RUTHFULLY YOURS

On Tuesday, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius hailed Obama’s “enormous victory” on the Iran nuclear deal. To be sure, Obama’s victory was not against Iran. It was against Netanyahu.
Trading horses with Putin This week US President Barack Obama informed Jewish leaders that he plans to meet with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on November 9.

Yawn.

After 42 Democratic senators spent September 11 blocking their Senate colleagues from voting on Obama’s nuclear deal with the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, the time has come to stop trying to influence the Obama administration’s policy toward Iran specifically and toward the Middle East in general. It’s a sucker’s game.

Obama’s supporters like to argue that the administration’s rupture with Israel over the Iran deal is nothing more than a difference of opinion about how best to deal with a problem that both sides wish to solve. But this is not the case.

It is great news that Fiorina has caught up and perhaps overtaken Donald Trump. She is a good debater, poised, intelligent and in command of facts. Kind of reminds me of the Hillary Clinton who debated Barack Obama in 2008 who was poised, intelligent and in command of facts.

Beware of crowning victors. Fiorina’s record…the real story….will be parsed as will Hillary’s “accomplishments” at the State Department. Both ladies (does one dare use gender terms?) lost elections to rather sketchy and liberal democrats with meager accomplishments. Hillary to Obama and Fiorina to intelligence challenged Senator Barbara Boxer.

Both have had policy opinions that have “evolved” over the years…..on immigration, supreme court appointments, Iran after 9/11…etc.etc.etc. Is Fiorina the real “non Clinton” everybody wants?

Stay tuned….rsk

Sol Sanders, my friend, has done it all, as correspondent, commentator, writer, and observer. He is unique. During our decades long friendship he introduced me to Hibachi food during marathon lunches where he recounted places he has been and people he has met. He once introduced me to Jonas Malheiro Savimbi a charismatic Angolan political and military leader who founded and led the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola. It was at a small breakfast party in an Upper East Side apartment where Savimbi charmed us, all the while carrying a barely concealed little revolver. Sol has known rogues and heroes and spies. It is all in his new book.

In wonderful prose Sol takes us behind the scenes of the seminal events of the last century- the Cold War, China, Vietnam and the leaders and spoilers owho shaped policy. Read it!.

Satan in the modern world — that’s why Michael Walsh wrote The Devil’s Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West. Is Critical Theory that bad? Hear him out in an interview with National Review Online. — KJL

Kathryn Jean Lopez: “When reason sleeps, monsters follow.” How best to keep the lights on?

Michael Walsh: By reading further into what Goya meant by his famous work of art: “Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters: United with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels.” Human beings are attracted to both the dark and the light; the trick is not to lose yourself in darkness.

Lopez: “It is the thesis of this book that the heroic narrative is not simply our way of telling ourselves comforting fairy tales about the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil, but an implanted moral compass that guides even the least religious among us.” How can that be so? How can that be reclaimed/renewed/reestablished?

Walsh: Art, as I argue in these pages, is the gift from God, the sole true medium of truth. The 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel famously declared that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,” meaning that in growing from embryo to adult, the individual organism goes through stages that mimic the evolutionary stages of the species. But perhaps it is, in an artistic and religious sense, precisely the opposite: It is phylogeny that recapitulates ontogeny. The evolutionary development of the species — its teleology — was adumbrated in the first moment of life. Think of art, therefore, as the Big Bang Theory applied to the soul instead of the body; by imagining the creative process in reverse, we can approach the instant of our origins and then beyond.

The World’s Scientists, In Their Own Words, On Michael E Mann, His Hockey Stick And Their Damage To Science
Volume I Compiled and edited by Mark Steyn, with illustrations by Josh

Do I expect you to publicly denounce the hockey stick as obvious drivel? Well, yes.
Jonathan Jones, Professor of Atomic and Laser Physics, University of Oxford

Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred …because the scientific assessments in which they may take part are not credible anymore.
Eduardo Zorita, Senior Scientist at Germany’s Institute for Coastal Research

Did Mann et al get it wrong? Yes, Mann et al got it wrong.
Simon Tett, Professor of Climate Science, University of Edinburgh

The defamation suit against Steyn by Michael E Mann, inventor of the global-warming “hockey stick”, is about to enter its fourth year at the DC Superior Court – which means Mark has a lot of case research lying around and he can’t wait forever for the trial to start. So he figured he’d put some of it in a new book, now available from SteynOnline.

In the fall of 2014, not a single amicus brief was filed on Dr Mann’s behalf, not one. He claims he’s “taking a stand for science”, but evidently science is disinclined to take a stand for him.

That got Mark curious as to what actual scientists think of Mann, his famous hockey stick, and his other work. So he started looking – and the result is a rollicking collection of insights into Big Climate’s chief enforcer by scientists from around the world, from Harvard to Helsinki, Prague to Princeton, with commentary from Steyn telling the story of the rise to global celebrity of one Mann and his stick.

Obama rolls out the red carpet for a racist, pro-cop-killing movement.

The Obama White House rolled out the red carpet this week for leaders of the racist revolutionary Black Lives Matter movement, providing yet more confirmation that the Obama administration supports its members’ increasingly violent activism.

News of the meeting comes after a Southern police chief was given the boot for posting a note critical of Black Lives Matter and of President Obama’s incessant race-baiting.

Black Lives Matter is animated not only by anti-white racism but by a hatred of normal American values, including law and order. Its members denounce the U.S. for imagined institutional racism and discrimination against African-Americans. Members idolize convicted, unrepentant cop-killers Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu Jamal, both of whom are black, and have declared “war” on law enforcement. Its members openly call for police officers to be assassinated.

Black Lives Matter activist Joseph Thomas Johnson-Shanks, a 25-year-old black man, murdered 31-year-old white Kentucky State Trooper Joseph Cameron Ponder last Sunday night. Johnson-Shanks apparently committed suicide-by-cop when troopers caught up with him the next morning. The convicted felon pointed a gun at police and they shot him in self-defense.

Presidential hopeful and former Hewlett-Packard HPQ -3.70% CEO Carly Fiorina has built her entire campaign around the fact that she comes from the business world, not politics.

“A fish swims in water, it doesn’t know it’s water. It’s not that politicians are bad people, it’s that they’ve been in that system forever,” she said at Wednesday night’s second debate among Republican candidates for the 2016 Presidential Election.

The line was consistent with Fiorina’s pitch to voters as a no-nonsense executive who knows how to revitalize the U.S. economy, but to hear one of her chief Republican rivals tell it, the business track record she leans on isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

“Hewlett-Packard was a disaster. Lucent, the company she was at before Hewlett-Packard, was a disaster. These were two disastrous reigns,” said Donald Trump in an interview with CBS’ Face The Nation.

For all Trump’s bluster on the campaign trail, he has a point here. Under Fiorina’s reign at HP shareholders took a beating. During her tenure, HP shares lost 42% while the broader market slid just 6%. The day she was fired in February 2005, the stock popped 7%.

Nobody thinks Hillary Clinton’s email controversy is funny, which is why her past attempts to make jokes about the issue have fallen flat. But the Democrat presidential hopeful doesn’t seem to have learned from her past stumbles.

She laughed derisively when asked on CNN to respond to recent comments made by Governor Chris Christie regarding her problematic email arrangement.

At the GOP debate last night, Governor Christie, a former federal prosecutor, took aim at Hillary’s email problem, saying: “The question is, who’s going to prosecute Hillary Clinton? The Obama White House seems to have no interest. The Justice Department seems to have no interest. I think it’s time to put a former federal prosecutor on the same stage with Hillary Clinton, and I will prosecute her during those debates on that stage. She knows she’s wrong, and she cannot look in the mirror at herself and she cannot tell the American people the truth.”

Mr. Malpass is president of Encima Global LLC. He served as deputy assistant Treasury secretary in the Reagan administration and deputy assistant secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration.

So the economy isn’t ready to withstand a quarter-point rate hike even after seven years of stimulus?
Like Lucy in the classic “Peanuts” comic strip, the Federal Reserve Thursday invited a running kick of the football—the first interest-rate hike in nine years—only to pull back at the last minute. The Fed cited recent “global economic and financial developments,” i.e., China’s stock-market woes, which “may restrain economic activity somewhat and are likely to put further downward pressure on inflation in the near term.”

Financial circles in New York and Washington are celebrating, but the latest delay in tapering off the Fed’s near-zero interest rate policy risks plopping the economy, like the hapless Charlie Brown, flat on its derrière. While Wall Street applauds, uncertainty about future rate increases will likely keep business investment weak.

The economy is stuck in a zero-rate trap in which businesses don’t want to invest when they don’t know the impact of a rate hike, while the Fed thinks a rate hike would shake financial markets and hurt investment. Underinvestment leaves high cash balances at big corporations, but it is idle liquidity and doesn’t add to productivity.

The 2016 presidential race has been notable for its surprises, and Wednesday night’s debate at the Reagan library in California may reshuffle the candidate polling order again. Our guess is that Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio helped themselves the most in a race that will see many more turns before a nominee is chosen.

Ms. Fiorina made it to the big debate stage for the first time and didn’t waste the opportunity. The former Hewlett-Packard CEO showed off her policy chops and skill in delivering a message. She does her homework.

She notably outshone the other two “outsiders” who haven’t held elected office— Donald Trump and Ben Carson. The retired pediatric neurosurgeon can be endearing but he suffered from vagueness and looked smaller than he did in the first debate. Mr. Trump was full of his usual bluster and bragging but seemed out of his depth when the debate turned toward specifics.