RUTHFULLY YOURS

Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and other lawmakers blasted the Obama administration for improving the rankings of Cuba and Malaysia on this year’s State Department human trafficking report for political reasons.

Cuba has been Tier 3 — the worst ranking — since the State Department began issuing the report in 2003. Nearly 200 lawmakers lobbied the administration to keep Malaysia at Tier 3 for failing to stop human trafficking. Both appeared in today’s report on the “Tier 2 Watch List.”

According to the State Department, that includes “countries whose governments do not fully comply with the TVPA’s [Trafficking Victims Protection Act’s] minimum standards, but are making significant efforts to bring themselves into compliance with those standards AND the absolute number of victims of severe forms of trafficking is very significant or is significantly increasing; there is a failure to provide evidence of increasing efforts to combat severe forms of trafficking in persons from the previous year; or the determination that a country is making significant efforts to bring itself into compliance with minimum standards was based on commitments by the country to take additional future steps over the next year.”

Declaring that the “reality of climate change is unforgiving — no matter what the deniers say,” Hillary Clinton unveiled a climate agenda Monday that industry critics immediately branded an “energy poverty agenda.”

“I know there are still people who would rather not hear this. Some deny climate change exists at all. Others throw up their hands and say, ‘Sorry, I’m not a scientist,’” Clinton said today in Des Moines.

“Well, I’m not a scientist either. That’s why I think it’s important to listen to scientists. It’s important to heed the warnings based on extensive scientific research to see what’s going on here in our own country and certainly around the world.”

Veteran, Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist Colbert King has published a crude, scurrilous attack [1] on Israelis and American Jews for opposing President Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran.

King says:

Those who regard the Iran nuclear deal as a grave threat to Israeli and U.S. interests have a moral duty to vigorously oppose it, just as those of us who view the deal as the best way to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon should work for its adoption.

Yet King goes on to say that opponents of the deal who exercise their “moral duty”—that is, if they’re Israelis—are guilty of racism and endangering what he calls the “alliance between blacks and Jews in this country,” meaning America.

King starts by quoting a stupid, offensive tweet last June 21 by Judy Mozes, wife of Israeli vice prime minister and interior minister Silvan Shalom: “Do u know what Obama Coffee is? Black and weak.”

The Iran deal does not prevent a nuclear Iran. At best, it only delays it a few years.

Under the disastrous Iran nuclear deal, $150 billion would go to a single regime that has been a state sponsor of terrorism for the entire 36 years of its existence.

The Iran deal, in five years, will actually lift a ban on sending Iran conventional weapons, including (in eight years) intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting the United States. But Iran is already wasting no time buying weapons and producing weapons on its own.

When Obama leaves office, he may think that any catastrophe the Iran deal causes will not “technically” be his, but the next president’s. But it is his. It’s as if someone is lighting a long fuse and will then say he was not near the dynamite when it went off. Any explosions that result from this huge military and financial payday to Iran will, and should, be known as “Obama’s war.”

In 1947 President Truman made history by launching the Marshall Plan, sending $13 billion (about $120 billion in today’s dollars) to help rebuild post-war Europe to prevent Western Europe from falling to Communist expansion.

Obama’s Iran deal is a direct manifestation of the President’s fundamentally misguided worldview, one which wishes away danger and then believes in the wishes.

Even more concerning is that the Iran deal may directly conflict with U.S. obligations as a signatory of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Iran deal may be unconstitutional, violate international law and feature commitments that President Obama could not otherwise lawfully make. By seeking approval of the deal under the UN Security Council, Obama has bound the U.S. under international law without Senate consent.

The gravest consequence of Obama’s Iran deal is that the world bestowed ideological legitimacy on the Islamic Republic’s radical theocracy, and in so doing has consigned the people of Iran to near permanent rule under the iron fist of Shi’a Islamism.

A total reversal of the Iranian regime’s behavior should have been, and still can be, a precondition for the removal of any sanctions related to Iran’s nuclear program. An end to Iran’s financial and material support for terrorist forces such as Hezbollah and Hamas must be demanded, along with the return of the four American hostages Iran is holding.

I am beginning to dread Hillary Clinton quitting the presidential race. Here I have been gleefully looking forward to reporting on her many criminal acts, not just the classified email crimes, but bribery and many other acts – depending on how far back you want to go. But now, things have gotten so bad that Michael Walsh of PJ Media is chortling, “The betting windows are now open: Hillary! Clinton’s Last Day As a Presidential Candidate. Get your markers down.”

He links to an article by Philip Bump of the Washington Post, examining how Hillary’s poll numbers are crashing in ‘”the states that matter,” and how her net approval/disapproval numbers are in the tank. In summary:

Recent surveys suggest that Hillary Clinton may be more reliant on the non-white vote in November 2016 than you might have assumed.

A poll released Sunday from NBC/Marist reinforces one from last week by Quinnipiac University that found her to be as unpopular as Donald Trump in key swing states. In Iowa and New Hampshire, Clinton’s net favorability — those who view her positively minus those who don’t — was negative-23 and negative-20, respectively.

NYT apologizes for saying Hillary was under investigation July 28, 2015 The Paper of Record is really reaching this time to protect its star candidate.

The public editor of the New York Times, whose job it is to excuse the enormities found in the biased articles of the Times on a weekly basis, had, for once, the reverse of his usual task. Instead of explaining away a slanted article (which can be a full-time job, if there are serious takers), the public editor was apologizing for the Times having “erroneously” reported that Hillary was under investigation for having classified information on her private email server.

It wasn’t really Mrs. Clinton directly who was the focus of the request for an investigation. It was more general: whether government information was handled improperly in connection with her use of a personal email account.

The 3 July 2015 issue of Science features a remarkable editorial by Editor Marcia McNutt. Titled “The beyond-two-degree inferno,” it suggests that an anthropogenic greenhouse (GH) warming of more than 2 degrees C (global average) will literally cause hell on earth, unless we can all agree to reduce emissions of the “infernal” GH-gas carbon dioxide – preferably before or at a UN-sponsored mega-confab in Paris in December. This much-hyped event, to be attended by nearly 200 national delegations and thousands of hangers-on, has even been endorsed in a papal encyclical, referred to, somewhat irreverently, as a “Pope-sicle” by my Virginia colleague Dr Charles Battig.

With the exception of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, all other candidates have made securing the U.S.-Mexican border a priority. While the U.S.-Mexican border must be made secure, the goal of securing that border is as deceptive as are the claims of the administration that the borders have never been more secure.

Purely focusing on the U.S.-Mexican border ignores the fact that, as I have noted in many articles and testimony at congressional hearings, the United States is a nation of 50 “border states.”

On July 6, 2014, FrontPage Magazine posted my article, “Border Security and the Immigration Colander – Why the breakdown of the Southwest border is only the tip of the iceberg.” I followed up on the issue of how many “border states” the United States actually has and how the false narrative that all that the U.S. has to address is the lack of security of our southwest border in my February 4, 2015, FrontPage Magazine article, “The ‘Secure Our Border First Act’ Deception – Why it’s no solution to the immigration crisis.”

Mr. DeSantis (R., Fla. District 6) is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security. He will be running for the Senate seat to be vacated by Marco Rubio .Mr. Jordan (R., Ohio District 4) is chairman of the Subcommittee on Health Care, Benefits and Administrative Rules. Both are outstanding legislators….I met them both at a private dinner in New York on July 20,2015….rsk

If the president doesn’t tell Commissioner Koskinen to go, then we in Congress should impeach him.

Internal Revenue Service Commissioner John Koskinen needs to go.

When it was revealed in 2013 that the IRS had targeted conservative groups for exercising their First Amendment rights, President Obama correctly called the policy “inexcusable” and pledged accountability. He even fired the then-acting IRS commissioner because he said it was necessary to have “new leadership that can help restore confidence going forward.”

Unfortunately, Commissioner Koskinen, who took over in the wake of the IRS targeting scandal, has failed the American people by frustrating Congress’s attempts to ascertain the truth. A taxpayer would never get away with treating an IRS audit the way that IRS officials have treated the congressional investigation. Civil officers like Mr. Koskinen have historically been held to a higher standard than private citizens because they have fiduciary obligations to the public. The IRS and Mr. Koskinen have breached these basic fiduciary duties: