RUTHFULLY YOURS

Recently, Charles Blow, a New York Times commentator, tried to promote his memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”, by racializing his son’s detention at Yale. “I have no patience for people trying to convince me that the fear these young black men feel isn’t real,” Blow ranted.

The publicity stunt fell apart when it was revealed that the officer who stopped his son was also black.

Now it’s Ta-Nehisi Coates’s turn to audition for America’s Next Top Victim with his latest memoir, “Between the World and Me”.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is younger than Blow, and this is his second memoir, which some might say is two memoirs too many for a man who hasn’t done anything except blog angrily about racism and Spider-Man and has yet to turn forty, but Coates is a professional victim where Blow is only an amateur.

Coates, the son of a Black Panther, has the gift of beginning with any random premise and concluding with his own racial victimhood. Coates blamed “Segregation” for his difficulty learning French. He accused the New Republic of “neo-Dixiecratism” and claimed that he “could never work at TNR”. When a cab in Amsterdam failed to pick him up, it was somehow Paul Ryan’s fault.

“Son of Kenya,” Barack Obama, proved once again that his patience with people, nations, and world leaders that disagree with his view of the world registers a big fat zero on the liberal Tolerance Meter. When Obama finds out anyone (other than a Muslim) disagrees with his social policy focus, it becomes his personal mission to convince them otherwise.

And if the mere awesomeness of his presence fails to change minds, Obama will attempt to humiliate his ideological adversaries into submission by getting in their face.

For example, after Barack ‘LGBTQ’ Obama was specifically asked by the Evangelical Alliance of Kenya to leave his gay pride light show back at the White House, true to form, the self-important agitator disrespected his hosts and brought up the touchy subject of gay rights in Kenya, where homosexuality is illegal.

Last week, we saw the U.S. flag go up in Havana but more and more dissidents were arrested and subjected to repression, the one thing that the Castro regime does real well. Sunday July 26th was a bad day for dissidents, as Marc Masferrer reported.

No protests from the White House. In fact, the silence is embarassing.

Yesterday, President Obama went to Kenya and lectured his father’s homeland about gay rights, illegal in that country.

Speaking last week about the newly concluded agreement/treaty of P5+1, Congressman Mike Pompeo (R-Kans.) noted, “This agreement is the worst of backroom deals. In addition to allowing Iran to keep its nuclear program, missile program, American hostages, and terrorist network, the Obama administration has failed to make public separate side deals that have been struck for the ‘inspection’ of one of the most important nuclear sites – the Parchin military complex. Not only does this violate the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, it is asking Congress to agree to a deal that it cannot review.”

“Secret annexes” are not new in the world of diplomacy. However, in modern history, they are most associated with the failed alliance systems of 19th- and early 20th-century Europe. The Concert of Europe, rife with backroom as well as “front room” deals, was initiated in Europe by Klemens von Metternich, representing Austria, with the collaboration of the brilliant Maurice de Talleyrand of France. The main idea was to bulwark monarchic power in Europe. Later, its successor, called the Alliance System, was jump-started by Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian master manipulator. This system is considered by historians as contributing to the occurrence of WWI.

No wonder Iran’s Supreme Leader sent around a tweet of Obama pointing a pistol at his own head. Iran’s forcing itself on the rest of the world is a central part of Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution.

The Ayatollahs’ wish has long been finally to defeat the divided Arabs, and then to move on to defeat Israel, and then the grandest prize of all – the “Great Satan,” the United States.

Worse, apparently a “side deal” — classified for the Americans but not for Iran — enables Iran to provide its own soil samples to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), to which it has been lying for decades. Even still worse, the parties to the negotiation are required to protect Iran’s nuclear weapons program should anyone try to attack it – including, presumably, any disenchanted signatories.

Iran will have been rewarded for having violated the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and been given a red carpeted fast track to complete its nuclear bomb.

School vouchers may be the most effective anti-poverty program around, yet they’re fought tooth and hammer by the teachers unions. Late last week the North Carolina Supreme Court awarded a victory to poor kids by protecting vouchers from another union attack.

Two years ago Tar Heel Republicans passed a modest reform offering low-income students $4,200 scholarships to attend qualifying private schools. The law requires, among other things, that private schools report graduation rates and test scores. It also mandates an annual report comparing the learning gains of voucher recipients and public school students.

Taxpayer plaintiffs backed by the union argued in a lawsuit that vouchers accomplish no “public purpose” because private schools don’t have to adhere to such state educational standards as teacher licensing requirements. You have to admire the gall of a union to argue that private schools are “unaccountable” when only one in five black fourth-graders at North Carolina public schools scored proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress in 2013. According to the Institute for Justice, which represented voucher parents in the case, five of six low-income students fail the state’s end-of-grade math or reading tests.

The Obama end-run around the Constitution could yet be blocked if states exercise their own sanctions regimes.

The Iranian nuclear agreement announced on July 14 is unconstitutional, violates international law and features commitments that President Obama could not lawfully make. However, because of the way the deal was pushed through, the states may be able to derail it by enacting their own Iran sanctions legislation.

President Obama executed the nuclear deal as an executive agreement, not as a treaty. While presidents have used executive agreements to arrange less-important or temporary matters, significant international obligations have always been established through treaties, which require Senate consent by a two-thirds majority.

The Constitution’s division of the treaty-making power between the president and Senate ensured that all major U.S. international undertakings enjoyed broad domestic support. It also enabled the states to make their voices heard through senators when considering treaties—which are constitutionally the “supreme law of the land” and pre-empt state laws.

“Mrs. Clinton’s Wall Street fan club keeps telling itself that she’d provide relief from the anti-growth Obama years. On the growing evidence of her policies, she’d be worse.”

Hillary Clinton’s march to the left continues, hitting a new milestone on Friday when she proposed to nearly double the top tax rate on long-term capital gains to 43.4% from 23.8%—or the highest rate in decades.

Mrs. Clinton says she wants to overthrow “quarterly capitalism,” the supposed tendency of companies to be preoccupied with earnings reports and stock prices at the expense of investment that pays off over time. Yet her plan would undermine short-run shareholder goals and long-range economic growth.
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U.S. administration says full disclosure about program’s history isn’t critical to verify future commitments.

An Obama administration assessment of the Iran nuclear deal provided to Congress has led a number of lawmakers to conclude the U.S. and world powers will never get to the bottom of the country’s alleged efforts to build an atomic weapon, and that Tehran won’t be pressed to fully explain its past.

In a report to Capitol Hill last week, the administration said it was unlikely Iran would admit to having pursued a covert nuclear weapons program, and that such an acknowledgment wasn’t critical to verifying Iranian commitments in the future.

Details of the report, which haven’t been previously disclosed, indicate the deal reached this month could go ahead even if United Nations inspectors never ascertain conclusively whether Iran pursued a nuclear weapons program—something Tehran has repeatedly denied.

A little past midway through the second season of House of Cards, Episode 1, Chapter 14, Frank Underwood, ambitious politician and murderer, throws Zoe Barnes, the sluttish, amoral reporter who helped him move closer to the Vice Presidency and finally the Presidency with her stories calculated to smear or destroy his rivals, not so much under the bus, as under an incoming DC Metro train. He does this just after persuading her to erase all evidence of contact with him from her iPhone. Barnes was also Underwood’s sometime mistress.

Earlier in the series, he tells a co-conspirator, Remy Danton, a former employee and now a weight-throwing lobbyist for an “evil” natural gas giant, that he disposes of people he is finished using if they threaten his climb up the political “food chain.” A while later, Freddy, the ribs specialist, tells him that his new ribs supplier uses what I recognized from his disapproving description of it as a version of the Muslim halal way of killing animals – letting them bleed to death first – instead of killing them quickly and cleanly. Freddy’s new supplier instead shoves a pipe down a pig’s throat.