RUTHFULLY YOURS

Padraig O’Malley’s “The Two-State ­Delusion” is an impressive and frustrating book. It’s impressive because ­O’Malley, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston who has written ­extensively on South Africa and Northern Ireland, has done a tremendous amount of research about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He’s not only delved deeply into its literature; he’s also interviewed dozens of participants on both sides. The result is a book so packed with information that it will reward even the reader so dedicated that she consumes the Israel-Palestine stories buried on Page A17 of The Times.

O’Malley, for instance, considers at length the potential economic viability of a Palestinian state, something often overlooked by American commentators. He notes that not only does public sector employment constitute more than 50 percent of the Palestinian Authority’s budget but also that “the tax base is small” and tax “collection practices are lax.” He observes as well that a Palestinian state would most likely be unable to desalinate water and thus “would almost necessarily have to import water from Israel, which has the necessary resources and expertise in the field, but water dependency devalues sovereignty.”

An influential Saudi former military commander on making common cause with Israel and warming toward Russia as the U.S. backs away.
President Obama knew how to soothe Arab nerves rankled by his nuclear diplomacy with Iran. In May he convened a Camp David summit with the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council. The only problem: Of six GCC heads of state, only two showed up. The most powerful and influential, Saudi Arabia’s King Salman, wasn’t among the attendees.

The snub was a rare public expression of the kingdom’s anger at Mr. Obama. Behind Riyadh’s ire is the sense that, in its pursuit of a nuclear accommodation with Tehran, America is tilting away from its traditional Middle East allies and toward Iran’s ayatollahs. For these Arab states, the new Washington dispensation means forging security arrangements that a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable. Perhaps the most astonishing of these developments is the nascent alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel.

The president is willing to gamble on U.S. security for the sake of his personal legacy.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said recently that the Obama administration is in the “final stages of drafting a plan to safely and responsibly” close the detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay. Our home states of Kansas and South Carolina are being considered as potential sites for housing the enemy combatants transferred from Guantanamo. Defense Department officials visited Fort Leavenworth, Kan., on Aug. 14 and will be visiting the Naval Brig in Charleston, S.C., on Monday to survey the facilities.

When Barack Obama won the White House in 2008, he announced that Guantanamo would be closed in the first year of his presidency. This was a political promise with little regard for recidivism rates, the continuing conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan, and most important, America’s national security. So it is fortunate that the deadline was not met.

Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas and chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
His progressive legacy won’t last because he passed vague laws and abused his executive power to impose policies that are unpopular.
How did Barack Obama join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan to become one of the three most transformative presidents in the past century? He was greatly aided by the financial crisis that erupted during the 2008 campaign. This gave the new president a mandate and a large Democratic congressional majority that fully embraced his progressive agenda.Having learned from previous progressive failures, President Obama embarked on a strategy of minimizing controversial details that could doom his legislative efforts. But no factor was more decisive than his unshakable determination not to let Congress, the courts, the Constitution or a failed presidency—as America has traditionally defined it—stand in his way.

Americans have always found progressivism appealing in the abstract, but they have revolted when they saw the details. President Clinton’s very progressive agenda—to nationalize health care and use private pensions to promote social goals—was hardly controversial during the 1992 election. But once the debate turned to the details, Americans quickly understood that his health-care plan would take away their freedom. Even Mr. Clinton’s most reliable allies, the labor unions, rebelled when they understood that under his pension plan their pensions would serve “social goals” instead of maximizing their retirement benefits.

Is it better to represent the agenda of one rich guy or 1,000 rich guys?

Donald Trump continues to lead the GOP presidential field in the polls, which means it’s time to start taking his ideas more seriously. One place to start is his argument that because he’s a billionaire who doesn’t depend on contributions from others, he’s somehow superior because he’s immune from political influence.

The casino magnate refers to his competitors who accept political donations as “puppets” who are “totally controlled by special interests, lobbyists and donors.” In contrast, he says, “I don’t need anybody’s money. I don’t want anybody’s money.” It is a consistent part of his pitch to voters—that he’s “very rich” and therefore cannot be induced to indulge a narrow special interest.

The argument plays into the current political frustration with Washington, but it is as self-serving as it is dangerous to democracy. What he’s really saying is that nobody who isn’t wealthy should be able to run for President because only the superrich can be untainted by political corruption.

The Chautauqua Institution, deemed an adult education center, is less education than it is indoctrination to the world of The Left. In the month of July, in an idyllic setting, the Institution invited Islamists who speak of “Love and Justice in a World of Suffering,” hiding the truths about the suffering caused by Islam – both the harsh Sharia law already in effect for its adherents and to establish it in Dar Al-Harb (House of War), the countries not yet under Sharia – until the entire world will writhe under Islamic oppression.

Omid Safi, appointed director of Duke University’s Islamic Studies Center in July, 2014, spoke in terms to please the under informed. He and they would prefer that hideous acts of violence, such as perpetrated by ISIS, ISIL, Boko Haram, Hamas, and countless others with like purpose, be removed from the news media and replaced with stories of compassion. In so doing, of course, he would silence the reporters and critics and destroy our freedom to speak, report, and inform the masses about the evils perpetrated by Muslims, so that we would remain oblivious to Islam’s stealth control over our media and our minds. He would then pursue and obtain legal accommodations without obstacle, force Sharia law over our Constitutional laws without hindrance, and threaten all our freedoms through influence, treachery, and force.

Hillary Clinton may finally have outdone herself by creating an entirely new offense: commingling information.

Commingling funds has a lengthy history as criminal behavior resulting in its being completely banned in any of the fiduciary professions such as law and real estate. Lawyers and brokers dumping funds earmarked for their clients into their own or the company account claimed convenience and security as an excuse, but in almost all cases it was intended as a method of muddying the waters as regards fraud. By the 60s it was banned, no ifs, ands, or buts. (When I was involved in real estate decades ago, commingling was repeatedly and vehemently proscribed in the state handbook.)

So here comes the smartest woman in the world with her homebrew server. Though not put in quite these terms, Hillary’s major excuse since the start of the email imbroglio has been that the commingling of official and private communications on her server somehow inoculated all the governmental data, rendering it innocuous and fully justifying her initial refusal to turn over the information and her later wiping of the server. Yoga schedules and Chelsea’s marriage, according to Hillary’s argument, outweighed national security. A bold excuse, but no more so than the claims of ancient shysters that their client’s settlement funds somehow got lost in the wrong account.

A Common Core-sanctioned reading method “respected by both teachers and parents” has been ruining children’s reading ability for decades
Hundreds of websites still casually assert what is probably the most destructive sophistry in the history of education:

The Dolch Sight Words [created in the 1940s] are a list of the 220 most frequently used words in the English language. These sight words make up 50 to 70 percent of any general text….Dolch found that children who can identify a certain core group of words by sight could learn to read and comprehend better. Dolch’s sight word lists are still widely used today and highly respected by both teachers and parents. These sight words were designed to be learned and mastered by the third grade.

It has been well confirmed that many Muslims fanatics, such as members of ISIS, al Qaeda and Boko Haram have utterly no regard for anyone not a follower of Islam. By the standards of civilized people the following sample acts are barbaric. It is estimated that Islamic terrorists have kidnapped 3700 females as young as […]

Nothing special in the air: World’s largest airline prefers Oneworld alliance that numbers carriers from Jordan, Qatar and Malaysia
Rina Rozenberg and Zohar Blumenkrantz

Citing financial considerations, American Airlines said at the end of last week it would stop flying to Israel, but sources in the aviation industry told TheMarker that the real reason is the United States carrier’s ties with Arab airlines through its Oneworld alliance.

American, the world’s largest airline by passengers flown, fleet size and revenue, said on Thursday it would end its Philadelphia-Tel Aviv route as of January. The airlines’ Israeli office was given no advanced warnings and learned about the decision from the media.