RUTHFULLY YOURS

School vouchers may be the most effective anti-poverty program around, yet they’re fought tooth and hammer by the teachers unions. Late last week the North Carolina Supreme Court awarded a victory to poor kids by protecting vouchers from another union attack.

Two years ago Tar Heel Republicans passed a modest reform offering low-income students $4,200 scholarships to attend qualifying private schools. The law requires, among other things, that private schools report graduation rates and test scores. It also mandates an annual report comparing the learning gains of voucher recipients and public school students.

Taxpayer plaintiffs backed by the union argued in a lawsuit that vouchers accomplish no “public purpose” because private schools don’t have to adhere to such state educational standards as teacher licensing requirements. You have to admire the gall of a union to argue that private schools are “unaccountable” when only one in five black fourth-graders at North Carolina public schools scored proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2013. According to the Institute for Justice, which represented voucher parents in the case, five of six low-income students fail the state’s end-of-grade math or reading tests.

The Obama end-run around the Constitution could yet be blocked if states exercise their own sanctions regimes.

The Iranian nuclear agreement announced on July 14 is unconstitutional, violates international law and features commitments that President Obama could not lawfully make. However, because of the way the deal was pushed through, the states may be able to derail it by enacting their own Iran sanctions legislation.

President Obama executed the nuclear deal as an executive agreement, not as a treaty. While presidents have used executive agreements to arrange less-important or temporary matters, significant international obligations have always been established through treaties, which require Senate consent by a two-thirds majority.

The Constitution’s division of the treaty-making power between the president and Senate ensured that all major U.S. international undertakings enjoyed broad domestic support. It also enabled the states to make their voices heard through senators when considering treaties—which are constitutionally the “supreme law of the land” and pre-empt state laws.

“Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street fan club keeps telling itself that she’d provide relief from the anti-growth Obama years. On the growing evidence of her policies, she’d be worse.”

Hillary Clinton’s march to the left continues, hitting a new milestone on Friday when she proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%—or the highest rate in decades.

Mrs. Clinton says she wants to overthrow “quarterly capitalism,” the supposed tendency of companies to be preoccupied with earnings reports and stock prices at the expense of investment that pays off over time. Yet her plan would undermine short-run shareholder goals and long-range economic growth.
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U.S. administration says full disclosure about program’s history isn’t critical to verify future commitments.

An Obama administration assessment of the Iran nuclear deal provided to Congress has led a number of lawmakers to conclude the U.S. and world powers will never get to the bottom of the country’s alleged efforts to build an atomic weapon, and that Tehran won’t be pressed to fully explain its past.

In a report to Capitol Hill last week, the administration said it was unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program, and that such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.

Details of the report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, indicate the deal reached this month could go ahead even if United Nations inspectors never ascertain conclusively whether Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program—something Tehran has repeatedly denied.

A little past midway through the second season of House of Cards, Episode 1, Chapter 14, Frank Underwood, ambitious politician and murderer, throws Zoe Barnes, the sluttish, amoral reporter who helped him move closer to the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency with her stories calculated to smear or destroy his rivals, not so much under the bus, as under an incoming DC Metro train. He does this just after persuading her to erase all evidence of contact with him from her iPhone. Barnes was also Underwood’s sometime mistress.

Earlier in the series, he tells a co-conspirator, Remy Danton, a former employee and now a weight-throwing lobbyist for an “evil” natural gas giant, that he disposes of people he is finished using if they threaten his climb up the political “food chain.” A while later, Freddy, the ribs specialist, tells him that his new ribs supplier uses what I recognized from his disapproving description of it as a version of the Muslim halal way of killing animals – letting them bleed to death first – instead of killing them quickly and cleanly. Freddy’s new supplier instead shoves a pipe down a pig’s throat.

The 60-day clock for congressional consideration of the Iran deal, otherwise ‎known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has barely begun to run, and the White House and its allies are ‎already in full sell-and-destroy mode. As details of the agreement are revealed, ‎including side agreements, the total collapse of our side’s negotiating position in ‎the last few weeks of the talks has become more apparent. This should be an easy ‎deal to reject on the merits. The promise of “anytime, anywhere” inspections ‎turned into 24-day advanced notice inspections. It was just rhetoric, claimed White ‎House adviser Ben Rhodes. We never meant it. Inspections at the Parchin facility, ‎where it is generally assumed military research and testing took place connected ‎with Iran’s nuclear program, will now consist of the International Atomic Energy Agency examining samples ‎provided by the Iranians.

The testimonials of more than 100 students from almost 50 colleges and universities in twenty states tell of “being intimidated, harassed or bullied as a Jewish and/or a pro-Israel student,” according to Student Voices(SV). A project of the AMCHA Initiative, which combats campus anti-Semitism, the data at SV spans the past year-and-a-half, and typically originates with student op-eds and articles from sympathetic media.

Although the majority of cited incidents involve Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Student Association (MSA), student government groups, and the BDS movement, several of the examples involve professors of Middle East studies, many of whom are themselves BDS activists and supporters.

http://edgar1981.blogspot.com.au/2015/07/the-iran-deal-comparison-with-1938-is.html,

The always astute and reliable Edgar Davidson points out the following:

For signing the deal Iran got 50billion with no strings attached. In 1938 the Germans got no money and a warning of war against them if they flout the deal. The Germans accepted limits on military movements and minor limits on weapons. The Iranians have no such limits on movements or conventional weapons.

In 1938 Germany promised not to harm the Jews, although Hitler made it very clear he wanted all Jews out of Germany. In 2015 Iran burns American flags, chants “Death to America” and repeatedly pledges death to Israel.

Chamberlain was a misguided pacifist. Obama sees global warming and climate change as the major threat to the world.

THANKS TO DAPHNE ANSON….
Palestine Solidarity Campaign at NUT Conference 2015 –

This year again Palestine was centre stage at the National Union of Teacher’s annual delegates conference in Harrogate during the Easter weekend.

Dozens of NUT delegates flocked to the PSC stall to sign the petition asking for sanctions on Israel, as well as finding out about our current campaigns and to purchase some essential PSC merchandise.

A disturbing pattern emerging regarding the candidate’s cavalier attitude toward the truth

The ultra-left Guardian is stirring up trouble for Donald Trump. The newspaper contacted several U.S. veterans listed as members of “Veterans for Trump” on the candidate’s website and discovered at least three had no clue they were supposed to be supporting him.

A number of people were named as members of “Veterans for Trump” on Trump’s election website. “These veterans have pledged their support to Mr Trump in the primary, and they will be advocating for him,” a press release said.

But when the Guardian contacted several claimed Veterans for Trump members on Friday, three said they had never heard of the organisation and had not signed up as members.