RUTHFULLY YOURS

Historic. Such is the ubiquitous description of the climate agreement recently announced in Beijing between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in which China promised for the first time to cap carbon emissions.

If this were a real breakthrough, I’d be an enthusiastic supporter. I have long advocated for a tangible global agreement to curb carbon. I do remain skeptical about the arrogant, ignorant claim that climate science is “settled,” that it can predict with accuracy future “global warming” effects, and that therefore we must cut emissions radically, immediately, and unilaterally if necessary, even at potentially ruinous economic and social cost.

I nonetheless believe (and have written since 1988) that pumping increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing. We don’t know nearly enough about the planet’s homeostatic mechanisms for dealing with it, but prudence would dictate reducing CO2 emissions when and where we can.

However, anything beyond that, especially the radical unilateralism advocated by climate alarmists, would be not just economic suicide but economic suicide without purpose. It would do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2 as long as China, India, and the other developing nations more than make up for our cuts with their huge and increasing carbon emissions.

China alone is firing up a new coal plant every eight to ten days. We could close every coal mine in Kentucky and West Virginia and achieve absolutely nothing except devastating Appalachia and, in effect, shipping its economic lifeblood to China.

The only way forward on greenhouse gases is global reduction by global agreement. A pact with China would be a good start.

Unfortunately, the Obama–Xi agreement is nothing of the sort. It is a fraud of Gruberian (as in Jonathan) proportions. Its main plank commits China to begin cutting carbon emissions 16 years from now. On the other hand, the United States must double its current rate of carbon cutting to meet a new, more restrictive goal by 2025, in return for which China will keep increasing its carbon emissions year after year throughout that period — and for five years beyond.

Obama’s speech announcing the his immigration diktat was the usual pabulum: “our immigration system is broken,” can’t let illegals “remain in the shadows,” “commonsense middle-ground approach,” blah, blah, blah. ​If I didn’t have to go on TV right afterwards, I would have played a drinking game.

But the speech was notable for some of the things Obama didn’t mention. For instance, he lied about what his non-amnesty amnesty consisted of: “All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.” As polling has suggested, this is less likely to provoke opposition than the truth: “All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you — and also, here’s a work permit, a Social Security number, and a driver’s license.”

He didn’t mention that his scheme will pull the plug on the Secure Communities program. The program checks the fingerprints of arrested criminal suspects against DHS records at the same time as they’re checked against FBI records. It is the lowest-common-denominator of immigration enforcement — if you oppose Secure Communities, you oppose immigration enforcement. But the anti-borders activist groups around the country do, in fact, oppose immigration controls of any kind, and reject the notion that illegal aliens who are arrested for drunk driving, assaulting police offices, beating their wives, and so on, should be subject to deportation. And Obama is one of them — but he has enough political sense not to mention that on national television.

Another part of his edict that wasn’t mentioned was the extension of the validity of the “temporary” grant of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from two years to three, eliminating the upper age limit to qualify, and extending it to those who entered before age 18 instead of the previous 16. These are details, for sure, but they highlight an important truth — he just set these parameters two years ago in an earlier edict and now he’s changing them. Why? Because he feels like it. These changes highlight the ad hoc nature of Obama’s lawmaking and point to the virtual certainty that any restrictions or limitations that may be included in the current directive can, and will, be changed whenever it’s politically convenient. He says you have to have arrived by 2010 to get this new amnesty? Well, he’ll just change it to 2013 next week. Didn’t include the parents of DACAs in this round of executive lawmaking? Maybe he’ll announce that in March.

None of the criteria Obama has laid out to qualify for amnesty benefits has any basis in law or even logic — they’re simply the result of political give and take, i.e., legislation. It’s just that instead of the people’s elected representatives debating and compromising and finally approving a measure, it is Obama’s staff that debates and compromises and finally approves something. Because Congress is now an advisory body with some residual powers, like the British House of Lords. Real law emanates from the White House.

The Immigration Position that Dare Not Speak Its Name — as Usual

An iron-clad rule of the the immigration debate is that advocates of amnesty are never willing to describe their own proposals as amnesty, although they will throw the word around about everything else. Marco Rubio, for instance, vociferously denied that the Gang of Eight bill was an amnesty, while he called the (functionally very similar) 1986 law an amnesty and called the status quo an amnesty. President Obama played by the same rules tonight:

I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty. Well, it’s not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today — millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time.

Going further, he said “mass amnesty would be unfair,” and called his proposal to give previously illegal immigrants some of the most important benefits enjoyed by legal immigrants “accountability.” It’s a sign of the enduring vulnerability of the pro-amnesty position that its supporters feel compelled to engage in this wordplay.

We’ve heard a lot about prosecutorial discretion the last few days, but, clearly, what the president is doing isn’t simply declining to enforce the law in certain instances; it is a new system, or as the president described it, a new “deal”:

So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes — you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily, without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law.

His rejoinder to those who doubt his power to unilaterally rewrite the law was a reiteration of his blackmail:

And to those Members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.

The speech had some nice rhetorical touches, especially toward the end, but otherwise was standard Obama fare. His position is, of course, the middle ground between mass amnesty and mass deportation; his opponents are consumed with grubby political considerations — they “scare people and whip up votes at election time”; as ever, he called for an end to “politics as usual.”

Altogether it would have been a wholly adequate pitch for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, in the normal give-and-take over proposed legislation. But he’s out of that business. Now he proposes and disposes, and the only alternative is assent.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, under pressure from U.S. ‎Secretary of State John Kerry, uttered a few words on Tuesday that appeared to ‎condemn the barbaric attack by two Palestinians in a synagogue in Jerusalem. (The ‎killers, of course, will soon be recognized as martyrs by Abbas’ political party Fatah, ‎and all the other Palestinian groups, which are even more extreme).

The attack, ‎which has so far killed five Israelis, as well as the two murderers (a mild term, really for ‎those who slaughter rabbis and others with an axe or knife while they are ‎praying), could have had a far worse outcome, though others in the hospital on life ‎support or in critical condition may soon be added to the death toll. ‎

Some 30 people were praying at the time of the attack, and the goal of the ‎killers was to murder them all. Israeli police prevented a worse bloodbath, ‎and it is a virtual certainty now that synagogues will be added to other institutional ‎venues in Israel that require more security. Had the monsters been more ‎‎”successful” before they were shot to death by the Israeli police, then CNN could ‎have headlined “32 dead in mosque attack in Jerusalem,” and the BBC could have ‎shown pictures of the two dead Palestinians while refusing to show any of the 30 ‎Jewish or Israeli casualties, and The New York Times could have used its typical ‎passive voice to describe the attack this way: “Violence breaks out in Jerusalem, 32 dead.” Someone needs to have a heart-to-heart talk with violence and keep him ‎from breaking out in this way. That is the road to peace.‎

The attack clearly had no impact in preventing or delaying the latest disgrace from ‎Europe, where Spanish legislators showed their concern for the dead and ‎wounded by voting to recognize the nonexistent state of Palestine.‎

Kerry has hardly been an innocent party in recent months, ‎repeatedly blaming Israel for the breakdown of peace talks that due to Palestinian lack of interest in even participating in a peace process, never got to a stage where they ‎could break down. His spokespeople at the State Department, amateur-hour ‎incompetents Jen Psaki and Marie Harf, have treated Israel like a pinata, particularly ‎during the recent Gaza war, when Israel just could not do enough in their eyes to ‎protect Palestinian civilians (despite their being regularly used by Hamas as human ‎shields, and with 12-year-olds sent off to fight). Better it seems that Israel had a ‎right to defend itself (all criticisms of Israel begin this way), but did nothing, since ‎any Israeli attack or bombing might involve civilian casualties, presumably ‎something new in the history of war. Yesterday, Psaki criticized Israel’s demolition ‎of the houses of the mass-murdering duo, since it was an obstacle in the path to ‎peace. That path, in the minds of some in the Obama administration, including ‎possibly President Barack Obama, himself, involves the eventual disappearance of Israel as a ‎Jewish state. ‎

Can the president make fraud and theft legal? How about assault? Cocaine use? Perjury?

You’d have to conclude he can — and that we have supplanted the Constitution with a monarchy — if you buy President Obama’s warped notion of prosecutorial discretion.

Tonight, Mr. Obama will unveil his executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens. According to news accounts, the criminal-law doctrine of prosecutorial discretion is the foundation of the president’s legal theory. It is the source of what he purports to be his authority to decree that these aliens have lawful status, a power our Constitution gives only to Congress.

Obama is distorting the doctrine.

As I explain in Faithless Execution (and in columns and posts here, here, and here), prosecutorial discretion is a simple and, until recently, an uncontroversial matter of resource allocation. It merely holds that violations of law are abundant but law-enforcement resources are finite; therefore, we must target the resources at the most serious crimes, which of necessity means many infractions will go unaddressed.

I’ve highlighted the last part because it is the key to understanding how Obama’s amnesty perverts the doctrine.

As is always the case with a well-constructed fraud, Obama’s amnesty has some cosmetic appeal because it derives from some indisputable claims. In the American system, the power to prosecute belongs solely to the executive. Consequently, it is for the president alone to prioritize which law violations will be prosecuted and which will go unaddressed. Congress writes the laws but it has no power to compel the president to enforce them. And immigration offenses, like other law violations, are more plentiful than the police and prosecutorial resources available to carry out investigations, arrests, trials, imprisonment, and deportations.

America’s near-total dependence on satellites for the most important elements of national security – secure communications, reconnaissance, intelligence gathering and navigation – has naturally attracted our adversaries’ efforts to counter our space-based advantages.

Those advantages – in intelligence gathering especially – are great, but come at a considerable cost. The price of a classified intelligence satellite can easily exceed $1 billion and the cost to launch one can be $200 million or more. The whole alphabet soup of intelligence agencies – including the CIA, NSA and NRO (the National Reconnaissance Office) – are highly dependent on such satellites to gather essential intelligence.

Russia’s current test of what is almost certainly a satellite-interceptor has gained even the attention of some mainstream media. But the media attention given the Russian test may act to mask the cyberwar measures being developed by Russia and other nations in concert with these other weapons.

The BBC report on Russia’s “satellite catcher” test was sufficient only to expose the obvious development of the most detectable – and thus least likely usable – of the several anti-satellite weapons we know about. Russia, China and America have been testing weapons capable of intercept a satellite intention for the purpose of capturing or destroying the objects. But that would be ruled out in times of peace – even the quasi-peace that prevails today – because that kind of interception could not be done without the satellite’s operator being able to track and identify the attacker. Capturing or destroying an adversary’s defense system satellites would be an act of war.

What we are seeing in Jerusalem today is not simply Palestinian terrorism. It is Islamic jihad. No one likes to admit it. The television reporters insist that this is the worst possible scenario because there is no way to placate it. There is no way to reason with it.

So what else is new?

The horrible truth is that all of the anti-Jewish slaughters perpetrated by our Arab neighbors have been motivated to greater or lesser degrees by Islamic Jew-hatred. The only difference between the past hundred years and now is that today our appeasement-oriented elite is finding it harder to pretend away the obvious fact that we cannot placate our enemies.

No “provocation” by Jews drove two Jerusalem Arabs to pick up meat cleavers and a rifle and slaughter rabbis in worship like sheep and then mutilate their bodies.

No “frustration” with a “lack of progress” in the “peace process,” can motivate people to run over Jewish babies or attempt to assassinate a Jewish civil rights activist.

The reason that these terrorists have decided to kill Jews is that they take offense at the fact that in Israel, Jews are free. They take offense because all their lives they have been taught that Jews should live at their mercy, or die by their sword.

They do so because they believe, as former Jordanian MP Ya’qub Qarash said on Palestinian television last week, that Christians and Muslims should work together to forbid the presence of Jews in “Palestine” and guarantee that “not a single Jew will remain in Jerusalem.”

Our neighbors are taught that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, signed the treaty of Hudaybiyah in 628 as a ploy to buy time during which he would change the balance of power between his army and the Jews of Kuraish. And 10 years later, once his army gained the upper hand, he annihilated the Jews.

Palestinians Butcher Israelis, Wall Street Journal Pivots to Blaming Israel
http://blog.camera.org/archives/2014/11/palestinians_butcher_israelis.html
Joshua Mitnick and Nicholas Casey, correspondents for the Wall Street Journal, have long evidenced a bias favoring the Palestinians in their reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But in recent months this bias has spun out of control. In a deluge of articles on the upsurge in violence around Jerusalem starting in October, Mitnick and Casey have struck a monotonic chord that always point to Israeli actions and policies as the problem.
Even the most recent case in which two Palestinians butchered four rabbis praying in a synagogue is not spared the usual spin. On November 20, page A10 of the Journal published two articles on the violence encompassing nearly the entire page. The top-of-the-page headline states, “Israel Destroys Home of Car-Attack Suspect.”
The entire thrust of the article is to condemn Israel for “reviving an internationally condemned demolition policy.”

In mantra fashion, each paragraph begins with a harsh Israeli action or a criticism of Israeli action.
Paragraph two starts with “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a harsh response…”
Paragraph three starts with a description of the action taken by Israeli soldiers against the family of one of the terrorists.
Paragraph four starts with “The demolition marked the return of one of israel’s m ost controversial policies…”
Paragraph five starts with “The U.S. views home destruction as counterproductive…”
Paragraph six starts with “Palestinians and rights groups say home demolitions aren’t a deterrent and only encourage families to seek revenge, fueling a vicious cycle.”
Paragraph seven starts with a quote from a pro-Palestinian leftist group B’Tselem, “You cannot punish people for other people’s actions.”

Video: Sonnie Johnson on “Change the Game”
The CEO of the Freedom Center’s new website and activist program exposes the failure and racism of progressive policies.
by Jamie Glazov
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/video-sonnie-johnson-on-change-the-game/

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/there-is-no-moral-equivalency-in-the-jerusalem-synagogue-attacks

Peace in the Middle East will come when the two parties involved both seek peace – not when one must constantly defend itself against terrorist attacks. Since the original two-state solution was first floated in the 1930’s, one side has never found it acceptable and has embarked upon decades of violent aggression and terrorism in order to advocate its case. In the meantime, he other side has created a prosperous multicultural democracy and is the target of constant assaults against its innocent citizens – including, as we recently reported, the killing of a three-month-old child.

Of course Israel, the recognized nation-state, is not only targeted by kinetic attacks, it must also survive propaganda attacks as it is demonized for defending its existence. I once again ask, how do you establish a cease-fire with a terrorist group whose raison d’être is the destruction of said state?

And so the insanity continues between those referring to themselves as “Palestinians” – you can read the history of the term here – and the State of Israel.

As reported by USA Today, “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to “respond harshly” after five people – three of them U.S.-born rabbis – were killed in a synagogue Tuesday by two Palestinians wielding meat cleavers, an ax and a gun. The incident was the latest violent event in the tense city where relations between Arabs and Jews have been deteriorating for weeks over a contested shrine holy to both Jews and Muslims. Netanyahu immediately ordered the demolition of the attackers’ homes, as well as homes of Palestinians who carried out several recent attacks.”

Of course the focal point for some media will be the ensuing consequences and punishment levied by Prime Minister Netanyahu – but he understands there must be consequences to the actions of terrorists.

It will be interesting to see how much we discuss the celebrations of this heinous attack, which occurred in Hamas-controlled Gaza.