RUTHFULLY YOURS

No American concession ever empties President Obama’s appeasement reservoir or satisfies Iran’s appetite. So on drone the negotiations toward a disastrous deal that would end sanctions against the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism while paving its way to a nuclear-weapons arsenal.

In that connection, as Patrick Brennan noted on the Corner Friday, Senator Ben Sasse has penned a letter to the president that makes a compelling case against a key aspect of the contemplated Iran deal.

Specifically, on the critical matter of establishing violations by Iran that would theoretically trigger reinstatement of the sanctions, Senator Sasse objects that Obama is foolishly shifting the burden of persuasion. The deal, he argues, would require the United States to prove Iranian violations rather than forcing Iran to prove it is in compliance.

At the hate festival that is Quds Day in Tehran, calls for the destruction of the U.S. and Israel are crowd-pleasers.

On Thursday, Western diplomats in Vienna missed another deadline in the years-long Iranian nuclear negotiations. The latest snag is Iran’s demand for immediate sanctions relief and the lifting of a United Nations arms embargo. The next day in Tehran, the regime issued other demands—namely, that the U.S. and Israel cease to exist.

Thousands of regime supporters on Friday marked Quds Day, an annual hate festival established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini. (Quds is the Arabic name for Jerusalem.) Braving a stifling heat wave, the Quds Day celebrants burned the American flag and displayed a caricature of what appeared to be King Salman of Saudi Arabia—a U.S. ally and detested Middle East rival—with his head morphing into a Star of David, topped by a Stars and Stripes yarmulke. All accompanied by the holiday tradition of chanting “Death to America!”

The oldest prejudice reappears in attacks on American capitalists.
On a visit last week to a Buenos Aires school, Mrs. Kirchner learned that the children were reading the Bard’s “Romeo and Juliet.” “I said, you have to read ‘The Merchant of Venice’ to understand the vulture funds,” Mrs. Kirchner replied, adding that “usury and bloodsuckers have been immortalized in the greatest literature for centuries.”

Not all the kids may have caught her point, but her allusion to Shylock, the play’s vindictive Jewish anti-hero, would not have been lost on literate Argentines. Nor would they have missed her reference to those “vulture funds,” her term of abuse for Argentina’s holdout creditors, led by Elliott Management’s Paul Singer, who have had the chutzpah to insist on being repaid. Her refusal to do so led to Argentina’s default last year, which hasn’t stopped her from heaping thinly veiled anti-Semitic abuse on Mr. Singer, who happens to be Jewish.

The Affordable Care Act was supposed to make insurance, well, more affordable. But now hard results are starting to emerge: premium surges that often average 10% to 20% and spikes that sometimes run as high as 50% or 60% or more from coast to coast. Welcome to the new abnormal of ObamaCare.

This summer insurers must submit rates to state regulators for approval on the ObamaCare exchanges in 2016—and even liberals are shocked at the double-digit requests, or at least the honest liberals are. Under ObamaCare, year-over-year premium increases above 10% must also be justified to the Health and Human Services Department, and its data base lists about 650 such cases so far.

If you want to understand why there is no peace in the Holy Land despite the best efforts of the Obama administration and the billion-dollar European “peace and human rights” industry, you owe it to yourself to read Catch the Jew! by Tuvia Tenenbom. This myth-shattering book became an instant bestseller in Israel last year, yet, Germany aside, it has largely been ignored in American and European media outlets and by the reigning Middle East punditocracy. Ostensibly, Tenenbom’s book is disdained because the author lacks the academic or journalistic credentials to be taken seriously as a commentator on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Though he speaks both Arabic and Hebrew, Tenenbom possesses no professional expertise on the modern Middle East, nor has he had any previous journalistic experience covering Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Islamist terror is not the product of Western policy. As David Cameron rightly notes, it is a global ideological network, with both violent and non-violent branches, and appears committed to enveloping everyone throughout the world.

But in the world of Giles Fraser, Baroness Warsi and friends, it seems as if terrorists are not radical, extremists are not extreme, and Islamism is not the product of Islamist ideas.

In June, Talha Asmal, a 17-year-old Muslim, became Britain’s youngest suicide bomber. In a vehicle packed with explosives, Asmal and three other jihadists attacked Iraqi forces at an oil refinery in the northern town of Baiji. Eleven people were killed.

When you travel to another country, you generally check to see how strong the dollar is against the local currency.

Yet even within the United States there’s a lot of variation between what a buck will get you in one state versus another.

According to a new analysis by the Tax Foundation, the states where $100 is worth the most are Mississippi, Arkansas and South Dakota. Meanwhile, go to D.C., Hawaii or New York and you’ll find that the same $100 gets spent the fastest.

Traitorous ‘sanctuary’ cities are only the tip of the iceberg.

The term “sanctuary” conjures up a place of safety and comfort and, indeed, in some dictionaries, those two terms are used to describe sanctuaries. Therefore pairing the two terms, “violent” and “sanctuary” in the same title may seem to constitute a contradiction in terms. As you will soon see, in this era of political corruption and intentional ineptitude, those two terms actually fit perfectly together.

While the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary in part, describes a sanctuary as, “a refuge for wildlife where predators are controlled and hunting is illegal” in so-called “Sanctuary Cities” such as San Francisco, predators are being granted sanctuary and innocent people are being hunted. Witness the senseless murder of Kathryn Steinle who fell victim to a predatory criminal alien, Francisco Sanchez, who easily entered the United States by running our borders with impunity on at least five occasions notwithstanding the fact that he has reportedly been convicted of committing seven felonies in the United States and yet was shielded by San Francisco’s sanctuary policies.

On June 27, right before the previous deadline determined by the P5+1 powers and the Islamic Republic of Iran to reach a nuclear deal, the municipality of Mashhad in northeastern Iran initiated a special program for kids. The nine-day event, promoted by the mullah-led regime in Tehran, took place in the framework of the 10th International Quran and Family Expo. It ended on July 6, the eve of the date when the nuclear negotiators had hoped to sign an agreement.

Called “The City of Resistance Games,” the program provided a host of activities for young children and teenagers. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, which released a special dispatch on this semi-summer camp, all the activities were aimed at indoctrinating participants in the justice of the fight against Iran’s enemies, chief among them the United States and Britain. You know, two of the countries in the midst of deluding themselves that a deal with the Islamic republic would be better for global security.

Commentators are probably right in assessing that Brianna Keilar’s CNN interview with Hillary Clinton was not quite the love-in that many of us anticipated. (See Jim Geraghty’s review of the Clinton interview, here.) Still, you have to mourn the media’s lack of self-respect: as Jim pointed out in Wednesday’s Morning Jolt, Mrs. Clinton blatantly lied when she claimed, “I’ve never had a subpoena” from a congressional committee regarding Benghazi. There was nothing subtle about it. Clinton was totally banking on CNN’s inclination to let her slide.

Well, they don’t call it the Clinton News Network for nothing. It is the network of Candy Crowley, who in the middle of a presidential candidates’ debate couldn’t restrain herself from inappropriately challenging – and misleadingly correcting – Mitt Romney’s remarks about Benghazi. But somehow, when Benghazi came up in a one-on-one media interview setting, CNN couldn’t bring itself to call Mrs. Clinton on an obvious lie.