RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Of course, Trump is not what he claims to be. He is hardly a paragon of conservative virtue, having supported Democratic politicians and liberal causes until quite recently. And it is all well and good to be frustrated; it is quite another to do something about it. Trump would never get anything done, even if he could win a general election (which he can’t). His in-your-face style might work great on a reality TV show, but the Framers designed our system to thwart such bullies.”

Donald Trump is not going to be the next nominee of the Republican party. The flamboyant businessman has made billions in real estate, but politics is another matter. He manifestly lacks the temperament to be president, and his conversion to the Republican party is of recent vintage. As the field narrows, and voters look closely at the other candidates, Trump will fade.
Still, the Trump surge should remind Republican politicians of a truth they may prefer to forget: Their voters do not like them anymore. Tune out Trump’s bombast and what’s left is a simple, compelling message to the Republican base: The rest of your party has been bought and paid for, but I’m my own man, and I’ll actually represent you.

All else being equal, it is surprising this message should resonate. For a party that does not control the White House, the GOP is in incredibly strong shape. Tallying up the state legislative, gubernatorial, and congressional seats, Republicans are as strong as they have been since the 1920s. History suggests that the GOP should win the White House, too: The Democrats are going for a historically rare third consecutive term; the incumbent president’s approval is weak; and their presumptive nominee has acute ethical problems.

August is traditionally a vacation month, and East Coast elites, following European tradition, are thick on the ground in the Hamptons, Martha’s Vineyard (the Obamas’ choice), and Nantucket.

But news — in some cases, shattering news — keeps breaking out all over, at home and abroad this August. Actually that’s not unusual. Saddam Hussein overran Kuwait in August 1990; Hitler ordered the invasion of Poland in August 1939; the great powers of Europe went to war in August 1914.

Nothing quite so momentous has happened so far this August. But the political world seems to be spinning out of control.

Thus last week 24 million Americans watched the Fox News Republican 9 p.m. Thursday presidential debate, an unprecedentedly enormous audience. And 6 million watched the 5 p.m. debate featuring candidates with low poll numbers. That’s 5 o’clock Eastern, 4 Central, 3 Mountain, 2 Pacific. How many Americans usually watch political debates at that hour?

Let’s be honest. Obamacare was nothing more than a bait and switch. But Americans never took the bait.

In 2010, as President Obama and his fellow Democrats were trying desperately to ram Obamacare down our throats, they made one false claim after another. They told us health-care premiums would go down. They insisted if you liked your health-care plan you could keep it. They guaranteed Obamacare wouldn’t include any tax increases for the middle class. Americans didn’t buy these lofty promises then, and they certainly don’t now, given that each and every one of them has been broken.

Five years after Democrats forced Obamacare on the nation, Americans still don’t support it. We don’t like the president’s health-care plan, and we don’t want to keep it. Therefore, we must pull this dysfunctional and destructive law out by the roots.

We must repeal Obamacare in its entirety as soon as possible. But we can’t stop there. The president’s policies must be replaced with a plan that will send power back to the people and the states, fix the decades-old problems of rising medical-care and health-insurance costs, and support economic growth instead of punishing workers and small businesses. We must do all of this while ensuring affordable coverage for those with pre-existing conditions, and removing the fear that something as simple as changing jobs could result in loss of coverage.

Next week, I will release a plan to replace Obamacare that accomplishes all of these goals, and addresses the following problems with the law:

Given the sort of views and preachers to which this member of the government’s counter-terrorism programme subscribes, he should not be entrusted work in publicly funded counter-extremism. But in the eyes of the media and government, Sulaimaan Samuel’s arguments against ISIS make him a suitable “moderate.”

Once again, hardline preachers and Islamist extremists have been rewarded and praised rather than ostracized. If Britain is to win the battle against Islamist extremism, public officials must be held to account for their irresponsible choice of partners.

A British government body responsible for monitoring the counter-terrorism procedures among Britain’s 44 police forces has admitted, the Daily Telegraph reports, to employing “one of Britain’s most notorious Islamic extremists.”

Abdullah Al-Andalusi, whose real name is Mouloud Farid, worked at Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary, at which he was privy to “highly sensitive and classified police and intelligence information.”

Hillary Clinton’s “inevitable” cruise to the presidency has crashed onto the twin sandbars of the Sanders surge and the FBI’s seizure Wednesday of the private computer server and thumb drives that likely contain classified documents. Thus, it is useful to review her initial statements on E-mailgate. In hindsight, she swaddled journalists in lies.

“I did not e-mail any classified material to anyone on my e-mail. There is no classified material,” Clinton declared at her March press conference.

This was a lie. There was classified material.

Among the 30,490 e-mails that Clinton handed the State Department last December, the inspector general for the intelligence community (ICIG) sampled 40 and discovered that four (or 10 percent) were classified. Of these, two (or 5 percent) “when originated” were designated “TOP SECRET//SI//TK//NOFORN.”

This information was not just sensitive, such as the date when Clinton might visit, say, Islamabad — which could tantalize the Pakistani Taliban. Rather, this involved such things as satellite images and electronic intercepts. Executive Order 12356 of 1982 specifies that these secrets’ unauthorized disclosure could cause “exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” If the ICIG’s sample mirrors Clinton’s other e-mails, some 1,500 could be top secret.

Congress Is Waking Up on Mental Health By The Editors

Fervent gun-controllers and cynical political observers sometimes deride efforts to reform America’s mental-health system as a distracting, even unhelpful, answer to the problem of mass shootings. This is unfair, as no small number of young men who commit unspeakable acts of violence do indeed have diagnosable serious mental illnesses. But it is also ignorant, because fixing our mental-health system is also a response to everyday mass suffering — to the burden that serious mental illness presents for the 7 million or so Americans, many of them on the streets or in prison, who have serious illnesses, and the families and communities that want to help them.

Thankfully, Congress seems to be coming around. There is not just one bill currently floating around that would improve the mental-health system, but several, all of which would move public dollars toward treating serious mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, etc.) and away from trying to diagnose and treat mental-health problems across the whole population.

The best bill is the one that Republican representative Tim Murphy, a psychologist from Pennsylvania, has been pushing for a couple of years now. Murphy’s bill, which has substantial bipartisan support, attacks some of the most perverse aspects of our laws regarding mental illness. It will finally change the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act so that family members of people with serious mental illness can know what medications they have been prescribed, when they are scheduled to see their doctors, and other crucial information. Murphy’s bill will also use federal mental-health grants to encourage the use of assisted outpatient treatment, which, unlike most of the work the federal mental-health bureaucracy supports, has been proven to be effective. The bill will require the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to reconsider whether Medicaid should be paying for long-term hospitalization for the mentally ill. More broadly, the bill would reform the federal mental-health bureaucracy, pushing it toward supporting the seriously mentally ill and reducing support for “patient advocates” efforts that actually hamper effective treatment.

This week’s announcement that Fiamma Nirenstein was being appointed Israeli ambassador to Italy ‎made waves on both sides of the Mediterranean.‎

Nobody is better suited than Nirenstein for this role — particularly in the wake of the signing of the ‎P5+1 agreement with Iran — due to her proven ability to create bipartisan support for Israel. Prime ‎Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ought to be lauded for recognizing this fact and acting on it. ‎No wonder the Left is not pleased.‎

But because Nirenstein’s knowledge of international affairs and experience in the political/diplomatic ‎sphere are as vast as they are solid, what the media came up with to cast aspersions on her ‎appointment was to call her “loyalty” into question. More specifically, it was to suggest that Italian ‎Jews fear they will be accused of “dual loyalty” if Nirenstein takes up the post.‎

Donald Trump is a great communicator. He’s self-assured, entertaining, pungent. He could, as they say of talented actors, read the phone book and make it interesting (if, that is, hilariously boastful readings of the phone book are your kind of thing).

There is only one area where his communication skills are lacking: The man that Trump refers to as Trump is not always adept at expressing Trump’s views.

The loudmouth mogul may be very good at saying words, but coherence and consistency sometimes elude him. Especially when he gets beyond his comfort zone of extolling his own phenomenal awesomeness and calling America’s leaders stupid and the leaders of China and Mexico — the new axis of evil — smart and cunning.

After that, it gets foggy.

Consider his signature issue of immigration, where the incendiary words and stalwart tone evidently are a smoke screen for a poorly conceived amnesty scheme.

It happened sooner than even the doomsayers predicted. The era of artificial intelligence is here. A computer has become self-aware, a moral agent responsible for its own actions.

This breakthrough didn’t happen in Silicon Valley or at MIT. It happened, of all places, in Chappaqua, New York. And the person responsible isn’t even a computer scientist, but a lawyer and politician: Hillary Clinton.

Clinton’s critics say a lot of things about her, but who would’ve believed she was Skynet’s mother?

A little background. Clinton was forced to turn over her “home-brewed” e-mail server to the FBI this week, along with a flash drive unlawfully stored at her lawyer’s office. The server and the drive are tangible evidence of Clinton’s decision to circumvent laws and procedures designed to preserve government records and keep classified information secret. She says she never knowingly sent classified information, but Clinton leaves out that the whole reason federal officials are barred from using private servers is that such systems are invisible to the classification process.

The Clinton team claims it handed over the server voluntarily — a classic example of Clinton’s penchant for half-truths. For months, they insisted they’d never turn it over. They caved because they had to. The decision was about as voluntary as a bank robber relinquishing his sack of cash to the cops at gunpoint.

The late real estate magnate Leona Helmsley sealed her reputation as the “queen of mean” when she told a housekeeper, “We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.”

Hillary Clinton is under new scrutiny after the revelation that some of the e-mails on her now-infamous private server included information then classified as “top secret.” Her flat denial in March that classified information ever passed through the server was laughable at the time, and it’s been proven false now. But no one expects the Obama administration to punish Hillary the way it has so many “little people” who have mishandled classified data in the course of their government service.

Take former State Department analyst Stephen Kim. He’s now serving a 13-month sentence in a federal prison for leaking classified data on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen, who in turn had his e-mail records searched by the Obama Justice Department without his knowledge. Journalist Peter Maass has made a compelling case that the North Korean material wasn’t sensitive: “According to court documents, one State Department official described the intelligence assessment as ‘a nothing burger,’ while another official said Rosen’s story had disclosed ‘nothing extraordinary.’” But Kim sits in prison nonetheless, a victim of the Obama Administration’s crackdown on the abuse of classified material.