RUTHFULLY YOURS

Despite losing the Oregon primary while barely eking out a win in Kentucky, Hillary Clinton emerged with 51 of Tuesday’s delegates to Bernie Sanders’s 55. To reach the 2,383 needed for the nomination, Mrs. Clinton now needs only 92 of either the 890 still-to-be-elected delegates or the 148 still-unpledged superdelegates. This is because she is already supported by 524 superdelegates—the Democratic Party’s unelected overclass—to Mr. Sanders’s 40.

Still, she must be concerned about losing the FBI primary. If the bureau recommends that the Justice Department indict Mrs. Clinton or close aides like Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin or Jake Sullivan for acting with gross negligence—disregard of known or easily anticipated risks—in sending classified information over a private email server, the campaign could be completely scrambled.

The FBI may not recommend indictments, or the Justice Department could refuse to issue them. The latter could result in high-profile resignations like those in 1973 with the Watergate “Saturday Night Massacre,” when several top Nixon officials were fired or resigned. Only this time, the turmoil would be covered on cable TV and in high-def.

If there are indictments, Team Clinton will dismiss them as an overreaction to unintentional, minor mistakes and try pushing on through. But that may be unacceptable to the party’s hierarchy, especially if indictments occur before the Democratic convention in Philadelphia opens July 25.

The party establishment might balk at having the ticket led by someone mired in a national-security scandal or by Mr. Sanders, a socialist and independent who has never before sought election as a Democrat or attended a state or national convention.

Instead, the party establishment might move to replace Mrs. Clinton with Vice President Joe Biden, a sentimental favorite, or Secretary of State John Kerry, whom many in the party’s leadership think more substantive, less prone to gaffes and, because of his 2004 loss against President George W. Bush, more deserving.

The legally unbound superdelegates hold the balance of power. Neither Mrs. Clinton nor Mr. Sanders can get the nomination without their votes. And the rest of the Democratic delegates, unlike their Republican counterparts, aren’t bound by state laws or party rules to vote for the candidate they were pledged to in their state’s primary for a certain number of ballots. CONTINUE AT SITE

Never Trump’s Third-Way Plan Is Futile, at Best By Deroy Murdock *****

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/435496/print
Much as Superstorm Sandy’s creeping flood waters knocked out a Con Edison power plant in Manhattan for four days in October 2012, a rising tide of disdain for Donald J. Trump has drowned the brains of some normally smart conservatives.

These activists and GOP luminaries failed to clinch the Republican nomination for any of the 16 rivals whom Trump flattened — fair and square. Notwithstanding the ballots of nearly 11 million Republican primary voters who chose the real-estate tycoon, some Never Trump enthusiasts are plotting to run a third-way contender for president and, they hope, trap the presumptive Republican nominee in Trump Tower.

This is utter madness.

It also saddens me to see otherwise astute friends of mine lose their senses and promote a project that looks as promising as a canoe being paddled rapidly away from Niagara Falls.

A conservative third-party or third-candidate bid will accomplish one thing: Hillary and Bill Clinton will recapture the White House as their once and future crime scene.

Before these “Never Trump” conservatives follow this third path any farther, they should Google these terms: President Ralph Nader, President Ross Perot, President John Anderson, President George Wallace, President Henry Wallace (no relation), President Strom Thurmond, and President Theodore Roosevelt.

TR was president, but as a Republican from 1901 to 1909. When he led the Bull Moose party’s charge against GOP incumbent William Howard Taft in 1912, Roosevelt lost. He also pulled enough Republican-leaning votes from Taft’s left flank to assure the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson. As chief executive, Wilson bestowed upon the American people the gifts of the Federal Reserve System, U.S. involvement in World War I, and the flaccid, feckless League of Nations. Wilson’s signature on the Revenue Act of 1913 midwifed the beloved federal income tax after the 16th Amendment permitted it.

Such are the unplanned reverberations of third-party presidential politics.

“Finally, and fortunately, Niall Ferguson and Never-Trump intellectuals like him have only one vote each. It won’t amount to a hill of beans. A group of miners in a single West Virginian coal mine, who usually vote Democrat, and who have no illusions about the misery of unemployment, will switch and more than make up for them; scribble away bitterly as they might from their job-secure ivory towers.”

If they were taking exception only to his language, critics of the man who is near-certain to be anointed the Republican presidential contender might have a point. Instead, what fuels their rants and denunciations is an other-worldly refusal to recognise the very issues that have driven his rise.
Get over it! Get over it! Before the world gets stuck with Hillary Clinton in cahoots with some far-left VP like, for instance, Elizabeth Warren. This was my thought when I read yet another conservative dumping on Trump; effectively wishing upon the US at least four more years of feckless foreign policy, open borders, escalating debt, and an activist Supreme Court potentially stretching two decades and more into the future. This time it was Niall Ferguson – writing originally in the UK’s The Sunday Times, reprinted in The Weekend Australian, 14-15 May.

Ridiculous claims littered the article without the least bit of credible evidence. Apparently Donald Trump would be “a global wrecking ball [who] would simultaneous break up the transatlantic alliance, sour the Sino-American relationship [and possibly consummate a ‘bromance’ with Putin] that freezes the blood.” On the domestic front, according to Ferguson, the US Constitution and its separation of powers is the only bulwark against disaster. “So how can he be stopped?” Ferguson asks. Why not simply say ‘I don’t like the guy!’ and be done with it, instead of inventing a caricature of his policies to fill a column.

Let’s cut to the chase. Trump will not break up the transatlantic alliance. He wants NATO allies (and also South Korea and Japan and, no doubt, Australia) to relieve the US military of its disproportionate share of the heavy lifting and take more responsibility for defending themselves. As he says, the US, with $19 trillion-and-growing of debt, can’t do it anymore. World Bank figures (over the period 2011 to 2015) show US military spending at 3.5% of its huge GDP. Japan and Canada (what a joke) spend 1% of their GDP, Germany 1.2%, Italy 1.5 %, Australia 1.8%, the UK 2%, France 2.2% and South Korea 2.6%. Of America’s allies, only Israel pulls its weight (as it must, of course), spending 5.9%. Maybe I am missing something, but from an ‘America-first’ perspective, and as The Donald might say, what the heck is going on?

He knows that you don’t get a better deal unless those on the other side think you are serious about walking away. Is that too hard to get? Because he’s an entrepreneur and businessman, Trump knows that you only get a better deal if the other side has something to lose. And, not so strangely, so do a lot of common people who might have haggled in shops and markets. A potential walker always gets a better deal. Why otherwise would a salesperson ever drop the price?

Equally with China, he wants a better deal on trade, hence the suggestion of a tariff. Those cocooned in the media, in universities, in politics just don’t get it. And they repeat the mantra that Trump is against free trade. Listen up! There is no such thing as free trade. It doesn’t exist. That is why free-trade deals take so long to put together and are so tortuous and complex. If trade were free, simple one line communiqués would do it: “trade between our countries is free.” None exist.

WHAT TRUMP “GETS”

Of the 16 “establishment” candidates the non-politician businessman Mr. Trump defeated to become the presumptive Republican presidential nominee of 2016, he, more than any of his former rivals, seems unabashedly patriotic, a man who appreciates, takes pride in, and feels deeply about America’s illustrious (and complicated) history. That history includes:

The Revolutionary War from 1775 to 1783, in which just a few brave souls broke from England in their successful quest for independence and freedom.
The Industrial Revolution from about 1760 to about 1840, which radically transformed America from primarily an agrarian culture to one driven by manufacturing and paving the way for our country’s wealth.
The Civil War from 1861 to 1865, in which our divided country was ultimately reunited and slavery abolished.
The women’s suffrage movement that began in 1840 and in 1920 resulted in the right of half our citizens to vote.
World War I (the Great War) from 1914 to 1918, which resulted in the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, the German and the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and the Ottoman Empire in 1922, and nearly 10 million deaths, including 116,516 Americans.
The Great Depression of 1929 that began in America after a fall in stock prices and metastasized into a worldwide catastrophe resulting in widespread welfare-relief programs and the rise of anti-capitalist, pro-Communist thinkers like Karl Marx.
World War II, 1939 to 1945, began in September 1939 when Germany, under Adolf Hitler and his Nazi regime, invaded Poland and France, pummeled England, and subsequently attacked and conquered Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. The conflict involved the majority of the world’s nations and was marked by the Holocaust (in which 11-million perished, including six-million Jews), the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 50-to-85-million fatalities––the deadliest conflict in human history. The Axis nations of Hitler’s Germany, Japan (under Emperor Hirohito and his Prime Ministers Tojo and Konoe), and Italy (under Mussolini) fought the Allied nations (England, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States of America, among others). The conflict concluded on September 2, 1945, with the official surrender of the last Axis nation, Japan.
The Korean War from 1950 to 1953 was between North and South Korea. A United Nations force, led by the United States, fought for the South, and China, assisted by the Soviet Union, fought for the North. The war ended in 1953, with the establishment of a Demilitarized Zone. But no peace treaty was ever signed so the two Koreas are technically still at war.
The Vietnam War from 1959 to 1975 pitted forces trying to unify the country under Communist control against the United States (aided by the South Vietnamese) trying to prevent the spread of Communism. While fought nobly for a noble cause, the war lost the support of the American public, and although U.S. and South Vietnamese forces won the Tet Offensive launched against them in 1968, President Johnson’s decision not to run again for president served to weaken U.S. resolve to win the war. His successor, President Nixon, started to withdraw U.S. troops in 1969, the last one leaving in 1973. The war ended in 1975 with Vietnam being unified under a single Communist government.
The War in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014 was launched by President G.W. Bush in response to the attack on America on September 11, 2001. Its goal was to dismantle al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The Iraq War, 2003 to essentially the present, was also launched by Pres. G.W. Bush to rid the Mideast of weapons of mass destruction––which every intelligence agency in the world said existed––and to bring democracy to the Mideast. The conflict toppled dictator Saddam Hussein, but today Iraq is plagued by ongoing sectarian conflicts and the deadly presence of ISIS (the Islamic State of Syria).
All this is not to omit our country’s society-altering decade of the 1960s, in which the advent of The Pill, the Women’s Movement, the rise of the two-income family, men landing on the moon, the Black Power movement, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy––all transformed our country profoundly, including the beginning of what has today become the seemingly irreparable breach between the perpetually seething and “victimized” left and, today at least, the ineffectual and accommodating right.

Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution forbids office holders from accepting anything of value from a foreign state, yet husband Bill Clinton collected $1 million from the Abu Dhabi government while Hillary was secretary of state.

Bill Clinton spoke at the Abu Dhabi Global Environmental Data Initiative (AGEDI) on December 13, 2011 and received a speaking fee of $500,000. The AGEDI is a program funded by the Abu Dhabi government, so the source of the funds was the government itself. Although the fee was paid to Bill, Hillary equally benefited from the payment. In effect, she accepted money from a foreign state.

A year later, Bill spoke to the World Travel and Tourism Council in Abu Dhabi (also funded by the Abu Dhabi government) for another fee of $500,000, for a total of $1 million.

The U.S. Constitution provides in Section 9 as follows:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

The Congress has provided that gifts to the president from foreign governments, for example, are transferred to the United States government. The Congress has never provided for office holders to accept personal gifts. Yet somehow, the Department of State allowed Bill to collect large speaking fees when Hillary was also a benefactor.

Bill and Hillary both studied law at Yale University and they presumably took a course on constitutional law. Also, Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago. Yet Bill was allowed to brazenly accept large speaking fees from a foreign government where Hillary also stood to benefit.

A Daily Caller News Foundation investigation reveals that Bill and Hillary Clinton received at least $100 million from autocratic Persian Gulf states and their leaders, potentially undermining Democratic presidential candidate Hillary’s claim she can carry out independent Middle East policies.

As a presidential candidate, the amount of foreign cash the Clintons have amassed from the Persian Gulf states is “simply unprecedented,” says national security analyst Patrick Poole.

“These regimes are buying access. You’ve got the Saudis. You’ve got the Kuwaitis, Oman, Qatar and the UAE. There are massive conflicts of interest. It’s beyond comprehension,” Poole told TheDCNF in an interview.
Overall, the Clinton Foundation has received upwards of $85 million in donations from five Persian Gulf states and their monarchs, according to the foundation’s website.

Activist groups have charged the five states — Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) — committed numerous human rights abuses.

For years, the accusations have centered on the Persian Gulf practice of importing hundreds of thousands of poor foreign laborers who work for low wages, including hundreds of thousands of female “domestic workers” who have no labor rights and often face exploitation and sexual abuse.

The ongoing Clinton financial relationship with despotic Persian Gulf states could hurt Hillary as a supporter of labor rights and tarnish her image as a vigorous supporter of women.

Yet as secretary of state, Clinton consciously and actively sought to legitimize the sheikdoms through many new Department of State programs.

It’s unclear what kind of promises or concessions the Clintons may have given the monarchs in return for their lavish financial support over the years, but last month the candidate reversed her long-standing support for fracking.

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