the Virginia Citizens Defense League (VCDL). In Under the Gun, a documentary directed and narrated by Katie Couric, (according to its website) “examines the events and people who have kept the gun debate fierce and the progress slow, even as gun deaths and mass shootings continue to increase.”

In the film, Katie Couric sits down with members of the VCDL and asks, “If there are no background checks for gun purchasers, how do you prevent felons or terrorists from purchasing a gun?”

For six minutes immediately following Ms. Couric’s question, she was provided with reasoned responses from the VCDL members, which was later released in an audio recording.

However, these answers clearly weren’t what Ms. Couric and her colleagues wanted to hear.

So, they decided to edit them out.

As Madison Gesiotto explains in The Washington Times, Ms. Couric and her colleagues, wanting to push their anti-gun agenda, intentionally mislead viewers of Under the Gun. Instead of showing the thoughtful answers on universal background checks from VCDL members, Ms. Couric left her question in and edited out the six minutes of answers from the Virginia panel. Viewers saw VCDL members sitting silently at the table, apparently too tongue-tied to answer Ms. Couric pressing question.

The unethical swap was undoubtedly made to encourage viewers to believe that these Second Amendment experts had no idea what they were talking about and no reason for opposing universal background checks.

Ms. Couric did issue an apology and took responsibility for her director’s misrepresentation of the exchange between Ms. Couric and the VCDL members. But in Under the Gun, the misleading edits in the film remain.

Katie Couric Sued for $12 Million For Defamation In Anti-Gun Documentary

My friend Chris Preble, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at The Cato Institute, offers a progress report on the steady dismantlement of ISIL.

A number of ISIL leaders have been killed by U.S. airstrikes, and its control over territory in Iraq and Syria is slipping away.

The sources of revenue that it had exploited — from the resources in the ground to the money it extorted from the people trapped under its brutal rule — are drying up.

Now, with ISIL’s losses mounting, some fear it will return to its roots, organizing or inspiring attacks in the region and beyond. That problem is best handled by the same approaches used against other terrorist organizations over the decades: applying persistent pressure on the group’s leaders, and attacking its ability to attract new recruits and raise funds.

The U.S. military has a role to play here, but killing terrorists doesn’t require placing tens of thousands of U.S. troops into the middle of the Middle East’s ongoing civil wars.

US Airstrikes Destroy Terrorist ISIS Vehicles AC130

What would you say about a presidential nominee who proposes a plan “to provide school choice to every disadvantaged student in America”? Amen, to that, writes the WSJ. Donald Trump recently told the audience at the Cleveland Arts and Social Sciences Academy, “There is no failed policy more in need of urgent change than our government-run education monopoly,” But judging the way the left is panicking, notes the WSJ, “you’d think he’d (DT) proposed eliminating public education.”

Donald Trump is proposing a winning issue—to redirect federal education money in the form of a $20 million block grant for states. The grant would be used to support charter schools and boost school vouchers. In other words, redirect federal education money. He wants parents—not government—to choose where the money goes. Mr. Trump also is endorsing merit pay for teachers and is championing school choice.

Hillary Clinton, showing how far left she has moved on education, responded to Trump’s plan with the warning that it would “decimate public schools across America.” But the fact is, charter schools are public schools. What sets them apart is that they are not under the yoke of union control.

According to the WSJ, $20 billion is “merely 3% of what states spend on K-12 education each year and less than the increase in school spending in California since 2012.”

Unions and their friends are trying to deflect attention from Mr. Trump’s speech and minority outreach by saying the charter school where he announced his plan received a failing grade on Ohio’s school-progress report card last year. But the charter flunked due to a switch in state tests last year that caused student scores to slump nearly everywhere in the state.

It’s ironic that progressives are howling about the charter’s performance on standardized tests, which they usually insist are a poor indicator of school and teacher quality. Why is it that the only schools that unions believe should be held accountable for student performance are those run by their competition? That’s a question Mr. Trump should ask from here to November.

As I posted last March, Hillary Clinton supported charter schools in her 1996 memoir. “I favor promoting choice among public schools,” she wrote, and praised charter schools for being “freed from regulations that stifle innovation, so they can focus on getting results.”

Why did Clinton turn her back on charter schools? Is it be too cynical to suggest, with the endorsement by the National Education Association and the American

Federation of Teachers to Hillary’s presidential run, that it s in her political best interest to flip-flop? As the NY Post noted, “So now Clinton’s script on charters might as well be written by AFT President Randi Weingarten (an informal campaign adviser).”

Trump: Every child will be placed on ladder to success

American policymakers use the U.S. military too promiscuously, and even as promiscuity goes, too stupidly. They do so because they face few impediments to doing so, and a number of powerful inducements. If you’re interested in creating more impediments, or removing some of the inducements, you get desperate.

Desperate enough to consider how conscription would factor into policymakers’ calculus.

What’s clear at present is that the policymaking elite views the all-volunteer force in the same way that a mafia don views his street thugs: as a tool. Useful but replaceable.

What’s also clear is the the military, serving as it does as a powerful agent for social mobility in an era where there are fewer and fewer such agents, socializes its members and their families to accept what would otherwise be appalling and unacceptable sacrifice without complaint. Since they bear a disproportionate share of the cost of interventionist policies, one naturally would look first to servicemembers and their families in an effort to impose penalties on policymakers who incurred those costs, but the socialization inherent in military life make this an unlikely avenue for success.

Finally, whatever wealthy political donors may think about foreign policy, only those with a hawkish orientation care deeply enough to make it central to their political action. On the left, tangential causes such as nonproliferation have replaced peace as a political end, and on the right, a few donors care enough to see that noninterventionist op-eds get printed, but none will fight with their hawkish colleagues on the issue, much less defenestrate warmongers like Senator Tom Cotton.

If the argument is right so far, and I think it is, one really starts reaching for any way to impose new costs on war-making. And say what one will, conscription would be an additional cost.

The scholarly research backs this up. Two studies in recent years, one large-N and one experimental, make clear that conscription raises the perceived cost of war among those subject to it.

The experimental piece gave study participants various scenarios with and without a draft, and found

strong support for the argument that conscription decreases mass support for war, a finding that replicates in several different settings. We also show that these findings are driven by concerns about self-interest, consistent with our theory. We conclude by discussing the relevance of these findings for debates about how domestic political conditions influence when states go to war.

A lot of people understandably get squeamish about experimental studies, so there is also a large-N, historical study that came out around the same time, using Vietnam draft lottery status as a predictor of hawkishness or dovishness. The findings?

Males holding low lottery numbers became more antiwar, more liberal, and more Democratic in their voting compared to those whose high numbers protected them from the draft. They were also more likely than those with safe numbers to abandon the party identification that they had held as teenagers. Trace effects are found in reinterviews from the 1990s. Draft number effects exceed those for preadult party identification and are not mediated by military service. The results show how profoundly political attitudes can be transformed when public policies directly affect citizens’ lives.

That last sentence should stick with us. In the absence of a draft, war rarely directly affects citizens’ lives. If war rarely directly affects citizens’ lives, how or why are those citizens supposed to force their rulers to tolerate peace?

To be clear: I think there almost certainly is not a libertarian case for conscription. Conscription, let’s remember, made no less a statist than Thomas Hobbes a bit squeamish. It’s tough to imagine a more despotic act in a country as unthreatened as the United States as that of an executive commanding, at threat of imprisonment, his subjects to go abroad and kill on behalf of his conception of the national interest.

But for the economically-minded, if peace is an important objective, and if politics is as much about incentives and disincentives as other aspects of human society, we might want to look at conscription, if as nothing more than a thought experiment for how to discourage policymakers from making war.

FLASHBACK VIDEO: The Draft Lottery-Vietnam War

In a response to a Democratic presidential debate question on Oct. 13, 2015 Hillary Clinton put NRA members as a list of enemies she is most proud of. Here’s what Kimberly Corban had to say about it:

Clinton’s declaration made us wonder how NRA members feel about being recklessly declared her enemy. So we decided to ask them: How does it feel to be named Public Enemy Number 1 by Hillary Clinton?

Today we hear from Kimberly Corban, a rape survivor who was largely dismissed by President Barack Obama at a televised town hall meeting earlier this year.

On May 12, 2006, my life was irrevocably changed. A stranger broke into my college area apartment, held me in my room for two hours and raped me. My horror did not end when I called 911 for help, nor did it cease when my rapist was captured weeks later. Even a guilty conviction at trial with a sentence of 24 years in prison failed to be enough to end the damaging effects that becoming the victim of a violent crime imposes upon a person.

When I went public with my story, I did so in hopes that I could save just one person from having to experience the trauma I had at the hands of pure evil. I dove into therapy, used necessary medication, trained in self-defense tactics and acquired my permit to lawfully carry a concealed firearm. I knew if another situation ever arose where I or my family was in imminent danger, I would have the ability to fight back—not be left defenseless merely hoping to live through yet another nightmare.

Rape Survivor Kim Corban Slams Hillary In Powerful New NRA Ad

Has Hillary dropped out of the presidential race? If you had been out of the country for six weeks and just returned home to New England, you’d not be faulted for thinking Clinton had withdrawn. Perhaps her frightening, all-too-regular coughing/gagging spells  had signaled a life-threatening condition?

Debbie and I just completed another back-road swing through R.I., southeast Conn and western Massachusetts (including Ware, yet another depression-era town). Not a Clinton lawn sign to be seen across the Democrat-riddled New England region. This observation includes Amherst, Mass, perhaps among the most liberal outposts in America. As expected, no Trump lawn signs in Amherst. But what was not expected: not a single sign for Hillary. (See Debbie’s post on the matter here).

In the end, there was not one Hillary sign over three states, Massachusetts, Connecticut and RI, including our summer base in strongly Democrat Newport.

The final count:

1. Hillary: zero.
2. Gary Johnson and Bernie: 2 each.
3. Donald Trump: 10.

I have been riding Rt. 9 through Ware in western Mass for over five and a half decades—starting with my Babson days visiting a college buddy in Wilbraham. I almost could make the run blindfolded, and kind of wished I had this trip. The huge hydro-centric brick mill, with all those workers laid off and the factory long since shut down, has produced a tragic trickle-down effect. Ware was never a prosperous metropolis, but there was a movie theatre, drugstore and bank—signs of a working man’s community.

Most of Main Street is now hollowed out. Many buildings are empty and dilapidated. In the middle of town, many storefronts are boarded and look ready for demolition. Except, who is going to spend money on demolition? There were precious few haggard souls on the streets on a beautiful September day. Only Debbie Wong’s remains from the old days. So much for a former working-class, jobs-rich, mom-and-pop business-centric New England town.  It’s DOA.

The outlook for shabby Ware, Mass. appears to be as bleak as that for the compromised Hillary Clinton.