RUTHFULLY YOURS

With Congress due to vote by Sept. 17 on the Iran nuclear deal, there’s a warning worth revisiting. It goes like this: The president is pushing a historic nuclear agreement, saying it will stop a terror-sponsoring tyranny from getting nuclear weapons. And up pipes the democratically elected leader of one of America’s closest allies, to say this nuclear deal is mortal folly. He warns that it is filled with concessions more likely to sustain and embolden the nuclear-weapons-seeking despotism than to disarm it.

This critic has more incentive than most to weigh the full implications of the deal, because his country is most immediately in harm’s way — though it has not been included in the nuclear talks. He notes that the nuclear negotiators have sidelined such glaring issues as human rights, and warns that Washington is naive, and the U.S. is allowing itself to be manipulated by a ruthless dictatorship.

No, the critic I’m referring to is not Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, though he has warned of precisely such dangers in the Iran nuclear deal. I am citing the warnings voiced 21 years ago by the then-President of South Korea, Kim Young Sam, as the Clinton administration bargained its way toward the 1994 nuclear deal with North Korea known as the Agreed Framework.

It’s a longstanding truism of international relations that “everyone knows” the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Yet today, after more than two decades of negotiations under several different Israeli, Palestinian, and American governments have repeatedly failed to produce the two-state agreement whose terms “everyone knows,” it is past time to put this false idea to rest. In fact, what the talks have shown is that even when there’s agreement on general principles, the remaining gaps are insurmountable—and often there isn’t even agreement on principles. What this means is that, for now and for the foreseeable future, a final peace is not achievable.

To most Israelis, this isn’t news. Repeated polls have confirmed that while a stable majority still favors a two-state solution, an even larger majority doesn’t believe an agreement can or will be signed anytime soon—or that the Palestinians are serious about reaching one.

In working through some of the 7,000 Hillary Clinton emails released by the State Department yesterday, I came across one curious one sent from aide Huma Abedin to the then-Secretary of State regarding a Koran-burning in the U.S.

Here is another intriguing email:

It is noteworthy that this message on a sensitive subject — presumably about a meeting between then-Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Sec. of State Clinton on weapons collections in Libya — would be left unredacted, while many other emails in the Clinton trove are redacted in toto.

Arizona Congressman Matt Salmon is in hot water with parents over a civics lesson he gave to second- and third-graders last week. The parents are objecting to the congressman’s presentation where he mentioned Palestinian child suicide bombers and nuclear weapons.

CBS5:

Several parents are demanding answers from Congressman Matt Salmon, saying they cannot believe what the lawmaker said to young school children during a visit to a Gilbert school.

“It should have probably just been a good civics lesson for kids who initially were excited to meet their congressman,” parent Scott Campbell said.

That excitement, however, turned into fear.

That fear, according to Campbell, was spawned by something Salmon said during a presentation he made Thursday about how bills become laws. The audience? Second- and third-graders at San Tan Charter School.

Campbell said the lesson took a dark turn when it came time to talk about vetoes.

Hillary Clinton’s defense that the emails she received were not “marked” as classified is great news for anyone accused of any crime with email evidence.

For example, Jared Fogle of Indianapolis may reopen his child porn case, and defend himself by saying he didn’t know the photos he received via email were child porn since they were not marked as “child porn.”

The IRS may have to adopt different enforcement policies, since they could no longer use anything not marked as “taxable income” as income. The IRS should soon come out with new regulations backing up this idea. Those paid by cash or who work as independent contractors would no longer have to declare any of this as taxable income, since it is not “marked” as taxable income. How were they to know?

Those who violate the 1996 Immigration Act and hire illegal immigrants can defend themselves by saying that the illegal immigrants’ job applications did not mark them as “illegal” or “undocumented” immigrants.

Yusef is a five-year-old United States citizen. His parents aren’t U.S. citizens. He speaks no English. He doesn’t dress or act like an American. He doesn’t remember America.

Abdul is Yusef’s brother and also a U.S. citizen. He understands very little English. He speaks, reads, and writes in Arabic. At age 14, he obsesses about football, but not American football. He has no memories of Georgia.

Around 1999, their father attended Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia on a student visa. Abdul was born while the family lived in Georgia. Nine years later, on a short ‘visit’ to the U.S., Yusef was born.

Yemen is the only home the boys know. Yemen is the center of their national identity, interest, and memories. Although born to Yemeni parents — with no loyalty or ties to the United States – both boys became U.S. citizens.

If you are bent on re-making society, first change or undermine long-held norms and values. Under a transforming officialdom, and with the police enlisted to serve as The Guardian’s paramilitary auxiliaries, the very concept of respectability is decried as “middle-class privilege”, a stigma in and of itself.
(editor’s note: Below, the edited text of an address by John O’Sullivan, editor of Quadrant, to the Samuel Griffiths Society)

As science has established, the human brain starts working from birth and continues doing so right up to when someone rises to make a public speech. But I look forward, having survived tonight, to enjoying the debates of tomorrow without reserve. Those debates are very necessary—if sadly so. In all the nations of the Anglosphere, with the partial exception of the United States, law was, until recently, a political battleground mainly at the stages of electoral debate and parliamentary law-making. There was usually a general understanding that decisions of the court that made law, rather than merely interpreting it, could be reversed by the legislature. And the legislature’s decision, like that of the editor, was final.

All that has changed in recent years with the Human Rights Act in the UK, the Mabo decision in Australia, and the growing power of Supreme Courts in Canada (where the Court recently rejected the government’s nominee on grounds that seem constitutionally dubious and politically biased) and in the United States (where the Court has taken to discerning constitutional rights founded solely in the musing of its members on the meaning of life.) In the great majority of these decisions, the political direction of change has been leftwards, and their political content has been supplied in great measure from ideas and values floating in the cultural atmosphere. That cultural atmosphere is not drawn, however, from the beliefs of the whole of society, or even of a majority of its citizens, but as the late Robert Bork used to complain, from the mindset of the academic-media-philanthropy complex that has metastasized since the Sixties and replaced the military-industrial complex as the dominant ideological force in political life throughout the Anglosphere.

Stocks took another tumble on Tuesday on a weak manufacturing report out of China, and investor shivers about Japan, the oil patch and the U.S. are increasing. The shaky markets and underlying economy seem relevant to the presidential debate—yet the front-runners of both parties have next to no pro-growth ideas to contribute.

Hillary Clinton favors higher taxation, heavier regulation, more political shackling of business, and centralizing more economic control inside the White House. So does Donald Trump—at least as far as we can tell.

Mrs. Clinton is promising Obamanomics Plus: continue the agenda of the last eight years, with bonus corrections toward the left as necessary. She’s proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on some capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, for example, up from 15% as recently as 2012.

On energy, one of the few U.S. growth areas of the Obama era, she is even further to the left. The green elites used to tolerate support for the U.S. oil and natural gas boom if gas could be levered as a transition fuel toward a post-carbon future. Now they favor massive subsidies for wind and solar today and no fossil-fuel drilling, and Mrs. Clinton is moving their way.

This column is correct but McCain is a cheerleader for the global warming groupies and together with another faux conservative, Joe Lieberman he sponsored “The Climate Stewardship Acts” whose aim was to set “mandatory cap and trade system for greenhouse gases, as a response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change.” Fortunately, the act failed to gain enough votes to pass through the senate.In April 2007, McCain called global warming “a serious and urgent economic, environmental and national security challenge.” rsk

Obama focuses on global warming while Putin’s neo-imperialist dreams continue to spread north.

President Obama is on a three-day visit to Alaska that will include a stop north of the Arctic Circle. The focus of his trip is climate change. Some of my Senate colleagues and I recently returned from the Arctic, and while we saw the challenges of melting polar ice, we also saw a greater and more immediate threat. It is a menace that many assumed was relegated to the past: an aggressive, militarily capable Russian state that is ruled by an anti-American autocrat, hostile to our interests, dismissive of our values, and seeking to challenge the international order that U.S. leaders of both parties have maintained for seven decades.

Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperial ambitions are clear enough in his attempt to dominate Russia’s neighbors, Ukraine most of all. But his ambitions increasingly extend to the Arctic and Europe’s northern flank. That is where I and my colleagues met with leaders and security officials from Norway, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Lowering ozone—from cars, trucks, factories and power plants—in the name of an imaginary health benefit.

This fall the Environmental Protection Agency plans to take its next grand regulatory step, following the announcement of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan over the summer. The agency is likely to introduce stringent new standards for ground-level ozone, arguing that a lower allowable level of ozone—an important component of smog—will reduce asthma in the U.S., among other claimed health benefits. Yet the EPA ignores decades of data and studies, some under the agency’s auspices, that reveal no detectable causal relation between past reductions in ozone and better public health, including reductions in asthma cases.