RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351287/lincoln-america-and-opportunity-interview

National Review editor Rich Lowry’s new book, Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — And How We Can Do It Again, is about the “why” of Lincoln. “A commitment to the fulfillment of individual potential — his own and that of others — was Lincoln’s true north, the bright thread running from his first statement as a novice political candidate in his early twenties to his utterances as one of the world’s greatest statesmen,” Rich writes. Lincoln hated “isolation, backwardness, and any obstacles to the development of a cash economy and maximal openness and change,” he observes. Lincoln’s standard “advice to aspiring lawyers, to discouraged friends, and to penurious relatives came down to exhortations to work, and then to work some more.”

Rich talks more about Lincoln Unbound with National Review Online’s Kathryn Jean Lopez.

KATHRYN JEAN LOPEZ: Should “Lincoln” be synonymous with “opportunity”?

RICH LOWRY: Yes. In Lincoln’s telling, America exists to give all people the chance to rise. We are, by birthright and through our free institutions, a nation of aspiration. He believed this in the marrow of the bones with which he had labored all during his youth. It suffused his determination, as a boy and into his early adulthood, to read and to learn, so he could do something besides chop and plow all his life. It was the touchstone of his politics as a Whig and then as a Republican.

If there is one thing to know about Lincoln, it is this belief. His war leadership and his martyrdom get so much attention, understandably. But Lincoln’s vision for the country goes deeper than either of those things.

LOPEZ: Should we associate a half-dollar with Lincoln more than the axe?

LOWRY: This is a major irony of Lincoln’s image (and my subtitle). In the normal course of things, he never would have wanted to be known as a rail-splitter. He got that moniker when Illinois Republicans made him their favorite son for president in 1860, and hauled out some rails he had supposedly cut decades ago. This was genius marketing. But he wasn’t an ax (or maul) person. He was more a half-dollar person.

He told a story in the White House that captured this. When he was a teenager, Lincoln had built a little boat that idled at an Ohio River landing. Two men approached in carriages. They wanted to meet a steamboat coming down river. Seeing Lincoln’s boat, they asked if he’d take them and their trunks out to meet the steamboat. Lincoln obliged and, when they were about to steam off, yelled out that they had forgotten to pay him. They each tossed a silver half-dollar onto the bottom of his little boat. Lincoln had, as he put it, “earned my first dollar.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/351324/santorums-quiet-2016-campaign-robert-costa

Two Ricks don’t make it for 2016. Rick Perry, my absolute fave in 2012 is a very successful conservative governor with a real record, but he is a klutzy debater, and even though all his ideas are now being claimed by those who pelted him in the primaries, he can’t be a candidate again. Rick Santorum, has no record of success- nada-zilch- defeated as incumbent senator in Pennsylvania-lackluster, charmless, and not very likeable. Make way for 2016 without recycled candidates…..rsk

Almost everybody has written off Rick Santorum as a 2016 contender — everybody, that is, except Rick Santorum.

Behind the scenes, the former Pennsylvania senator is quietly preparing for another presidential run. Trips to Iowa are in the works, he’s meeting daily with his advisers, and he’s already fine-tuning his message for the early primaries.

Hints of that pitch came last Thursday during a fiery speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s summer conference. Santorum cast himself as a populist conservative. “When all you do is talk to people who are owners,” he warned, the GOP becomes nothing more than a social club for entrepreneurs.

For Santorum, it marked the start of his unofficial campaign. He tells me he plans to build upon his speech’s theme in the coming months, positioning himself as a conservative outsider.

“Some of the Wall Street folks have hijacked the party,” he says. “But we can’t just be a party that’s aligned with where the money comes from.”

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
Every city is by necessity a tyranny. Density determines how people live and how they do not. Freedom is in part inefficiency and city living is fed by the need to achieve social efficiency. Bloomberg’s much denounced nanny state tactics are only an extension of the same drive to maximize social efficiency.

Bloomberg may have become the poster billionaire for such behavior, but the majority of cities have their own solutions to the problems of people that come at the expense of individual freedom. The same efficiency that compresses the maximum number of people into an existing space is also applied to every other area of their lives. In cities of strangers, there is no area of life too intimate to be examined and made more efficient.

Unlike the country, the city is its own frontier. Its great adventure is not exploration, but existence. The city is always changing, mutating, falling apart and coming together under assault from waves of new immigrants and social challenges. Its spaces are inner spaces; whether those of the mind of the individual on a crowded bus, the meaning of the squiggles in a piece of abstract art or that club hidden at the end of an old alley.

Cities are never stable. That is what makes them exciting. Truly old cities become fossilized, but they still always seem on the verge of being tipped over. The city is a social breakdown in motion and the authorities are always scrambling to apply emergency measures to salvage it. There are always poor people somewhere and other people on the verge of rioting. A criminal underclass haunts its towers and slums. And most of all there are too many people.

http://pjmedia.com/ronradosh/2013/06/17/oliver-stone-disgraces-himself-again/?print=1 Our old friend Oliver Stone is at it again. This time, as The Hollywood Reporter [1] informs us, he is being feted and wined and dined in the People’s Republic of China, where he is the star attraction at this year’s Shanghai International Film Festival. The festival will be screening his big flop Alexander, […]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323566804578551522812888206.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion

Anthony Weiner, who resigned from Congress two years ago this Friday in a side-splitting social-media scandal, is running for mayor of New York? We don’t know why, but we’re now pretty sure it’s not for the money. The New York Post reports that Weiner and his wife, Huma Abedin, “hauled in as much as $350,000 in outside income on top of Abedin’s $135,000 government salary.”

Far be it from this columnist to begrudge the Weiners their financial success. What’s eyebrow-raising about this, though, is that Abedin, who works for the State Department, is the source of some of that outside income:

Abedin, who served as [Hillary] Clinton’s deputy chief of staff when Clinton was secretary of state, later became a ‘special government employee’ who was able to haul in cash as a private contractor. . . .

One of the clients she did consulting work for while on the government payroll was Teneo Holdings, a firm founded by longtime Bill Clinton aide Doug Band.

The Post reports that Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican the paper describes as “one of the Senate’s most aggressive investigators,” is looking into the matter. In a letter to Abedin and now-Secretary John Kerry, Grassley “wrote that he was concerned Abedin’s status ‘blurs the line between public- and private-sector employees, especially when employees receive full-time salaries for what appears to be part-time work.’ ” Grassley also “suggested Abedin was providing clients ‘political intelligence,’ ” a claim denied by an unnamed “person close to Abedin.”

New York’s Daily News reports that white-knight Weiner “defended his wife” during a Saturday campaign appearance. “I’m proud of my wife and I’m proud of the work she’s done,” he said, adding that “she has done everything completely above-board with approval of the State Department.”

That may well be true–in which case the scandal here may be what’s above board rather than what’s below it. The Post reports that an unnamed State Department official “noted there were 100 such consultants at the agency.”

A hundred Abedin-size salaries would add up to $13.5 million–presumably not counting benefits–being paid to people whose work for the department has to compete with their outside gigs for their time and attention. Are they thoroughly screened for conflicts of interest? If so, that’s an additional expense for the taxpayers. If not, we can’t rule out the possibility that some State Department workers are trading on their access to what Grassley calls “political intelligence.”

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324520904578551273594278646.html?mod=hp_opinion

‘There’s a sucker born every minute” is one of those great American phrases, fondly and frequently repeated by Americans, who tend to forget that it was said mainly about Americans. In the election of Hassan Rohani as Iran’s president, we are watching the point being demonstrated again by someone who has demonstrated it before.

Who is Mr. Rohani? If all you did over the weekend was read headlines, you would have gleaned that he is a “moderate” (Financial Times), a “pragmatic victor” (New York Times) and a “reformist” (Bloomberg). Reading a little further, you would also learn that his election is being welcomed by the White House as a “potentially hopeful sign” that Iran is ready to strike a nuclear bargain.

All this for a man who, as my colleague Sohrab Ahmari noted in these pages Monday, called on the regime’s basij militia to suppress the student protests of July 1999 “mercilessly and monumentally.” More than a dozen students were killed in those protests, more than 1,000 were arrested, hundreds were tortured, and 70 simply “disappeared.” In 2004 Mr. Rohani defended Iran’s human-rights record, insisting there was “not one person in prison in Iran except when there is a judgment by a judge following a trial.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/jun/18/the-social-cost-of-breathing/ The key to success in business is making products that beat the competition. Government just makes rules, and drives up costs for competitors. Despite President Obama’s happy talk about the nation having achieved the highest proportion of domestic oil and gas production in 20 years, his administration is tipping the scale further in favor […]

While Russia has been INCREASING and revitalizing its conventional and nuclear arsenal, the U.S. has been drastically SHRINKING theirs.

America’s armed forces have been reduced, the Navy shrunk from 600 ships to 286, the Air Force from 37 combat wings to 20 and the Army from 17 divisions to 10. Plus, Obama has NOT supported key anti-ballistic missile defense systems and pursued a course of nuclear arms reduction. Aging and obsolete conventional weapons have not been replaced.
Meanwhile, Russia is adding 153,000 soldiers and will conduct 500 drills within the next few months. Russians have been training for pre-emptive nuclear strikes and engaging in “snap drills” of massive size and scope without prior notice. One such drill involved Space Defense forces, long-range aviation, air and anti-missile defence forces and 8,700 personnel! Russian has announced that it will resume nuclear submarine patrols and expand its reach into international waters…….JANET LEVY, L.A.
USAGOVPOLICY.COM

Russia’s Long Hot Summer

Following a spring which saw the beginning of a draft that will add 153,000 conscripts into the Russian Armed Forces by mid July, the summer of 2013 will be among the most active ever for Moscow’s armed forces.

The Russian Defense Ministry reports that Moscow’s military will conduct no less than 500 drills within the next several months. The Jamestown Foundationreports that in September, “Russia and Belarus will stage a joint military exercise on Belarus territory, allegedly to rehearse a defense against a Polish attack on the country.” A similar exercise held in 2009 included training for a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Poland.

A number of worrisome “Snap Drills” have taken place in recent months, in which Russian forces engage in war-footing maneuvers without prior warning. The Voice of Russiareports that in May, a snap drill involving Space Defense forces, long-range and transport aviation, an combined air and anti-missile defense forces in Russia’s Western District took place. 8,700 personnel were involved. Russia’s own emphasis on anti-missile defense renders Moscow’s objections to the U.S. ABM system rather odd.

Those maneuvers followed the March snap drill exercises in the Black Sea. The Jamestown Foundation described the exercise:

“At 4 a.m. on March 28, President Vladimir Putin delivered a sealed letter to Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ordering him to launch at once unscheduled maneuvers involving not just the Black Sea Fleet but air and airborne forces and the Army… They were not the only such maneuvers conducted at this time, only the most prominent ones. In conjunction with these latest surprise military exercises, the Strategic Missile Command conducted an impromptu check of missile troops in Tver Oblast, and Russia also carried out exercises for Long-Range Aviation forces in the Saratov region (Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation, March 30; Interfax, March 29). Simultaneously, Russia’s fleet in the South China Sea also conducted a live-fire exercise (Interfax-AVN, March 28). the exercise also consisted of a coastal landing operation in the Caucasus where the fleet, helicopters, and fighter and reconnaissance aircraft supported the marines landing ashore (Interfax-AVN Online, March 29).

http://nsroundtable.org/index.php/straight-talk/our-new-moderate-hardliner/ If I hear words like “moderate” or “reformist” associated with the name Hassan Rouhani one more time, I will literally and figuratively bust a gut! Today’s newspapers are replete with articles, analyses, editorials and commentary on Iran’s new president-elect, cleric Hassan Rouhani. You can read about his background – including that he was lead […]

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-207_162-57589675/barbra-streisand-slams-treatment-of-women-in-israel/ AT LEAST SHE DOES NOT BOW TO THE PRESSURE OF THE BDS MOVEMENT ….RSK Barbra Streisand waded into one of Israel’s touchiest issues during the first major stop on her tour of the country — Jewish religious practices that separate men and women. Speaking at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem on Monday, she took […]