RUTHFULLY YOURS

July 11, 2015 The following is a faux memo, although its contents are based upon my interviews with people close to Hillary Clinton, including some I’ve known since my years covering the Clintons in Arkansas. These sources spoke on condition of anonymity because attempts to make their case directly to the Democratic front-runner and her campaign team were icily received. Like my December 2013 memo titled “You’re the Problem,” this represents their point of view.

To: Hillary

From: A few of us

Subject: We love you, but you’re still the problem

The last time we wrote as a group, you were deciding whether to run for president. Conventional wisdom pegged you as a dead-certain candidate; we knew better. We knew you were worn from a lifetime of service, personal tension, and the getting-vaster Right Wing Conspiracy. We knew you truly wanted to devote the rest of your years to charity and Charlotte. We also knew you wanted to be president—and we’re not embarrassed to say we thought you’d be a good one.

We had qualms. To review, we warned that an American public buffeted by socioeconomic change has lost faith in Washington, the U.S. political system, and virtually every social institution. We said that would be a particular problem for you in 2016, because you are viewed as a creature of Washington, a calculating politician, and an institution (“not just because of your age,” we wrote, “The Clinton family itself is an institution, one freighted with baggage.”)

People ask me if I ever lack ideas for opinion pieces. Au contraire: Like a Malibu firefighter encircled by blazing brush, I can’t decide where to aim my hose. I spent most of Wednesday trying to pick which of that day’s Obama-fueled infernos to douse.

I awoke to the news that Obama has fallen way behind on his promise to train moderate Syrians to fight ISIS. After budgeting some $500 million to instruct and equip 3,000 anti-ISIS troops by year’s end, Obama, in fact, has unleashed 60 such combatants. That’s 2 percent down, 98 percent to go. But, hey, what’s the rush?

Even before the advent of ISIS, Obama originally touted this effort as a bulwark against the brutality of Bashar Assad, the dictator of Damascus. “We are particularly interested in making sure that we are mobilizing the moderate forces inside of Syria,” Obama declared at a presidential debate on October 22, 2012. Thirty-two months later, Obama’s moderate Syrian force boasts a whopping five dozen members.

Few in the odd coalition of Left and Right pushing for reauthorization of the 81-year-old Export-Import Bank have been louder than Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

“It’s wrong that candidates for president, who really should know better, are jumping on this bandwagon,” she said at a May 22 campaign stop in New Hampshire. “It’s wrong, it’s embarrassing. . . . The idea that we would remove this relatively small but vital source of funding for our businesses to compete is absolutely backwards.”

Clinton’s defense of Ex-Im may be motivated by more than mere concern for American businesses. Critics have argued that her family’s byzantine network of political and business interests benefits tremendously from the bank’s low-interest loans, and previous investigations have raised questions about the bank’s independence from the Clintons’ political pressure.

Trump is an oaf, a distraction and a joke who has latched on to a vein of American discontent with illegal immigration…And he once favored amnesty for illegal aliens..Even Bernard Sanders is more suited to enter the most serious election of our time……..rsk

Las Vegas — It’s the height of political fashion to bash Donald Trump, and I’ve done my share. It’s harder to understand his appeal, but it’s absolutely necessary if we are to come to terms with the political times we live in.

Anyone who watched Trump’s speech to 2,000 attendees of FreedomFest in Las Vegas on Saturday could easily lampoon his bizarre, meandering, and egomaniacal delivery. But by the time he left the stage, a big chunk of the audience approved of him, and many expressed a willingness to vote for him.

“Trump was upbeat, and, unlike other candidates, he’s a man of action,” Barbara Carter, of Las Vegas, told me after the speech. She is considering voting for Trump. A former resident of Wasilla, Alaska, she was a fan of Sarah Palin’s when Palin was mayor there. She says that both Palin and Trump cut through the politically correct rhetoric of our day and speak plain truths. When I pointed out that Trump never presents any evidence for his charges that the Mexican government deliberately sends rapists and killers to the U.S., she agreed that both Palin and Trump “may have been pushed onto the national stage before they were ready.”

Readers keep asking me about the presidential race, and to be honest my heart sinks. Yes, yes, I know it’s important to elect a Republican candidate because, if nothing else, as we’re always told, they get to nominate strong candidates to the Supreme Court – like, er, Anthony Kennedy and, um, John Roberts. So that said:

Because for many years the only TV station I could get in my corner of New Hampshire was Channel 3 Vermont (with its excellent local news show anchored by the late and much missed Marselis Parsons), I’ve been watching Bernie Sanders since he was Mayor of Burlington. His rise from mayor to congressman to senator embodies what one might call the Ben&Jerrification of a once great and rock-ribbed Republican state. A New York Jew with a very urban accent, Bernie started in the latte enclave of Chittenden County, expanded to other semi-flatlandered quartiers of the state, but eventually conquered the plaid-clad hold-out of the North-East Kingdom. He did all this as an “independent socialist” without any party machine.

So he’s not just an attractive gadfly but an extremely well organized one. Which is why a man who is largely unknown to the national media is pulling the largest crowds of this campaign – 10,000 in Wisconsin, 8,000 in Maine. And he’s being very positive – it’s all about Bernie, very little about Hillary. He would be the oldest man ever elected president and 83 years old at the end of two terms – which we won’t have to worry about because the entire country will have slid off the cliff long before then. But he’s enthusing the base, and any base wants to be enthused.

Hillary, by contrast, is in trouble not because she’s a sleazy, corrupt, cronyist, money-laundering, Saud-kissing liar. Democrats have a strong stomach and boundless tolerance for all of that and wouldn’t care were it not for the fact that she’s a dud and a bore. A “Hillary rally” is a contradiction in terms: the thin, vetted crowd leave more demoralized and depressed than when they went in. To vote for Bernie is to be part of a romance, as it was with Obama. To vote for Hillary is to validate the Clintons’ indestructible sense of their own indispensability – and nothing else. Hillary is a wooden charmless stiff who supposedly has enough money to be carefully managed across the finish line. But that requires Democratic electors to agree to be managed, too, and the Sanders surge is a strong sign that, while they’re relaxed about voting for an unprincipled arrogant phony marinated in ever more malodorous and toxic corruption, they draw the line at such a tedious and charisma-free specimen thereof.

While the Donald Trump sideshow has been sucking the oxygen from the news cycle over the last few days, the Obama administration has been off quietly doing what they do best — undermining America and the free world at every opportunity.

This time it’s the big one, finally bringing home the long-awaited Iran deal that promises peace in our time with the Islamic Republic much as Neville Chamberlain promised peace with Nazi Germany, although, unlike the Chamberlain agreement, made when Britain was militarily weak, we are the military powerhouse giving away the store to the vastly weaker side — and that store is reported to include a “signing bonus” of some fifty billion bucks, good news indeed for Hezbollah, Hamas, the Houthi, the Revolutionary Guards and, among other mass murderers, Bashar al-Assad.

SF Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi wants to tear down our borders and the walls of our prisons.

The hostility of the radical left-wing sheriff of San Francisco to America’s prison system — not just to federal immigration law — may have been a factor in the decision to release a Mexican illegal alien who went on to murder young Kate Steinle.

Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi (pronounced: Meer-kah-ree-me) is taking heat for releasing Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, a 45-year-old illegal alien with a second grade education who reportedly has seven felony convictions and has been deported from the U.S. five times. Federal officials had characterized the man who went on to shoot Steinle at Pier 14 on July 1 as an “enforcement priority” and filed an “immigration detainer” asking jail officials to hold him until they could take custody.

Why negotiations are shaping up to be a win-win for the Mullahs.

The mainstream media have ignored and overlooked the Islamic Republic’s recent moves, which threatened regional security. The Islamic Republic’s search for regional hegemony has also been overshadowed by President Obama’s prioritization of signing a nuclear deal.

Iranian leaders and media outlets have given an estimate of how much they have so far gained from the nuclear talks. The Iranian leaders and state-owned media have recently boasted about receiving approximately $12 billion in assets over the period of the nuclear talks by July 7th.

The ruling clerics in the Islamic Republic and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps have also unveiled and are celebrating the deployment of a new and second long-range Ghadir radar. According to an Iranian state-owned outlet, Brigadier General Farzad Esmaili, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) air defense force, who unveiled the Ghadir phased-array radar, pointed out that “Discovering and tracking micro aerial vehicles (MAV)… is one of the special qualities of the Ghadir radar system.”

Why the Muslim-majority country is outlawing the Islamic attire.

While people who oppose the wearing of facial coverings by Muslim women are routinely accused of Islamophobia, the Muslim-majority nation of Chad has not only banned such garments but ordered one variety, the burqa, burned.

“Wearing the burqa must stop immediately from today, not only in public places and schools but throughout the whole of the country,” said Prime Minister Kalzeube Pahimi Deubet, Chad’s ruler since 1990.

To spend money trying to interfere with the carbon cycle is foolish; to try to bury carbon dioxide is a crime against the biosphere.

“Climate” is formally the thirty year “average” of weather. Climate is what we expect, on average – weather is what we actually get.



It is true that atmospheric conditions (dust, smoke, smog, aerosols, aircraft contrails, clouds and trace gases) can affect Earth’s weather. But none of these minor atmospheric constituents can generate energy – they merely filter, reflect, transfer or redirect a portion of solar energy. The effects of any changes tend to be short-lived, or reversed as the atmosphere clears; or they often trigger negative feedbacks that largely offset the initial effect. In particular, carbon dioxide does not drive the weather. No weather forecaster notes what tomorrow’s level of CO2 is likely to be, and no farmer wonders what it will be next spring.



The sun is the short-term weather wizard. It clearly controls the changing temperatures of day and night, winter and summer; it energizes the atmosphere to give the power to storms and cyclones; together with the Moon it produces tides and gyres and their changing cycles drive weather cycles on Earth. Meteorologists, long-range forecasters who study solar and planetary phases, and many intelligent farmers are best placed to forecast weather. The carbon-centric model predictions have failed dismally, suggesting strongly that carbon dioxide does not control weather.