RUTHFULLY YOURS

Hillary Clinton gave a speech yesterday, and Vox.com published a puff piece about it. The next part is hard to believe: The Vox puffer, Jonathan Allen, did not give Mrs. Clinton enough credit.

Mrs. Clinton was the keynoter at Columbia University’s 18th annual David N. Dinkins Leadership and Public Policy Forum. Her campaign website headlines the speech “It’s Time to End the Era of Mass Incarceration,” and the headline of Allen’s piece reads “Hillary Clinton Just Gave One of the Most Important Speeches of Her Career.” Here’s how Allen begins:

Fair or unfair, Democrats’ chief criticism of Hillary Clinton has been that she doesn’t truly share their most cherished values, particularly when it comes to addressing inequality. They also worry that she’s not ready for prime time—that she’s too stilted, too programmed, too cold on the stump.

On Wednesday she answered both points.

Her first major policy address of the 2016 campaign was Clinton at her finest, showcasing both strong policy chops and a deep sensitivity to Americans who are heartbroken over the deaths of young black men at the hands of police officers.

Indeed, she read the names—Walter Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin—and said “the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable,” without specifying what the disparate and in some cases uncertain fact patterns in these cases have in common.

“She freely moved between prose and statistic,” gushes Allen, referring to her invocation of the Fox Butterfield fallacy: “It’s a stark fact that the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, yet we have almost 25% of the world’s total prison population. The numbers today are much higher than they were 30, 40 years ago, despite the fact that crime is at historic lows.”

Mrs. Clinton didn’t offer much by way of policy proposals, apart from body cameras for police and “community mental health centers.” “I don’t know all the answers,” she said. “That’s why I’m here—to ask all the smart people in Columbia and New York to start thinking this through with me.” But she was clear about the goal of turning many prisoners loose: “It’s time to change our approach. It’s time to end the era of mass incarceration. We need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe.”

An electromagnetic-pulse attack from North Korea or another U.S. enemy would cause staggering devastation.

Amb. Cooper is the former director of the Strategic Defense Initiative. Mr. Pry is executive director of the EMP Task Force on National and Homeland Security and served in the EMP Commission, the House Armed Services Committee, and the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Pentagon is moving the headquarters for the North American Aerospace Defense Command (Norad) back into Cheyenne Mountain near Colorado Springs, Colo., a decade after having largely vacated the site.

Why the return? Because the enormous bunker in the hollowed-out mountain, built to survive a Cold War-era nuclear conflict, can also resist an electromagnetic-pulse attack, or EMP. America’s military planners recognize the growing threat from an EMP attack by bad actors around the world, in particular North Korea and Iran.

An EMP strike, most likely from the detonation of a nuclear weapon in space, would destroy unprotected military and civilian electronics nationwide, blacking out the electric grid and other critical infrastructure for months or years. The staggering human cost of such a catastrophic attack is not difficult to imagine.

“I’m not sure that it is any business of Congress to determine who should be running for public office.”

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/417760/fec-goes-far-outside-its-mandate-hold-women-politics-forum-hans-von-spakovsky?target=topic&tid=3264

One of the biggest problems in Washington is the overreach of federal agencies, many of which go far beyond their limited mandates. Instead of simply carrying out the duties assigned to them under federal laws, they invade the province of Congress, which is supposed to hold hearings, formulate public policy, and create the federal laws that these agencies enforce.

Take Federal Election Commission chair Ann Ravel’s May 12 forum on “Women in Politics.” The FEC was created in 1975 to enforce the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), which governs the raising and spending of funds in federal elections for president and Congress. The federal statute that authorizes the FEC (2 U.S.C. § 437c) lays out its duties very succinctly: 1) enforce federal campaign-finance law, 2) issue regulations implementing the law, and 3) provide advisory opinions to affected individuals, candidates, and political organizations that explain the requirements of the law. Congress also very specifically made the FEC a bipartisan agency.

Dear Black Thugs: To each of you I echo what actor Terrence Howard’s character told his gangbanger brother in the Academy Award–winning film Crash: “You embarrass me. You embarrass yourself.” From Ferguson to Baltimore, the whole world is watching as you run wild. Thanks to you, plate-glass store windows shatter into shards. You pry ATMs from walls to drain them of cash. One of you joy-rode a car through flaming debris along a smoldering street. You set homes, workplaces, and shops ablaze. You burned a 60-bed nursing home for seniors, still under construction, and literally knifed Baltimore firefighters’ water hoses as they tried to douse this inferno. And you enjoyed a 100-percent-off shopping spree — damn the consequences. How does ripping off a bottle of whiskey from a smoldering liquor store help us overcome?

In 1850, French economist Fredric Bastiat, of whom you bums probably are oblivious, wrote an essay titled That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen. You can see the devastation that you have created: You burned to the ground 17 businesses worth an estimated $4.6 million in Ferguson. You torched a CVS Pharmacy in Baltimore. Thanks to your violence, the Orioles beat the Chicago White Sox inside an empty Camden Yards stadium Wednesday. For safety’s sake, the next three Orioles home games, against the Tampa Bay Rays, will shift to St. Petersburg, Florida.

Obama’s solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years.

President Barack Obama responded to the Baltimore riots with a heartfelt bout of self-righteous hectoring. Supposedly, we all know what’s wrong with Baltimore and how to fix it, but don’t care enough. Not only is this attitude highhanded, it rests on a flagrantly erroneous premise. President Obama doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fix Baltimore. His solutions fall back on liberal bromides going back 50 years. Dating back to the Kerner Commission after the riots of the 1960s, the Left’s go-to solution to urban problems has been more social programs. Since then, we’ve gotten more social programs — and just as many urban problems.

Exhibit A is Baltimore itself. The city hasn’t been “neglected.” It has been misgoverned into the ground. It is a Great Society city that bought fully into the big-government vision of the 1960s, and the bitter fruit has been corruption, violence, and despair. We don’t know all the facts surrounding Freddie Gray’s tragic death. But as a general matter, it is easy to believe that the Baltimore police are corrupt, dysfunctional, and unaccountable — because most of the Baltimore government is that way. This is a failure exclusively of Democrats, unless the root causes of Baltimore’s troubles are to be traced to its last Republican mayor, Theodore Roosevelt McKeldin, who left office in 1967. And it is an indictment of a failed model of government. The city has been shedding jobs and people for decades, including in the 1990s when the rest of the country was booming.

Prospective Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush clashed with National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry over immigration policy on Thursday, telling Lowry “I love you. I just think you’re wrong on immigration.” In an interview at the National Review Institute’s Ideas Summit,at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in Washington, D.C., the former Florida governor spoke about his policy positions and his plans for a potential presidential administration.

Lowry and the audience were in broad agreement with the governor on foreign policy and most economic issues. Bush voiced his opposition to the Iran nuclear deal and stressed the need to confront Islamic terrorism — poking fun at “the girl with the really cool glasses in the State Department,” Foggy Bottom spokeswoman Marie Harf, for refusing to accurately characterize the threat. And he decried economic over-regulation and “the New Normal” of a deflated American economy. “’The New Normal’ makes me nauseous,” he said.

The [Conservative] Government has drafted legislation designed to give the Charity Commission greater powers to shut down charities linked to terrorism. Some critics argue, however, that many of the government’s promises are largely bluster.

If Labour wins the upcoming elections, the next government will include a number of Ministers with strong Islamist ties.

The UKIP’s foreign policy, however, seems tolerant of the Russian-Iranian axis.

“We have been impressed by the warm and welcoming attitude of the SNP.” — Azzam Tamami, Hamas’s “special envoy” to the UK.

On May 7, the British electorate will go to the polls in the 2015 general election. Voters will elect their local members of parliament. It seems voters may not, however, be able to choose their next government.

As in 2010, current polling data suggests a hung parliament, in which no political party can achieve an outright majority. Governance requires the confidence of the House of Commons. Of the 650 parliamentary seats, then, a ruling coalition requires the backing of at least 326 MPs.

For the past five years, Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative Party has retained the confidence of the House through a reasonably successful and stable coalition with the Liberal Democrats.

This time around, however, things are not so simple. For the first time, special interest and minor parties look set to have a powerful influence over the next government. If, as looks likely, neither the Conservatives nor the Labour Party is able to achieve an outright majority, coalitions with smaller parties will become a necessity.

The Liberal Democrats, the UK Independence Party, the Green Party, the Scottish National Party, Wales’s Plaid Cymru a

Race riots usually begin with criminality and end with criminality. They’re protests by criminals on behalf of a dead criminal.

The stores with smashed windows aren’t the means to express outrage, but the end. The purpose of criminality is criminality. The police exist so that stores can remain unrobbed and random pedestrians can remain unbeaten. The protests express opposition to that policy by robbing stores and assaulting random white people.

The police were never the problem. The looters and rioters were.

The counterculture has not changed dramatically since the 70’s, but it has tossed aside any appearance of idealism. The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. Their goals are purely materialistic, looted iPods and government subsidies for housing, education and anything else they can think of.

Divestment is the common denominator. Neither the white leftist nor the lower-class black rioter is invested in his society. The white rioter is a globalist, the black rioter is an outsider. Neither are invested in the city and country they are busy trashing.

“In Miliband’s Britain, it will become impossible to criticise any aspect of Islamic culture, whether it be the spread of the burka or the establishment of Sharia courts or the construction of colossal new mosques. … If he wins, Miliband will ensure that the accelerating Islamification of our country will go unchallenged.” — Leo McKinstry, British commentator.

The report shows that Britain’s Muslim population is overwhelmingly young and will exert increasing political influence as time goes on. The median age of the Muslim population in Britain is 25 years, compared to the overall population’s median age of 40 years.

The leader of Britain’s Labour Party, Ed Miliband, has vowed, if he becomes the next prime minister in general elections on May 7, to outlaw “Islamophobia.”

The move — which one observer has called “utterly frightening” because of its implications for free speech in Britain — is part of an effort by Miliband to pander to Muslim voters in a race that he has described as “the tightest general election for a generation.”

One Baltimore protester exclaimed to FOX News’ Geraldo Rivera, “I want to tell White America to stop not giving a damn about Black people.” And there you have it in a nutshell, the underlying sentiment trying to be vocalized by a violent, frustrated Black urban demographic that has taken to the streets in cities areas across America. There is just one thing wrong with that narrative. It is based in obliviousness of a cultural reality that has been prevalent for the last two to three generations. And it is truly sad.

I grew up in the 1960s. I remember full well the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The 1960s and the 1970s were decades of true and real change; change that reshaped and redefined American culture in many ways, some for the better, some for the worse. Those years gave way to the Civil Rights movement and the understanding of a need for gender equality, to name but a few of the good things that came from that era. But it also gave way to a degradation of the importance of personal responsibility, civility and a need to be a productive and positive member of a community.