RUTHFULLY YOURS

If you’re Marco Rubio, and you’ve launched your campaign on a theme of sunny optimism and cheery confidence that America’s best days are ahead of it, how do you adjust when the GOP electorate seems to be eagerly embracing the mad-as-hell-and-not-gonna-take-it-anymore style of Donald Trump?

You take it head on.

“People are rightfully angry and upset,” Rubio said to “yeah!” responses here at the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit in Columbus, Ohio.

“It’s good to let that anger motivate us, but we can’t let that anger define us,” Rubio said. “We’re not an angry nation. We’re a hopeful nation. What nation would you trade places with? Where would you rather be? This is still a great nation. But we’re just not living up to our potential.”

Rubio began by focusing on how “the economy is changing faster than ever before. The largest retailer in America, Amazon, doesn’t own any stores. One of the biggest transportation companies in America, Uber, doesn’t own any cars. Our policies are outdated. Big government and more regulation have never worked – and they’re a disaster in the twenty-first century.”

Rubio spent a good portion talking about education reform, from the need for a refocus on vocational training, “We need to give people the skills for the best-paying jobs… I promise you this: A welder makes a lot more money than a Greek philosopher. The market for Roman philosophers has tightened significantly in the past 2,000 years, and our students need to know that.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/422942/print Toto the dog wasn’t needed in Mobile, Ala., Friday night to pull the curtain from behind The Great and Mighty Trump. Trump let his own curtain flutter open, showing to much of the audience the humbug within. In an hour-long verbal meanderthon at half-filled Ladd-Peebles Stadium, Trump allowed an atmosphere of electric excitement to […]

From Malmö comes the news that the Sweden Democrats, scrubbed-up neo-fascists who have forsaken the Roderick Spode uniforms, have become Sweden’s most popular political party, commanding the allegiance of a quarter of Swedish voters.

The 25 percent mark is of some interest: It’s about where Donald Trump stands in the most recent Republican primary poll and where Bernie Sanders stands in Democratic primary polls. It’s a little bit ahead of the 20 percent mark, where the Danish People’s party stands, and a little bit behind Nigel Farage’s UKIP, while in France, Marine Le Pen’s National Front took 25 percent of the vote in local elections earlier this year. Somewhere between one in four and one in five seems to be, for the moment, the golden ratio of pots-and-pans-banging politics.

For the right-leaning movements, the common issue is immigration. Senator Sanders, a professing socialist from Vermont, may seem like an outlier in this gang, but his views on immigration are substantially the same as those of Trump and by no means radically different from those of Marine Le Pen, even if his speeches are edited for progressive audiences; he charges that a shadowy cabal of billionaires (the name “Koch” inevitably looms large) wants to flood the United States with cheap immigrant labor to undermine the working class: “Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them,” he says, with emphasis on the eternal infernal Them. “Real immigration reform puts the needs of working people first — not wealthy globetrotting donors.” Strangely, Sanders protests that Trump is a beastly beast for holding roughly the same views. “All kinds of people,” indeed — not our kind of people.

Quick action by unarmed off-duty U.S. servicemen on a high speed train from Amsterdam to Paris narrowly averted tragedy yesterday as they subdued a terrorist gunman before he could begin his rampage. And according to multiple reports, the suspect in custody was known to multiple European intelligence agencies — yet another case of what I have termed “known wolf” terrorism.

Since last year, I’ve noted here at PJ Media that virtually all of the terrorist incidents in the West have been conducted by subjects who were already known to law enforcement and national security agencies, refuting the “lone wolf” narrative floated by authorities and the establishment media that such terrorist activity is random and unpredictable.

And such appears to be the case yet again in the case of what happened on the Thalys train.

In less than a month, Congress will vote on the Iran nuclear deal. It’s a terrible deal, in all its sanctions-melting, cash-bestowing, arms-and-missile-embargo-lifting, nuclear-enrichment-approving and self-sunsetting capitulation to Iran.

It’s even worse for having been rushed by the Obama administration to the United Nations Security Council for approval on July 20th, just six days after it was announced, and one day after the Obama administration officially transmitted a copy to Congress. And it’s worse still for relying on secret side deals between Iran and the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency to handle inspections pertaining to Iran’s past work on nuclear weapons — the “possible military dimensions.”

Hillary Clinton evidently thinks she can tough her way out of her email server problems by blaming others and deflecting attention, strategies she is already employing to no useful effect. Her latest gambit was revealed in an interview with friendly journalists at the Huffington Post. Sam Stein writes:

To get in front of these headlines, the Clinton campaign is plotting a three-pronged pushback strategy. The first, described by communications director Jennifer Palmieri in an interview with The Huffington Post, is an end-of-summer effort to educate the public on the classification process for national security material. The second, coming when Congress returns from recess, is to aggressively pivot to policy announcements, from economic and women’s issues to President Barack Obama’s Iran deal, which will receive a vote in September. The last is to “go on offense” on Clinton’s record as secretary of state, which the campaign sees as the ultimate target of her Republican critics.

As Chuck Ross points out in The Daily Caller:

…none of the pieces of that multi-part pushback plan…appear to involve the Democrat actually explaining why she used a private server, when she wiped it clean, and why she did so.

Of course not, for that would bring more grilling from the media, which have not been willing to accept the evasions and lies she has been offering. Unlike her other scandals, this time around there are forces on the left, armed with sympathetic media, that want to hold her to account.

My American Thinker article of June 12, 2015 asked the question: “What if Most Democrats Don’t Want Hillary?” The question I asked and my prediction of the trend of polls that suggested that Hillary would soon be unwanted by Democrats are no longer hypothetical. Two polls in mid-August show that Hillary has dropped below fifty percent among Democrats.

The most recent poll published, the CNN/ORC poll shows that today the percentage of Democrats who want her as the party nominee is 47%. As bad as that news is for her, it is the trajectory of that poll that ought to terrify Hillary’s supporters, considering the decline since April in the percentage of Democrats favoring Hillary for the nomination: April 19 (69%), May 31 (60%), June 28 (58%), July 22 (57%), and August 16 (47%). The next CNN poll can be expected to show her percentage support in the mid-40s.

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Analysis-A-warning-to-Tehran-412953 The swift Israeli reaction on Thursday and Friday to the launching of four rockets from Syria at the Galilee and Golan shows how deep is the Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran’s military. It was not the first time that precise and updated intelligence data enabled Israel to prevent terrorist attacks from Syria sponsored by […]

“My answer, as always, is to counter the boycott with a buy-cott, favoring blue-and-white products.If individual BDS supporters feel compelled to boycott all Israeli cultural, medical and technological developments that’s their right, even if their lives will be poorer, shorter and more miserable as a result.”

“All my life I’ve been waiting for I’ve been praying for For the people to say That we don’t wanna fight no more There will be no more wars And our children will play…”– “One Day” performed by Matisyahu

The lyrics might seem innocuous – pro-peace and world harmony, even – but hip-hop singer Matisyahu who performs them was singled out as being out of tune with the message of an annual music festival in Benicassim, near Valencia in Spain. As The Jerusalem Post’s Herb Keinon put it: “If you plan on going to the Sunsplash Rototom Reggae Festival in Spain this week, you better not speak the language of the Hebrewman. If you do, they might kick you out.”

Matisyahu’s sin was being Jewish. The well-known singer shot to fame while he was still an ultra-Orthodox Jew with a distinct hassidic look. He shaved off his sidecurls and beard and dropped the haredi garb several years ago, but he is still a proud Jew: an American Jew; not an Israeli.

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/As-I-see-it-Israel-and-the-culture-wars-412786 The banning of rapper Matisyahu by the Sunsplash reggae festival in Spain – subsequently rescinded after protests – was an “aha!” moment. After pressure from the Israel-bashing Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement, the festival organizers disinvited the singer because he refused to support “the right of Palestinians to have their own state.” Matisyahu is, […]