RUTHFULLY YOURS

The success of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate has to be getting under the skin of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.

“He led the largest city in the country as it prospered for a dozen years, and to see this guy who is all talk seize control of the apple cart is galling to him,” a Bloomberg friend told me this week. Maybe that explains why Ian Bremmer, a Time magazine columnist and president of the consulting firm Eurasia Group, issued the following tweet Saturday: “Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering independent run.” His words have since ricocheted everywhere in retweets and made the Drudge Report.

But how serious is this boomlet? The climate for an independent in the race is favorable. For years, politicos have talked of Bloomberg as a potential White House contender who would resonate with an alienated electorate that wants to end government gridlock. More than 70 percent of voters think the country is on the wrong track, with both the Democratic president and the GOP Congress unpopular. The upcoming election could feature major-party candidates who have negatives of above 40 percent with voters. A dynastic race between Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton would leave many voters aching for fresh faces.

Bloomberg has been officially silent about any possible interest in the White House, spending his time managing his media company and a foundation that promotes his mix of socially liberal and fiscally conservative ideas. But he has fans in both parties. Last month, Rupert Murdoch, the media mogul who runs Fox News, called on Bloomberg to run, saying “it’s time” for him “to step in the ring.” New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin reported in June that New York Democrats disgruntled with Hillary Clinton were urging him to run.

With polls showing that a majority of Americans believe that she is lying, Hillary Clinton has been more aggressive in addressing questions about her private e-mail server. But with each new appearance, more questions are raised than answered. Her latest interview with Meet the Press’s Chuck Todd is no exception.

For months, Mrs. Clinton has insisted that she, and she alone, had the power to determine whether her e-mails were required to be preserved as federal records. In her initial press conference at the United Nations in March, she explained that “for any government employee, it is that government employee’s responsibility to determine what’s personal and what’s work-related.” Her campaign website reinforces that contention, arguing that the “Federal Records Act puts the obligation on the government official to determine what is and is not a federal record.” And the Department of Justice recently told a federal judge the same thing: “Under policies issued both by the National Archives and Records Administration and the State Department, individual officers and employees are permitted and expected to exercise judgment to determine what constitutes a federal record.”

American interfaith groups are being infiltrated and undermined by the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliate, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). In their eagerness to find Muslim faith partners whom they want to believe share their values of religious tolerance and mutual respect, Jewish interfaith leaders allow themselves to be exploited. Under the guise of interfaith dialogue, Islamist organizations like ISNA that have ties to extremism, insinuate themselves into faith organizations while advancing their hidden agendas. Faith leaders who disregard ISNA’s ulterior motives place their congregations at risk.

In its June 2015 ruling in favor of Samantha Elauf, a Muslim woman who was denied employment for wearing a headscarf, the Supreme Court reaffirmed the American judiciary’s prohibition on workplace discrimination based upon religious practice. In the American melting pot, there are benefits to all faiths that successfully negotiate societal challenges between the secular and the religious, but these benefits are only guaranteed by a legal system that upholds a universal human rights standard. Blind spots in the interfaith movement, however, undermine common cause when religious leaders pursue interfaith outreach at any cost.

One such example was described in an article in a Jewish community paper written by a participant in a Christian/Jewish interfaith partnership with the Muslim organization, the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). The current head of ISNA’s interfaith relations, Dr. Sayyid M. Syeed, a sociolinguist by training, is a founder and former executive of ISNA. At the invitation of its rabbi, Nancy Fuchs Kreimer, Syeed met with faith leaders of various denominations, professors of religion, and “interested citizens” at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) in suburban Philadelphia. The rabbi presented Syeed “to guide our thinking about these issues.” Rabbi Kreimer is founding director of the Multifaith Studies Department of the RRC, the seminary of a branch of Judaism on the left side of the political spectrum and self-described as liberal progressive.

Come on. What do you people want from Hillary anyway? She’s been as transparent as possible… for a Clinton.

Speaking with NBC’s Chuck Todd on “Meet the Press,” Clinton said, “Look, I think I have done all that I can to take responsibility, to be as transparent as possible in turning over 55,000 pages in turning over my server.”

Hillary Clinton’s version of “as transparent as possible” involved

1. Setting up a private email server controlled by her and routing her government work through it

2. Claimed to have deleted all her emails and then turned over tens of thousands of print outs of emails while leaving out crucial emails. “Finally, in December, dozens of boxes filled with 50,000 pages of printed emails from Mrs. Clinton’s personal account were delivered to the State Department.”

3. Refused to answer if she wiped her server

4. Attempted to dodge FBI and State Department investigations

5. Lied about the time she began using the email

Today it’s Osama bin Laden’s aide; tomorrow it could very well be the Blind Sheikh.

​The Obama administration quietly shipped Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard back to the Wahhabist Kingdom of Saudi Arabia last week despite warnings that the Muslim terrorist remains a serious threat to the United States.

The newly released terrorist detainee is Abdul Shalabi, 39, who trained to be the 20th hijacker for the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Shalabi was set free even though military officials deemed him too dangerous to be unleashed on the world and too valuable as an intelligence asset to be released from U.S. custody.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said last week that the liberation of Shalabi, whom he referred to as a “dangerous detainee,” is “another example of President Obama playing politics with national security and putting campaign promises ahead of U.S. national security interests.” Shuttering the terrorist detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba has long been a goal of President Obama, going back at least to the campaign trail in 2008.

For an architect whose abstract ideas were, he assured us, very so important, he wasn’t much of a thinker. His notions were to real thought what doggerel is to genuine poetry — a catalogue of inaccuracy, looseness, laziness and mendacity, all covered in a thick sauce of arrogant self-confidence.
French fascism is alive and well, and its current headquarters (as I write this) are not in the offices of the Front National but, appropriately enough, in the ugliest building in the world in the most beautiful capital city in the world, the Centre Pompidou in Paris. It is here that has been held the completely uncritical exhibition to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Le Corbusier, the fascist architect, under the title Le Corbusier, Mesures de l’homme.

Not a word about his fascism has been allowed to obtrude on the almost religiously respectful thoughts and impressions of the visitors who troop through the exhibition with solemn or pious expressions on their faces, as if regarding something holy, though what is exhibited is often so extremely bad and incompetent in execution that it should evoke derision and laughter rather than the abject mental genuflection that it does in fact evoke. People, especially in France, have long been cowed into veneration by decades of propaganda to the effect that Le Corbusier was a great, possibly the greatest, architect, and that any revulsion from, let along mockery of, his work would reveal their own lack of understanding. It is certainly true that Le Corbusier was a master: but a master of propaganda and self-promotion in a credulous age, not a master of architecture.

Not long before Xi Jinping’s state visit to Washington last week, the Obama Administration leaked that it might sanction Chinese companies and individuals for digitally plundering U.S. trade secrets and intellectual property. That followed an April executive order that declared “significant malicious cyber-enabled activities” to be a “national emergency” punishable by visa bans, asset freezes and other means.

“We’re not going to just stand by while these threats grow,” one Administration official told the Washington Post at the time. “If you think you can just hide behind borders and leap laws and carry out your activities, that’s just not going to be the case.”

Bill Clinton Blames — Wait for It — the GOP for Hillary’s Email Woes By Rick Moran

The Clintons are, if nothing else, predictable when it comes to defending themselves against scandals.

It’s never their fault and the press always blows whatever it is they’ve done way out of proportion.

So is anyone surprised when Bill Clinton blames Republicans and the press for Hillary’s own actions in using a private server to store classified information?

Politico:

In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria to be aired Sunday, Clinton said of the former first lady and Secretary of State, “The other party doesn’t want to run against her. And if they do, they’d like her as mangled up as possible.”

He likened the controversy over Hillary’s Clinton’s State Department emails to the Whitewater scandal that dogged his own campaign in 1992, in an anecdote about how George H.W. Bush officials contacted him saying, “The press has to have someone every election. We’re going to give them you. You better not run.”

This time it’s a seal dating back three thousand years to the time of King David. This latest archaeological find in Jerusalem [1] was made by a ten-year-old boy, a volunteer for the Temple Mount Sifting Project, which sifts through thousands of tons of earth that was illegally removed from the Temple Mount by the Muslim Wakf in 1999.

Archaeologist Gabriel Barkay says this find is “particularly significant” because it originated on the mount itself and “testifies to the administrative activity [that took place there] during those times.” It joins a growing body of evidence—including finds from the Ophel [2] and City of David [3] excavations—that biblical accounts of ancient Jerusalem are accurate.

Unfortunately the news these days from the Temple Mount and its environs doesn’t only concern archaeological finds. The Israeli security cabinet has had to announce stepped-up measures [4] to combat weeks of raging violence on the mount and in parts of Jerusalem.

Toward Ann Coulter I had always taken a “suffer little children to come unto me” attitude. Not that she ever came on to me or anything. It’s just that she’s a kid. She was born in 1961. I’ve got skinny Brooks Brothers neckties in the back of my closet older than that.
Ann Coulter grew up during the “I-was-conservative-after-conservatism-was-cool” era, helping found the Cornell Review in the early 1980s. She’s noisy and she gives me a headache. But kids are, and kids do. I have several.
She’s from Connecticut and is very upset about immigrants. I am willing to lend a sympathetic ear to people from Connecticut who are very upset about immigrants, if they have a tribal casino.
And I forgive her for supporting Donald Trump. Kids do that stuff. My 17-year-old daughter has wheedled the car keys and right now is out probably behaving at least as stupidly.
Other than that I’ve been, I suppose, to the extent I’ve paid attention, on the same political page as Ann Coulter. Well, in the same political book, several chapters further on, under the subhead “Grumpy Old Farts and the Libertarian/Neocon Conundrum.”