RUTHFULLY YOURS

“Maybe Republicans should nominate Donald Trump after all. We could have an election that completely fulfills the modern archetypal tendency to select candidates who crave the presidency to satisfy their own needs, not the country’s.”

How will six different capital-gains rates make managements or shareholders any less concerned with quarterly earnings? She doesn’t say.

Hillary Clinton would string syllables together in any order if she thought it would get her to the White House, so it’s with that giant asterisk that we examine the content of her capital-gains plan unveiled in a speech in New York last week.

That Mrs. Clinton found time at the end to notice any imperfections in government—for instance, that it can’t write and execute a budget—came almost as a shock in a speech designed to assure us that ultracompetent government can fix the failings of big business.

Why we’re suing to make the government do what it seems disinclined to do: get to the bottom of this murky matter.

The truth about Hillary Clinton’s email practices is murkier than ever.

On Friday news broke that the inspectors general for the State Department and the intelligence community raised serious concerns about the mishandling of classified information in conjunction with Mrs. Clinton’s emails as secretary of state, all of which were routed through a private email account and server. This was followed by reports in this paper that, despite her claims to the contrary, she sent multiple classified emails via her private account. Speaking to a TV station in Des Moines, Iowa, on Sunday, Mrs. Clinton responded by saying “it’ll all work its way out.”

Two of the most powerful members of the Democratic Party, former and current senators from New York, now hold the fate of the putative deal with Iran in their hands. Because they alone can overturn it, this means that presumptive presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and presumptive Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer carry a heavy burden that will deeply affect their personal reputations and, most probably, the trustworthiness of the Democrats in foreign policy for at least a generation.

Their former senatorial colleagues Barack Obama, Joe Biden and John Kerry already own their decision, though their logic still remains unclear to both the most diligent and the most casual observer. The president asserts that his piece of paper will prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons, presuming both the honesty of a regime that has displayed mendacity and hostility for 35 years as well as the existence of a wide-ranging verification capability that his own agreement has fatally compromised. And then, of course, there is the sunset provision that enables Iran to acquire nuclear weapons anyway. As they congratulate themselves on the hard work that produced this bizarre document—Bloomberg News related that “[a]ll present were in a kind of awe”—have these former Solons stopped to wonder why Iran negotiated in the first place when their leaders still insist on claiming they don’t want nuclear weapons? The entire process is built on lies. If the Iranians didn’t want nukes, then why would they want a time limit?

There was no ‘better deal’ with Iran to be had. Now this calamitous one offers Tehran two paths to the bomb.

Almost everyone who opposes the deal President Obama has struck with Iran hotly contests his relentless insistence that the only alternative to it is war. No, they claim, there is another alternative, and that is “a better deal.”

To which Mr. Obama responds that Iran would never agree to the terms his critics imagine could be imposed. These terms would include the toughening rather than the lifting of sanctions; “anytime, anywhere” nuclear-plant inspections instead of the easily evaded ones to which he has agreed; the elimination rather than the freezing of Iran’s nuclear infrastructure; and the corresponding elimination of the “sunset” clause that leaves Iran free after 10 years to build as many nuclear weapons as it wishes.

Since I too consider Mr. Obama’s deal a calamity, I would be happy to add my voice to the critical chorus. Indeed, I agree wholeheartedly with the critics that, far from “cutting off any pathway Iran could take to develop a nuclear weapon,” as he claims, the deal actually offers Tehran not one but two paths to acquiring the bomb. Iran can either cheat or simply wait for the sunset clause to kick in, while proceeding more or less legally to prepare for that glorious day.

Iran president invited to Paris as sides seek to boost ties
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius lands in Tehran, calls for a kickstart to the two countries’ relations following nuclear accord
Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani has been invited to visit Paris in November, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said in Tehran on Wednesday.The official invitation came in a letter addressed to Rouhani from French President Francois Hollande which Fabius delivered on his trip to the Iranian capital, two weeks after a nuclear deal was struck between the Islamic republic and world powers.

Does Bibi really have a strategy? He appears to have gambled everything on America’s power to force Iran into a position of total capitulation on its nuclear infrastructure. He has also expected the US to roll back Iran’s regional power throughout Lebanon and Syria. What Bibi has failed to understand is that after two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the vast majority of the Democratic Party is loath to risk entering into a third. Probably the same can be said for a clear majority of the Republican Party as well. So when Kerry or Obama ask the question to opponents of the Iran nuclear deal — what is your alternative other than war? — they are met with the facile answer of “a better nuclear deal”.

There is good reason to refrain from bandying about the word “Holocaust” with abandon. The defining atrocity of the 20th century has to be given the gravitas it deserves. Comparing lesser events to the meticulously planned genocide of Europe’s Jews is both cheapening and a cheap trick. Indeed, invoking the Nazis frivolously is as sinful as denying the mass murder they carefully carried out.
Nevertheless, both the former and the latter have grown so commonplace that they barely elicit a yawn any more. This is the case even when they are used interchangeably — and simultaneously — by the same source, usually by Islamists, who alternate between Holocaust denial and accusing Israel of Holocaust perpetration.
Occasionally, however, a World War II analogy emerges which causes surprising levels of consternation.
Take, for example, a statement made over the weekend by former Arkansas governor and current Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.

The Donald’s life has been seven decades of buffoonery.
If there was a good reason to distrust presidential candidate Mitt Romney, it had to do with his views on abortion. Not his position per se — as difficult as it is to understand the pro-choice tendency, there are people of good faith on both sides of the abortion question — but the fact that he arrived at that position so late in life and at a moment when his change of heart was politically convenient. Even if we assume that this was not simple cowardly political calculation, as in the matter of Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama’s evolving views on gay marriage, the situation must give us pause: If a man hasn’t figured out what he believes about abortion by the age of 50 — after having been a father, a governor, a business leader, and an influential figure in an important religious congregation — it may be the case that he is not ready for the responsibilities of the presidency.

Donald Trump is looking at 70 candles on his next birthday cake, and his mind is, when it comes to the issues relevant to a Republican presidential candidate, unsettled.

“If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.”
Barack Obama is the first American president from Chicago. That fact will be the trailblazing Obama’s most lasting legacy.

Chicago has long been stereotyped as a city where any-means-necessary politics have ruled, and where excess is preferable to moderation. Convicted felon Tony Rezko, leftist extremists Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Father Michael Pfleger, radical Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky’s take-no-prisoners Rules for Radicals, felon and former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich — all these were part of Barack Obama’s Chicago tutelage. Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel’s infamous adage — “You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before” — was the unofficial motto of the Obama administration’s efforts to grow government, up-regulate, and borrow immense sums — measures impossible without a climate of induced panic and fear.

Director Brian De Palma’s 1987 film The Untouchables rejuvenated Chicago’s reputation for muscle over niceties. The film dramatized Chicago’s institutionalized bribery and corruption during the effort to bring down Roaring Twenties mobster Al Capone. Screenwriter David Mamet famously had characters brag of “the Chicago way.” On more than one occasion, a cop advised: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun.” Gun-control advocate and Chicagoan Barack Obama made waves in his 2008 presidential run when he echoed the film’s advice to a Philadelphia audience. He joked of what his campaign might do to his rival, John McCain: “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” Obama exemplified the Chicago stereotype of how to get business done when, that same campaign year, he advised his followers to confront their political opponents: “I want you to argue with them and get in their face.”

“Chicago politics” seems a common denominator in serial scandals involving political bias, cronyism, and incompetence at the VA, IRS, DHS, ICE, NSA, Secret Service, and, most recently, Office of Personnel Management. The NSA’s monitoring of the Associated Press journalists fit perfectly the Chicago stereotype, which often involves two prime characteristics: sending a message to political opponents that the power of government can be unleashed against unwise criticism, and using off-the record understandings and under-the-table sweeteners to close a deal.

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and other lawmakers blasted the Obama administration for improving the rankings of Cuba and Malaysia on this year’s State Department human trafficking report for political reasons.

Cuba has been Tier 3 — the worst ranking — since the State Department began issuing the report in 2003. Nearly 200 lawmakers lobbied the administration to keep Malaysia at Tier 3 for failing to stop human trafficking. Both appeared in today’s report on the “Tier 2 Watch List.”

According to the State Department, that includes “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s [Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s] minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards AND the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or the determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year.”