RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Down the lanes of August – and the bees upon the wing,All the world’s in color now, and all the song birds sing.Never reds will redder be, more golden be the gold,Down the lanes of August, and the summer getting old.”

“Down the Lanes of August” – 1923 Edgar Albert Guest (1881-1951)

Financial markets dominated the month. Puerto Rico defaulted on a bond payment, marking the first time a U.S. commonwealth had done so. In seven business days the Shanghai Index lost 27% of its value, or about $1.5 trillion. In six days, U.S. stocks fell 11%, costing investors around $2.8 trillion. Markets in other parts of the world shared similar fates. The VIX, a measurement of volatility that had spent much of the year in the mid to high teens, spiked to 40.74 on the 24th, the day the DJIA was down 3.6%. Another measure of volatility looks at the closing price of the DJIA versus the previous day. On only three occasions in the preceding four months did the index close up or down more than 1.5%. In August, that happened five times. Volatility is disquieting, but provides opportunities for traders. Investors should ride out churning seas.

The media made much of the point moves in the Dow Jones, while paying less attention to the less dramatic percent changes. Certainly, those few days were enough to wake a complacent investor from his August slumber, but they didn’t come close to setting records. Yes, the 588 points in the DJIA lost on August 24th exceeded the 508 points lost on October 19th, 1987, but to be equivalent the Dow Jones would have had to have lost 3,700 points!

Jerrold Nadler, New York Congressman, Endorses Iran Nuclear Deal-http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/22/nyregion/jerrold-nadler-new-york-congressman-to-endorse-iran-nuclear-deal.html?_r=0

THIS IS FROM HIS CAMPAIGN SITE IN 2014…..WHAT A HYPOCRITE…..DESERVES TO LOSE IN 2016

FOREIGN POLICY/MIDDLE EAST

“He greatly values the unshakeable bond between the U.S. and Israel and supports U.S. efforts to promote safety, security and prosperity there. And he has long believed that the U.S. has an important and unique role to play in the peace process. The Jewish Press wrote that Jerry “is a consistent and lifelong supporter of Israel, as well as a strong community activist in both the Jewish and general community.”
While Israel and her neighbors struggle to find peace, there is a disturbing trend of growing anti-Semitism around the world. This blind and irrational hatred of the Jewish people rears its ugly head not only in Arab nations that do not support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, but in other countries as well, particularly in parts of Europe. Jerry believes that it is vitally important to work against the scourge of anti-Semitism around the world. As such, he has spearheaded a number of efforts to use congressional power and influence to do just that.
One of his signature achievements in this regard was, on the heels of the infamous 2001 UN Conference Against Racism in Durban, successfully persuading the Ford Foundation to issue new funding guidelines, to immediately cease funding of groups that promote “bigotry, hatred or the destruction of any state,” and to strengthen its approach to oversight of grant-making. These efforts have played a major role in catalyzing the philanthropic sector generally to become a strong partner in combating global anti-Semitism and anti-Israel hatred.”

New e-mails released from Hillary Clinton’s private e-mail account by the State Department late on Monday show that the then–secretary of state was furious over the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, blaming mysterious “forces” for orchestrating the January 2010 ruling and plotting with shadow adviser Sidney Blumenthal about ways to overturn it.

Two days after the Court’s January 21, 2010, decision — which cited the First Amendment in its decision to overturn aspects of campaign-finance laws that restricted the political spending of organizations — Blumenthal forwarded to Clinton an article from the Center for Public Integrity. The piece postulated that the new ruling would allow foreign leaders to sway American elections through donations from U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies.

“This is unbelievable,” Clinton replied to Blumenthal. “Or maybe totally so given the forces at work.” She gave no further hint as to what “forces” she was referring to.

Conservative luminaries have been warning that Donald Trump poses a threat to the Republican party and to the political future of conservativism. Charles Krauthammer has called him “political poison.” Fred Barnes says Trump has “made the GOP’s future dicey.” George Will thunders characteristically that “every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency.”

All this may be true. Trump is indeed a braggart who goes out of his way to antagonize people — not a winning approach in electoral politics. And he’s shown little real commitment to conservative principles — or principles of any other kind, for that matter.

But Trump is not the long-term problem faced by the Right. Ramesh Ponnuru’s assurance regarding Trump that “this too shall pass” may be underestimating Trump’s staying power, but at some point he will pass.

But if mass legal immigration is permitted to continue, the Right is finished regardless of what Trump does or says.

ew e-mails from Hillary Clinton’s private server released late Monday night by the State Department reveal the increasingly nasty tone and tactics deployed by her shadow adviser, Sidney Blumenthal, with the close Clinton confidant blasting Obama senior adviser David Axelrod, savaging Republican leader John Boehner, and suggesting ways to impeach African-American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Though President Obama banned Clinton from bringing Blumenthal into her State Department coterie, the latest tranche of private e-mails from 2010 released Monday by the department illustrates the extent to which Clinton relied on Blumenthal for political and diplomatic advice. From the conflict in Northern Ireland to Israel to the U.S. midterm elections, Blumenthal was intimately involved in some of the most sensitive topics that crossed Clinton’s desk that year.

The former prosecutor who let Petraeus slide weighs in on the e-mail scandal.

Well, well, well: The Obama-appointed prosecutor who gave Obama’s former CIA director a sweetheart plea deal when he was caught mishandling classified information now says there’s no case against Obama’s former secretary of state for mishandling classified information. How very persuasive.

Oh, and did I mention that the Obama-appointed prosecutor is a donor to the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign?

In what appears to be an audition for attorney general in a hoped-for Clinton II administration, Anne M. Tompkins, the former U.S. attorney for the western district of North Carolina (appointed by President Obama in 2010), has penned an op-ed for USA Today arguing that Hillary Clinton is not guilty of “knowingly sending or receiving classified materials improperly.”

Understand: Ms. Tompkins has had nothing to do with the FBI’s investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s handling of classified information through an unauthorized private e-mail system. She is not privy to the evidence the FBI is gathering — she knows no more about the case than anyone else who reads the papers. To exonerate Clinton, she relies on nothing other than her status as the government lawyer who oversaw the prosecution of David Petraeus.

The Petraeus case, she insists, was much stronger than the case — or at least what she frames as the case — against Hillary Clinton. She thus contends that there is “no merit” to the comparison between the Petraeus and Clinton situations offered in a Wall Street Journal op-ed by former Bush attorney general and top federal judge Michael Mukasey.

Trump is political street theater. If voters want a rant, they will get it from Trump. If they want solutions with substance they can get that from Ted Cruz, Rubio. Walker, Fiorina. ….rsk

Donald Trump has at least three things going for him.

One, the mood of the country remains foul and fed-up — and volatile to the point that conventional wisdom is hardly reliable. Two, Trump has turned invective and narcissism into an art form, and his simplistic putdowns seem to garner ever more attention even as they become more monotonous and banal — largely because they are directed at a despised media elite. Three, the Democratic party is in worse shape than the Republican party. Apparently Trump’s attacks can still safely be savored as long as the Democrats are imploding.

Trump’s successes have come about not because of a brilliant new Contract with America or because he is reassuringly conservative on the issues. His diehard supporters — and even those who would never confess that they derive a perverse and stealthy delight from watching him put down the New York/Washington political and journalistic elite — don’t care that just in the last decade he has flipped on all the issues. They apparently ignore the fact that Trump is often self-contradictory, as he wings his way through endless interviews and blustery press conferences.

Those putting party over country try to conceal their votes from the public.

Democratic senators supporting President Obama’s disastrous nuclear deal with Iran are cowards. They know that a majority of Americans oppose the deal. Thus, they are running for cover to avoid going on the record and voting against a resolution disapproving the deal. A filibuster to block a vote on the merits altogether is the Democratic Senate caucus’s preferred way out.

The White House is reportedly pushing the filibuster strategy even though Obama is virtually certain to have enough votes to sustain a veto of a resolution of disapproval passed by both houses of Congress. Two-thirds votes are required in both the House of Representatives and the Senate to override an Obama veto. But if Obama can get out of using his veto pen and expending political capital to sustain it, he is all too happy to hide behind the filibuster fig leaf.

So far only two Democratic senators have declared their opposition to the deal – New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, and New Jersey’s senior senator, Robert Menendez. Assuming they both would vote with the Republican majority to end a filibuster, four additional votes would be needed to reach the magic closure number of 60 and allow the resolution to proceed to a floor vote. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is doing what he can to corral enough support among his fellow Democrats to prevent the closure number from being reached.

Even black voters, Obama’s most enthusiastic base, split on the deal 39 to 38 percent.
Obama’s case for the Iran deal has gotten tangled up in his own lies. He’s claiming that the Iran deal will give Iran near zero breakout time to the bomb and that it will “permanently” stop it from developing a bomb. He claims that the deal is rigorous and yet we’ve learned that Iran will be doing at least some self-inspections.

The poll numbers for the deal keep getting worse. Some Democrats have done the responsible thing by coming out against the deal.

Obama’s associates have tried to portray opponents as Republicans, Iraq War supporters and chickenhawks, but as Senator Webb, a member of his own party, a Vietnam vet who was against the Iraq War, said, “I think it’s a bad deal and I’ve said so for several weeks now. I think we need to put country ahead of party.”

But Democrats refuse to do that. Instead they’re putting Obama over party. They’re even putting Obama over their own constituents, as Nadler did, betraying his voters who have made it very clear that they oppose the deal.

You can never be equal if you’re always angry and afraid. There is a war on black people.

You hear about it from powerless black men like Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Al Sharpton. Black people can hardly leave the house without being shot by a cop for no reason at all. That’s what you hear from the activists of #BlackLivesMatter who illustrate the point by blocking traffic, harassing white people in restaurants and shoving elderly Democratic presidential candidates… without getting shot.

Black racist activists and their white leftist allies like to talk up “White Fragility” which means that white people are used to sitting down for brunch without having fat black women yell in their faces about genocide. Or as the official definition would have it, white people are so insulated from critical dialogues about race that they get upset when those women, who are actually working on their PhDs in critical race theory, loudly accuse them of white supremacy.