RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remember when Senator Barack Obama assailed President George W. Bush for exceeding his presidential powers? In the twilight days of his own Presidency, Mr. Obama is speaking and acting as if he can determine U.S. foreign policy all by his lonesome.

That afflatus was on display Saturday at the Summit of Americas in Panama City, where the President took umbrage that anyone would disagree with his unilateral forays on Cuba, Iran and climate change. He was especially annoyed at Senator John McCain for daring to point out that Secretary of State John Kerry’s interpretation of his “framework” nuclear accord differs substantially with that of Iran Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
“That’s not how we’re supposed to run foreign policy, regardless of who’s President or Secretary of State. We can have arguments, and there are legitimate arguments to be had. I understand why people might be mistrustful of Iran. I understand why people might oppose the deal—although the reason is not because this is a bad deal per se, but they just don’t trust any deal with Iran, and may prefer to take a military approach to it,” Mr. Obama said.

Taking one-third of U.S. coal-fired power plants off the grid by 2020 simply isn’t workable. Here’s why.

Americans don’t give much thought to whether their electricity will be there when they need it. You flip a switch, the lights go on. Your phone charges up. The medical equipment in the emergency room does its job. Yet electric reliability, long a bedrock of this country’s prosperity and high standard of living, does not come as easily as its steady presence might suggest.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, a proposed regulation limiting carbon emissions from existing coal-fired plants, threatens to jeopardize the reliability that Americans and businesses have come to depend upon. The EPA proposal calls for states to cut emissions by 30% from 2005 levels by 2030. It also imposes aggressive interim targets starting in 2020 that will test states’ ability to meet these standards without disrupting service. For example, 39 states must achieve more than 50% of their final target by 2020.

Democrats are falling in line because they feel they have no choice.

Hillary Rodham Clinton did the formality of announcing her latest bid for the White House on Sunday, revealing nothing no one didn’t already know and facing no plausible competitors for the Democratic nomination. The question is whether this political machine candidacy will appeal to voters.

Mrs. Clinton is running less as an individual than as the figurehead of an apparatus of money and organization designed to keep power for the Democratic Party and American liberals. You might even call it a vast left-wing conspiracy, to modify the former First Lady’s famous coinage. She rose atop this machine not because of her personal qualities or her ideas but because she’s all the Democrats think they have.

What does Mrs. Clinton stand for? The main rationale for her candidacy seems to be that she would be the first woman President, and she’ll campaign on themes like mandated family leave and universal pre-K and child care. She was reluctant to emphasize her X chromosomes in the 2008 primaries, but now gender gets the showcase in the identity politics that defines modern Democrats.

Mrs. Clinton also ran in 2008 as inevitable—recall her kickoff motto of “I’m in it to win it”—and the irony this time is that this inevitability is probably true even as she pretends it isn’t.

Mrs. Clinton lost that race because her campaign was a snake pit of egos and competing power centers that allowed an untested freshman Illinois Senator to steal the nomination. She won’t make those mistakes again—and former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley is not a phenom in the President Obama mold. He also has the liability of his birth as a straight white male.

Just 15 days before the 9/11 attacks, a well-connected Saudi family suddenly abandoned their luxury home in Sarasota, Fla., leaving behind jewelry, clothes, opulent furniture, a driveway full of cars — including a brand new Chrysler PT Cruiser — and even a refrigerator full of food.

About the only thing not left behind was a forwarding address. The occupants simply vanished without notifying their neighbors, realtor or even mail carrier.

The 3,300-square-foot home on Escondito Circle belonged to Esam Ghazzawi, a Saudi adviser to the nephew of then-King Fahd. But at the time, it was occupied by his daughter and son-in-law, who beat a hasty retreat back to Saudi Arabia just two weeks before the attacks after nearly a six-year stay here.

Neighbors took note of the troubling coincidence and called the FBI, which opened an investigation that led to the startling discovery that at least one “family member” trained at the same flight school as some of the 9/11 hijackers in nearby Venice, Fla.

Hillary Rodham Clinton entered the presidential race Sunday to a stunning cold shoulder from Mayor de Blasio and few signs of genuine enthusiasm from other top New York Democrats, who want to see her espouse a far more liberal agenda.

The lack of enthusiasm for Clinton — made clear to the nation Sunday by de Blasio’s refusal to endorse on “Meet the Press” — ranges from far-leftist “progressives” allied with de Blasio, who prefer a Wall-Street-bashing populist like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, to Jewish voters worried by President Obama’s Mideast policies, to union activists taking their lead from AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, who want Clinton to face a primary challenge to force her into stronger stands on issues vital to organized labor.

And the lack of passion for Clinton was also seen on the local level Saturday at the Ready For Hillary gathering in Manhattan, where a mere 200 people and virtually no “A-list” Democratic officials attended a final fund-raiser before Clinton’s announcement.

Opponents of campus affirmative action typically rest their case on the immorality of using racial or ethnic categories (more delicately called “diversity”) versus treating people as individuals. That objection is certainly valid but when it comes to hiring of faculty, the damage far exceeds just violating a principle. Racial preferences deeply corrupt and will inevitably undermine academic excellence in ways that campus outsiders seldom grasp.

To appreciate this damage, consider Brown University’s recent National Diversity Summit in which the school announced plans to double its “underrepresented” minority (i.e., black) faculty by 2025 — from the current 9% to 18% (women don’t count here since the proportion of female faculty is already more than 50% but the plan nevertheless calls for a substantial increase in women in science departments). Strategies included creating post-doctoral fellowships for black scholars to be mentored by Brown faculty and attracting young blacks to the Brown campus with conferences. More forceful measures will entail asking departments to develop a “diversity action plan” whose annual goals would be monitored and requiring faculty search committees to ensure a diverse pool of minority candidates. In numbers, 410 black professors will have to be recruited.

A year after it left Ukraine for Russia, the region is suffering. What ever happened to Crimea? In the year since the peninsula voted to leave Ukraine and become the Russian Federation’s newest holding, Western attention has shifted away from it toward eastern Ukraine, where pro-Moscow separatists continue to wage an insurgency against Kyiv. But the case of Crimea is worth a second look, because in the past year, conditions there have deteriorated significantly.

As such, the region’s fate offers a telling glimpse into the harsh reality behind Russian rule. Crimea’s drift is unexpected, insofar as the Kremlin promised to reward the region handsomely for its pro-Russian trajectory. Indeed, the Russian government has worked hard to integrate Crimea into the rest of the country. It has launched an action plan to develop the peninsula and improve living conditions via investments in everything from water supply to power lines to new roads. But these plans have become a casualty of the wider Ukraine crisis. Russian aggression has prompted several rounds of Western sanctions to date. Cumulatively, these measures — coupled with the low price of world oil — have had a pronounced impact on the country’s economy. As a result, there simply isn’t enough money to go around, leading Moscow to reallocate funds from its own infrastructural needs just to keep Crimea afloat. In other words, to sustain its Crimea project, Russia is now depriving the rest of the country. Telltale signs of this constriction are everywhere. Moscow has frozen the pension savings of Russian citizens this year.

Clinton’s return is a recipe for disaster. Not being Tammy Wynette. Cattle futures, Red Bone, back-allocating trades. Madison Guaranty. Requested destruction of Madison files at the Rose Law Firm. Whitewater land development. Delinquent Whitewater tax filings. Resolution Trust Corporation criminal referral. Rose Law Firm shenanigans. Bimbo eruptions. Cookie recipes. FDIC inspector-general reports that Hillary “deceived” federal regulators. Travel Office: improper firings, false accusations, lies, cover-ups. Unethical behavior on the Watergate committee. “More ecstatic modes of living.” Alinsky disciple. Clerked for Communist lawyer. Defended child rapist, joked about it. Fulminations about a vast right-wing conspiracy.

“Vacuum Rose law files.” The Lippo Group and its principals and offshoots in the 1980s. Lippo Group in the 1990s. Lippo Group via visa waivers in 2010. John Huang. Charlie Trie. Coffee klatches. Rifling through, and hiding, poor Vince Foster’s files. Missing billing records. Snooping through FBI background checks, or at least surrounding herself with people who did. Improperly secret meetings on health-care reform. Secret desire for a government single-payer system, despite public denials. Profiting from short-sales of pharmaceuticals even as she attacked the pharmaceutical industry. Slandering (Lewinsky as a “narcissistic loony toon”), and perhaps worse, the women with whom her husband had sexual relations.

“Ambitious” is an understatement, and the public is wary.
In the run-up to Hillary Clinton’s presidential announcement, a lot of commentators dismissed criticism of her or suggested it would boomerang against Republicans. Her former consultant James Carville accused MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough of “scandalmongering.” On Sunday, Chuck Todd of NBC’s Meet the Press, speaking to radio talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, expressed his skepticism of Republican efforts against the Clintons: “I look at sort of an obsession on the right of beating Obama and beating Bill Clinton over the years . . . is there a point where you do this too much?” But clearly many voters disagree.

A new Bloomberg poll finds approval of Hillary at 48 percent in the wake of her e-mail scandal. The poll finds 53 percent of Americans believe “she purposely withheld or deleted some relevant e-mails from a private account and home server she used while in office.” Just 29 percent of respondents think she is being truthful. “Voters do think she is a strong leader — a key metric — but unless she can change the honesty perception, running as a competent but dishonest candidate has serious potential problems,” concludes Quinnipiac’s assistant polling director Peter Brown.

As President Obama tries to sell the world his mysterious nuclear “framework agreement,” India’s defense establishment is just not buying it. The U.S. and Western commentators might be expecting “peace dividends” from Iran, but India cannot afford to harbor such illusions.

The Iranians have already announced that they plan to sell “enriched uranium” in the international marketplace, and will be “hopefully making some money” from it. To whom will they sell?

A nuclear Iran would be able to hold the world hostage by blocking one-third of the world’s oil supply at the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian proxies have also been trying to seize control of the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait, the maritime choke point of the Suez Canal.

The only question is whether the West would rather have an adversary such as Iran before it has nuclear weapons or after.