RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama administration is expected to announce today new restrictions on U.S. power plants that are, in the words of the New York Times, “the strongest action ever taken in the United States to combat climate change.” In reality, the new regulatory regime is no such thing, a fact that ought to inform the years-long political and legal fight that the president’s unilateral rulemaking inevitably will provoke.

The president will instruct U.S. power plants to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by just under one-third (32 percent). How that is to be achieved and at what cost is . . . not Barack Obama’s problem. States will have until 2018 — comfortably remote from any presidential election — to submit their plans, and until 2030 to implement them.

Dana Point, Calif. – Senator Ted Cruz on Sunday got perhaps the most enthusiastic applause of any Republican presidential candidate to appear before the 450 donors drawn to Southern California for the Koch brothers’ summer conference with a point-blank denial of global warming.

Politico’s Mike Allen moderated a question-and-answer session with the Texas senator, who said of global warming simply, “The data and facts don’t support it.”

The Texas senator, who dominated his time on stage, leaning into Allen and at one point waving off a question from the moderator, went on to deliver a full-throated denial of global warming and a scathing evisceration of its proponents. The riff showcased Cruz in all of his rhetorical glory – relentless, uncompromising, and witty, talking about an issue on which many Republicans have softened. Cruz at times grate on conservatives, but the off-the-cuff riff was something his supporters will surely point to as a high-point of the campaign season and a reason why this is their guy.

Allen asked Cruz if he is concerned by a Boston Globe story published on Saturday that suggests Republicans will pay a price in 2016 for their skepticism about climate change. Cruz’s response? “Not remotely.”

General Petraeus misused classified info — and look at what happened to him.
Hillary Clinton is running two races: one for president and one to keep information about her private e-mail server and activities as secretary of state from public view as long as possible, preferably until she is back in the White House in 2017.

Last week, we learned more about the extent of the Clinton cover-up. Acting on a lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch, federal Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, cracked down on the delay tactics exercised in the effort to build a moat around her e-mails. He ordered Clinton and two of her closest aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to “describe, under penalty of perjury, the extent to which Ms. Abedin and Ms. Mills used Mrs. Clinton’s email server to conduct official government business.” He also ordered them to confirm that that “they have produced all responsive information that was or is in their possession as a result of their employment at the State Department.” And if “all such information has not yet been produced,” they are ordered to produce it “forthwith.”

It will be a herculean task to convince enough House and Senate Congressmen and women to vote in enough numbers to defeat Obama’s noxious Iran deal and overcome his threatened veto.

This catastrophic sell out, if it proceeds, will provide the Iranian mullahs with an eventual nuclear arsenal and an immediate $150 billion dollars which will not go to build Iranian hospitals or schools.Instead it will enrich Iran’s terror proxies, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and other Islamic terrorist movements, which in turn will condemn untold numbers of Jews, Christians, as well as Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and many others to death and destruction.

I wanted to have these two article edits naming the scholar mentioned by Haqqani, which he later identified for me.

“He noted, for example, the 20th century, Oxford-educated Egyptian scholar Ali Abd al-Raziq for whom the initial Muslim community under Muhammad in seventh-century “Medina was not really a state in the modern sense.”….

In Raziq’s view, Haqqani stated, the “purpose of Islam is piety and not power” and the “whole notion of an Islamic state is flawed.””

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“We can give up the business of saying that this has nothing to do with Islam,” stated Hudson Institute scholar Hassan Haqqani while discussing jihadist violence at Washington, DC’s American Enterprise Institute (AEI) on July 21. Haqqani and AEI’s conference “Islamic Extremism, Reformism, and the War on Terror” examined insightfully radicalism’s literal rootedness in Islam and its reform prospects to a conference room filled with about 80 listeners.

Notwithstanding prevalent “political correctness,” AEI moderator Danielle Pletka stated that the atrocious Islamic State (in Iraq and Syria, or ISIL) “may not be the form of Islam that should be, but it is, in fact, certainly a form of Islam.”

John Kerry giveth and Barack Obama taketh away. After a few days of hearings ‎in U.S. House of Representatives and Senate committees and subcommittees, opponents of the Iran nuclear ‎deal were hoping for an extension of hearings, if for no other reason, than to keep ‎the secretary of state on the hot seat. The more Kerry spoke, the greater were the ‎doubts among wavering Democrats about the agreement. Kerry’s performance ‎combined some of his worst tendencies — a disdain for anyone challenging what he ‎regards as his received wisdom, and an inability to make a case, in this instance for ‎a bad deal that he himself negotiated.

Civilizations normally go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.

It’s easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty’s worth of anthropologists in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.

Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.

The barbaric civilization is the simplest of all. It runs on kinship. Pre-rational, it operates on explosions of emotion. It has no concept of enduring facts or objective reasoning. It holds life cheaply and kills casually. It loathes outsiders and has no universal laws. It is ruled by hierarchies which gain their position through brutality and trickery.

For the ISIS rapists, for the British and European Muslim rapists, the sex act is not a means to celebrate life, but to celebrate death, and the potency of their evil.

On July 29th Jihad Watch ran an interesting article by Ralph Sidway of the Facing Islam blog, “’The Nightmare’ – Europa and the Incubus.” The Gothic painting illustrating his column, by German-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli, depicts an incubus sitting atop the limp and helpless body of Europa. The mythical Europa is more notoriously noted for having been carried off by Zeus in the guise of a bull. Sidway dwells in the metaphor that Europe is instead being conquered and ravished by an ugly ogre or incubus – or by Muslims. It has been abducted, as well, and is daily ravished by Islam. He begins:

Sometimes an image — a metaphor — is much more effective at presenting truth than even the most persuasive argument or laying out of facts. ‘The Nightmare’ is such an image.

In May, President Barack Obama donned a yarmulke and spoke in a Washington, D.C., synagogue. He reminded his audience that Jeffrey Goldberg, a member of the congregation, once called him the “first Jewish president.” He claimed to be flattered by the characterization. And perhaps he was—most Jews, after all, voted for him for president, and many Jews of Obama’s acquaintance have sometimes seemed to care more about the well-being of Planned Parenthood than about the survival of the state of Israel.

But recently Obama seems to have soured on the chosen people. At a press conference on July 16, Obama urged members of Congress to make their decision on the Iran deal based “not on politics. Not on posturing. Not on the fact that this is a deal that I bring to Congress, as opposed to a Republican president. Not based on lobbying.”

In Buenos Aires, Nisman’s case generated conspiracy theories involving spies and foreign governments and conniving politicians.

In the last days of his life, Alberto Nisman could hardly wait to confront his enemies. On January 14th of this year, Nisman, a career prosecutor in Argentina, had made an electrifying accusation against the country’s President, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He charged that she had orchestrated a secret plan to scuttle the investigation of the bloodiest terrorist attack in Argentina’s history: the 1994 suicide bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, the country’s largest Jewish organization, in which eighty-five people were killed and more than three hundred wounded. Nisman, a vain, meticulous fifty-one-year-old with a zest for Buenos Aires’ gaudy night life, had pursued the case for a decade, travelling frequently to the United States to get help from intelligence officials and from aides on Capitol Hill. In 2006, he indicted seven officials from the government of Iran, including its former President and Foreign Minister, whom he accused of planning and directing the attack, along with a senior leader of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Months later, Nisman secured international arrest warrants for five officials, effectively preventing them from leaving Iran. As the case made him a celebrity, he invested in blue contact lenses and Botox injections. “Whenever he saw a camera, that was it, he would drop everything,” Roman Lejtman, a journalist who covered the investigation, said.