RUTHFULLY YOURS

Stocks took another tumble on Tuesday on a weak manufacturing report out of China, and investor shivers about Japan, the oil patch and the U.S. are increasing. The shaky markets and underlying economy seem relevant to the presidential debate—yet the front-runners of both parties have next to no pro-growth ideas to contribute.

Hillary Clinton favors higher taxation, heavier regulation, more political shackling of business, and centralizing more economic control inside the White House. So does Donald Trump—at least as far as we can tell.

Mrs. Clinton is promising Obamanomics Plus: continue the agenda of the last eight years, with bonus corrections toward the left as necessary. She’s proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on some capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%, for example, up from 15% as recently as 2012.

On energy, one of the few U.S. growth areas of the Obama era, she is even further to the left. The green elites used to tolerate support for the U.S. oil and natural gas boom if gas could be levered as a transition fuel toward a post-carbon future. Now they favor massive subsidies for wind and solar today and no fossil-fuel drilling, and Mrs. Clinton is moving their way.

This column is correct but McCain is a cheerleader for the global warming groupies and together with another faux conservative, Joe Lieberman he sponsored “The Climate Stewardship Acts” whose aim was to set “mandatory cap and trade system for greenhouse gases, as a response to the threat of anthropogenic climate change.” Fortunately, the act failed to gain enough votes to pass through the senate.In April 2007, McCain called global warming “a serious and urgent economic, environmental and national security challenge.” rsk

Obama focuses on global warming while Putin’s neo-imperialist dreams continue to spread north.

President Obama is on a three-day visit to Alaska that will include a stop north of the Arctic Circle. The focus of his trip is climate change. Some of my Senate colleagues and I recently returned from the Arctic, and while we saw the challenges of melting polar ice, we also saw a greater and more immediate threat. It is a menace that many assumed was relegated to the past: an aggressive, militarily capable Russian state that is ruled by an anti-American autocrat, hostile to our interests, dismissive of our values, and seeking to challenge the international order that U.S. leaders of both parties have maintained for seven decades.

Vladimir Putin’s neo-imperial ambitions are clear enough in his attempt to dominate Russia’s neighbors, Ukraine most of all. But his ambitions increasingly extend to the Arctic and Europe’s northern flank. That is where I and my colleagues met with leaders and security officials from Norway, Sweden, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Lowering ozone—from cars, trucks, factories and power plants—in the name of an imaginary health benefit.

This fall the Environmental Protection Agency plans to take its next grand regulatory step, following the announcement of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan over the summer. The agency is likely to introduce stringent new standards for ground-level ozone, arguing that a lower allowable level of ozone—an important component of smog—will reduce asthma in the U.S., among other claimed health benefits. Yet the EPA ignores decades of data and studies, some under the agency’s auspices, that reveal no detectable causal relation between past reductions in ozone and better public health, including reductions in asthma cases.

For decades many Americans were ambivalent about immigration. The false arguments made by the open borders advocates – whom I have come to refer to as the “Immigration Anarchists” – succeeded in suppressing the truth from the majority of American citizens.

The notion that the United States has just four “border states” was blindly accepted by many people, along with the false statement that illegal aliens did the work Americans won’t do.

The concept of four border states caused many Americans, who lived far from the U.S.-Mexican border, to believe that the impact of illegal immigration was of scant consequence for them. Most Americans were unaware that nearly half of all illegal aliens were actually lawfully admitted into the U.S. and then, in one way or another, violated the terms of their admission.

For years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and various lobbying groups have peddled the false notion that the U.S. needs to import high-tech workers from overseas. Indeed, there are still politicians who support greatly increasing the number of H-1B visas for those high-tech workers. However, as John Adams famously remarked, “Facts are stubborn things.” News reports have made it clear that Silicon Valley and various U.S. corporations, such as Disney, have fired their highly qualified and experienced American workers, replacing them with workers from India and other countries.

Two Israelis have made MIT’s prestigious “35 Innovators Under 35” list for 2015, which the university published on Monday.

One of the Israelis is Cigall Kadoch, 30, who holds a doctorate from Stanford. She is the daughter of an Israeli and was raised in San Francisco. Her field of expertise is cancer research, with a focus on breast cancer.

Gilad Evrony, 33, the second Israeli on the list, is a Harvard Medical School researcher. Evrony helped make a surprising discovery: Brain cells sitting right next to each other don’t always have the same genetic codes.

According to the MIT’s Technology Review, Evrony’s discovery “could provide insight into age-related cognitive decline and brain disorders such as epilepsy and schizophrenia.”

Jason Pontin, the editor in chief and the publisher of the MIT Technology Review, said: “Throughout the years we have successfully chosen young innovators whose work has had a profound impact on humanity. Past lists have included the likes of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s chief designer, and many others.

Ideas are the most powerful human force. And the idea of jihad that the Obama administration will not discuss is perhaps the most powerful idea in the world’s marketplace of ideas today.We have arrived at the point where the consequences of the West’s intellectual disarmament at the hands of political correctness begins to have disastrous consequences in the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

Speaking last month at the memorial service for the five US marines massacred at a recruiting office in Chattanooga, Tennessee, US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said, “The meaning of their killing is yet unclear, and what combination of disturbed mind, violent extremism, and hateful ideology was at work, we don’t know.”

On Tuesday, Three Reps and two Senators announced their support for the Nuclear Iran Deal. One More Senator in support will dash opponents’ hope.

By mid-afternoon on Tuesday, Sept. 1, three members of the U.S. House of Representatives announced they were supporting the Nuclear Iran Deal. As the afternoon wore on, word came that first Senator Bob Casey (D) of Pennsylvania, and then, to close out the afternoon, Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) also came out in favor of the agreement.

The three members of the House of Representatives who said they will support the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action are Rep.s Patrick Murphy (D-FL-18), Bobby Rush (D-IL-01) and Adam Smith (D-WA-09). None of these were real surprises.

But people were quite hopeful that Casey might swim against the tide. In fact, his statement announcing his support went on for 17 pages.

Casey, like so many other politicians who say they will vote to support the deal, admits that the chances of Iran cheating are significant. He began his analysis with this understanding.

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was hosted by Ari David, the host of the Ari David Show Podcast, and joined by Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel came on the show to discuss The Catastrophic Iran Deal, analyzing the Radical-in-Chief’s dirty work for the Mullahs (starts at 6:45 mark).

The discussion was preceded by a dialogue on The Clinton Scandal and Cover-up, in which Daniel unveils the endless lies of the Clintons.

Don’t miss it!

Talk about imposing sanctions on Chinese and Russian individuals and a company benefiting from their government’s looting of American trade, military and personnel secrets, is cheap, but futile.

The Obama administration’s threats of sanctions may sound reassuring to largely cyber-ignorant Americans, but it will do little to discourage further attacks. But threatening obviously difficult-to impose sanctions, will do little to deter the Chinese or the Russians. Especially so, since the security of the American government and private sector cyber systems is lacking, thus minimizing the risk of discovery before large quantities of data can be stolen over a long period of time.

“Down the lanes of August – and the bees upon the wing,All the world’s in color now, and all the song birds sing.Never reds will redder be, more golden be the gold,Down the lanes of August, and the summer getting old.”

“Down the Lanes of August” – 1923 Edgar Albert Guest (1881-1951)

Financial markets dominated the month. Puerto Rico defaulted on a bond payment, marking the first time a U.S. commonwealth had done so. In seven business days the Shanghai Index lost 27% of its value, or about $1.5 trillion. In six days, U.S. stocks fell 11%, costing investors around $2.8 trillion. Markets in other parts of the world shared similar fates. The VIX, a measurement of volatility that had spent much of the year in the mid to high teens, spiked to 40.74 on the 24th, the day the DJIA was down 3.6%. Another measure of volatility looks at the closing price of the DJIA versus the previous day. On only three occasions in the preceding four months did the index close up or down more than 1.5%. In August, that happened five times. Volatility is disquieting, but provides opportunities for traders. Investors should ride out churning seas.

The media made much of the point moves in the Dow Jones, while paying less attention to the less dramatic percent changes. Certainly, those few days were enough to wake a complacent investor from his August slumber, but they didn’t come close to setting records. Yes, the 588 points in the DJIA lost on August 24th exceeded the 508 points lost on October 19th, 1987, but to be equivalent the Dow Jones would have had to have lost 3,700 points!