RUTHFULLY YOURS

As the New York primary approaches, Empire State residents with international connections may wish to consider the implications of a Donald Trump presidency for lands overseas that are dear to many of their hearts.

Trump wants to gut NATO. He has openly expressed admiration for Russian revanchist strongman Vladimir Putin, and he has hired several Kremlin-allied persons as his top advisors. These include Carter Page, an investor in the Russian gas giant, Gazprom, and a vocal supporter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Paul Manafort, a henchman of deposed Ukrainian dictator Victor Yanukovych, on whose behalf Putin’s invasion was initiated. Furthermore, Trump has been endorsed by Aleksandr Dugin, the totalitarian “Eurasianist” philosopher and geostrategist, and a leading advocate for the policy of expanding Russia into a transcontinental Eurasian bloc incorporating most of Europe and Asia.

What do these affiliations mean for several countries that could soon be in the Kremlin’s line of fire?

Let’s start with Poland. Polish independence was extinguished in the late 18th century, and with the exception of a 20-year period between the wars was not fully recovered until the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989. Putin wants to restore the Soviet bloc, or at the very least, the Czarist empire, which included not only Ukraine, but most of Poland, and the Baltic states as well. This means that, as far as Putin is concerned, Polish independence must be crushed. His potential methods for achieving this objective include both military and economic means.

Russia’s military dominance in the region is obvious. Its only potential counter is NATO, an alliance that Trump says is obsolete. The threat of Russian military aggression against Poland and the Baltic states had been greatly enhanced by the failure of the Obama administration to honor America’s commitment to defend Ukraine with more than token support. Trump’s advisor Carter Page, however, has attacked Obama for defending Ukraine too strongly, with the administration’s economic sanctions against Gazprom no doubt being particularly objectionable. Such an approach — without NATO protection or even the threat of retaliatory sanctions — would make a Trump administration a virtual green light for further military aggression by the Kremlin in Eastern Europe.

I wouldn’t say that the GOP is falling in love with Ted Cruz, but maybe it’s falling in like.

In arguably the most improbable political season of our lifetimes, this fact has to rank high on the list of things no one could have seen coming. If they gave out report cards for first-term senators, Cruz would get an “F” in the “plays well with others” category. Party leaders believed that his 2013 gambit to shut down the government over Obamacare was a disaster for everyone but Cruz, and they have harbored a not-so-secret disdain for him since.

But that’s all over — at least for now.

Like Perseus pulling Medusa’s head out of a sack to petrify his enemies, Cruz has been able to dangle the prospect of a President Trump to strike fear in the hearts of even his biggest detractors.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) once said choosing between Donald Trump and Cruz was like choosing between being shot or poisoned. Graham chose his poison. He’s out there raising money for Cruz. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), whose hatred for Cruz was the stuff of Sicilian blood feuds, seems to have reconciled himself to the fact that Cruz is the only person who can stop Trump. McConnell’s definitely not in love, but he recognizes that these are the cards we’ve all been dealt.

RELATED: Cruz Is a Safer General-Election Bet than Trump

Team Cruz fears that people such as McConnell will use the convention in Cleveland this summer to reshuffle the deck and get a new deal — a new candidate more palatable to the establishment. “There is still distrust over whether or not the party is actually willing to accept Cruz as the nominee or if they’re using him to shut down Trump only to then stab Cruz in the back come summer,” Erick Erickson, a conservative talk-show host and Cruz backer, told the Washington Post.

The concern is understandable but overblown. Although a contested convention is likely, the “white knight” scenario, in which someone other than Cruz, Trump, or John Kasich swoops in and “steals” the nomination, is not.

The presidential primaries are in New York now, with it not beyond imagining that Donald of Trump Tower will sweep the state’s 95 delegates Tuesday by winning all of its 27 congressional districts. If so, Ted Cruz can blame it and his possible third-place finish on that dumb remark about “New York values.”

He says it won him the Iowa caucuses. We’re not in Iowa anymore, senator.

Sen. Cruz had a point, but he blew it by not describing it so that even many New Yorkers would agree.

One example: The greatest moral issue in America is four decades of failed inner-city public schools. In New York, local liberals won’t lift a finger for minority-district schools in east Brooklyn, Harlem or the Bronx.

Instead, Andrew Cuomo and Bill de Blasio, like Jerry Brown in blue California, stay afloat on public unions and a liberal urban sea of smug, yuppie self-absorption. Donald Trump learned this week that these people don’t even bother to vote. In 2013, New York’s now-unpopular Mayor de Blasio won with 17% of eligible voters (turnout was 24%).

New York, after its primary, will revert to its status as a blue-state automaton. Just now, New York’s political values are a good subject.

Hillary Clinton this week is defending herself against charges that as senator, she never delivered on her promises to beleaguered counties upstate. She blames George Bush’s economic policies.

More revelatory of New York values, though, is Vermonter Bernie Sanders, ranting about “Wall Street” and “bankers.” To be clear: Those people, much mocked of late for living on Park Avenue and such, annually give tens of millions to support charter schools, scholarships to parochial schools, social entrepreneurs, and innumerable nonprofits and arts institutions. Most, Republican and Democrat, would do it without the tax deduction.

Bernie is praising New York for its total ban on hydraulic fracking. Let me rephrase that as a local political value. New York City to upstate New York: Drop dead.

Donald Trump projects himself as the embodiment of “New York, New York,” the ethos of making it big as sung by Frank Sinatra at the end of Yankees home games: “Top of the list, King of the hill, A-number-one!” CONTINUE AT SITE

Dear Donald Trump:

You are a great deal-maker. By your own account you’re the greatest dealmaker of the 20th century, and almost certainly the greatest dealmaker of the 21st century, even though it isn’t quite over yet. The Art of the Deal is your campaign playbook, as CBS News reported April 1. You have promised great trade deals with China, a great deal with Mexico to build a wall on the border, and other great deals on theSupreme Court, peace in the Middle East, healthcare and everything else that anyone has asked you about.

How would you like to the greatest dealmaker of all time?

You can go to Cleveland on July 18 and make the most stupendous deal in all of human history. Lots of people get to be president of the United States, but there can only be one all-time greatest dealmaker, and that could be you.

It’s clear that you won’t win the Republican nomination on the first ballot. Your delegates will have no obligation to vote for you on the second ballot, and a lot of them will vote for Sen. Ted Cruz on the second ballot. They probably will be joined by Marco Rubio’s 170 delegates and others.

There’s a digital outcome here.You can be the Greatest of Dealmakers, or G.o.D. — not the God, but a god, as Bill Murray said inGroundhog Day — or you can be the diametric opposite of the Greatest of Dealmakers, namely a Sore Loser, or to be precise, the Sorest Loser in the known universe. For Donald Trump to be a Loser would be tragic; for Donald Trump to be the Sorest Loser would introduce a disturbance into the space-time continuum. That can’t be allowed to happen.

No-one is saying you are a Sore Loser — yet. The risk is out there. Republican officials in a number of states complain that your organization has threatened them personally over delegate allocation. Your advisor Roger Stone warned earlier this month, “We will disclose the hotels and the room numbers of those [Republican convention] delegates who are directly involved in the steal [that is, not supporting Trump]. We’ll tell you who the culprits are. We urge you to visit their hotel and find them.”

It’s a strange spectacle from the vantage here in Israel: of the five remaining U.S. presidential candidates, one, lately, has been bashing Israel—and it’s the only one of the five who’s Jewish.

Bernie Sanders’s “recollection” that “over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza” during the summer 2014 war was, as many have noted, five times beyond Hamas’s claims. Sanders then changed it to “the number was I think 2100”—which is actually the figure that the UN, not known as a pro-Israel body, came up with, and even the UN said about one-third of that total were terrorists.

For the record, Israel’s Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center carried out a name-by-name analysis of the 75% of the Gaza fatalities who could be identified, and found that, of those, 55% were combatants. (Here former U.S. Chief of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey says that Israel went to “extraordinary lengths” to limit civilian casualties in Gaza.)

Sanders’s astonishing ignorance—he’s been a U.S. senator since 2007—was further revealed when, asked what he thought of Michael Oren’s criticism of his inflated Gaza figures, he answered, “Who is Mr. Oren?” Oren is, of course, the former high-profile Israeli ambassador to the U.S. (2009-2013) and author of the bestselling book Ally on the Obama administration’s hostility toward Israel.

But Sanders’s ignorance is not just a personal foible. When it comes to Israeli issues, Sanders is an ideologue. He parrots the standard ideological line of people who do not know what they’re talking about and don’t feel they need to know what they’re talking about, since the ideology comes prepackaged. Trying to add nuance, Sanders said Israel “has a 100%…right to live in freedom,” then added: “we will not succeed to ever bring peace into that region unless we also treat the Palestinians with dignity and respect.”

There are many ways to reply to that, such as: the Palestinians already receive more aid per capita than any other group; they have already been offered, and rejected, statehood far more than any other people in history (the offers run from 1937 to the present); in the existing Palestinian entities of Gaza and the (West Bank) Palestinian Authority, women, gays, Christians, people of dissenting views, and others are treated with something other than “dignity and respect”—a situation certain to be perpetuated if the Palestinians attain independent statehood; and so on.

The state of Delaware has made itself a very comfy home for corporations to legally domicile themselves. Many large publicly listed companies are officially Delaware corporations, in part because the Delaware Chancery Court has specialized in issues of corporate governance and is widely regarded as expert and fair. But another component of Delaware’s legal system for registering and governing corporations is its lack of transparency compared to other states. Owners of companies registered in Delaware can remain anonymous. Like, for example, in Panama.

Thus, as The Free Beacon reports:

The address “1209 North Orange Street” in Wilmington, Del., has become known in recent years as the epicenter of U.S. corporate secrecy. The squat, split-level building is the official address of over 285,000 companies, many of which are looking to take advantage of Delaware’s Panama-like secrecy rules, tax incentives, and business-friendly case law.

Among those 285,000 shell companies (with no operations at all in Delaware):

Hillary and Bill Clinton quietly set up two shell companies listed at “1209 North Orange Street” in 2008 and 2013, the Washington Free Beacon has found. The names of the companies, but not their location, were first made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton last year.

According to records, one of the Clintons’ “1209 North Orange Street” companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.

Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company.

The “1209 North Orange Street” building is the headquarters for the Corporation Trust Company. The firm acts as a registered agent for thousands of corporations that are not actually located in Delaware, including the Clintons’ companies.

Now, all of this is notable only because Hillary Clinton poses as a crusader against Wall Street abuses.

Hillary Clinton has promised to crack down on tax havens on the campaign trail. Referring to the Panama Papers last Wednesday, Clinton condemned “outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere.”

Two things are worth noting about Donald Trump’s whining over what he suddenly perceives as the “rigged” GOP nomination contest.

1. Trump is powerfully illustrating the fraud at the core of his case for the nomination. He claims that because he is a successful businessman he would be much more adept than conventional politicians at mastering the intricacies of problems and processes. He will, he brags, figure out how to deal with challenges in a way that maximizes American interests, assembling the best, most competent people to execute his plans of action. As a result, we are told, American will “win, win, win” with such numbing regularity that we will be bored to tears by all the success.

But look what is happening. The process of choosing a Republican nominee for president, while far from simple, is not as complicated as many of the challenges that cross an American president’s desk. There are, moreover, countless experienced hands who know how the process works and how to build an organization nimble enough to navigate the array of primaries (open and closed), caucuses, party meetings, varying delegate-allocation formulas, etc., exploiting or mitigating the advantages and disadvantages these present for different kinds of candidates. Yet, Trump has been out-organized, out-smarted, and out-worked by the competition – in particular, Ted Cruz, whom I support.

Trump is not being cheated. Everyone is playing by the same rules, which were available to every campaign well in advance. Trump simply is not as good at converting knowledge into success – notwithstanding the centrality of this talent to his candidacy. Perhaps this is because he is singularly good at generating free publicity (and consequently minimizing the publicity available to his rivals). Maybe he underestimated the importance of building a competent, experienced campaign organization. But he can hardly acknowledge this because it is a colossal error of judgment – and his purportedly peerless judgment is the selling point of his campaign.

As the prospect of a contested Republican presidential convention increases, so does the brawling over delegates—and the whining from the losers. If someone decides to run for President, is it too much to ask that he or his campaign managers understand the nominating rules?

“The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” Donald Trump said Monday on Fox News, with his usual understatement, after Ted Cruz won 34 GOP delegates in Colorado while Mr. Trump was shut out. “The people out there are going crazy, in the Denver area and Colorado itself, and they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. This was given by politicians. It’s a crooked deal.” The truth is that he lost due to his own campaign’s ineptitude.

The state politicians in Colorado did exactly what they are entitled to do under Republican Party rules: set up a process that allocates delegates to candidates in any way a state party sees fit. Most state parties nowadays hold primary or caucus elections, but some do so with a hybrid system that can seem convoluted but makes sense if the goal is to build a party of volunteers from the ground up.

Colorado awarded delegates through a caucus process that began with precinct meetings and moved to congressional district and state GOP conventions. The attendees at those conventions then voted to elect the delegates to the national convention, and Mr. Cruz won 30 delegates that will be pledged to him on the first ballot. Another four are free agents but say they prefer Mr. Cruz. Three others are state party leaders who are free to vote as they please.

None of this was “crooked.” Mr. Trump is claiming the process was rigged because the Colorado GOP cancelled its usual straw poll held on Super Tuesday (March 15 this year). But the state party made that decision last August because such a poll would have been binding under new national GOP rules, and the Colorado party wanted its delegates to be free to support the candidate they liked in what was then a crowded field. The decision wasn’t aimed at Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cruz cleaned up in Colorado because his campaign was paying attention to the process. Whatever one thinks of the Texan’s appeal as a candidate, his campaign is organized and focused on winning the required 1,237 delegate majority. This speaks well of his ability to lead a complex organization. CONTINUE AT SITE

At a Bernie Sanders event in New York City, a black “community activist” began ranting about “Zionist Jews” running the Federal Reserve and Wall Street. At previous events, Sanders had been quick to condemn what he claimed was bigoted and Islamophobic rhetoric by Republicans. But when confronted with the real thing by a left-wing activist at one of his own events, he couldn’t do it.

There was no condemnation of anti-Semitism. Instead after an initial claim that he was proud to be Jewish, he switched to a rambling speech criticizing Israel and distancing himself from Zionism.

Bernie Sanders had suggested at the same event that President Clinton was racist for defending his crime fighting policies to Black Lives Matter protesters, but would not condemn anti-Semitism. Instead of defying left-wing hatred for Jews, he tried to suggest that he wasn’t one of the “bad Zionists”. He was one of the “good Jews” who had a balanced position on Israel and “Palestine”.

It was a sad and shameful display. And this was not the first time that Bernie saw bigotry and blinked.

When NPR’s Diane Rehm accused him of having dual citizenship in Israel, he stumbled through a reply, but never condemned the anti-Semitism inherent in the question. He backed Jesse Jackson despite the Hymietown slur. When asked about it, he did his best to avoid directly condemning anti-Semitism.

Bernie Sanders came out of a political movement rife with anti-Semitism. He encounters it in public on a regular basis. And he is too much of a coward to stand up to it.

After Roseanne Barr ran for president, she stated that during the campaign, “everything I had ever believed about the left was severely shaken” and that she discovered that “many of those I had considered comrades were naked bigots”.

And she did what Bernie Sanders won’t do. She condemned the bigotry.

There’s little doubt that Bernie Sanders has encountered far more anti-Semitism in private than he has in public. And at every turn of the road, he made the decision to fall in line and keep his mouth shut.

In the UK, prominent Jews and non-Jews within Labour have been speaking out against growing anti-Semitism within the party and its political adjuncts. But here there’s a culture of silence about anti-Semitism on the left. And those who speak out pay the price. Consider the response to Phyllis Chesler’s The New Anti-Semitism. And, in contrast, the mainstreaming of Max Blumenthal’s blatant bigotry.

The “gentleman’s agreement” used to be that Jews were expected to keep quiet about anti-Semitism on the left while claiming that all the bigots were on the right. Bernie Sanders is a product of that system. His refusal to talk about anti-Semitism while accusing the right of bigotry is typical of how it works.

The Sanders event at the Apollo Theater also featured Harry Belafonte, who had claimed that “Hitler had a lot of Jews high up in the hierarchy of the Third Reich” and Spike Lee who had responded to criticism of anti-Semitic stereotypes in his movies by saying that he “couldn’t make an anti-Semitic film” because Jews run Hollywood. What does it say about Bernie Sanders that these are the ugly views of the people whom his campaign used in order to present him to a black audience?