RUTHFULLY YOURS

The former governor sat on the board of the GOP-establishment-friendly American Action Forum. Jeb Bush was associated for years with the tip of the spear of the Republican establishment’s campaign for a permissive immigration policy. For five years the American Action Network (AAN) and the Congressional Leadership Fund (CLF), well-heeled outside spending groups, have been go-to sources of support for the Republican establishment’s immigration “reform” efforts.

For most of that time, Bush sat on the board of the think tank with which both are affiliated, the American Action Forum (AAF) — from shortly after its founding in February 2010 by former Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former Minnesota senator Norm Coleman, and hotelier and Nixon hand Fred Malek, until December 2, 2014. The most notorious initiative by AAN — the brawn to AAF’s brain — came in early March, a few months after Bush had left the board of its sister organization. As John Boehner pushed a “clean” Department of Homeland Security appropriations bill, one that would fund President Obama’s executive amnesty, AAN launched a controversial $400,000 national ad campaign accusing conservative opponents in the House of “putting our security at risk” by resisting Boehner’s bill.

CAIRO (AP) – Arab League member nations formally announced on Sunday an agreement to form a joint military force. While details of how such a force would actually operate remain thin, the agreement is a telling sign of a new determination among Saudi Arabia, Egypt and their allies to intervene aggressively in regional hotspots, whether against Islamic militants or Iran-backed groups.
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HOW WILL THE JOINT FORCE WORK?
Senior officials from participating counties have been dispatched to collectively examine the issue, and a full proposal is to be presented to the Arab League’s Joint Defense Council within four months. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, has described the force as an absolute necessity. Egyptian military and security officials have said the proposed force would be made of up to 40,000 elite troops and will be headquartered in either Cairo or Riyadh, the Saudi capital. The force would be backed by jet-fighters, warships and light armor.
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WHO WILL LEAD IT?
Saudi Arabia, as the region’s economic powerhouse, will likely take a leadership role. Egypt, which boasts the Arab world’s largest standing army but is heavily dependent on financial aid from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations, will also be a major player.

An estimated 40% of Muslim youth in France and 50% in Germany are unemployed but far from destitute. Rather, they receive a wide range of social benefits. [2] For example, an estimated 40% of welfare outlays in Denmark go to the 5% of the population that is Muslim. [3] According to Otto Schily, former German interior minister, speaking of immigrants in general: “Seventy percent of the newcomers [since 2002] land on welfare the day of their arrival.” [4] In Sweden, perhaps the most acute case, immigrants are estimated at 1.5 million out of 10 million people; immigration is estimated to cost almost $14 billion per year. [5]

These high levels of welfare are accompanied by high levels of unemployment. Nor has this situation improved; rather, it is deteriorating. According to analyst Christopher Caldwell: “In the early 1970s, 2 million of the 3 million foreigners in Germany were in the labor force; by the turn of this century, 2 million of 7.5 million were.” [6] Similar stories abound in other West European countries.

Large numbers of people may be receiving unemployment, but that is not their only form of income. The money for the designer sneakers sported by idle youth comes, in fact, from drug deals and fenced goods as well as from welfare payments. But the symbolism of welfare payments affects not only disgruntled taxpayers but also the youth themselves. Some Muslims interpret the payment of social benefits as a form of jiziya, the poll tax traditionally paid in Islamic societies by non-Muslim peoples as a sign of their submission to Islamic rule. In other words, not only are the social benefits interpreted as a right due to Muslim recipients, but they reflect the higher, dominant position of the latter which is embedded in sharia. [7] In fact, a minority consider draining the government’s coffers to be a contribution to jihad. [8]

Never in the history of American foreign policy has so much egg adhered to so little face as in the matter of Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. All of America’s allies, including Britain and Australia, have elected to join the Chinese-led institution. That is a grand validation of China’s One Belt/One Road vision for infrastructure upgrades across the whole Eurasian landmass. China’s President Xi Jinping envisions $2.5 trillion of trade between his country and the “Silk Road” nations over the next decade. Rather than fret about the impact of a slowing (or shrinking) world economy on China’s export-driven prosperity, China is seeking to shape the economic environment around it.

I share the legitimate concerns of center-right critics over the gravely delusive and dangerous concessions the Obama Administration appears hell-bent to agree upon in its nuclear negotiations with Iran:

giving an international imprimatur to Iran’s so-called “right” to enrich uranium, with the maintenance of ~6500 centrifuges, including perhaps 600 in the concrete-reinforced, 300 foot subterranean Fordow facility;
simultaneous “quick” economic sanctions relief, and even a partial lifting of existing embargoes on arms sales to the Islamic Republic;
the exclusion of Iran’s robust ballistic missile (BM) program, which, per mid-March Senate testimony by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency Director, Navy Vice Admiral James Syring, could have intercontinental (IC) capability this (i.e., 2015) calendar year [note: a satellite image published January, 2015 purports to show a 27-meter tall Iranian ICBM just outside Tehran];
the steadfast refusal by Iran—despite repeated, ongoing International Atomic Energy Agency demands—to reveal its record of putative military nuclear development/ weaponization experiments.

After weeks of escalating criticism of Israel by the Obama Administration, Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State and the leading 2016 Democratic presidential contender, on Sunday called for the renewal of the “special” relationship between the US and the Jewish state.

In a telephone conversation with Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Clinton said that she “thinks we need to all work together to return the special US-Israel relationship to constructive footing, to get back to basic shared concerns and interests.”

Gaming the demise of the Saudi monarchy has been a flourishing industry on the think-tank circuit for the past dozen years. Not long ago I sat in private conclaves of US national security officials with a sprinkling of invited experts where the head-shaking, chin-pulling consensus held that the Saudi royal family would be gone in ten years. A premise of the “realist” view that American policy in the region should shift towards Iran was that the Saudi monarchy would collapse and Sunni power along with it. All of us misunderestimated the Saudis.

Now the Saudis have emerged at the top of a Sunni coalition against Iran–limited for the moment to the Houthi insurgency in Yemen, to be sure, but nonetheless the most impressive piece of diplomacy in the Sunni world since Nasser, and perhaps in modern times. That attributes a lot of importance to a coalition assembled for a minor matter in a small country, but it may be the start of something important: the self-assertion of the Sunni world in response to the collapse of American regional power, the threat of Sunni jihadist insurgencies, and the Shi’ite bid for regional hegemony.

A most peculiar crisis is developing for the Chinese economy – and, indeed, for the regime — while the world’s attention is riveted on the chaos and terror in the Mideast and Russian aggression in Ukraine.

Not the smallest element is the clever manipulation by Beijing’s strategists of the world’s hopes for continued remarkable Chinese growth as a last call instrument to bail out a dawdling world economy.

That misapprehension of China’s economic capacities may well forestall, again, at least for a time, an inevitable coming to grips with basic problems of it vast society under the Communist Party monopoly. But there is growing evidence that China’s financial problems have reached a crescendo that Beijing can no longer manage.

The Romance of the Confederacy
It’s time the South dropped it in favor of a better part of its heritage. This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments re Texas’s refusal to allow Confederate flags to be stamped on license plates as part of a “Sons of Confederate Veterans” design. I wouldn’t ask sons of Confederate veterans to disown their ancestry; in fact, my mother’s mother’s family was Southern, and four of my great-great-grandfathers fought in the Confederate army. And I know that lots of Americans sincerely see the Confederate flag as a symbol of states’ rights — particularly because virtually no Confederate soldiers actually owned slaves.

But, personally, I see the Confederate flag as the symbol of men who, as Lincoln put it, wrung their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces; who, “to strengthen, perpetuate, and extend” slavery, were willing to “rend the Union, even by war.” And I’m a very reasonable man. “Both parties” to the Civil War, said Lincoln, “deprecated war, but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish.” That war killed about three-quarters of a million Americans, and the Stars and Bars are the symbol of the men responsible — regardless of its having also been a symbol of men who were just trying to defend their homes.

Needless to say, the South has lots to be proud of, and — though it might not be my place — I’d like to point out something that could (and ought to) supplant its traditional reverence for the Confederacy. The best estimates of the size of the Confederate army range from 750,000 men to a million. One hundred ten thousand additional Southerners fought in the Civil War — for the Union. That means that more than one of every ten Southerners who fought in the war fought to end slavery and keep the country united.

It is entirely possible that there is a clause in the agreement that parallels the Kennedy Doctrine, except that it is aimed against Israel.Israel and the United States need to get ready to thwart a terrible surprise.

At the moment there no such thing as an Obama Doctrine for foreign policy – but one may be coming and it could prove catastrophic.I worry about bringing it up. It might give the President an idea he may have skipped, so it might be best to leave it unspoken.

What does Israel do when it is not Israel but Iran that has America’s back?But we must approach the subject, like it or not, because the possibilities are staggering. In fact, I’d be surprised if it were not already the central part of the deal being manufactured between Obama and the ayatollahs toward an agreement that is entirely favorable to Iran regarding Iran’s nuclear program.