RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two notorious crooks are helping us wrap up another sordid episode in the saga of the United States biofuel mandates, while further highlighting how bungled and long past its expiration date the program is.

Congress concocted the mandates over fears that US gasoline demand would rise forever and keep the United States dependent on foreign oil, as America’s supposedly limited reserves were depleted. The mandates currently require that we blend 15 billion gallons of ethanol with gasoline every year, and produce over a billion gallons of biodiesel. They hammer us consumers every time we fill our tanks.

Turning corn into ethanol requires vast amounts of land, fertilizers, pesticides, tractor and truck fuel, and natural gas for distillation. It enriches some farmers but raises animal feed prices and thus the cost of beef, pork, chicken, eggs, fish and international food aid. Biodiesel from restaurant waste oil makes some sense, but making it from palm oil or soybeans has similar negative ecological impacts.

The selling point of the Iran deal comes down to two things: (1) Iran will take more time to build a nuclear weapon in the future than it would do with no deal; and (2) Iran will have to openly break the terms of the deal to produce enough nuclear bomb fuel to build nuclear weapons.

Let’s start with their nuclear reactor at Arak. It is true that if Iran complies with the restrictions on the Arak reactor it will not be able to produce plutonium that can be easily reprocessed into nuclear fuel. That’s the good.

“Today Connecticut is the home to the highest state and local tax burden nationwide. Dem governor Daniel Malloy forbade CT gov employees from traveling on state business to Indiana, as a protest against Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act — while CT had the same statute for some twenty years.”
A brain-eating toxin has ravaged Democrat party bosses in Connecticut, who just announced, under pressure from the CT NAACP, that the name of its annual fund- raising dinner, the Jefferson Jackson Bailey dinner, will be scrapped. Apparently Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson deserve disapprobation, as slave owners and practitioners of Oppression 101, but why should John Moran Bailey share such a disgraceful fall just for his name’s proximity?

Bailey, a notable Democratic Party luminary, headed the Connecticut Dem party machinery in the 50s and 60s. Bailey also was national Dem party chair who presided over the Dems’ notorious 1968 presidential convention in Chicago.

Since Bailey wasn’t a slaveholder, he can stay on the masthead. And add PT Barnum, Bridgeport native and snake-oil king extraordinaire. The Barnum and Bailey dinner has a certain ring…how suitable for such a venerable event.

A training video released today by Liwa Fursan al-Haqq (Knights of Justice Brigade) of the “vetted moderate” Free Syrian Army (FSA) opens with the group’s special forces practicing their abduction and kidnapping skills. And yet FSA units, funded, supported and armed by the U.S., have been repeatedly implicated in the abduction and kidnapping of U.S. citizens in Syria.

Here you can see them putting their U.S.-funded training to practice:

Also shown are critical military skills, such as standing on the back of a motorcycle while shooting two U.S.-funded AK-47s one-handed:

Of course no jihadist training video would be complete without the requisite traversing of the monkey bars:

Or the “Fiery Ring of Death”:

Delta Force and the Navy SEALs have nothing on Liwa Fursan al-Haqq. Yet all three elite units are funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars!

News that the Connecticut Democratic Party has dropped the names “Jefferson” and “Jackson” from their annual fundraising dinner is being greeted by incredulity from many historians.

The decision immediately drew criticism from some historians as a politically correct overstep, including Robert Turner, a law professor at the University of Virginia, which was founded by Jefferson.

“It is a sad and short-sighted decision based upon tragic ignorance,” said Turner, who has written extensively about Jefferson’s legacy.

This December will mark the 150th anniversary of the enactment of the 13th Amendment of the Constitution, which abolished slavery.

Ohio Governor John Kasich, who officially entered the crowded GOP field on Tuesday, told Sean Hannity that Hillary Clinton attended the party in 1997 when he became engaged to his wife Karen.

Sean Hannity, who interviewed Kasich after his announcement on Tuesday, asked the Ohio governor about comments he’s made downplaying the IRS and Benghazi scandals.“You said, ‘I’m more worried about how we’re going to fix America than Hillary’s email server and you said, ‘I don’t believe you beat her by talking about Benghazi or her emails–”

“No, you don’t,” Kasich interrupted Hannity.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) dedicated part of his statement at today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Iran nuclear deal to the Americans being held in Iran.

Secretary of State John Kerry had said earlier in the hearing that “we are going to continue to press Iran for information about the missing American, about the immediate release of Americans who’ve been unjustly held, and there isn’t a challenge in the entire region that we won’t push back against if Iran is involved in it.”

Regarding the colossal farce of the Tim Hunt affair, about which I wrote previously on this site [1], more remains to be said about the doubling down of Hunt’s dissembling critics and delators. Connie St. Louis [2], his principal and most effective accuser, whose pre-redacted CV has now been rumbled as a document full of misrepresentations and “downright falsehoods [3],” is unrepentant about the snuff job she helped foment. Berating Hunt for sexism and old-boyism while bowdlerizing his text and excerpting only the “problematic” portion of his pre-luncheon toast, she essentially reverse-triggered the larger context of his speech. In this way she tampered with evidence in order to convict her prey.

For this piece of skullduggery, she suffered no qualms of conscience. “I’ve no regrets about breaking a journalistic story,” she boasted.

In fact, her story has nothing to do with journalism as we once knew it. It is a journalism so yellow and speckled it resembles a rancid banana. Of course, if she is referring to contemporary journalism, then she is spot on, for most mainstream reporting in our day is little more than a vast propaganda and indoctrination mill serving the progressivist cause. In a fair milieu, it is not Hunt but St. Louis who should be drummed out of her profession and summarily dismissed from her teaching post. If I were Tim Hunt, I would immediately retain a pitbull lawyer and sue for malfeasance, libel, and defamation of character.

Malaysia is in the midst of a first-class political scandal, thanks in part to reporting in this newspaper that $700 million linked to a state-owned investment fund allegedly was transferred to the personal accounts of Prime Minister Najib Razak. Mr. Najib denies wrongdoing, and neither the original source nor ultimate destination of the money is clear.

Yet the larger scandal in Malaysia is hiding in plain sight. We’re talking about the imprisonment of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, who is five months into a nonappealable five-year prison sentence on trumped-up sodomy charges. Nearby we publish an op-ed by Mr. Anwar, written in his jail cell, detailing the Najib government’s broader assault on the civil liberties of all Malaysians.

While Mr. Anwar’s op-ed speaks for itself, it would help if others speak up for him. That goes especially for President Obama, who has long claimed an interest in cultivating the forces of moderation in the Muslim world. Too bad, then, that he refused to meet Mr. Anwar when he visited Malaysia last year, though he had time for a very public round of golf with Mr. Najib in Hawaii a few months later. Mr. Obama’s reticence on behalf of political freedom in the world, from Iran in 2009 to Malaysia today, is one of the mysteries of his Presidency. Out of realpolitik or indifference, he is mute.

As Florida Governor, Jeb Bush conquered what he called “Mount Tallahassee,” and now that he’s running for President he is proposing to do the same to “Mount Washington.” On Monday he offered some initial ideas on how to do it, and some are better than others.

The good news is that he wants to start by reducing the size of the bureaucratic Everest. “You can have a fast-expanding economy or you can have a fast expanding government, but you can’t have both,” he said in a speech at Florida State University.

His best idea would freeze the federal workforce and then reduce it by 10% over four years through attrition. In particular he proposes a “three-out, one-in” rule—one new hire for every three who leave. According to the White House budget office historical tables, that would shrink federal civilian employment by some 210,000 from the 2.114 million full-time equivalent (FTE) positions in the executive branch in 2015. As recently as 2008 there were 1.875 million FTEs.