RUTHFULLY YOURS

It happens to everyone. One time I found $13 million under a sofa cushion. And don’t get me started on all the billions behind the maps of Cleveland in the glove compartment.

Come on, they’re only human [2].

The Clinton Foundation reported Thursday that it has received as much as $26.4 million in previously undisclosed payments from major corporations, universities, foreign sources and other groups.

The disclosure came as the foundation faced questions over whether it fully complied with a 2008 ethics agreement to reveal its donors and whether any of its funding sources present conflicts of interest for Hillary Rodham Clinton as she begins her presidential campaign.

The first priority of most Western governments today seems to sign a deal with Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who openly calls for Israel’s and America’s destruction.

The next priority of many European governments, and apparently the Pope, is to entrust a state to the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, a movement that does not hide its genocidal intentions.

Unless the Obama Administration and Congress stop Iran, we are about to witness the world’s next genocide, committed by Iran. By teeing up Iran’s nuclear capability and triggering a Middle East nuclear arms race, the U.S. and the negotiators of the P5+1 are creating conditions that can only lead to a disastrous war with catastrophic results.

The great columns and pediments of Washington, D.C. that give it a Roman and Greek air have their origins in a lost city in the Syrian desert. After Robert Wood and James Dawkins visited the ruins of Palmyra [2] in the eighteenth century, the illustrations of the bare columns and broken arches helped inspire neoclassical architecture. Now the city that helped inspire Washington is occupied by ISIS.

It is a historical irony that the classical architecture of our national capital where Islamic terrorists are appeased owes a good deal to a forgotten Christian outpost that surrendered to the armies of Islam.

Some would even say that history is repeating itself.

Palmyra fell when it was besieged by the savage horde of Khalid ibn al-Walid; the Sword of Allah. The Sword of Allah was known for numerous atrocities. One particularly gruesome account describes how he murdered the Arab poet and chieftain Malik ibn Nuweira for returning taxes demanded by Mohammed to his people, telling them, “Your wealth is now your own.” The Islamic IRS was even nastier than ours.

The Sword of Allah cut off Malik’s head and used it to cook dinner [3] before raping his wife. Through such atrocities, that helped inspire the modern crimes of ISIS, the Sword of Allah was able to keep Mohammed’s conquests together after his death. When he came to Palmyra, the Sword swore by Allah that he would conquer it even if it were in heaven and capture its sons and daughters.

A rather uneventful college commencement season full of the usual platitudes and bromides was shaken up by British novelist Ian McEwan’s refreshingly challenging the zeitgeist of trigger warnings, free-speech zones, and campus censorship at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania this week.

McEwan did not shy away from addressing the current temper on campus, choosing to focus on the creeping group-think in faculty lounges and discussion sections instead of the all too easy targets of Russian crackdowns on free speech or the “industrial scale” state-sponsored censorship in China. McEwan directly confronted the problem of a country rooted in the tradition of free expression under the First Amendment meekly submitting to what he called “bi-polar thinking” — the eagerness of some to “not side with Charlie Hebdo because it might seem as if we’re endorsing George Bush’s War on Terror.”

The good news for global-warming alarmists is that they can pretty much be guaranteed that there will always be something happening somewhere in the world to get alarmed about. “It has been a really bad week for the ice shelves of the quickly warming Antarctic peninsula,” the Washington Post’s resident alarmist Chris Mooney wrote a week ago. In a few years, a very warm summer will see the Larsen B ice shelf shatter into thousands of smaller icebergs, a researcher told him. However, Mooney did not report that the same team that had detected Antarctic warming also said that the warming had not been reproduced by climate models. “Until the past warming can be properly simulated, there is little basis for prediction that rapid warming will continue in future,” according to the British Antarctic Survey.

Neither does the alarm extend to the total area of ice floating on the seas surrounding Antarctic and the North Pole. There was a sharp recovery from the low recorded in 2012, and global sea-ice area is currently above the 1979–2008 average. The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reckons that Antarctic sea ice has expanded at an average of 4.1 percent per decade since 1979. This slightly more than offsets shrinkage of the larger area of sea ice at the North Pole, which the NSIDC says has declined by 2.4 percent a decade.

Recent news of the Clintons’ $25 million jackpot in 2014 makes it tough for Hillary to push her core campaign theme with a straight face. Indeed, widespread laughter will greet her efforts to champion “everyday Americans” against those who allegedly make too much money.

“The deck is stacked for those at the top,” Hillary Clinton said Tuesday, not mentioning that her household income puts her in not just the top 1 percent of tax filers but the top 0.1 percent.

“There’s something wrong when CEOs make 300 times more than the typical worker,” Clinton told Iowa voters last month. However, as Sean Davis noted Tuesday at TheFederalist.com, “she did not elaborate on whether there’s something wrong when non-CEOs who run tax-exempt organizations make 380 times more than the typical worker.”

There are plenty of reasons to believe 2016 will be a very ugly election year. Here’s one more.

Bloomberg Politics convened a focus group of Iowa Democrats. Nearly all loved Hillary. “She’s a bad mama-jama,” said one female participant. Bad mama-jama is good, by the way. The woman explained that Clinton is “not afraid to step up” or “afraid to say, ‘No. I don’t want to do it that way. I’m going to do it this way.’”

Another participant insisted that Clinton is a “better woman than I am” — a great standard for selecting a president, to be sure — because of Clinton’s ability to weather various scandals and humiliations.

The awkward part came when Bloomberg’s Mark Halperin asked the room, “What did she accomplish that you consider significant as secretary of state?”

The answers — or rather, the replies, since no one had an answer — were awkward to say the least.

“I really can’t name anything off the top of my head,” one squirming Democrat admitted.

President Obama’s assertion in his commencement address to cadets at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy that the rise of ISIS in Syria and Boko Haram in Nigeria, and the brutality of both, is somehow linked to climate change shows just how dangerously detached from reality U.S. foreign policy has become.

For those who wondered why upwards of two hundred thousand have died in Syria, Boko Haram abducts Christian schoolgirls, and ISIS beheads and burns people alive in its reign of terror, the president placed a major part of the blame on fossil fuels and your SUV.

I understand climate change did not cause the conflicts we see around the world, yet what we also know is that severe drought helped to create the instability in Nigeria that was exploited by the terrorist group Boko Haram. It’s now believed that drought and crop failures and high food prices helped fuel the early unrest in Syria, which descended into civil war in the heart of the Middle East.

Believed by whom? Those who think Elvis Presley and Jimmy Hoffa are alive running a donut shop in Idaho? Weather, which is what we used to call climate change, has played a pivotal role in world history, from the defeat of the Spanish Armada to Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow to the Normandy invasion and Battle of the Bulge in World War II. But it does not create tyranny and evil.

There was no violence, there were no beheadings, there was no burning people alive during the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Groups like ISIS and Boko Haram are not out foraging for food. They are poster children for the evil that lurks in the world and that advances as we retreat from our global responsibilities and indulge in these irresponsible fantasies.

Trump Slams Geller, Muhammad Cartoon Contest: ‘With All the Problems We Have, Why Taunt?’Bridget Johnson

Donald Trump said a Bloomberg poll that shows him viewed unfavorably by 68 percent of global investors, analysts and traders has no bearing on his presidential chances.

“I think that’s because nobody thinks I’m running. They don’t think I’m running. It’s really a funny thing. As you know, I came in, like, beat almost everybody in the New Hampshire Bloomberg poll, the same thing. Yet they don’t think I’m running. So we’ll see what happens. I mean, in June, I will announce one way or the other, and I think you may be surprised. Even you may be surprised. I’ll be announcing some time in June,” Trump told Fox last night.

In this month’s Bloomberg New Hampshire poll, Trump came in with 8 percent behind Rand Paul and Scott Walker tied at 12 percent, and Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio tied at 11 percent.

“Democracy exists to give people the kind of government they deserve. If the American people do not have the moral fibre to extirpate corruption on the Clinton scale, they will deserve what’s coming to them.”

I have been reading Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash with brief pauses to wipe the puke off the computer screen. For the past fifteen years, there has been no sewer too stinky for Bill and Hillary to bathe in. Most of Schweizer’s research has already made the mainstream media, but the sheer mass of it still amazes. It’s not one malfeasance or three, but an unbroken pattern of overtly corrupt behavior trading half-million-dollar speaking fees and multi-million-dollar payoffs to the Clintons’ foundation in return for billion-dollar mining concessions and corporate takeovers staged by the most revolting gangsters in the jungle of Third World governance. The English language needs a word like the Yiddish term “chutzpah” to describe them, but without the connotation of modesty and discretion.

What kind of people are we Americans, that we allow these kleptocrat’s hirelings to persist in public life? The answer, I fear, is that we have become corrupt ourselves. I’ve seen enough corruption in the Third World to know that it requires the consent of the governed. Between 1988 and 1993, I directed a Mexican research project on tax and regulatory reform. In 1990, I advised Violeta Chamorro after her election victory over Nicaragua’s Sandinistas for exactly one week, coaching her team in negotiations with the International Monetary Fund. Back then I was chief economist for the consulting firm Polyconomics, and I canceled the contract after one of Mrs. Chamorro’s advisers handed me our fee in the form of an envelope full of $100 bills–duly declared and reported to the U.S. tax authorities. In 1992, I was asked to advise Russian Finance Minister Yegor Gaidar on currency stabilization after the fall of Communism, and made several trips to Moscow. I never did meet Gaidar, but I saw enough of the looting of state assets to persuade me to get out of Dodge. Rather than pursue emerging markets, I shifted to quantitative modeling of high-grade bonds. Even that field turned rotten in the subprime scam two decades later, but that’s another story.