RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) called for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to oversee the investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of private email as the nation’s top diplomat.

Cornyn said the investigation should be as “far removed from White House politics” as possible.

“In light of the unprecedented nature of the case and the multiple conflicts presented to the Department of Justice, I can see no other appropriate course of action than for Attorney General Loretta Lynch to appoint a special counsel to pursue this matter wherever the facts may lead,” he said on the Senate floor. “That need is underscored by the apparent inability by the White House to try to influence or at worst obstruct the current investigation.”

The State Department categorized at least 22 emails found on Clinton’s server as “Top Secret.” The agency recently announced it would not release them. In response, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said an indictment does not seem to be the direction in which the White House is heading.

“Either the White House has information that they should not have about the status of this ongoing criminal investigation by the FBI, or they’re sending a signal to the FBI and the Department of Justice that they want this to go away,” said Cornyn, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

“It’s hard for me to interpret these comments both by the president or his press secretary as anything other than trying to influence the FBI or the Department of Justice on the outcome the administration prefers.”

President Obama has spent seven years denouncing Wall Street and persuading young progressives that the U.S. economy is rigged for the benefit of wealthy financiers. So how will he now persuade them to support Wall Street’s favorite Democrat?

This is the political trap Mr. Obama has sprung on Hillary Clinton, who made it difficult to watch Wednesday’s Democratic town hall on CNN as she squirmed in response to a question about speaking fees she collected from Goldman Sachs. Host Anderson Cooper asked her whether she really had to be paid $675,000 for giving three speeches.

“Well, I don’t know. That’s what they offered,” said Mrs. Clinton—to much audience laughter. She then tried the argument that every Secretary of State does it, and then settled on the unbelievable claim that at the time she took the money she didn’t know she would be running for President again. Mr. Cooper was so startled he asked her to repeat the point.

The laughter likely occurred because the average voter can guess that the traders at Goldman have a keen sense of value. And they’re not trading $675,000 for the entertainment value of Hillary Clinton appearances.

SIDE NOTE: From Janet Levy- I’m not sure where the candidates stand on ethanol production and its blending with gasoline but there are some SERIOUS negatives involved:

1) Per gallon, ethanol contains about 30% less energy than gasoline.
2) Ethanol production results in higher food prices as land used for food production produces corn for transportation fuel.
3) Ethanol mixtures increase gas prices as oil companies are forced to blend specified amounts of ethanol into their products.
4) Ethanol damages engines – cars, boats, lawn mowers, etc.
5) Burning ethanol increases air pollution adding 22% more hydrocarbons to the atmosphere than burning gasoline.

“In all fairness, we Texans have had a sizeable advantage over the rest of the country because we have followed Ted Cruz’s life and career for many years. What makes many of us Texans value Ted Cruz so highly is because of his proven record to stand for the Constitution even if it means alienating other people.

We Texans well remember the horrible crime committed by illegal immigrant José Ernesto Medellín in 1993. Two innocent girls, 14-year old Jennifer Ertman and 16 year-old Elizabeth Peña, were walking home in Houston and decided they would take a shortcut through a secluded area. José and members of his “Black and White” street gang captured and repeatedly raped and murdered both girls. At José’s trial, the details of his handwritten confession indicated that after the girls were raped, he stomped on the neck of one girl and strangled her with a belt. The other girl was strangled with a shoelace: José held one end of the shoelace while another boy held the other end, watching while it cut into the girl’s throat.

José was convicted and sentenced to death, but that is not the end of the story.

In 2004 while President George W. Bush was in the White House and Condoleezza Rice was the Secretary of State, the judicial arm of the United Nations (a.k.a., International Court of Justice, World Court) decided that José’s case should be reopened because he had not been informed by the police of his right to contact his consulate even though José had lived as an illegal immigrant in the U. S. almost all of his life!

Gov. Greg Abbott was the Texas Attorney General at the time, and Ted Cruz was his Solicitor General whose job as lawyer for the state of Texas was to defend the laws and the Constitution of the State of Texas and represent Texas in litigation. Both Gov. Abbott and Ted Cruz agreed that the World Court had no right to subject state and federal courts to the authority of the United Nations.

Unfortunately, because of particular political circumstances at the time, President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and the U. S. Solicitor General Paul Clement (all Republicans and all people Ted Cruz respected highly) decided that Texas should obey the World Court’s decision. This would have meant that José Ernesto Medellín, a rapist, torturer, and murderer of two young girls, could have been set free.

Donald Trump’s performance in this year’s Iowa caucuses was identical to Pat Buchanan’s in 1996: second place, enjoying the support of approximately one in four Republican caucus-goers. Trump’s campaign, like Buchanan’s, is powered by the resentment and anxiety of the white working class.

Trump is this year’s celebrity mascot for the Buchanan boys.

The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency. So they construct for themselves a story in which they have been victimized by elites and a political system based on interest-group politics that serves everyone except them. Trump is supported by so-called white nationalists, as Buchanan was before him, but the swastika set is merely an extreme example of the sort of thinking commonly found among those to whom Trump appeals.

If you want to understand the patron-client model behind the appeal of a man such as Pat Buchanan, then begin by consulting one of the keenest political minds of our time: Pat Buchanan. In a memo to Richard Nixon, he sketched out his model: “There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money. . . . If we can give 50 Phantoms to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks . . . why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system?”

The Jews Buchanan is writing about here presumably were those in Jerusalem rather than those in Brooklyn, but the conflation of overseas national-security projects with domestic interest-group politics is hardly restricted to self-conscious white nationalists. Bernie Sanders complains that money spent overseas ought to be spent servicing his constituents’ interests at home, and Trump dreams of turning our foreign adventures into a profit-making scheme, looting oil and other assets from foreigners to fund the British-style socialist health-care system of his dreams.

Inquiring minds want to know: have we reached Peak Trump? Most of the polls told us that Trump would cruise to victory in Iowa. Instead, Cruz did the cruising, not only precipitating the largest turnout in history (186,000 votes; the previous record was 122,000), but also achieving that record after frankly opposing ethanol subsidies, a fuel that (so the pundits told us) was absolutely indispensable to victory in the Hawkeye State.

Except that it wasn’t. Once upon a time, Trump had been opposed to ethanol subsidies, until political expediency convinced him to join the “I love ethanol” bandwagon. But then, Trump’s record has shown that he will say anything at any time to anyone if he thinks it will benefit him.

For his part, Rubio declared himself in favor of ethanol subsidies “for seven years” (that should hold ’em). The pandering of the Republican cohort over the issue of ethanol subsidies was nauseating (the Dems didn’t quite rise to that level of pandering), but Cruz was the only one who stuck to his free-market guns. The ethanol subsidy is a classic government boondoggle: bad for everyone and everything (even the environment, which it was supposed to help). It even hurts the farmers getting the government checks, because it lures them into a cycle of dependency and so robs them of their independence.

So what’s next? All the polls I’ve seen put Trump way ahead in New Hampshire, where the world will descend on February 9 to gape and ogle before decamping for points south until the cycle starts again in four years. But now that the game is really afoot, has Donald Trump peaked?

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) got the endorsement of another one of his colleagues as Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) threw his support behind Rubio’s presidential bid.

That brings Rubio’s upper chamber endorsements up to six, including Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Jim Risch (R-Idaho), and Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who endorsed after Rubio came in third in the Iowa caucuses this week.

Toomey announced his support on CNN this afternoon, saying that last week he called Rubio and said, “Marco, I want to help you any way I can.”

“I want to help you become the next president of the United States. I’m endorsing his candidacy and I’m very optimistic about his prospects,” Toomey said.

Asked why Rubio was a better pick than Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the Pennsylvania senator replied, “You know, we face a huge national security crisis, obviously emanating from the Middle East. There is tension all around the world. I think Marco has demonstrated a clear understanding.”

“He’s done the hard work. He’s very knowledgeable, thoughtful. He’s a smart guy. He’s demonstrated the leadership. You know, domestically I think we’ve sometimes have a crisis of confidence,” Toomey continued. “And Marco has an extraordinary ability, I think, to communicate and to inspire people. I think he’s going to be a really strong leader.”

Toomey dismissed Jeb Bush’s charge that Cruz and Rubio haven’t had to make any tough decisions.

One of the things that has troubled me the most about Donald Trump is his lack of emotional maturity. Unlike with a reality TV show host, it is vital that the president of the United States be grown up and mature. But Trump, time and time again, acts like a child, name-calling, holding grudges, and crying when things don’t go his way.

Case in point: the Iowa caucuses. On election night Trump grudgingly congratulated Ted Cruz. But now he’s saying that Cruz “stole” the Iowa caucuses by repeating a news report that Ben Carson was about to leave the presidential race (which, by the way, may well be true – how many candidates do you know right now who have flown all the way home to “pick up some more clothes”?). Here’s what Trump tweeted:

Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated.

And finally, Cruz strongly told thousands of caucusgoers (voters) that Trump was strongly in favor of ObamaCare and “choice” – a total lie!

Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.

Former president Jimmy Carter, who is still alive, says of the Republican candidates that he prefers Donald Trump to Ted Cruz because Donald Trump has no fixed beliefs and his views are malleable:

“I think I would choose Trump, which may surprise some of you,” the former Democratic president said during an appearance at Britain’s House of Lords on Wednesday afternoon. He was asked who he would pick for the GOP nomination.

“The reason is, Trump has proven already he’s completely malleable,” Carter explained. “I don’t think he has any fixed [positions] he’d go the White House and fight for. On the other hand, Ted Cruz is not malleable. He has far-right wing policies he’d pursue if he became president.”

It’s not hard to figure out why Carter would think that, given that Trump has had close relationships with Democrats for most of his adult life. In Trump’s own words:

I always had a decent relationship with Reid, although lately, obviously, I haven’t been dealing with him, so he’ll actually use my name as the ultimate – you know, as the ultimate of the billionaires in terms of, you know, people you don’t want. I always had a great relationship with Harry Reid and frankly, if I weren’t running for office I would be able to deal with her or Reid or anybody. But I think I’d be able to get along very well with Nancy Pelosi and just about everybody.

Sen. Ted Cruz’ victory in the Iowa Caucus last night leaves Sen. Marco Rubio as the “Establishment” alternative to the “populist” rebels, namely Cruz and Donald Trump — or so the punditeska of the American media tells us. Rubio’s stronger-than-expected third place finish gives the “Establishment” a viable horse in the race after the implosion of Bush 3.0. The content of the Republican primaries is obscure even to American analysts, and from an Asian vantage point must appear as opaque as the tribal dances of New Guinea neolithics. Nonetheless, Iowa is a great moment for a radically changing world.

“No one likes Ted Cruz,” one hears from Establishment players. One of Mitt Romney’s largest “bundlers” (fund-raisers) told me, “There are 99 other senators and hundreds of Congressmen, and not one of them likes Cruz. How can he get elected?”

Cruz’s colleagues hate him with good reason. During the Reagan and Bush pere-et-fils administrations, the Republican Establishment became a formidable force, with major media (Fox News and the Wall Street Journal), think tanks (with the American Enterprise Institute in the lead), political journals, and — perhaps most important — an intellectual caste prepared to train and vet promising young people for future high positions. Although American universities fell under the sway of the Left, conservative holdouts in university departments could direct their students into the right internships, starter jobs, and senior positions with appropriate doctorates, scholarly articles, middlebrow books and newspaper op-eds.

And at the end of the career cycle, there were lobbying firms to provide pension plans. Newt Gringrich’s $1.6 million lobbying fee for the Federal National Mortgage Association, a prime culprit in the 2008 subprime crash, was egregrious but not atypical. The donor list that Irving Kristol assembled back when he ran the Reagan administration’s kindergarten at the American Enterprise Institute still provides fellowships at foundations, research grants, and subsidies for loss-making publications.

The problem is that the Republican Establishment failed catastrophically in the mid-2000s. It sold out to the subprime bubblers (although the Wall Street Journal editorial page warned early and often of the risks of federal guarantees for dodgy mortgage loans). It was asleep at the switch when the banks persuaded then Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan to allow 70-t0-1 leverage on bogus AAA securities backed by subprime. And it closed ranks between the stupidest idea in the history of American foreign policy, namely the export of democracy at great cost in blood and treasure.