Politics

Hillary Clinton has refused to discuss the contents of the emails sent on her private email server because they are her ‘private business.’ Appearing before reporters after a campaign speech on her home turf of New York, the Democrat frontrunner responded to questions about the FBI investigation into the email scandal by saying the emails were ‘very personal.’ ‘They are like poems that I write about my deepest thoughts and feelings. I don’t want to show anybody right now. How would you like it if I demanded to see your most personal things? You would feel violated.

Submitted by Martin Armstrong via ArmstrongEconomics.com,

The last time a Republican Presidential Convention opened without a decided nominee in the primaries was 1976, during the fight between Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford. There were past efforts by the establishment to stop two people they regarded as outsiders — Barry Goldwater in 1964 and Ronald Reagan in 1976.

Last week, Bashar al-Assad celebrated one of the most significant (at least from a symbolic perspective) military victories in the history of his government’s campaign against opposition groups battling for control of Syria.

With the help of Russia and Hezbollah, Assad’s army liberated the ancient city of Palmyra from Islamic State. Palmyra is a UNESCO world heritage site and over the course of the last nine or so months, ISIS has obliterated a number of priceless artifacts on the grounds that they are monuments to paganism.

I agree with Alan Jacobs and Michael Brendan Dougherty that the GOP will be remarkably unchanged by having Trump as its nominee. If there is one rule that seems to govern the modern Republican Party, it is that its leaders learn little or nothing from disaster and reliably draw the wrong conclusions from their defeats. We saw that in the wake of the 2012 election, when party leaders and donors concluded that the only significant fix needed for the party’s problems was to embrace immigration legislation opposed by most Republicans.

In a strong column, Michael Brendan Dougherty writes that “there are reasons to believe this moment is unsustainable and the basic status quo of the Republican Party will eventually emerge triumphant.”