RUTHFULLY YOURS

With Washington’s attention on the struggle by House Republicans to find a new Speaker, another story slipped by that will surely have long-run implications for the presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton.

Clinton has come under fire this year for choosing to withhold her work emails from the State Department, and the public, for as many as five years after she began her employment as secretary of state. Clinton’s decision to conduct all work on a private server, and to keep the contents of that server to herself for more than a year after leaving office, was undertaken out of a false sense of entitlement to privacy.

It not only kept the public in the dark as to her communications in office but it also placed sensitive and classified information within reach of hackers, because the server was not properly secured.

Just how much sensitive or classified information are we talking about? The full extent remains unknown, but some of it was very highly classified — “Top Secret” and “Sensitive Compartmentalized.” And this week, it emerged that the name of a top CIA contact in Libya was contained in one of the emails she chose to keep in her unsafe computer.
Sid Blumenthal, a former Clinton-era White House staffer whom President Obama had forbidden Clinton to hire at State, nevertheless sent her periodic email updates on foreign affairs. She appears to have taken these seriously, encouraging him to send them and at times even forwarding his communiques to staff.

NEW YORK – The Clinton Foundation scandals form a centerpiece of investigative journalist Ed Klein’s new book on Hillary Clinton, “Unlikeable: The Problem with Hillary,” providing additional support to the series of articles published by WND reporting Wall Street analyst and investor Charles Ortel’s research alleging the Clinton Foundation is a “vast criminal conspiracy.”

Klein discloses that an FBI investigation regarding Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server when she was secretary of state also includes a probe into conflicts of interest in the Clinton Foundation’s acceptance of foreign donations while she was secretary of state.

Klein believes Michelle Obama and Valerie Jarrett were behind Obama’s decision to launch the FBI investigation.

“Both Michelle and Val thought that the FBI and the Justice Department should be ordered by the president to investigate the Clintons’ conflict of interest,” Klein wrote. “Valerie argued that Hillary had deliberately lied to the president about not taking foreign donations for the foundation while she was secretary of state, and that she had ignored warnings about the use of her private email account.”

Every time Obama issues another public ultimatum to Congress (before doing what he wants to do anyway) he phrases it in terms like “common sense” or “pragmatic”. It’s “non-ideological” he insists. The left’s ideological agenda just happens to be the common sense pragmatic non-ideological solution.Obama may be the most radical political figure to occupy the White House, but he is careful to avoid political labels. His leftist allies calculatingly compare him to Reagan or Roosevelt. He’s not an ideologue. Just another one of those “Great American Leaders” bent on helping ordinary people.

A big part of the left’s latest successes can be attributed to this non-ideological rebranding.

The old left (both old and new) was a political movement that wanted to be understood in terms of its ideology. The post-leftist left wants to be seen as progressive. It emphasizes policies linked to people instead of ideology. The ideology is still there and choking entire university departments to death, but its public face emphasizes an apolitical technocracy of pragmatists and caring social workers.

I’ve noticed something about Rubio and Cruz. They’re white guys.

They’re sons of Cuban immigrants, and their ethnic background is Hispanic, in that their ancestors were from Spain. Spaniards are genetically just as white as Finns, only with a dark complexion. Many Hispanics, in Cuba and elsewhere, intermarried with Native Americans, and to a certain extent with black Africans. The ancestors of Cruz and Rubio did not, to any appreciable extent. You can tell by looking at them.

Since they’re Cuban-American, they are not Mexican-Americans. Their language skills will help them a bit, but the large majority of Hispanic-Americans do not identify with them. They’re Cubans.They’re white.

The Republican presidential candidate can prevail by increasing his share of the Hispanic vote, or the white vote. The problem with concentrating on Hispanics is that they’re mainly in the wrong states. Apart from Florida and Colorado, the battleground states cannot be won by a shift to the Republicans by Hispanics. The key to a Republican victory is in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa. These are not blue states. Look at their state legislatures. A lot of working class whites in these states stayed home rather than vote for Romney. If Cruz or Rubio can appeal to them in a way that Romney did not, they’ll turn out and give the Electoral College to the Republicans.

The U.S. and International Community Must Hold Palestinians Accountable for Terror

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) submitted the following statement into the Congressional Record concerning the recent Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians:

“My thoughts and prayers are with the Israeli people who are enduring a new escalation of Palestinian terrorism.

“Last Thursday evening, a mother and father were murdered in front of their four children ages 9, 7, 4 and 4 months when Hamas terrorists opened fire on their car. A few days later, another Jewish family was walking in the Old City of Jerusalem after praying at the Western Wall when a Palestinian terrorist went on a stabbing attack. He murdered the father along with another courageous man who rushed to the scene to the family’s aid. Both men leave behind their wives and nine children. In addition to the four murdered, many more Israelis have been seriously wounded from car-ramming, rock-throwing, and brutal knife and screwdriver stabbing attacks in what appears to be a fresh horror—an epidemic of low-tech, brutal attacks by militants who are acting on their own initiative.

For the fourth time this week, Ben Carson finds himself embroiled in controversy. This time, he’s in trouble with the Left for declaring that, “the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed.” Before that, he caught flack for saying that people should rush mass shooters, that the loss of constitutional liberties is “more devastating” than a body with bullet wounds, and that not “every lifestyle is exactly of the same value.”

The list could go on — Carson has been touching off such online tempests for months.

Each time, the pattern is the same: Carson expresses his opinion — typically grounded in common sense and widely shared by the American people — the media declares that some people are “offended,” and he doubles down, restating his position again and again in the same calm, even tone.

Here he is, for example, addressing his comments about the Oregon shooting:

House Benghazi committee chairman Trey Gowdy (R., S.C.) has accused Hillary Clinton confidante Sid Blumenthal of outing a CIA source in Libya, and using his close ties to the then-secretary of state to profit from the 2011 American intervention that brought down Moammar Qaddafi.

Yesterday, Gowdy sent a fiery letter accusing Elijah Cummings (D., Md.), the ranking Democrat on the Benghazi committee, of improperly politicizing the committee’s 17-month investigation by selectively leaking information. In the face of Democratic calls to disband the committee, Gowdy’s letter sought to justify the committee’s existence by highlighting some of its key findings.

In particular, Gowdy pointed to the committee’s substantial collection of e-mails between Secretary Clinton and Blumenthal, who had been specifically barred from working at the State Department by White House officials. Gowdy noted that approximately half of all of Clinton’s messages pertaining to Libya were between her and Blumenthal, prompting him to label the former journalist “Secretary Clinton’s primary advisor” on U.S. policy in the North-African country.

Speaking Tuesday night to Brett Baier, Donald Trump sounded more like Democrats Sheila Jackson Lee and Dennis Kucinich than like the Republican front-runner for president. Asked whether he stood behind his 2008 interview where he said it would have been a “wonderful thing” if Nancy Pelosi had attempted to impeach President George W. Bush, Trump said this: “I think he was a disaster and I think it was one of the worst decisions ever made. [He] has totally destabilized the Middle East. If you had Saddam Hussein, you wouldn’t have the problems you have right now.”

I’m sorry, but this is nonsense. The Middle East was not stable with Saddam in power, and the present instability is far more related to the Arab Spring and the American pullout from post-Surge Iraq than it is to the initial decision to invade. In 2009, Barack Obama inherited a Middle East where American and Iraqi forces had crushed the al-Qaeda insurgency, Libya’s Moammar Qaddafi was effectively neutralized — agreeing months after Saddam fell to abandon his own WMD stockpiles — and Iran’s power was checked in part by the presence of American combat troops next door.