RUTHFULLY YOURS

Want to know why Clinton’s State Dept. failed to help an elected leader? Follow the money and stench of Lanny Davis

Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley, considered by some to be the only real threat to Hillary Clinton, has joined Sen. Bernie Sanders to be the only two challengers to the former secretary of state. Republicans, whose seemingly limitless field seems poised for a “Hunger Games”-esque cage match, worry that a Clinton cakewalk through the primaries will leave her relatively unscathed in the general election against a beaten and beleaguered GOP nominee whose every foible will have been exposed.

And yet for some reason, GOP candidates lob tired Benghazi charges at the presumptive Democratic nominee during the short breaks in infighting. The issue only really excites the GOP base, and it’s highly unlikely that after almost three years of pounding the issue the tactic will work. Plus, House Republicans’ own two-year investigation into the attack absolved Clinton’s State Department of the worst GOP allegations, giving her something of her own “please proceed, Governor” arrow in the quiver if she is attacked from that angle.

It’s the SCUD missile of political attacks when there are laser-guided Tomahawks in the arsenal.

Mrs. Clinton called for an end to the U.S. embargo yesterday.

Some will say that she is supporting President Obama’s foreign policy. However, this has more to do with the American left than anything else. Mrs. Clinton is desperately trying to go left, or sadly where the Democratic Party is.

Lifting the embargo will not do a darned thing to help the people stuck in the Castro regime.

I agree with The Miami Herald:

Despite months of talks between the two countries that began in December with President Obama’s announcement that relations would be normalized, we have yet to see any significant actions by the Castro regime that will benefit the United States or enhance the civil liberties and freedoms of the Cuban people.

My inbox is full of emails touting Donald Trump’s “Time to Get Tough” book, now with Rush Limbaugh’s endorsement. He blames most of America’s problems on a “tidal wave” of illegal Hispanic immigrants and unfair Chinese trade practices. He reminds me of H.L. Mencken’s classic one-liner: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.” One might add, “dangerous,” because Trump appeals to our desire to blame someone else for problems we created. If you want something to worry about, have a look at the math questions that Chinese high school students have to answer to qualify for college admission.

Let’s review the facts.

Immigration from Mexico actually fell after the 2008 crash, mainly because construction jobs disappeared.

The best data we have suggest that net immigration from Mexico was negative between 2005 and 2010–that is, more Mexicans left the U.S. than arrived. Hispanics, to be sure, are more visible in the workforce–their share of total employment has risen from about 14% 10 years ago to to 17% today–but that is due to the natural increase in the Hispanic population. In 1990, non-Hispanic whites had a fertility rate of 1.7 children per female, vs. 2.9 children for Hispanics. This bumper crop of Hispanic children has been entering the workforce for the past several years. But that has nothing to do with recent trends in immigration.

Bruce Hoffman’s Anonymous Soldiers is a deftly written account of the Jewish revolt against the British in 1940s Palestine. Despite its scholarship—it draws heavily on recently declassified British documents—and its significant bulk, it is a page-turner that leaves the reader feeling sorry once the book is finished.

Unlike most accounts of the Jewish underground, this one tells the story from the British point of view, though without taking Britain’s side. It leaves the reader with no doubt that it was the Irgun, and to a lesser extent the much smaller Lehi, that drove the British from Palestine, and not, as the longtime mythology of Israel’s Laborites would have it, David Ben-Gurion’s skillful politicking.

It was Lehi that began the terror war against the British in 1940. Its members were completely isolated at first, perceived by the Yishuv—a term for Palestine’s Jewish community—as a criminal gang. Lehi was led by Avraham (Yair) Stern, whom Hoffman describes as a man “of grandiose dreams and half-baked plans,” an outstanding classics student at Hebrew University, and a poet. The title of Hoffman’s book comes from a poem written by Stern, which would become Lehi’s anthem. Stern was killed by the British in 1941, and the group’s remaining members killed or captured. The group was revived in 1943 under the leadership of Yitzhak Shamir, decades later to become Israel’s prime minister.

In 1898, the top Jewish demographer, Simon Dubnov, projected 0.5mn Jews in Israel in 2000. He was off by 5.5mn Jews.

In 1944, the founder of Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, Prof. Roberto Bacchi, projected 2.3mn Jews in 2001, a 33% minority. He was wrong by 3.7mn Jews.

In 2015, there are 6.5mn Jews and 3.4mn Arabs in the combined area of Judea, Samaria and pre-1967 Israel: a 66% majority, benefitting from a fertility and migration tailwind.

In June 2015, there is a 1.1mn gap between the real number of Arabs in Judea & Samaria (1.7mn) and the number claimed by the Palestinians (2.8mn).

The 1.1mn excess consists of the inclusion of 400,000 Arabs living abroad for over a year, in defiance of internationally accepted standards, which stipulate their inclusion in the count of their new country of residence.

When former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee raised the specter of the Holocaust in his evaluation of President Obama’s Iran deal, he touched a raw nerve because Huckabee got it right: The Holocaust taught us that evil is not satiated after it consumes Jews. A deal that is catastrophic for Israel is also catastrophic for the United States. The Governor reminded us that imagining the deal means losing some purportedly tolerable number of American servicemen to Iranian terror, somewhere “over there,” is morally and empirically wrong.

Critics, however—starting with the President—jumped on the Governor’s remarks – misread and misrepresented. What the Governor actually said to Breitbart News on July 25, 2015 was as follows: “This president’s foreign policy is the most feckless in American history. It is so naive that he would trust the Iranians. By doing so, he will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.”

The wide sidewalk behind a gleaming new building on the small campus of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art has become a stomping ground for homeless vagrants doing disgusting things.

The shenanigans of the scruffy drifters are on full display for Cooper Union students, faculty members and staffers thanks to the impressive glass facade of $111 million building, reports the New York Post.

“I have seen drug deals, public urination, defecation, masturbation in broad daylight in the Taras Shevchenko alley,” one Cooper Union professor told The Post.

Cooper Union, a prestigious and historic school in New York City’s East Village neighborhood, also houses Preschool of the Arts, a pricey private daycare.

New residential permits surge as developers rush to qualify for tax break
New York City is entering what could be the biggest building boom in a generation, census figures show, as work gets under way on hundreds of residential projects in neighborhoods across the city.

In the first six months of the year, developers received new residential building permits for 42,088 apartments and houses in the city, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, already more than in any full year since 1963, when nearly 50,000 permits were issued.

The surge in permits this year followed a rush by developers to start foundation work on many residential projects by June 15, in time to qualify for a valuable property-tax abatement that was scheduled to expire.

“There is a lot of digging going on,” said David Schwartz, a co-founder and principal of Slate Property Group, who helped shepherd six apartment projects through the permit process in late May and early June to meet the tax-abatement deadline.

Frederick Law Olmsted and Robert Moses’s Priceless Riverside Park .Riverside Park is a one-of-a-kind piece of infrastructure, seamlessly bringing together park, highway, railway and river.

In 1914 Robert Moses, who would become the park- and highway-building czar of New York City, was taking a ferry across the Hudson River from Manhattan’s Upper West Side. As he looked back at the receding shore he could see Riverside Drive, a curving tree-lined boulevard that fronted a sinuous line of grand mansions and stolid apartment houses. Below lay the boulder-strewn slopes of Riverside Park.

It wasn’t much of a park in 1914, rudely gashed by a rail line that ran along the waterfront with clattering trains belching dense coal smoke and carrying reeking livestock to slaughter.
Less than 25 years later, Moses could cruise the Hudson River and see the fragments of Riverside Park knitted together in rounded slopes and swales of trees and lawns that descended in gentle terraces. Stone walls retained those terraces and buried the rail line, making room for an auto parkway lined with greenery along the water’s edge.

A masterpiece is usually thought the work of a single artistic or design intelligence. But Riverside Park (including Riverside Drive, for they are inseparable as experienced) is the work not only of Moses, but of Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape genius behind Central Park, and the almost unknown Clifton Lloyd, the architectural engineer whom Moses picked to realize his vision.

Repression lifted slightly in the 1990s but the economy did not, and state-sponsored terrorism abroad continued.

Most backers of the nuclear accord with Iran hopefully insist that the theocratic regime will moderate once sanctions are lifted. Plugged back into the global economy, Iran will become less militant. The “pragmatists”—those surrounding President Hasan Rouhani, who supposedly want better relations with the West, will grow in strength; the “hard-liners”—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the ideologically ardent clergy—will weaken.

This is an unlikely scenario. Consider what happened after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, died in 1989. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the mentor of Mr. Rouhani, was elected president shortly afterward and remained in office until 1997. Mr. Rafsanjani, with Mr. Rouhani always at his side, encouraged and welcomed European engagement. A regime of global sanctions did not exist, and American sanctions were far less effective then. Tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment and trade arrived.