RUTHFULLY YOURS

In an interview on Sunday with the Washington Post’s Lally Weymouth, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah spelled out his vision for peace with Israel.

This involves creating a “new framework for negotiations”; an end to the Israeli “occupation” by 2017; and the establishment of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, with east Jerusalem as its capital. For starters.

To guarantee all of the above, the leadership in Ramallah is hoping to secure a U.N. resolution to enforce these stipulations. They are also seeking other outside help, from the French, for example, who have floated an initiative to set a time frame for Israeli territorial withdrawals.

In the interview, however, Hamdallah said, “Nothing can be imposed from the outside. We need negotiations between us and the Israelis sponsored by the United States, by the U.N., by the [European Union]. We need outside intervention from the U.N., from the superpowers, from the United States. Once there is a resolution, whether the U.N. asking for Israeli withdrawal and for the establishment of the state, this has to be guaranteed by the superpowers. Otherwise, it will be just a paper.”

The Clintons and Their Royal Saudi Friends: More Dubious Donations to the Family’s Foundation
In December 2008, as Hillary Clinton prepared for the hearings that would confirm her as the next U.S. secretary of state, the Clinton Foundation disclosed a list of its donors — separated into tiers by amount given — to reassure the public and Congress that the former first lady would avoid any potential conflicts of interest in her new perch atop Foggy Bottom.

“I agree that these are matters that have to be handled with the greatest of care and transparency,” Clinton said during her confirmation hearing.

A look at one organization that made a donation in the range of $1 million to $5 million shows how the Clintons’ gestures toward transparency often revealed little. Meet Friends of Arabia, or FSA, a thinly veiled public-relations organ of the repressive Saudi regime.

In a testament to the Clinton Foundation’s confusing, tangled, and secretive finances, Friends of Saudi Arabia’s former CEO, Michael Saba, denies that the nonprofit ever made the contribution. He suggests, rather, that the group’s founders, which included members of the Saudi royal family, made the donation before filing papers with the IRS. For three years, the now-defunct FSA functioned as a propaganda tool for the Saudis, a mission that put it at odds not only with some parts of the State Department’s assessment of the regime, but also with Hillary Clinton’s attempts to position herself as a champion for women’s rights across the globe.

RELATED: ‘Clinton Cash’ Author Finds Eleven ‘Coincidences’

FSA was closely tied to the Saudi regime. A 2005 tax form identified Dr. Selwa Al-Hazzaa, head of the ophthalmology department at King Faisal Specialist Hospital, as chairman of the board. Saudi King Abdullah appointed her to the Saudi legislature in 2013, shortly after women were allowed to join the body.

FSA’s work earned the contempt of activists pushing for reforms in Saudi Arabia.

Where previous presidents fostered American strength, Obama revels in weakness.

Director Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, set during the Depression, was a divine counterfactual thought experiment designed to remind a suicidal George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) that his hometown, Bedford Falls, would have turned out to be a pretty miserable place called Pottersville without his seemingly ordinary presence.

Consider the Obama administration’s first six years as a prolonged counterfactual take on what the world might have been like for the last 70 years without a traditionally engaged American president dedicating our country to preserving the postwar Western-inspired global order.

The what-if dream seems to be working to show the vast alterations in a world that Westerners once took for granted. France, a perennial critic of America, is suddenly an unlikely international activist. For seven decades, the French harped about American hyperpuissance – on the implied assurance that such triangulating would be ignored by an easily caricatured, aw-shucks American George Bailey trying his best to keep things in the global community from falling apart.

The peacemakers, as has so often been the case, have made war of every imaginable kind more likely — and that includes military intervention in Iran. If Obama dreams of a legacy, a war his policy of appeasement promoted may well be it
Back in December 2014, former US secretaries of state Henry Kissinger (who served from 1973 to 1977) and George Shultz (1982 to 1989) wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled “What a Final Iran Deal Must Do”. This missive appeared a week after President Obama signed the 2013 interim nuclear agreement with the Islamic Republic of Iran, one that purported to temporarily freeze Tehran’s decade-long advance towards military nuclear capability. Kissinger and Shultz warned that the Islamic Republic’s quest for the nuclear bomb would be enhanced by the 2013 interim agreement. On April 12, 2015, a week after Obama celebrated his latest “breakthrough” with the Mullahs of Iran, the so-called framework for a preliminary nuclear agreement, Kissinger and Shultz published a sequel in the Wall Street Journal, this time titled “The Iran Deal and Its Consequences”. The worst fears of the former secretaries of state appeared to be confirmed by the latest turn of events:

A strong West, united behind Washington, might have responded to Russian adventurism in Ukraine by supplying materiel, intelligence and public support. With Obama in the White House and US influence in retreat, that is one possibility Moscow need not worry about
On one level, the news, reported in The Australian on May 29, 2015, that Russian President, Vladimir Putin, had signed a decree making military losses in “special operations” during peacetime a state secret is one more marker in Russia’s reversion to its Soviet totalitarian past. On another level, Putin is seeking to sustain an utterly implausible deniability. Yet the cat is well and truly out of the bag, as the old saying goes.

On May 14, President Obama said that the two-state solution is “vital” for peace between Israel and its Arab population. Furthermore, in a Huffington Post interview dated March 21, the President reiterated his belief that, “A two-state solution is the only way for the long-term security of Israel, if it wants to stay both a Jewish state and democratic.”

The question is why anyone is still talking about a two-state solution? After all, no one person or body has succeeded in imposing or implementing this “solution” to the satisfaction of all parties, even going back as far as the 1937 Peel Commission, when it was first suggested that the Mandate for Palestine could be divided into two states for two peoples. And if we can all agree that the two-state solution hasn’t worked, one might reasonably ask whether the two-state solution is really the “only” solution available toward the resolution of what Ruth Wisse calls “the Arab war against Israel and the Jews.”

Supporters of Obamatrade won in the Senate by selling the idea that Fast Tracking would strengthen American power. They cited a letter signed by several former defense secretaries which claimed:

There would be harmful strategic consequences if we fail to secure these agreements. In both Asia-Pacific and Atlantic, our allies and partners would question our commitments, doubt our resolve and inevitably look to other partners.

Unfortunately, these defense secretaries did not understand the economics of trade deficits. The Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), the first deal that Obama is negotiating, would actually accelerate the destruction of U.S. power by growing our massive trade deficits.

Trade Deficits and Power

It is clear at this point that TPP would increase U.S. trade deficits. Amendments to combat mercantilist currency manipulation were narrowly rejected in the Senate because TPP backers argued that U.S. insistence on ending currency manipulation would lead others (e.g. Japan) to scuttle the deal. Instead, TPP will enable currency manipulation, the chief technique used by mercantilist countries to expand their trade surpluses and our trade deficits.

The basic contention of mercantilism (the strategy of running intentional trade surpluses) is that maintaining a favorable balance of trade leads to an increase in national power. Hence, running a trade surplus is a means to the end of increasing national power and wealth, while running a trade deficit undermines these. There is nothing new in this contention. It is expressed in the Bible in Deuteronomy (15:6):

Thou shalt lend unto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow; and thou shalt rule over many nations but they shall not rule over thee.

Mercantilist governments buy foreign currency (as part of their currency manipulations) and then they lend that currency to foreign nations. In this way they gain trade surpluses and power. We analyzed the economic reasons why trade deficits undermine national power in our recently published book Balanced Trade.

The Only Way Hillary’s Democratic Competition Can Defeat Her Which Democrat presidential candidate has the guts to call Queen Hillary a liar?

You’ve probably noticed a few intrepid souls have stuck their toes in the Democratic Party 2016 presidential race to contest the coronation of Queen Hillary. So far they’re not doing too well. According to the Real Clear Politics averages, Vermont senator Bernie Sanders is running at 8.8% and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley at a stupendous 0.8%. (Two-thirds of them must have been at his announcement in Baltimore last week.) O’Malley’s even 1 percent behind Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee, who hasn’t announced yet. He’s supposed to take the plunge on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, the Queen rules at 63.6%. The one who’s doing the best against her at 12.5% is that house -flipping squaw Elizabeth Warren, who claims not to be running and is a full 51.1% behind anyway.

So things look pretty bad for Sanders, O’Malley and, potentially, Chafee, and, oh yes, again potentially, Jim Webb, all of whom seem to be prepared to engage in a tedious bidding war for who has the most extreme progressive policies. That will get them virtually nowhere — and if by some chance some idea catches fire, Hillary can co-opt it in ten minutes. She may lose a few points here and there (she’s even losing them now) but she’ll end up cruising to the nomination anyway.

The indictment of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert provides a good opportunity to weigh in on a subject that is especially apt for a blog called “Ordered Liberty”: over-criminalization. It is one that has gotten a good deal of attention on the right and the left — even bringing Rand Paul and Al Sharpton together, notwithstanding their disagreements on most everything else.

The ever-more sweeping regulation of human activity and concomitant diminution of liberty are elements of the “democratic despotism” problem foreseen by Alexis de Tocqueville, as Roger Kimball eloquently observes (see, e.g., here).

Students of the criminal law learn early on the difference between malum in se and malum prohibitum — i.e., conduct that is wrong in and of itself (e.g., murder, theft) versus conduct that is considered wrong only because we have chosen to legislate against it. The structuring of cash transactions is an excellent example of the latter.

“Black Lives Matter.” At first blush, it seems difficult to imagine anyone taking issue with the obvious, self-evident truth articulated by those three simple words. But when we peel away the veneer of deception, we find that Black Lives Matter (BLM) is in fact one of the most destructive, hateful, racist movements in living memory. Founded by a core group of revolutionaries who detest the United States and revere the nation’s most devoted radical enemies, BLM is, at its essence, an ideological reincarnation of the Black Panther [2] movement that flourished in the Sixties.

Black Lives Matter was established [3] two years ago in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the “white Hispanic [4]” who was tried for murder and manslaughter vis-à-vis the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin. According to BLM, Zimmerman’s act was but a microcosm of the “virulent [5] anti-Black racism” that “permeates our society” and continues to exacerbate [6] “the deep psychological wounds of slavery, racism and structural oppression.”