RUTHFULLY YOURS

Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience at the Milan Expo that while climate change didn’t cause the Syrian civil war, the drought associated with it aggravated the circumstances.

Washington Examiner:

“Make no mistake: The implications here extend well beyond hunger,” Kerry said, according to an Associated Press report. “This isn’t only about global food security; it’s about global security — period.”

Violence in Syria under the regime of President Bashar Assad has resulted in the mass migration of millions of immigrants into Europe, straining resources there. Kerry said that the already-bad situation under the regime was worsened by climate change and the resulting drought and food shortage.

“I’m not suggesting the crisis in Syria was caused by climate change — obviously, it wasn’t,” Kerry said in the speech. “It was caused by a brutal dictator who barrel-bombed, starved, tortured and gassed his own people. But the devastating drought clearly made a bad situation a lot worse.”

Jake Tapper did not get a chance to question Democrats in their first presidential debate, for some reason, even though he was chosen by CNN for the GOP debate the network broadcast. Perhaps as a consolation prize, he was able to get a one-on-one sit-down interview with Hillary Clinton, and asked her about her email scandal. Before he could even finish his question, she deployed her most feared weapon, the extended cackle-laugh.

It was a remarkably inappropriate response to a serious question about national security. But it served its purpose, which was to evade a serious answer and signal to her supporters that these questions are not worthy of a response.

Will she deploy the cackle when questioned by the House Special Committee on Benghazi next week? My guess is that she will, and I suspect that members of the Committee will have appropriate responses if she does literally laugh in their faces.

“Snowden told reporters that it is totally ridiculous for anyone to believe that Clinton’s emails were safe from cyber attacks, and that it’s okay if anyone wishes to use his educated viewpoint in any critique of Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.”

Presidential wannabe Hillary Clinton told an audience during a “staged” town hall in New Hampshire on Friday that the now infamous National Security Agency (NSA) fugitive Edward Snowden should voluntarily come back to the United States and explain his reasons for stealing and then leaking highly classified documents especially while he lived in Russia.

One of the audience members had asked Clinton if she believed Snowden is a “patriot” or a “traitor” for revealing classified government data, but with the skill of a politician she failed to answer but did claim she questioned his motives. I think we need to continue the balance on civil liberties, privacy, and security — it’s always a challenge,” Clinton said, in the midst of being the subject of an FBI investigation into her own alleged breaches of national security.

“Because he took valuable information and went first to China and then is now under the protection of Vladimir Putin, I think that raises a lot of questions about everything else he did. So I do not think he should escape having to return and answer for what he has done,” she told the carefully screened audience.

Hillary Clinton laughed in an interview with Jake Tapper when the CNN anchor pointed out that while Bernie Sanders said “the American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn e-mails,” there are “a lot of people who are not including FBI officials.”

“And this is something else that is very confusing to me. With all your experience, why wouldn’t you anticipate that over the course of four years, handling very sensitive diplomatic negotiations, overseeing military interventions and surveillance, why wouldn’t you anticipate that something classified, whether about North Korea or Iran or drones or an informant for the CIA, that it wouldn’t be e- mailed to you? And why wouldn’t you consider that having it on your personal account with some server in Colorado might be a potential risk?” Tapper asked the Democratic presidential candidate.

GOP presidential candidate Marco Rubio unveiled his energy policy in Salem, Ohio, on Friday. Speaking to an overflow crowd at BOC Water Hydraulics just outside Youngstown, Rubio was introduced by popular Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel, who extolled his virtues as a father and family man before saying he thinks Rubio is highly qualified to be our next president.

Rubio began by saying that the outdated political establishment in Washington is holding our economy back. He prefaced his policy proposals by saying that ”21st century America has the greatest energy potential of any nation in human history.” Rubio said, “Not only do we have an abundance of oil and coal and natural gas, but we also have an unparalleled capability to leverage these into prosperity through the miracle of American free enterprise.”

This week the Washington Post reported that Cheryl Mills, who served as Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff at the State Department, was simultaneously being paid by a private organization to negotiate with a foreign government. And that foreign government has been particularly generous to the Clintons.

In 2009, while Ms. Mills held the second most powerful job at State, she also represented New York University as it negotiated with officials from Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). The school was preparing to open a campus there funded by the Abu Dhabi government. The campus opened in 2010 and welcomed Bill Clinton as a speaker at its inaugural commencement ceremony in 2014.

According to the Post, Ms. Mills was not paid by the U.S. government during the early months of the new Obama Administration, but was instead “officially designated as a temporary expert-consultant—a status that allowed her to continue to collect outside income while serving as chief of staff.” Outside of the Clintons and their staff, who else thinks it’s a good idea for senior State Department officials to be paid by private institutions to cut side deals with Middle Eastern dictatorships—or any foreign governments?

A previously unknown e-mail address used by Huma Abedin was discovered on Thursday, just hours before the top Hillary Clinton aide prepares to testify in front of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

Conservative watchdog group Citizens United discovered the address in an e-mail exchange that shows Clinton Foundation CEO Robert Harrison forwarding a speaking invitation for then-Secretary of State Clinton to both Abedin’s State Department account and an unfamiliar Abedin address on November 6, 2012. “I tried to send this to your ‘clintonemail.com’ address, but it bounced back as undeliverable, so here it is again,” Harrison wrote.

The new address is titled “humamabedin,” and appears to be a private e-mail account. The State Department redacted the account’s domain name, citing a personal-privacy exemption.

Lee Zeldin speaks softly and carries a big stick.

The freshman Republican congressman from New York’s First District sits in a banquette at The Fourth restaurant in Manhattan, sips a cappuccino, and says things at just above a whisper. But his words are the embodiment of peace through strength. Zeldin is a low-key tough guy.

“Nothing threatens America’s security more than the silence that’s coming out of the White House with regards to the way our enemies are testing us,” says Zeldin, 35. “America is being tested right now, President Obama is being tested. North Korea turns a key to a nuclear reactor. Russia is having a submarine off our coast of Georgia, or naval warships off the Pacific Coast. The Chinese naval fleet is just off the coast of Alaska while the president is there. Iran is threatening the United States and our allies while Congress is deliberating whether or not to approve the arms deal. We are being tested and we can’t be silent.”

Being tough doesn’t mean warmongering, Zeldin explains.

“When I say, ‘We can’t be silent,’ it doesn’t mean we want war. That’s what the Left likes to say. There is a huge range of options between silence and war. . . . Our enemies all around the world will continue to test us more and more, until the president and this country have the backbone to stand up for ourselves.”

The mild-mannered Mr. Zeldin generated headlines during the debate over Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran. He didn’t just speak softly. He went totally silent.

Zeldin took to the House floor and asked his Democratic colleagues a simple question: “How do you support a deal based on verification without knowing what the verification is?” He offered to yield time and let any Democrat answer. He stood there, and soaked in their silence for ten seconds, as none of them could answer his question. A clip of this moment soon raced around the Internet.