Friday brought an end to a horrific thunderstorm here and for Hillary and the Democratic Party, some telling legal orders.

In the capital, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan issued the following order against Hillary:

As agreed by the parties at the July 31, 2015 status hearing, the Government shall produce a copy of the letters sent by the State Department to Mrs. Hillary Clinton, Ms. Huma Abedin, and Ms. Cheryl Mills regarding the collection of government records in their possession.

These communications shall be posted on the docket forthwith. The Government has also agreed to share with Plaintiff’s counsel the responses sent by Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin, and Ms. Mills. These communications shall also be posted on the docket forthwith.

In addition, as related to Judicial Watch’s FOIA requests in this case, the Government is HEREBY ORDERED to:

(1) identify any and all servers, accounts, hard drives, or other devices currently in the possession or control of the State Department or otherwise that may contain responsive information;

(2) request that the above named individuals confirm, under penalty of perjury, that they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department. If all such information has not yet been produced, the Government shall request the above named individuals produce the information forthwith; and

(3) request that the above named individuals describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.

The Government shall inform the Court of the status of its compliance with this Order no later than August 7, 2015, including any response received from Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills. Signed by Judge Emmet G. Sullivan on July 31, 2015.”

In California Judge William Orrick, a federal judge in San Francisco who was a big Democratic donor and Obama campaign fund bundler (and nominee for his judgeship), upon the application of the National Abortion Federation blocked the release of any recordings (there are said to be 8-10 more than those already released) made at meetings of abortion providers by the Center for Medical Progress, saying that the Federation would likely suffer irreparable injury absent a temporary restraining order. His action follows a similar order issued in Los Angeles earlier this week.

It’s far from clear these orders are sustainable under the Constitution’s prohibition on prior restraint of speech. In any event, I think there’s nothing to stop a Congressional Committee from subpoenaing copies and playing them on the floor of the House or for any third parties with control of the videos to release them. So we can be sure the damage will continue on into fall.

Clearly, the organization and its allies understand that these videos are serious threats to its continued existence and government funding. As Richard Fernandez observes: 

The “secret knowledge” was in fact Planned Parenthood’s best defense, for it bound many to silence out of guilt or shame.  We could not bear to look; we still cannot bear to look.

Now that the cat is out of the bag the objections to looking the issue straight in the face, without euphemism, must vanish. Even those who, like Geraldo Rivera, argue that the end justifies the means can have no further reason for refusing to tell us “what end in exchange for these means?”. And in that matter, handwaving will not suffice.  If Geraldo’s so proud of “medical research”, surely our admiration for it can only grow after all 300 hours of undercover video have been broadcast.

In our modern, post-religious age society needs to know what ethical taboos, if any, remain. What won’t we do? 

Both the e mail scandal and Planned Parenthood orders underscore the perilous position of the Democratic party whose “inevitable” nominee has been hit by a never-ending serious of scandals and gaffes and whose principle supporters seem to be either disaffected or, in the case of Planned Parenthood, on the ropes themselves.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good though, and as the storm ended, a water-splattered memo to the DNC was blown onto my front doorstep.

I couldn’t make out the author’s name and the letterhead was too smudged for me to be certain of the sender, but it was printed on very expensive stationery so I assume it was one of the many well-compensated pollsters and political advisers who dot our neighborhood.

The body of the memo reads:

Let’s be honest with ourselves. Hillary is tanking and we need to find a replacement. I know this sounds shocking -- and certainly you’ve been considering throwing your support behind Joe Biden -- but I think we should enlist Donald Trump as our nominee.

Let me explain.

We need Black voters and they like him.

They really like him. I know Hillary’s been doing her best to curry favor with Black voters, but it’s not working well and if she does more than what she’s done we can expect a rush to the exits by other voters.

Even if she could persuade some of the usual race baiters (excuse my bluntness but we need some plain talk), she cannot match the enthusiastic responses which twice put Obama over the top.

Despite what you might be reading in the papers -- you know the ones who earlier had been promoting Jeb and Hillary as inevitable -- Republicans are not really that crazy about Trump , and we can use this to get him to jump ship.

Nat Silver’s nailed it:  

Before Trump officially declared for the presidency last month, his favorability ratings among Republicans were execrable. They improved after he announced his candidacy but have since slipped back to mediocre (well below the standard of candidates who have won their party’s nomination in the past).

But if you’re going to imply that a candidate is popular based on their receiving 20 percent of the vote, you ought to consider what the other 80 percent thinks about him. Most Republicans who don’t plan to vote for Trump are skeptical of him instead.

Trump hasn’t received any big endorsements yet, but check out how the other 2016 candidates are doing in the Endorsement Primary.

On the other hand, Trump seems to be far more likely to draw a great deal more Black support than Hillary: 

But, more crucially, his stance on immigration would immeasurably benefit African-Americans. It is they who suffer when America does nothing to stem the tide of illegal aliens pouring over the border: it’s harder for them to get jobs, and wages are pushed down even further.

Normally what happens with sizeable immigrant populations is that existing groups start to move up the ladder: they become middle-class while the immigrants take low-paid and menial jobs. In LA, even in very black neighborhoods, the construction workers are all Latino.

Yet that upward ratchet doesn’t seem to be happening in the overwhelmingly Democratic-run black ghettoes so in flux in America today. Blacks aren’t benefitting from the Hispanic invasion: in fact, it’s making their lives even worse.

Liberal journalists constantly try to paint Trump as a racist because he speaks plainly about problems in the black community.[snip] But the mud never sticks, in part because Trump seems to really care.

Look, for instance, what he does in business. When opening a members’ club in Miami in the 1990s, Trump insisted on accepting black and Jewish patrons even though the prevailing atmosphere was hostile to both groups. Never mind his off-the-cuff rhetoric: where it matters, he has their back.

As president, he wants to boost American manufacturing jobs, bringing factories back from overseas. Black Americans have traditionally flocked to such jobs: his plan would get a lot of currently unemployed black men back into work. How many black jobs would a $2.4 billion Ford factory based in the US create? Imagine if it was in Detroit.

Securing the border is most important to those at the bottom of the economic ladder as they are competing for limited unskilled worker jobs and limited public services.

As Ann Coulter puts it: “I’m so sick of this nonsense about Donald Trump being the racist here,” she continued. “He’s the one speaking for working-class Americans, for African-Americans! Have you seen the teenage black unemployment rate? Why shouldn’t they be getting those jobs? It’s Donald Trump that’s speaking up for them!” 

The War on Women Has Just Met its Waterloo

This week three undercover videos of Planned Parenthood haggling over price with pretend fetal tissue buyers and technicians tease apart tiny body parts went public, arousing almost universal revulsion. The organization’s allies went into quick legal war mode and secured two temporary restraining orders.

What does this mean for Hillary? She is too tied to the organization to credibly distance herself.

Greg Gutfeld said it best: "Hillary's campaign is so dead, Planned Parenthood is trying to sell parts of it."

Indeed, the whole party is too linked to the organization for comfort

Cecile Richards, the head of the organization (who makes over $500,000 a year and whose organization has received a Solyndra-like whopping $500 million per year in federal funds visited the Obama White House 39 times, beginning with Obama’s first day in office.

The head of Planned Parenthood is inextricably linked by the hip to the party. Her mother is former Texas governor Ann Richards, her husband is s labor organizer for SEIU, another arm of the Democrat left. Before heading Planned Parenthood she founded and served as president of America Votes, a coalition of national Democratic Party-affiliated organizations the Texas Freedom Network, a Texas organization formed to counter the Christian right ,and was deputy chief of staff to the U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi.

And then there’s the circular fund exchange: Hillary says the videos released this week “disgusted” her, but anyone who pays any attention at all knows that the organization has been conjoined with the party for decades and its reputation has been badly shaken and will continue to fall.

It’s not just Hillary: it would appear impossible for any elected Democrat to credibly sever a connection with the organization.

Planned Parenthood also serves as an extension of the Democratic National Committee. Last year alone, PP spent over $600,000 contributing to political campaigns.

Out of the over 100 candidates that Planned Parenthood funneled money to, only one was a Republican.

Some notable recipients included DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, Sen. Al Franken, Sen. Kay Hagan and of course, Sen. Mark “The Uterus” Udall.

Three prominent Democrat house members, including members of the Congressional pro-choice caucus, have been making the rounds supporting Planned Parenthood and claiming that there is nothing wrong with conducting research on “fetal tissue”.  The myth that the doctors on these videos were only talking about tissue has been thoroughly debunked by their own words but the media has also failed to mention that those three house members -- Rep. Rosa DeLauro (Conn), Rep. Barbara Lee (CA) and Rep. Jan Schakowsky (Illinois) -- all received campaign donations from Planned Parenthood.

This spending spree was not unique to 2014 -- it has been happening for years. In 2011, Planned Parenthood spent $700,000 lobbying to different groups in California.

To summarize, Planned Parenthood is raking in over $1 billion per year, including about $500 million in taxpayer funds and that money is not only being spent on truly abhorrent practices, it is being used as a slush fund to prop up liberal candidates who promise to keep the money flowing.

Many, if not all of the candidates who received donations from Planned Parenthood have been completely silent on the recently published behind-the-scenes videos.  Not a single one of the candidates running for the Democratic presidential nomination have bothered to comment on the atrocious revelations.

Hillary Clinton, the presumptive presidential front runner, is seeing money literally pour in from Planned Parenthood employees and executives to the tune of 20 times more than the rest of the Democrat field combined. 

It seems impossible for the party to distance itself from the organization

In fact, the entire party is too linked to Planned Parenthood.

Trump, on the other hand, says Planned Parenthood should absolutely be defunded, and he hasn’t the party’s baggage on this to overcome. 

For quite some time the organization’s face has been attractive women using euphemisms to hide its work with aid from Democrats like Bill Clinton who say abortion should be “safe, legal and rare” as they raked in financial and on the ground support from the organization and filled its already overflowing coffers. Recently, even Obama falsely claimed it provided mammograms to women who needed it.

Of course the real goal here is keeping abortion “legal,” which chiefly means appointing Supreme Court justices who will uphold Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Safe” and “rare” are rhetorical flourishes designed to keep abortion respectable. In practice, most Democrats object to regulations designed to make abortion safer on the ground that they would also tend to make it rarer.

The Planned Parenthood videos are a direct threat to the respectability of abortion. The imperative to keep abortion respectable is behind the euphemistic language --“choice,” “reproductive rights,” “women’s health” -- proponents use when discussing it, as well as the demonization of opponents: “Whether Congress chooses to stand with extremists or with the women of the United States is up to them,” wrote Cecile Richards in a Washington Post op-ed.

Planned Parenthood is America’s highest-volume practitioner of abortion, and also the practice’s respectable public face. Hence the emphasis on other services the organization provides (or for which it provides referrals), as in this tweet from Mrs. Clinton last night: “Proud to stand w/Planned Parenthood & for access to quality, affordable healthcare for women, men & young people. -H.” The accompanying retweet credits the organization with “500k breast exams & 4.5M STI [sexually transmitted infection] tests in ’13” but omits abortion. (A 2012 Washington Post “fact check” reported that “Planned Parenthood does not perform mammograms or even possess the necessary equipment to do so. . . . Instead, its clinics provide referrals and direct low-income women toward resources to help pay for the procedure.”)

But euphemisms cannot effectively rebut the blunt language on the videos.

In sum, we need Trump. Without Obama on the ticket we desperately need a candidate who can bring in Black votes. That’s Trump. Planned Parenthood may be too damaged to do their usual outreach to women voters, many of whom will be appalled by the videos and no longer in the palm of an embattled Planned Parenthood .We need Trump. Is there any downside? Sure, Republicans could outsmart us and be for stricter immigration enforcement and secure borders. They could also wholeheartedly support exposing Planned Parenthood and its operations and cutting out its federal funding as the truth is more widely known, but that’s out of our hands, isn’t it?

I don’t know if the memo reached its intended audience, but maybe Democrats will figure out for themselves the hole they dug themselves in.