RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street fan club keeps telling itself that she’d provide relief from the anti-growth Obama years. On the growing evidence of her policies, she’d be worse.”

Hillary Clinton’s march to the left continues, hitting a new milestone on Friday when she proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%—or the highest rate in decades.

Mrs. Clinton says she wants to overthrow “quarterly capitalism,” the supposed tendency of companies to be preoccupied with earnings reports and stock prices at the expense of investment that pays off over time. Yet her plan would undermine short-run shareholder goals and long-range economic growth.
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U.S. administration says full disclosure about program’s history isn’t critical to verify future commitments.

An Obama administration assessment of the Iran nuclear deal provided to Congress has led a number of lawmakers to conclude the U.S. and world powers will never get to the bottom of the country’s alleged efforts to build an atomic weapon, and that Tehran won’t be pressed to fully explain its past.

In a report to Capitol Hill last week, the administration said it was unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program, and that such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.

Details of the report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, indicate the deal reached this month could go ahead even if United Nations inspectors never ascertain conclusively whether Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program—something Tehran has repeatedly denied.

A little past midway through the second season of House of Cards, Episode 1, Chapter 14, Frank Underwood, ambitious politician and murderer, throws Zoe Barnes, the sluttish, amoral reporter who helped him move closer to the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency with her stories calculated to smear or destroy his rivals, not so much under the bus, as under an incoming DC Metro train. He does this just after persuading her to erase all evidence of contact with him from her iPhone. Barnes was also Underwood’s sometime mistress.

Earlier in the series, he tells a co-conspirator, Remy Danton, a former employee and now a weight-throwing lobbyist for an “evil” natural gas giant, that he disposes of people he is finished using if they threaten his climb up the political “food chain.” A while later, Freddy, the ribs specialist, tells him that his new ribs supplier uses what I recognized from his disapproving description of it as a version of the Muslim halal way of killing animals – letting them bleed to death first – instead of killing them quickly and cleanly. Freddy’s new supplier instead shoves a pipe down a pig’s throat.

The 60-day clock for congressional consideration of the Iran deal, otherwise ‎known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has barely begun to run, and the White House and its allies are ‎already in full sell-and-destroy mode. As details of the agreement are revealed, ‎including side agreements, the total collapse of our side’s negotiating position in ‎the last few weeks of the talks has become more apparent. This should be an easy ‎deal to reject on the merits. The promise of “anytime, anywhere” inspections ‎turned into 24-day advanced notice inspections. It was just rhetoric, claimed White ‎House adviser Ben Rhodes. We never meant it. Inspections at the Parchin facility, ‎where it is generally assumed military research and testing took place connected ‎with Iran’s nuclear program, will now consist of the International Atomic Energy Agency examining samples ‎provided by the Iranians.

The testimonials of more than 100 students from almost 50 colleges and universities in twenty states tell of “being intimidated, harassed or bullied as a Jewish and/or a pro-Israel student,” according to Student Voices(SV). A project of the AMCHA Initiative, which combats campus anti-Semitism, the data at SV spans the past year-and-a-half, and typically originates with student op-eds and articles from sympathetic media.

Although the majority of cited incidents involve Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), student government groups, and the BDS movement, several of the examples involve professors of Middle East studies, many of whom are themselves BDS activists and supporters.