RUTHFULLY YOURS

Americans love to name places after legislators, mayors and presidents. I have a suggestion. Perhaps New York’s Gowanus Canal should have its name altered. The waterway has been described as “a fetid corpse of water” after decades of industrial dumping and “a toxic-swamp of a river that crawls through much of south Brooklyn.” I can think of several pols that merit the honor.

However, now that President McKinley has been dismounted, the choice may not suit because it is named after after “Gouwane” chief among the Lenape tribe called the Canarsee, who lived and farmed on the shorelines.
In that case, how about the Waste Transfer Station on the upper East side of New York?

A delighted Mick Jagger just visited the Stalinist nation that criminalized his music and herded many of its listeners into forced-labor camps at Soviet bayonet-point as punishment.

The visit was reported by the proud Stalinist regime’s captive (literally!) press this week.

The exact purpose of the visit was not ascertained but the Rolling Stones (renown for their tributes to black music and musicians) seem to be planning a concert sponsored by the lily-white regime that jailed and tortured the most and longest-suffering black political prisoners in the modern history of the Western hemisphere.

In fact, this Castroite jailing and torture of blacks took a nice uptick precisely during Jagger’s visit.

Back in 1985 Rolling Stones’ guitarists Keith Richards and Ron Wood proudly joined Artists United Against Apartheid and played on the ad-hoc music group’s anti-Apartheid anthem titled: “Sun City.” Sun City was a resort in segregationist South Africa during the 1980’s (but this resort wasn’t itself subject to segregationist laws.)

As a direct consequence of the carnage and chaos in the Middle East millions of people are literally running for their lives. Their desire to put distance between themselves and the violence of their own leaders as well as the violence of ISIS, al Nusra and other terrorists organizations is certainly understandable.

However, among the innocent people fleeing the violence are terrorists seeking to enter European countries as well as the United States. These terrorists attempt to blend in with the massive number of bona fide refugees hoping to gain entry into European countries and the United States. Their ultimate goal is to carry out terror attacks, repaying the generosity of countries willing to help them by killing as many of the civilians of those countries as possible.

Alain El-Mouchan is the pen name of a professor of history and geography in Paris.
French Jews are emigrating to Israel by the tens of thousands. Their departure isn’t just about them; it’s about the end of the French idea.

The violent turmoil in today’s Middle East is producing an array of bewildering and seemingly contradictory effects. One of them is this: hundreds of thousands of refugees, soon perhaps millions, are fleeing the region in hopes of finding shelter in a Europe deeply uncertain both of itself and of what to do with them. Simultaneously, on a much smaller but historically portentous scale, tens of thousands of Jews are departing France, the home of Europe’s largest Jewish population, and heading for the same Middle East, but in their case for a country ready, willing, and eager to enfold them.

What meaning can be given to this apparent coincidence of opposites? Focusing almost entirely on the situation in France, the analyst Alain El-Mouchan here teases out the causes that lie behind the departure of thousands of its Jews for home in Israel. Much has already been written about the crisis of European Jewry, including notably here and here in Mosaic. But, especially in the light of the continent’s stark disorientation as it confronts masses clamoring for entry, the topic has become timely again, carrying as it does lessons not only about the past but for the future.

“If 100,000 Frenchmen of Spanish origin were to leave, I would never say that France is no longer France. But if 100,000 Jews leave, France will no longer be France. The French Republic will be judged a failure.” Thus declared Prime Minister Manuel Valls to the National Assembly in January 2015, within days of the homicidal jihadist attacks in Paris on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket.

What prompted this impassioned declaration? It is true enough that increasing numbers of French Jews have been leaving for Israel. In the past five years alone, more than 20,000 have done so, and since 2012 the annual figures have been moving steadily upward. Still, the French Jewish population, standing at about 480,000, remains the largest in Europe, and the latest surge, following as it does upon earlier, smaller movements of French Jews to Israel, is a far cry from the Prime Minister’s alarmed figure of 100,000. Is so massive an outflow really imminent, and, no less important, is there a sense in which the departure of a cohort of 100,000 Jews would truly mean the failure of the French political model of republican governance—that is, of France itself?

Donald Trump’s support has declined nationally since my last post about ten days ago. Since then (September 28), four national polls and thirteen (!) new state polls have been released. As the tables below show, Trump’s national average has dropped five points from 24 percent to 19 percent. Moreover, only one of the four polls released recently has him above the 24 percent average he carried into October.

The state poll average, though, shows him roughly unchanged from his late September national average. The state poll average shows him at 23.2 percent, only slightly below his prior national mark.

One should not simply compare the state average to the national one. The state average includes only about 30 percent of the country, so it could easily be the case that it is not fully representative. And it indeed is not — of the ten states polled (three were polled twice), six are in the South and two of the others are Iowa and New Hampshire, where one would expect voters to have firmer opinions about the race.

The Texas senator may look like an also-ran, but he’s a legit contender.
Where’s Ted Cruz? The outspoken Texas senator has been unusually quiet in recent weeks. But in GOP circles, there’s soft but growing chatter that he is likely to be one of the last men standing in one of the most chaotic and unpredictable presidential races in recent memory.

You wouldn’t know it from his poll numbers. Cruz is running at about 6 percent nationally and in key states such as Iowa and New Hampshire. That’s well behind outsiders Donald Trump, Carly Fiorina, and Ben Carson, and those numbers accord with the attitude that many influential Republicans have taken toward him since his arrival in Washington three years ago: There’s no way he can win the nomination. He’s too conservative and doctrinaire, and his abrasiveness doesn’t help the cause.

Given his poll numbers and his solid but unremarkable debate performances, the press has mostly ignored him. The result is that the Texas senator may be the most undercovered serious candidate in the race – and the most underestimated. But he shouldn’t be dismissed. This is the man, after all, who, according to one of his allies, began meeting with Iowa activists to plot his path to victory in the state in August of 2013, just nine months after he was elected to the Senate. Is it possible that he’ll sneak up on the Republican establishment again, just as he did in his 2012 Senate race?

Within Republican circles, attitudes about his viability have begun to change. Even strategists associated with some of Cruz’s rivals acknowledge that, in a historically crowded field, he may be one of the last men standing. “He’s got a long way to go, but unlike some of these guys, he has a coherent strategy, he has a lot of money, he has a pretty consistent message, and he’s not making mistakes,” says a top Republican strategist allied with Florida senator Marco Rubio. “He’s running a good campaign.”

The $8-billion-a-year agency gives us a chance to see whether we need it at all.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to reinterpret the Clean Water Act; according to Congressman Bill Shuster, its new interpretation will “open the door for the federal government to regulate just about any place where water collects.” Till now, the EPA has been able to impose itself only on “navigable waterways.” The EPA wants to drop the word “navigable.”

That would give the agency authority not only over every body of water in the country, flowing, standing, or tidal, but it would also — allegedly — give it control over any land where water temporarily pools: NRO has already posted a good piece on the subject, by clean-water expert Andrew Langer. Last Wednesday, during a joint House–Senate hearing on the agency’s plans, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said that the EPA’s powers-that-be “are in fact narrowing the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.” This, then, is the latest chapter in the long story of federal agencies voluntarily relinquishing power.

Since 1980, ground-level ozone pollution has dropped by one-third, to a nationwide average level of 68 parts per billion (ppb) in 2014. But for the Environmental Protection Agency’s bureaucrats, that reduction isn’t enough. Thus, the agency announced its newest standard, which reduces the allowable level of ground-level ozone from the current 75 parts per billion (ppb) to 70 ppb.

According to the EPA, by 2025, the new ozone standard will provide annual benefits of between $2.9 billion and $5.9 billion, at an annual cost of only $1.4 billion. One can almost hear one of those late-night announcers shouting: “You get all this — fewer premature deaths, fewer missed school days, fewer asthma attacks, all for the low, low price of just $1.4 billion. But wait, there’s more!”

So how did the EPA, which recently spent $92 million on new office furniture for its employees, determine that the benefits of the proposed ozone rule would greatly exceed the costs? Simple: The EPA adds in the “co-benefits” associated with reducing particulate emissions that the agency assumes also will occur when ozone levels are reduced.