RUTHFULLY YOURS

Bush and Clinton Downplay Foreign Policy in Their Announcement Speeches

American presidents have greater leeway on foreign policy than on domestic issues. Just see how President Obama is forging ahead to an agreement with Iran opposed by large majorities in Congress and among voters.

A president’s personal predilections and core assumptions can have much more of an effect on his foreign policy than on domestic issues. You can draw a straight line from Obama’s 2008 judgment that Iraq was a “stupid” war to the decisions that have led to the mess we see there today.

We suspect that death-penalty opponents will be largely silent as the case of Dylann Root, the 21-year-old racist who gunned down nine people in a Bible-study class on Wednesday, goes through the court system. His horrendous crime cries out for the ultimate punishment. It leaves children without parents, parents without children, and the community of Charleston, S.C., devastated.

Root may not generate any sympathy or pleas for clemency, but plenty of other cold-blooded killers do — and go on to escape the death penalty. But the cases in which they commit evil acts and leave a trail of tears don’t get the publicity that Root’s case will. It’s time we give these lesser-known crimes a closer look when we evaluate claims that the death penalty is barbaric and unjustified.

~The decision to boot Alexander Hamilton off the ten-dollar bill – or at any rate reduce him to one-half of a double-act (like the short-lived Dan Rather and Connie Chung) – is one of those small acts of historical vandalism I absolutely loathe. The powers that be have decided it’s time (once more – see right) for “a woman” on a US banknote. So Hamilton’s not even being bounced for some outstanding individual but just for some dreary identity-group quota. Secretary Lew said, “Find me a woman, any woman” – Sacagawea, Harriet Tubman, Caitlyn Jenner, Rachel Dolezal… And that means one of the dead white males has to go. Not Washington or Lincoln – people have still, just about, heard of them. But Hamilton? I mean, dude, like, he wasn’t even president …er, was he?

No, but he can stake a greater claim to being on there than most of the guys who were: Jackson, Wilson, they’re just the passing parade – but Hamilton earned his place.

Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton’s longtime confidante, is currently the vice chair of her 2016 presidential campaign. “I’m not sure Hillary could walk out the door without Huma,” Clinton adviser Mandy Grunwald said back during the days of Hillary’s first run for the presidency. Huma and Hillary are inseparable, including having been linked together on a private e-mail network while Ms. Clinton was Secretary of State and Ms. Abedin was her deputy chief of staff. If Hillary Clinton were to be elected president of the United States, Ms. Abedin will no doubt be right there with Hillary as her right hand person in the White House. And that may well be a major coup for the Muslim Brotherhood, whose strategic plan calls for destroying Western civilization from within and “‘sabotaging’ its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers…”

In view of her background [2] that involves the Muslim Brotherhood, it is time for Huma Abedin to come out of the shadows and reveal exactly what she did and whom she communicated with while at the Clinton State Department.

Few things are more disturbing than the collaborative media silence that attends the ongoing disintegration of post-apartheid South Africa. The nation’s ruling African National Congress (ANC), led by President Jacob Zuma, is the essence of corruption in a nation with one of the highest rates [2] of rape in the world, and a murder rate best described [3] last September by MP Dianne Kohler Barnard of the Democratic Alliance, the nation’s second largest [4] political party. “We have 47 murders a day,” she said. “That sort of figure is what one would expect in a war zone.”

In her book, “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” [5] author Ilana Mercer cuts through the tyranny of political correctness that surrounds the ostensible improvement that was supposed to have emerged in that nation, following the release of Nelson Mandela from prison in 1990, and the subsequent adoption [6] of a new constitution in 1994, enfranchising blacks and other minorities. While she rightly describes the “terrible injustice” of the apartheid regime that produced an average of 7,036 people murdered per year, she reveals the Western-celebrated ANC government saw an average of 24,026 murders annually in the first eight years of its existence.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Why do black lives only seem to matter when white people take them? Why does the president of the United States think it’s proper to take a horrible racial tragedy in Charleston South Carolina as an excuse to bash America as the violence capital of the “advanced” world, and a prop for Democrats’ lust for gun control legislation in a state that already has it?

Last year 82 people were shot over the Fourth of July weekend in Chicago. 16 of them died [2]. The victims and the shooters were black.

Clarence Thomas isn’t often the Supreme Court’s swing Justice, but he was on Thursday as the Court ruled on two cases that illuminate when the government can restrict speech. His answer is that the government has more power to do so when the speech belongs to the government.

The High Court issued a welcome verdict in Reed v. Town of Gilbert, ruling unanimously that the Arizona town’s limits on signs announcing church services violated the First Amendment. Gilbert said that Pastor Clyde Reed’s signs directing people to his church could be no larger than six square feet and displayed only 12 hours before and one hour after an event. The town put no such limits on political and ideological signs, and the Court ruled that this amounted to content discrimination against Rev. Reed.

“Innocent motives do not eliminate the danger of censorship presented by a facially content-based statute, as future government officials may one day wield such statutes to suppress disfavored speech,” wrote Justice Thomas, who was joined by the four conservatives and Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

AMEN TO THAT….RSK

If the Republicans make the mistake of nominating a pro-Common Core candidate to run for president in 2016, they’ll be positioning themselves to lose. It will be disastrous for the Republican Party and for the country, because we could very likely end up with Hillary Clinton as our next president. Both Jeb Bush and John Kasich – enthusiastic supporters of the top-down, federally influenced state education standards – are destined to go down with the Common Core ship and they’ll take the GOP with them if either one is at the top of the ticket in 2016.

Does that sound extreme? I think the numbers and the anecdotal evidence are on my side. Consider that there are some 50 million children enrolled in public schools in the United States, plus another 5 million who attend private schools, most of which are following the Common Core standards. A Gallup survey of parents with kids in public schools found that 35% view the standards unfavorably — and 18% have a “very negative” view of them. Even allowing that many families have more than one child in school, it’s still likely that a million parents think the standards are bad and probably at least half a million think they’re really bad. Add to that the grandparents and friends of the family who are hearing about it second hand and you’ve got a giant pool of Americans — all potential voters — who don’t like Common Core.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said the federal government is “choking innovation” instead of creating an environment for it to flourish.

Booker, the former mayor of Newark, N.J., also said federal government rules and regulations on drones are blocking technological advances.He recommended the government open up datasets to fuel innovation.

“In New York, you can get an app, go to any restaurant and get any health data. Why should that health data be the privy of government alone? So I come to the United States Senate and I’m like, ‘wait a minute, the reason why we empower lobbyists in the Senate in the first place is because it’s so opaque, you can’t get data.’ We literally, if you want documents from the Senate, they are on a format that’s not readable, not XML, you have to get PDF files. Imagine if we, just in the Senate, did what industry is doing, what local governments are doing, opening up and making it more transparent,” Booker said at the Techonomy Policy conference.

These days major reports are coming out on the Gaza war last summer. The main issue of contention: did Israel go on a rampage in Gaza, killing civilians recklessly or even intentionally, or did it try to minimize civilian casualties as much as possible?

The report of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva should be out any day. The UNHRC is a notorious Israel-bashing body, 80% of whose resolutions [1] have condemned Israel. Prof. William Schabas, previous head of its current “fact-finding commission” on Gaza, had to step down when it turned out he’d been in the pay of the Palestinians [2]. This commission’s report is, of course, expected to hit Israel hard.