RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a column on Tuesday and follow-up post on the Corner, I relate that beginning in 2011, President Obama secretly enticed the Iranian regime to the bargaining table by communicating that he was open to abandoning longstanding American opposition to Iran’s claimed “right” to enrich uranium. This news comes to us from a new MEMRI report, which elaborates that Obama relied on then-senator John Kerry to grease the wheels for his entreaty to Iran’s leader.

Why Kerry?

Though he was surely a key Obama ally on Capitol Hill, Kerry was not in the administration. The president already had a compliant secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, who was dutifully implementing his appeasement policies. He also had any number of subordinate administration officials capable of passing messages. So why would Obama choose Kerry as his emissary to alert Iran to a dramatic shift in American policy?

Clearly, there are two reasons: Obama needed someone outside the administration, and Kerry’s status and track record made him a natural.

The latest PPP poll out of Iowa shows Hillary Clinton trailing four Republican candidates in head-to-head matchups.

Ben Carson performs best against the former secretary of state, besting her by by four percentage points, 44–40, while former Florida governor Jeb Bush performs the worst. He trails her by four points, 44–40. The other three GOPers who came out ahead of Clinton are Wisconsin governor Scott Walker and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, leading her 44–43, and Florida senator Marco Rubio, who leads her 43–42.

Kentucky senator Rand Paul and real-estate mogul Donald Trump both trail Clinton by three points, 43–40; Texas senator Ted Cruz, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, New Jersey governor Chris Christie, and Ohio governor John Kasich all trail her by two points.

The poll’s margin of error is four points, so all of the results remain, of course, with the margin.

Carly Fiorina Shows How to Address the Left on Climate Change
By David French

In the political battles over climate change, there are three distinct and relevant questions. First, does mankind have a material affect on the Earth’s climate? Second, if mankind does impact the climate, is that impact harmful? And third, if we assume that mankind is harming the environment, will any given American policy or collection of policies have a meaningful beneficial impact? So far, the conservative movement has mainly pushed back on the “scientific consensus” related to the first question — the extent of human influence over the Earth’s climate. To see a textbook example, watch Ted Cruz’s recent interview with Katie Couric earlier this year, when he confronted her with the miserable recent history of environmentalist predictions:

Neither Hillary Nor Bernie Is Up to the Task of Holding the Obama Coalition Together
‘We are trying to be reasonable,” an organizer for Bernie Sanders’s Seattle rally said.

The black female protesters who stormed the stage became enraged. “We aren’t reasonable!” they shouted back. “If you do not listen to [us], your event will be shut down,” one of them declared to the crowd.

Sanders caved to the protesters from the Black Lives Matter movement and gave activist Marissa Johnson the microphone. “I was going to tell Bernie how racist this city is, even with all of these progressives, but you’ve already done that for me. Thank you,” she said, apparently in response to members of the crowd who booed her. I suppose if you’ve already conceded that you aren’t reasonable, it’s not hard to argue that booing an uninvited rabble-rouser is “racist.”

It’s understandable that all eyes have been on the insane food fight Donald Trump has instigated on the right. Even Trump’s biggest detractors — and I count myself among their number — have to concede that Trump is awfully entertaining. But while the spectacle on the right seems like a canceled TV-reality-show pilot — call it Desperate Billionaires of Manhattan Gone Wild — the spectacle on the left is no less fascinating or significant.

As his speech ended, and before he could be whisked from the room, I ignored his bodyguards and rushed the podium. I approached the small and unlikely man and silently held out the book and pen. He beamed with a smile. Authors quietly rejoice whenever they are asked to sign their own works — even this giant whose words steered the events of world history.

The well-worn paperback was Open Secrets, a collection of essays by the Czech poet President Vaclav Havel. It was 1998 and President Havel was visiting the United States. I had been tipped off that he’d be speaking to an audience in the bowels of Congress, so I grabbed my copy of his book and set off.

I’ve collected signed books of moonwalkers and rock stars, politicians and new-media pioneers, but I treasure my signed copy of Open Secrets above all. Under his signature, he drew a simple and charming heart.

Lawmakers are demanding to know what the Environmental Protection Agency is doing about the environmental contamination it caused while “investigating” the Gold King Mine in southwest Colorado.

According to the EPA, while an agency cleanup crew was “excavating loose material that had collapsed into the cave entry, pressurized water began leaking above the mine tunnel, spilling about three million gallons of water stored behind the collapsed material into Cement Creek, a tributary of the Animas River.”

The path of the toxic water, laced with arsenic, lead, copper and cadmium, is affecting Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Southern Ute Tribe and Navajo Nation.

“EPA is taking the lead on efforts to contain the leak and flow from the mine is now controlled. EPA has also deployed federal On-Scene Coordinators and other technicians in Colorado, New Mexico and Navajo Nation to assist with preparations and first response activities in these jurisdictions. EPA is sharing information as quickly as possible with the community as experts work to analyze any effects the spill may have on drinking water and public health,” the agency said on a website page pulled together with news on the spill and a link to a damage claim form.

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) said his Environment and Public Works Committee is closely monitoring the spill and the EPA’s response.

The inspector general for the intelligence community confirmed in a memo today that there was classified information in the emails stored on Hillary Clinton’s private server.

“My office received multiple Congressional requests for copies of Former Secretary Clinton’s emails containing classified Intelligence Community (IC) information,” wrote Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III. “These emails, attached hereto, have been properly marked by IC classification officials and include information classified up to ‘TOP SECRET // SI/TK // NORFORN.”

SI/TK stands for special intelligence/talent keyhole, covering signals or imagery intelligence work. NORFORN means it can’t be viewed by foreign citizens.

“IC classification officials reviewed two additional emails and judged that they contained classified State Department information when originated,” McCullough continued. “These officials referred the emails to State Department classification officials on 7 August 2015 for final determination on current classification. We will provide these documents once they have been properly marked by State Department.”

The truth is that I’ve started to really hate “climate change” stories.

The problem is that both side have made it into an item of faith. On the AGW side, the “Apostle’s Creed” is that climate change is an existential crisis, that all unpleasant weather events — and an amazing number of other things — are caused by climate change, that current changes in temperature are unprecedented, that human-driven causes are the principle reason for temperature increases, and that any measures to ameliorate climate change are justified, no matter the cost or impact. What’s more, any further discussion is pointless, as seen in the the recent editorial by the editor of Science magazine (“The beyond two-degree inferno [1]“):

see:http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2015/08/08/the-suicide-of-the-liberal-arts-by-john-agresto/
The Suicide of the Liberal Arts By John Agresto
John Agresto’s Aug. 7 essay “The Suicide of the Liberal Arts” is one of the more eloquent of the elegies for high culture that appear from time to time in the quality press. A former president of St. John’s College (Santa Fe), perhaps the best undergraduate Great Books program around, Agresto wrote in the Wall Street Journal:

When properly conceived and taught, the liberal arts do not by themselves make us “better people” or (God knows) more “human.” They don’t exist to make us more “liberal,” at least in the contemporary political sense. But the liberal arts can do something no less wonderful: They can open our eyes.

They show us how to look at the world and the works of civilization in serious and important and even delightful ways. They hold out the possibility that we will know better the truth about many of the most important things. They are the vehicle that carries the amazing things that mankind has made — and the memory of the horrors that mankind has perpetrated — from one age to the next. They teach us how to marvel.

Western culture has become inaccessible to the general public because we have lost the ability to see the world through the eyes of those who created it. A generation ago, the literary critic Harold Bloom complained in The Western Canon that it no longer was possible to teach English literature to undergraduates because they lacked the cultural references to make sense of it: imagine reading Moby Dick without knowing who Ishmael and Ahab were in the Bible, or Joyce’s Ulysses without knowing that someone named Homer had written an epic about a certain Odysseus. (Outside the English realm, Bloom is guilty of the same sort of ignorance, but that is a different matter).

Convicted in Ponzi scheme, Norman Hsu speaks in first prison interview about politics; denies he broke campaign-finance laws

Norman Hsu was in the middle of the action in national politics eight years ago, as a top fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.These days, he is holed up in a federal penitentiary here on charges of operating a Ponzi scheme and breaking campaign finance laws, and the action is anything but heated.

Recently, an inmate asked him how to make $1 million “legitimately, in a year.” Mr. Hsu advised him: “Win the lottery.” When a guard approached him to ask a question, Mr. Hsu stopped him: “I said, ‘I know what you’re going to ask: Who’s going to be the next president?’”

The government said Mr. Hsu stole between $50 million and $100 million from individuals by claiming he was making short-term loans to retail companies—and then pressured the investors to make political contributions.