RUTHFULLY YOURS

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Hillary Clinton’s next phase of life . . . has officially begun,” Politico reports. Well, stop the damn presses, she’s back. “She’s coming in to her husband’s signature foundation, which has been renamed for all three Clintons,” the third being 33-year-old Chelsea. “It’s the first time the two elder Clintons . . . are yoking their careers together.” Mercifully, there’s no word on whether they’re yoking anything else together.

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How can we miss you if you won’t go away?

“The foundation provides her with a formal apparatus” and “is also the structure that has provided sustenance for the extended Clintonland for over a decade, a sprawling world of donors, supporters and close friends,” Politico explains.

Finally in paragraph 9 we get to the point, in a quote from Robert Gibbs, a former Obama White House press secretary: “I think having a place such as this for a platform gives her a great launching pad into 2016.” If Gibbs is right, Mrs. Clinton is using a sinecure at a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization–that’s the kind that’s supposed to be extremely limited in its political involvement–as a nascent campaign organization.

Now, the man currently in the White House, President Asterisk, made good on his “jocose” 2009 threat to subject his political opponents to Internal Revenue Service audits. Mrs. Clinton is a former rival of his, and there is reason to think there remains bad blood between Barack Obama and the Clintons. Could an IRS full-body search of the Clinton Foundation be in the offing?

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=5351

On Friday, I published a column in these pages about my trials and tribulations over my repeated suspensions from Facebook.

It took two months of experiencing intermittent bans from the social network — due to ostensibly “inappropriate material” on my page — before I finally took any measures to extricate myself from the situation.

Each time I received a warning and a temporary ban, I would wait impatiently for my punishment to pass, and enlist the help of friends and family members to share my pieces in my stead.

But then it got to be an annoyance. Facebook is a key tool for writers, present company included. As someone once admonished me prior to my entry into the world of social media, “If you’re not on Facebook, you don’t exist.”

This was not a philosophical statement, but the advice of a well-wisher who was looking out for my career. He was right, of course, a fact I have come grudgingly to acknowledge. I had been hesitant about taking the plunge; but once I did, I understood why I should have swallowed my pride and done so years earlier.

So when I began to be barred, it was not personal rejection, I felt, but rather a form of ill ease, as though I was being watched. This is a pretty ironic, if not an almost irrational sensation, considering it was I who opted to put my views and thoughts on display for the world to see in the first place.

Nor did I automatically chalk up the nuisance of being prevented every so often from “joining the club” to discrimination. Indeed, if there’s one thing I can’t stand as a political conservative, it is right-wing conspiracy theories born out of paranoia — a symptom of megalomania.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/355723/print The White House plans to delay yet another provision of Obamacare, the New York Times revealed on Monday, in what was described as “another setback for President Obama’s health-care initiative.” Indeed, it seems that every week the administration offers up a new example of the implementation “train wreck” of which Obamacare architect Max Baucus […]

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/355715/obamas-gay-rights-hypocrisy-andrew-c-mccarthy ‘What,” Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani was asked, “is [Islam’s] judgment on sodomy and lesbianism?” “Forbidden,” he curtly pronounced. “Those involved in the act should be punished. In fact, sodomites should be killed in the worst manner possible.” So what does Barack Obama have to say about that? Cynically mounting his high horse last week in […]

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/08/loving-the-stranger/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=7aa478ebca-Mosaic_2013_8_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-7aa478ebca-41165129

lbert Camus’ Algerian Chronicles have never been presented, until now, in a full English translation, and this is a pity. The Chronicles contain his articles on Algerian themes for the French and Algerian press beginning in 1939 and continuing until he brought out the book in 1958, at a moment when the Algerian War had reached its halfway point. He made a number of arguments in the course of the collected articles, and some of those arguments are well known in English even without having benefited from a complete translation. These are his positions on torture (he was opposed), terrorism (likewise), and the duty of intellectuals (they ought to keep their cool). One of his arguments has been pretty much forgotten, though—and this additional argument ought to strike us as curious and thought-provoking and, given the circumstances of our own moment, more than a little insightful.

His own evaluation of Algerian Chronicles was modest. In his preface in 1958, he explained that a principal reason to collect the articles was merely to defend his reputation against his detractors. “If you write a hundred articles, all that remains of them is the distorted interpretation imposed by your adversaries. A book may not avoid every possible misinterpretation, but at least it makes certain kinds of misunderstandings impossible.” Nor did he gaze back on his Algerian journalism with any kind of satisfaction. Whatever he had hoped to achieve had not been achieved. “This book is among other things the history of a failure.” Only, what exactly had been the failure? His dashed hopes—what did they add up to? This is what hardly anyone remembers today, or, more precisely, what everyone remembers only in the distorted versions imposed by his adversaries.

Algeria in the mid-twentieth century consisted, in Camus’ sometimes variable figures, of some nine million people, of whom eight million were conventionally described as Arabs—meaning, a mixture of Arabs and Kabyles, who are Berbers. The other million or million-plus were people denoted as French, which tended to include a number of Spaniards, too, together with a scattering of other Europeans. There were Turks and also Jews, who were caught, as he explained, between the old-fashioned French anti-Semitism and Arab mistrust. In Camus’ interpretation, all of these people counted as indigenous Algerians, the million-plus French Algerians no less than the eight million Arabs. It is true that, here and there in his journalism, his language lapses into a more conventional terminology, with the Arabs labeled as “indigenous” or “natives,” and the French as “settlers,” not to mention as “colonists,” by which he meant settlers who were also exploiters. Mostly he insisted on his own vocabulary, though, which decreed that French Algerians and Arab Algerians were, in both cases, “indigenous” populations—separate communities uneasily inhabiting together the same Algeria.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/08/murderers-for-peace/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=7aa478ebca-Mosaic_2013_8_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-7aa478ebca-41165129 Today Israel will free 26 murderers, a price exacted by the PLO before it would return to peace negotiations. Israel has entered into such deals before, for example freeing over 1,000 prisoners in exchange for the captured corporal Gilad Shalit. But in that case the decision was Israel’s own, and the United States rightly […]