RUTHFULLY YOURS

Obama claimed that ISIS was only a “jayvee” team even as it was capturing Iraqi cities. Now he wants us to believe that Iran is just another “jayvee” team even as it’s taking over Iraq, Syria and Yemen.

Like the rest of his Iran deal talking points, the one about Iran’s tiny military budget is false, and not only is it false, but his claim about how small Iran’s military budget keeps changing.

A few weeks ago, in a speech at American University, he was claiming that “The defense budget of the United States is more than $600 billion. To repeat, Iran’s is about $15 billion.”

“Iran’s defense budget is $30 billion. Our defense budget is closer to $600 billion. Iran understands that they cannot fight us,” Obama had told the New York Times in April.

Just now, he told the Forward, “As I pointed out repeatedly, Iran’s annual defense budget is about $15 billion.”

What is Iran’s military budget? Read Obama’s lips. It’s either $15 billion or $30 billion.

I am so sick and tired of pundits explaining what we can “learn” from Donald Trump. Do they not listen to Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Carly Fiorina to channel anger properly. Peter Wood explains this free floating anger in his very prescient book:” A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now” Jan 4, 2007

Donald Trump is the angry man of the hour. He joins a long list of people who in the last half century have made their mark by bursting the confines of civility to say aggressively rude and obnoxious things. Vein-popping, vitriolic anger displayed in public is an art form — of sorts. It is a performance art, and it is a new thing — new, at least, in the yardstick of lifetimes and centuries. Donald Trump’s antics would have been unthinkable in the era of Eisenhower, let alone FDR.

It was not that people in such past generations didn’t get angry, didn’t sometimes express their anger in awkward ways, or didn’t sometimes become publicly known for their bluster. We’ve had our Huey Long–style politicians who have made pyrotechnic anger their trademark. But beginning in the aftermath of World War II, the nation began a transition from believing that an easy or too frequent resort to anger is a weakness to a belief that anger is empowering and that expressing it vigorously is healthy and good.

The shift from self-control to self-expression didn’t happen all at once, and at first it was confined to artists, writers, and intellectuals. Think of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1955) as one of the early expressions of self-actualizing rage. But Ginsberg was howling in a beat dive in San Francisco. How did we get from there to Mr. Trump howling on stage?

Thom Tillis defeated liberal incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan in 2014……He ran on defeating Obamacare, ending big government and EPA regulations…..rsk

The United States entered negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran in an undeniable position of strength. Sanctions on Iran were working as intended: causing the Iranian currency to crumble, wreaking havoc on Iran’s financial sector, and dramatically cutting Iran’s oil exports. Iran’s economy was teetering on the verge of collapse. As President Obama noted earlier this year, the United States imposed “the toughest sanctions in history” that “helped bring Iran to the negotiating table.”

During the final presidential debate in October 2012, the president outlined his necessary condition for a deal, declaring: “The deal we’ll accept is they end their nuclear program. It’s very straightforward.”

However, once at the negotiating table, it was clear that President Obama wasn’t motivated to strike the best deal possible to end Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, he was intent on striking any deal — even a bad one.

Today I will be visiting Oklahoma City to meet with some of the leaders of America’s energy revolution. Developments in shale-oil production such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have opened up new and exciting possibilities for a secure energy future for our nation. Yet this week, President Obama traveled to Alaska to talk not about seizing our energy potential, but about limiting that potential through environmental policies that grow government and raise costs. I believe this is an outrageous misalignment of priorities.

It is hard to think of a single industry that has a more direct impact on Americans’ financial well-being than the energy industry. Our energy resources truly sustain our human resources. Our businesses need to be able to operate affordably and efficiently in order to create jobs and grow our economy. Our families need reasonable gas and electric bills in order to reach financial security. Working moms and dads need to be able to commute to work without breaking the bank.

Yet despite the importance of this industry, our outdated government has made energy one of the most politicized and regulated aspects of our economy. It picks winners and losers through subsidies and higher taxes. And while some of the environmental concerns influencing regulations are legitimate, others are seriously overblown. A small but vocal minority, with some very highly paid lobbyists, has successfully pushed for restrictions that result in higher prices and fewer jobs for our people in exchange for minimal environmental benefits.

I believe that the vast majority of Americans — both Democrats and Republicans — are very reasonable when it comes to balancing ecology with the economy. And I believe it is conservatives, not liberals, who ultimately have the more sustainable and forward-looking agenda. This is because the true path to an economically and environmentally secure energy future is not through regulation, but through innovation. And innovation comes from less government involvement, not more.

The Blaze picks up a story flagged by Joe Scarborough, who expressed astonishment on Morning Joe on Tuesday at an e-mail exchange in which then–secretary of state Hillary Clinton appeared to berate one of her top aides, Jacob Sullivan, for his reluctance to send Clinton classified information by e-mail.

The subject line of the February 10, 2010, e-mail exchange is “Insulza.” The exchange is about a speech, apparently by a foreign official. Perhaps the subject line refers to José Miguel Insulza, a Chilean politician who has been secretary general of the Organization of American States since 2005. In any event, the U.S. government’s internal reporting on the speech has clearly been classified (not surprising in light of what Shannen Coffin and yours truly explained earlier: foreign government information is presumptively classified). This is clearly very irritating to Secretary Clinton, who is anxious to read the speech.

Editor’s Note: A version of this article appeared in the June 22, 2015, issue of National Review.

The 950 residents of King Cove, Alaska, have been trying to build an emergency road to nearby Cold Bay. They have been trying to build the road for 40 years.
King Cove is near the western tip of the Alaskan Peninsula; a few miles west begin the Aleutian Islands. King Cove has a school and two churches and a Chinese restaurant, and its economy is buttressed by the presence of PeterPan Seafoods, one of the largest commercial fishing operations in North America, whose seasonal employees constitute about one third of the local population. But like most towns in the Alaskan bush, it has only a small clinic and no full-time physician. For everything from minor surgeries to delivering a baby, residents must venture to a proper hospital — 625 miles away, in Anchorage.

Rarely can that be done directly from King Cove. The town’s 3,500-foot gravel airstrip, built in 1970 in the Delta Creek Valley north of town, cannot accommodate large aircraft, and the single- and twin-engine aircraft that use it are particularly vulnerable to King Cove’s weather and geography — which are, to put it lightly, forbidding. The airstrip is situated between two volcanic peaks, which funnel into the valley winds that regularly reach 70 mph. And while clear, calm days do visit King Cove, bad weather — thick fog, lashing rain, driving snow — is Mother Nature’s curse on King Cove a third of the year, sometimes more.

So getting to Anchorage requires first getting to next-door Cold Bay, a hamlet of 100 people, mainly transient state and federal employees, that happens to be home to a 10,000-foot, all-weather airstrip capable of handling the long-distance flight to the state’s largest city. (Why tiny Cold Bay has such an outsized role in King Cove’s story is something of a historical accident: Cold Bay Airport was built in World War II, when this distant patch of the Alaska Territory became a strategic outpost against a possible Japanese invasion. The site chosen, Army engineers agreed then, and locals agree now, was the only one in the area suitable for an airstrip of such size.)

To this day, the Obama administration mourns the fall of Egypt’s Islamist President Morsi, and turns a cold shoulder to forward-looking President el-Sisi, who is (sometimes) trying to take Egypt into the 21st century and extricate Egypt from its economic and societal crisis.

Muslim Brotherhood terrorism against the Egyptian regime is a perfect example of how this “political movement” is in reality a terrorist movement whose objective is the violent overthrow of Egypt’s government. The White House, fully aware of the facts, continues hosting senior Muslim Brotherhood officials and shows them respect during consultations about the American Islamic community and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

Events in Sinai prove there is no such thing as “political Islam.” There is a radical Islamist leadership that represents itself to the gullible West as “moderate,” preaches violence from mosques, cloaks itself in ideological-religious tradition, and employs Islamist terrorists to attack civilians and Egyptian government targets.

It is hard not to conclude, looking at President Obama’s record (ignoring protesters of 2009 in Iran; “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone”; the dictatorial way the Iran deal is bypassing the democratic process) that in his heart-of-hearts, he is far more committed to supporting extremist Islamist regimes — whether the mullahs of Iran or the Muslim Brotherhood — than to supporting democracy, individual freedoms or human rights.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2015/09/giving-anti-semites-a-free-pass/

Jeremy Corbyn—a frontrunner for the leadership of Britain’s Labor party—has fond words for Hamas and Hizballah, and considers some of their leaders his friends. Why, asks Brendan O’Neill, don’t these associations earn him opprobrium from within his own party?

http://www.jewishnews.co.uk/opinion-anti-zionists-are-not-as-different-from-anti-semities-as-theyd-like-to-think/

THERE’S NO evidence Jeremy Corbyn is an anti-Semite. But the storm over his dodgy associates has thrown up ample evidence that the modern left doesn’t take anti-Semitism seriously.

It’s extraordinary. Ours is an era of super-sensitivity towards race and prejudice. A politician who cracks a less-than-PC gag about black people can expect a thorough Twittershaming. Criticise Islam and you’ll be diagnosed as suffering from the mental malaise of Islamophobia. Share a platform with a BNP nutjob or Christian evangelical who hates gays and you’ll be frogmarched out of polite society.

Yet what has been the left’s response to revelations that Corbyn rubbed shoulders with anti-Semites? In a nutshell: “Chill out. Stop making a fuss over nothing.”

All of 21st-century Britain’s racial sensitivities seem to fly out the window whenever Jews are involved. Corbyn, far from facing expulsion from the dinner-party set for having mixed with racists, is being protected from criticism by the dinner-party set. They’ve erected a moral forcefield around him.

So Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who frequently frets about Islamophobia and the white observers who apologise for it, described the criticisms of Corbyn as “political trickery”. She even peddled a dodgy-sounding theory for why Corbyn is facing attack. An “unholy alliance” of “the right, Blairites and hard Zionists” has clearly set out to besmirch his good name, she wailed. Those bloody Zionists and their pesky alliances. All this from an observer who normally treats shoulder-rubbing with racists as a scourge.

With Congress due to vote by Sept. 17 on the Iran nuclear deal, there’s a warning worth revisiting. It goes like this: The president is pushing a historic nuclear agreement, saying it will stop a terror-sponsoring tyranny from getting nuclear weapons. And up pipes the democratically elected leader of one of America’s closest allies, to say this nuclear deal is mortal folly. He warns that it is filled with concessions more likely to sustain and embolden the nuclear-weapons-seeking despotism than to disarm it.

This critic has more incentive than most to weigh the full implications of the deal, because his country is most immediately in harm’s way — though it has not been included in the nuclear talks. He notes that the nuclear negotiators have sidelined such glaring issues as human rights, and warns that Washington is naive, and the U.S. is allowing itself to be manipulated by a ruthless dictatorship.

No, the critic I’m referring to is not Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he has warned of precisely such dangers in the Iran nuclear deal. I am citing the warnings voiced 21 years ago by the then-President of South Korea, Kim Young Sam, as the Clinton administration bargained its way toward the 1994 nuclear deal with North Korea known as the Agreed Framework.

It’s a longstanding truism of international relations that “everyone knows” the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet today, after more than two decades of negotiations under several different Israeli, Palestinian, and American governments have repeatedly failed to produce the two-state agreement whose terms “everyone knows,” it is past time to put this false idea to rest. In fact, what the talks have shown is that even when there’s agreement on general principles, the remaining gaps are insurmountable—and often there isn’t even agreement on principles. What this means is that, for now and for the foreseeable future, a final peace is not achievable.

To most Israelis, this isn’t news. Repeated polls have confirmed that while a stable majority still favors a two-state solution, an even larger majority doesn’t believe an agreement can or will be signed anytime soon—or that the Palestinians are serious about reaching one.