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David Harsanyi says, “actually getting rich is Hillary’s greatest achievement.”

… Which brings me to Hillary Clinton, whose clumsy efforts to convince America that she’s a commoner aren’t only transparently silly, but intentionally discount her most impressive gift: the ability to convince rational people to pony up $200,000 (the Wall Street Journal says she was paid $300,000 for a speech at UCLA) to hear her talk about a career in politics. One thing’s for sure: those students would benefit far more from a talk about the inner working of Clinton Inc.’s multimillion-dollar business than they will sitting through an hour of platitudes about public service.

If I had to pick a reason to vote for Hillary, it would be her wealth. She should own it. It’s her greatest success. Through her speaking engagements and terrible ghost-written books, she is worth somewhere between $25 and $50 million. Bill’s net worth is around $80 million (or more). Even combined, that’s nothing like the Koch money, or even John Kerry or Mitt Romney money, as the Washington Post helpfully pointed out recently. …

… Certainly, Hillary is more gifted at making money than she was at being First Lady, a stint that featured a disastrous stab at health-care policy and her husband being tricked into having an affair by a shadowy conspiracy. She is undoubtedly a better businesswoman than she was a Senator, where the single consequential vote she took turned out, in her own words, to be “a mistake.” And she is a far better businesswoman than she was a secretary of State, a job that doesn’t seem to feature any achievements worth remembering by anyone. …

Telegraph, UK says sales of her book have tanked.

Hillary Clinton’s memoirs have been replaced at the top of the New York Times best sellers list by an expose of the Clintons’ rocky relationship with Barack Obama.

Edward Klein’s book “Blood Feud” now tops the combined print and non-fiction table in what is being seen as a blow to the former secretary of state’s prestige ahead of a likely run for the presidency in 2016.

One expert suggested that the less than expected sales suggested that there was some “Clinton fatigue” among the American public.

According to the latest authoritative Nielsen BookScan ratings which covers 85 per cent of the US market, Hard Choices now stands at number nine in the list of hardcover sales. …

According to Jennifer Rubin the disaster of the book roll-out has some Dems convinced they have a Hillary problem.

You expect Hillary Clinton to be panned by conservatives. But increasingly she is getting some brutal reviews from, of all places, MSNBC commentators. Mark Halperin broke the news to the network’s liberal audience: “The biggest development in the 2016 race in the last month is Republicans do not fear anything like they did before. She’s never going to be a great candidate. She’s never going to have the fingertip feel of politics of her husband, Barack Obama or George Bush. I think the story to some extent is the people around her failing to prepare her for the most obvious questions imaginable.”

Or maybe they did try to prepare her and she wasn’t receptive. (Worse, could be this be the improved version?)

With no specific GOP opponent journalists covering the lead-up to the 2016 presidential race don’t have much to do but dissect her latest gaffes and try to maintain some suspense  in a race with a candidate they’ve been covering for decades. (Will she run? Why can’t she talk about money?) Some rather frank criticism of her from liberal media and mainstream reporters may provoke some Democratic soul-searching. …

An example of Mrs. Clinton’s problem with the media is Maureen Dowd’s column this past Sunday.

CHELSEA CLINTON never acted out during the eight years she came of age as America’s first daughter.

No ditching of her Secret Service detail. No fake IDs for underage tippling. No drug scandal. No court appearance in tank top and toe ring. Not even any dirty dancing.

Despite a tough role as the go-between in the highly public and embarrassing marital contretemps of her parents, Chelsea stayed classy.

So it’s strange to see her acting out in a sense now, joining her parents in cashing in to help feed the rapacious, gaping maw of Clinton Inc.

With her 1 percenter mother under fire for disingenuously calling herself “dead broke” when she left the White House, why would Chelsea want to open herself up to criticism that she is gobbling whopping paychecks not commensurate with her skills, experience or role in life?

As the 34-year-old tries to wean some of the cronies from the Clinton Foundation — which is, like the Clintons themselves, well-intended, wasteful and disorganized — Chelsea is making speeches that go into foundation coffers. She is commanding, as The Times’s Amy Chozick reported, up to $75,000 per appearance.

Chozick wrote: “Ms. Clinton’s speeches focus on causes like eradicating waterborne diseases. (‘I’m obsessed with diarrhea’ is a favorite line.)” …

Joel Kotkin says there will be no recovery without the middle class. 

What if they gave a recovery, and the middle class were never invited? Well, that’s an experiment we are running now, and, even with the recent strengthening of the jobs market, it’s not looking very good.

Over the last five years, Wall Street and the investor class have been on a bull run, but the economy has been, at best, torpid for the vast majority of the population. Despite blather about our “democratic capitalism,” stock ownership is increasingly concentrated with the wealthy as the middle class retrenches. The big returns that hedge funds, real estate trusts or venture capitalist receive are simply outside the reach of the vast majority.

A recent study by the Russell Sage Foundation suggests these patterns of inequality, which have been developing over the last several decades, have become more pronounced in the post-Recession years. In 2013 the wealth of those at the 90th and 95th percentiles was actually higher than 10 years ago. Everyone else is lower.

The labor market may be strengthening, with the unemployment rate falling to 6.1% last month, but too many of the new jobs are low wage or part time. They aren’t providing the kick the economy got in the last, more broad-based expansion from robust consumer spending.

Wage growth has been weak, rising 2.5% annually since 2009, according to Bloomberg, compared with a 4.3% annual rise from 2001 to 2007. …

Similar thoughts from Mort Zuckerman.

There has been a distinctive odor of hype lately about the national jobs report for June. Most people will have the impression that the 288,000 jobs created last month were full-time. Not so.

The Obama administration and much of the media trumpeting the figure overlooked that the government numbers didn’t distinguish between new part-time and full-time jobs. Full-time jobs last month plunged by 523,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. What has increased are part-time jobs. They soared by about 800,000 to more than 28 million. Just think of all those Americans working part time, no doubt glad to have the work but also contending with lower pay, diminished benefits and little job security.

On July 2 President Obama boasted that the jobs report “showed the sixth straight month of job growth” in the private economy. “Make no mistake,” he said. “We are headed in the right direction.” What he failed to mention is that only 47.7% of adults in the U.S. are working full time. Yes, the percentage of unemployed has fallen, but that’s worth barely a Bronx cheer. It reflects the bleak fact that 2.4 million Americans have become discouraged and dropped out of the workforce. You might as well say that the unemployment rate would be zero if everyone quit looking for work.

Last month involuntary part-timers swelled to 7.5 million, compared with 4.4 million in 2007. Way too many adults now depend on the low-wage, part-time jobs that teenagers would normally fill. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen had it right in March when she said: “The existence of such a large pool of partly unemployed workers is a sign that labor conditions are worse than indicated by the unemployment rate.” …

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Looking over this administration’s foolishness, Victor Davis Hanson says the chickens have come home to roost.

Often, crazy things seem normal for a time because logical catastrophes do not immediately follow.

A deeply suspicious Richard Nixon systematically and without pushback for years undermined and politicized almost every institution of the federal government, from the CIA and the FBI to the IRS and the attorney general’s office. Nixon seemed to get away with it — until his second term. Once the public woke up, however, the eventual accounting proved devastating: resignation of a sitting president, prison sentences for his top aides, collapse of the Republican party, government stasis, a ruined economy, the destruction of the Vietnam peace accords that had led to a viable South Vietnam, the end of Henry Kissinger’s diplomatic breakthroughs, and a generation of abject cynicism about government. Did Nixon ever grasp that such destruction was the natural wage of his own paranoia?

In the post-Watergate climate of reform, for nearly three years a naïve Jimmy Carter gave utopian speeches about how American forbearance would end the Cold War and create a new world order based on human rights — until America’s abdication started to erode the preexisting global order. Scary things followed, such as the fall of the shah of Iran, the rise of Iranian theocracy, the taking of American hostages in Tehran, revolutions and insurrection throughout Central America, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, radical Islamists taking over Mecca, more gas lines, continued stagflation, and China invading Vietnam. Did the puritanical Carter ever understand what might be the consequences of his own self-righteousness in an imperfect world?

Barack Obama likewise has done some crazy things that seemed for years to have no ramifications. Unfortunately, typical of the ways of Nemesis (a bitter goddess who waits until the opportune moment to demand payment for past hubris), suddenly the bills for Obama’s six years of folly are coming due for the American people.

When a president occasionally fails to tell the truth, you get a scandal like the monitoring of the Associated Press reporters. When a president serially fails to tell the truth, you get that plus the scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, the VA, Benghazi, and too many others to mention.

The same is true abroad. …

Kimberley Strassel with an example of this foolishness.

In the smallest stories we sometimes find the biggest themes. The small story of the past month has been dysfunction at a backwater federal agency known as the Chemical Safety Board. Yet in this tale of obstruction, bullying and lawlessness we find what is now the clear pattern of the Obama administration.

If you’ve never heard of the CSB, join the rest of humanity. Created by Congress in 1990, the CSB is charged with probing industrial chemical accidents. Like the National Transportation Safety Administration, it’s a rare entity with no regulatory authority; CSB’s only job is to investigate and make recommendations. Its board and staff have mainly been wonky safety experts, and the agency largely devoid of political controversy.

That changed with this administration. The scandal popped in late 2013 when the Environmental Protection Agency’s inspector general, Arthur Elkins (charged with CSB oversight), sent a “seven-day letter” to Congress. Said letters are rare, since they are used (reads the statute) to convey to legislators “particularly serious or flagrant problems” at an agency. …

Andrew Claven thinks the country will be able to overcome what this president has left behind.

… In fact, I would predict that almost everything Obama has done in his time in office will vanish without a trace within a decade or two. Obamacare, the clown car foreign policy, the corruption…  I think it has caused some problems and will cause some more, but then I think we’ll shrug it all off and move on. Even some of the cleverer subterranean stuff, like favoring cities over suburbs, will only have a long-lasting effect if, in fact, the suburban era is over. If people still want their houses and lawns and cars, they’ll get them back, no matter what oppressive regulations this guy puts in place.

Many people on the right think Obama is an Evil Leftist Genius. Not me. I think he is a hapless putz. I think his ideas are all wrong, his application of his ideas is incompetent, and the chaos that he causes with his wrongness and incompetence will not lead in the direction he thinks it will.

I think when the history of the 21st century is written, Obama will not merit more than a single line. Even the fact that he was the first black president may come to seem irrelevant in a couple of decades. In which case, he will not merit any line at all.

The guy is just a sad little schmuck who played cynical politics well and got promoted way above his competence. His policies won’t change the face of the nation. They’ll just make a mess that those who come after him will have to clean up.

Writing in the National Review, A. J. Delgado argues the costs of immigration amnesty will fall most heavily on African Americans.

One of the sleeper issues surrounding the debate on amnesty for illegal immigrants – an inconvenient one that no proponent of a widespread amnesty wishes to acknowledge – is the devastating effect so-called immigration reform will have on African Americans.

The black unemployment rate is almost 11 percent, far higher than that of any other group profiled by labor statistics. African Americans are disproportionately employed in lower-skilled jobs – the very same jobs immigrants take. As Steven Camarota asked in a recent column, why double immigration when so many people already aren’t working?

Who will be harmed most by amnesty? African-Americans.

The issue resurfaced this week when a YouTube video emerged of two young African-Americans confronting pro-illegal-immigration demonstrators in Murrieta, California. Murrieta is one of the towns in which undocumented minors are being relocated — and supporters are squaring off with protestors.

The young man argues: …

Road & Track publishes the unbelievable costs of maintaining super cars. A new clutch for a Porsche Carrera GT is $25,000. A brake job – $30,000. 

On paper, a used super-exotic makes sense. You get the mind-blowing performance and heartbreaking looks, but at a lower price than a new hypercar, and with no yearlong stay on a dealer’s waiting list. But—surprise!—the buy-in is only half the damage. Parts are far from cheap and often hard to come by. Many jobs require purpose-built tools. And for countless reasons, supercars are rarely designed for ease of maintenance—the same task that takes an afternoon on your mother’s Toyota could consume five days on a McLaren. We polled owners and mechanics to find out what makes working on these cars aggravating, expensive, and just plain weird. …