RUTHFULLY YOURS

A cousin of mine has finished his freshman year in college; like most freshmen, he now knows absolutely everything. He took it upon himself, this week, to announce (to my brother, who is a very patient man) that Iran’s Islamist dictators were “a predictable consequence of American imperialism,” which manifested itself through “the CIA’s international pro-fascist crimes.”

That’s nonsense, of course, but it’s widely believed nonsense — and not just among college kids who’ve read the first chapter of a Noam Chomsky book. There are serious men who are under the impression that the CIA led a coup to replace an upstanding, democratic reformer named Mohammed Mossadegh with a fascist Shah named Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and that Pahlavi’s crimes were so atrocious that Iran was driven into the arms of the mullahs. None of that is true. And with Congress getting ready to vote on the Iran deal, everyone could use a little historical perspective.

Just for the record….Steve King is an outstanding legislator and gets a -4 from the Arab American Association for his staunch defense and support of Israel…..rsk
Islamic jihad has declared war on the United States and all of Western civilization. ISIS has announced its intention to dominate the world and fly its black flag from the White House in continuation of a 1,400-year-old war against us “infidels.”

In the first 100 years after the death of Mohammed (a.d. 632)`, Islamic jihad conquered most of the known world except Western Europe. Christian forces blocked the first century of Islamic conquest at the very bloody Battle of Tours on October 10, 732. Islamic jihad continued to threaten the very existence of Christianity throughout the next millennium. October 7, 1571, marked the destruction of Islamic jihad’s massive fleet by the Holy League fleet in the Aegean Sea.

More than a century later, Islamic jihad, having conquered the Middle East and most of Eastern Europe, had surrounded and besieged the crown jewel of Western Christendom, Vienna. If Vienna fell to Islam, all of Western Europe would be likely to follow. After a two-month siege of Vienna, relief forces from Poland and Germany arrived.

The battle for relief of Vienna began on September 11, 1683, and ended with the rout of the Islamic forces the following day. On September 11, 1697, Prince Eugene caught and routed a large Islamic army and delivered a decisive blow at the Battle of Zenta.

Her “short-termism” fear will lead to long-term stagnation.

The worst sectors of the worst recovery since World War II are business investment in new plants and equipment and new business start-ups. These are the biggest job-creators, and their slump is a key reason for the sub-par labor recovery, with low participation rates and high numbers of involuntary part-time workers.

So if investment is the problem, what does Hillary Clinton go out and do? She proposes jacking up the tax on investment. It’s almost inconceivably stupid.

In her latest economic speech, Clinton proposes doubling the capital-gains tax rate on the profit made from asset sales (stocks, bonds, real estate) held a day less than one year up to two years. Right now, if you take a capital gain a day more than one year, you are taxed at a 20 percent rate. Actually, it’s 23.8 percent when you include the health-care surtax. So under Clinton’s brilliant new play, you’d be taxed at 43.4 percent — the top individual cap-gains rate of 39.6 percent plus the 3.8 percent Obamacare surtax.

That means, instead of keeping 80 cents on the additional dollar of profit, you’d only keep 56.6 cents — a 30-percentage-point reduction in the take-home-pay reward for taking an extra dollar’s investment risk.

By lying and withholding information about the agreement, he gives aid and comfort to America’s enemy.

The president “must certainly be punishable for giving false information to the Senate.”

One can imagine hearing such counsel from a contemporary United States senator on the receiving end of President Obama’s “full disclosure” of the nuclear deal with Iran. But the admonition actually came from James Iredell, a champion of the Constitution’s ratification, who was later appointed to the Supreme Court by President George Washington.

Iredell was addressing the obligations the new Constitution imposed on the president in the arena of international affairs. Notwithstanding the chief executive’s broad powers to “regulate all intercourse with foreign powers,” it would be the president’s “duty to impart to the Senate every material intelligence he receives.” Indeed, among the most egregious offenses a president could commit would be fraudulently inducing senators “to enter into measures injurious to their country, and which they would not have consented to had the true state of things been disclosed to them.”

The politically convenient illusion that a coherent United States of Europe might be nudged into being paved the way for the financially convenient delusion that a single currency would see the Euro Zone stable, secure and surging ahead. The turmoil in Greece puts pay to that notion
Jean-Claude Juncker, the President of the EU Commission, may be widely referred to as “the master of lies”, but when he spoke to a group of students in Belgium in early May he was not at his best. The Eurozone, he claimed, was an “area of solidarity and prosperity”. There are no reports of laughter but in Hades Tacitus could be heard repeating that old jibe of his, “ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant”: They make a desert and call it peace.

A desert it is, at least in the currency union’s south. About the only abundance is in miserable statistics. To take just a few, Greece’s GDP fell by roughly a quarter between 2008 and 2014. In Spain, youth unemployment stood at slightly under 50 per cent this March, some 10 per cent worse than in Italy, a country with an economy that has barely grown since the turn of the century. There has been a wave of emigration from Europe’s south in which the best and the brightest are over-represented. Talk of a lost generation is not hyperbole.

Why did so many embark on leaky boats, rather than present themselves as ordinary economic migrants? Because they have no marketable skills, little education and no jobs waiting for them upon arrival. What many do boast is a troubling insularity borne of loyalty to fundamentalist Islam.
Many, perhaps most, of the difficulties and malaise currently being experienced by the West, including Australia, stem in large measure from two factors: the unprecedented increase in population in the Third World, and the replacement of secular, universalistic ideologies, especially Marxism, by religious fundamentalism. Neither underlying trend has been widely discussed here, and the aim of this article is to examine these factors on the context of Australia’s policy towards immigration and political extremism.

The statistics of population increase throughout the Third World in recent decades are simply staggering. Although everyone is aware that there has been a worldwide population explosion, and that this has occurred primarily in the under­developed world, in all likelihood few know just how astronomical this increase has been. Here is a table of the populations of various randomly selected Third World countries in 1950 and today (numbers in millions):

Yes, they are hemp-clad loons, ignore history’s lessons and remain resolutely impervious to both empirical evidence and logic, but the sincerity they invest in their misconceptions is somewhat admirable. The same cannot be said of Bill Shorten, that consummate opportunist, and his party.
Give credit where credit is due: the Australian Labor Party is not without its traditionalist element. For instance, in the lead up to the ALP 47th National Conference (July 24-26), Senator Joe Bullock has taken a sensible, non-ideological position on Israel: Australia’s immediate recognition of an Arab Palestinian state cannot be conducive to peace since it advances the cause not of Arab Palestinians but of Hamas, a Salafi jihadist (okay, terrorist) organisation that is currently in league with al-Qaeda-in-the-Sinai.

Amongst the Greens, on the other hand, apparatchik after apparatchik appears to be a foaming-at-the-mouth anti-Zionist

The Obama Administration has made a two-year career of dismissing concern about IRS policies targeting conservative tax-exempt groups. That evasion just got harder. New information shows the agency may have shown similar bias in tax audits.

A new Government Accountability Office report says protocols in place at the IRS Exempt Organizations unit made it possible for groups to be unfairly targeted for audit “based on the organization’s religious, educational, political, or other views.” That’s our emphasis. The report also shows a process that allowed reviewers to wield significant discretion over whether certain groups were selected for scrutiny.
GAO says that once the audit targets were chosen, the process lacked transparency and documentation, including why the groups were selected. Of the audits that came in from outside referrals, the agency had no documentation for around 25% of the original complaints. This raises the possibility that some groups may have been flagged for audits by political opponents who disapproved of their tax-exempt purpose. In some cases, the GAO says the IRS never disclosed why a group was selected for audit.

Obama is hoping that the nuclear pact will lead to equilibrium in the Middle East. All the evidence points the other way.

In making the case for his nuclear-arms-control deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, President Obama has confronted Congress with a stark choice. “There really are only two alternatives here,” he declared at last week’s press conference. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war.”

This binary argument is so central to his administration’s case that the president provided a second formulation: Without the deal, he said, “we risk even more war in the Middle East, and other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.”
The president insists that the Iran deal is tightly focused on “making sure” that the Iranians “don’t have a bomb.” It is not, he says, “contingent on Iran changing its behavior” in any other respect—notably the funding of proxy armies and terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. “The incremental additional money that they’ve got to try to destabilize the region,” according to Mr. Obama, is not “more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

“One of this week’s big political stories is that Mrs. Clinton is now trailing three GOP presidential candidates in head-to-head polling in three swing states. More dangerous for Democrats, a majority in those states say they don’t believe Mrs. Clinton is honest or trustworthy. Perhaps that’s because she has proven so often that she isn’t.”

When Hillary Clinton called a press conference on March 10 to defend her use of private email for official State Department business, she was categorical in saying that as Secretary of State she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

Mark that down as another Clinton untruth, along with coming under fire on a tarmac in Bosnia, suddenly discovering the Rose Law Firm billing records in the upstairs bedroom after years of saying they’d been lost, earning a 10,000% profit trading cattle futures after having read the Wall Street Journal, and so many more.