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2016

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Crushing Climate-Change Dissent for Profit State attorneys general hire trial lawyers to stifle climate-science debate. By Hans A. von Spakovsky & Tiger Joyce

By on May 26th, 2016

‘Progressive” government officials have launched an Orwellian effort to outlaw research that dares question the soundness of computer-predicted climate catastrophes or costly policy proposals aimed at mitigating climate change.

Much has been written about how this attempt to criminalize inquiry and debate threatens fundamental First Amendment and due process rights. But how they are going about it is equally troubling.

Some state attorneys general are hiring profit-seeking, private-sector personal-injury lawyers to do their legal dirty work. Moreover, any contingency fees collected by these lawyers through settlements arising from these cases could be used, in part, to fund the campaigns of allied politicians who embrace the “one, true belief” of man-made global warming.

This is more than an attempt to suppress political and scientific dissent. Deputizing self-interested personal-injury lawyers with the awesome power of the state subverts the public interest.

We have seen this unseemly dynamic in action before. Two years ago, a Pulitzer Prize–winning New York Times series focused on the business model of the class-action specialists at Cohen Milstein, a law firm that seeks to create “big paydays by coaxing attorneys general to sue” large, sometimes politically unpopular corporations or industries. The firm brags about being the “most effective law firm in the United States for lawsuits with a strong social and political component.”

By e-mail, a Cohen Milstein spokeswoman said the firm did not participate in a then-secret but now widely reported Manhattan meeting of climate-change activists and political operatives in January. But it certainly appears as though the class-action bar’s interests were well represented during the discussions.

A draft agenda for the meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows a determination to use their powers to push a political agenda. Among their goals: “To establish in public’s mind that Exxon is a corrupt institution that has pushed humanity (and all creation) toward climate chaos,” and “To drive Exxon and climate into center of 2016 election cycle.” But money is a big motivator as well.

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The Lessons of Pearl Harbor 75 Years Later By Victor Davis Hanson

By on May 26th, 2016

This year marks the 75th anniversary of the December 7, 1941, Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor that killed more than 2,400 Americans.

President Obama is visiting Hiroshima this week, the site of the August 6, 1945, dropping of the atomic bomb that helped end World War II in the Pacific Theater. But strangely, he has so far announced no plans to visit Pearl Harbor on the anniversary of the attack. The president, who spent much of his childhood in Hawaii, should do so — given that many Americans have forgotten why the Japanese attacked the United States and why they falsely assumed that they could defeat the world’s largest economic power.

Imperial Japan was not, as often claimed, forced into a corner by a U.S. oil embargo, which came only after years of horrific Japanese atrocities in China and Southeast Asia. Instead, an opportunistic and aggressive fascist Japan gambled that the geostrategy of late 1941 had made America uniquely vulnerable to a surprise attack.

By December 1, 1941, Nazi Germany, Japan’s Axis partner, had reached the suburbs of Moscow. Japan believed that the German army would soon knock the Soviet Union out of the war.

Japan had also hedged its bets by signing a nonaggression pact with the Soviets. Japanese leaders assumed that even if communist Russia survived, Japan could avoid a costly land war on its rear flank. The U.S., not Japan, would likely have a two-front war.

By 1941, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium had all been defeated and occupied by the Third Reich. Only the British remained of the original European anti-Axis allies, and London had been under constant aerial assault by the German Luftwaffe during the Blitz. Japan figured that Germany and Italy might soon win the war and wished to pile on before it ended.

Japan had calculated that all of Europe’s resource-rich Pacific and Asian colonies were now orphaned and up for grabs. By starting a Pacific war and knocking out the U.S., Japan could get its hands on the resources necessary to fuel its war machine.

British-held Singapore and the American bases in the Philippines were isolated and poorly defended. And they would be completely cut off once the U.S. Seventh Fleet and air arm were neutralized at Pearl Harbor.

Starting a war in the Pacific meant the Japanese would have easy access to huge supplies of oil, rubber, rice, and strategic metals for their newfound mercantile empire, the Great East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

The U.S. also had lost military deterrence. The Japanese had watched carefully as America did little to help its two closest allies: France and Great Britain. The former was easily overrun by the Nazis, the latter bombed unmercifully.

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A Split Over Israel Threatens the Democrats’ Hopes for Unity By Jason Horowitz and Maggie Haberman

By on May 26th, 2016

A bitter divide over the Middle East could threaten Democratic Party unity as representatives of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to upend what they see as the party’s lopsided support of Israel.http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/bernie-sanders-israel-democratic-convention.html

Two of the senator’s appointees to the party’s platform drafting committee, Cornel West and James Zogby, on Wednesday denounced Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank and Gaza and said they believed that rank-and-file Democrats no longer hewed to the party’s staunch support of the Israeli government. They said they would try to get their views incorporated into the platform, the party’s statement of core beliefs, at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia in July.

“Justice for Palestinians cannot be attained without the lifting of the occupation,” Dr. West, one of Mr. Sanders’s five representatives on the platform committee, said in an interview. Dr. West said that while he recognized the necessity to provide for the security of Jews, who for thousands of years have been a “hated people,” he thought that the platform needed to bring more balance to “the plight of an occupied people.”

The presence of Dr. Zogby and Dr. West on the 15-member panel, which also has six appointees of Hillary Clinton and four from the party chairwoman, does not guarantee their views will prevail. But it raises the prospect that one of the party’s most sensitive issues will be open to public debate while Mrs. Clinton is in a fight to unify her party and appeal to voters turned off by Donald J. Trump.

It also laid bare a steady shift in the Democratic Party, whose members have been less willing to back Israel’s government than in years past. According to a Pew Research Center survey in April, self-described liberal Democrats were twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians over Israel than they were only two years ago. Forty percent of liberals sympathized more with Palestinians, the most since 2001, while 33 percent sympathized more with Israel.

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Buying the Media to Sell the Iran Nuke Deal Time to investigate the pay-to-play scheming of NPR, the White House and left-wing non-profits by Joseph Klein

By on May 26th, 2016

Ben Rhodes, President Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser for strategic communications, was the subject of a recent eye-opening New York Times Magazine article. The article discussed Rhodes’ prominent role in selling Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran to the public. Rhodes, who was originally interested in writing fiction before embarking on a government career, boasted of the “echo chamber” the administration was able to create among pliant media and non-profit groups to spin the deal in its most favorable light. Channeling his days as an aspiring novelist, Rhodes filled the echo chamber with a false narrative. It turns out that the “echo chamber” itself was more like a pay-to-play chamber, which merits investigation for possible illegal conduct by at least two non-profit tax-exempt organizations.

Money was dispensed through pro-nuclear deal tax-exempt organizations to buy favorable coverage in the media, including the tax-exempt National Public Radio (NPR), according to an Associated Press report. Ben Rhodes had specifically mentioned “outside groups like Ploughshares” as playing a key role in conveying the pro-nuclear deal narrative that the Obama administration wanted the public to hear.

According to the Associated Press report, Ploughshares, a left-wing non-profit organization financed by George Soros’ Open Society Institute, “gave National Public Radio $100,000 last year to help it report on the pact and related issues.”

Since 2005, Ploughshares has plowed about $700,000 into NPR’s coffers. Since 2010, the grants to NPR specifically mention Iran. Ploughshares’ 2015 annual report, for example, explains that the purpose of its grant to National Public Radio, Inc. is to “support national security reporting that emphasizes the themes of US nuclear weapons policy and budgets, Iran’s nuclear program, international nuclear security topics and US policy toward nuclear security.” (Emphasis added)

Ploughshares and NPR are both 501(c) (3) non-profit organizations, which take tax deductible contributions. Both organizations are prohibited from engaging in any substantial lobbying, advocacy of legislation or “propaganda.” Although both may have crossed the line in spreading Rhodes’ propaganda regarding the nuclear deal with Iran, they have denied any wrongdoing.

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Obama’s Refugees and Surging Deadly Diseases in America The lethal violation of the nation’s most basic public health protocols. Matthew Vadum

By on May 26th, 2016

An outbreak of deadly infectious tuberculosis among refugees President Obama sent to Indiana is a frightening reminder that the administration’s dangerous immigration policies are putting American lives at risk.

In a frenzied rush to bring as many non-English-speaking Third World aliens to the country as possible before his presidency ends in a few months, Obama is allowing Syrian war migrants and refugees to be brought into the country without first undergoing proper medical examinations, a violation of the nation’s most basic public health protocols.

“Tuberculosis is one of the most lethal infectious diseases in history,” said Dr. Jane Orient, executive director of the Association of American Physicians and surgeons. “It is easily transmitted, say on a public bus [and] increasingly, it is becoming highly resistant to all our antibiotics,” she said.

It is clear that Obama doesn’t care about the health and well-being of the American people. That was obvious when he began pushing to create the so-called death panels that Obamacare mandates. But now as a result of the president’s recklessness, fatal diseases are surfacing or making a comeback in the U.S. Among those ailments are pneumonia, paralysis-causing acute flaccid myelitis, dengue fever, swine flu, and enterovirus D68.

Under Obama, immigration policy aims to import new Democratic voters — the less skilled, less educated, less enamored with the norms and values of Western civilization, the better. Lackluster border security, risible efforts at immigration law enforcement, mass amnesties, promises of generous taxpayer-financed welfare benefits, and other goodies, are used by Obama to expand and remake the American electorate.

Prior to the Obama era, tuberculosis was a rare diagnosis and many thought the disease had more or less been eradicated in the United States. Multi-drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis have been reported in populous California, Florida, Texas, and New York, all of which have large concentrations of illegal aliens.

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Feminist Totally Occupied by Palestine Guess why a British feminist historian refused a half a million dollar prize?Phyllis Chesler

By on May 26th, 2016

This month, a British feminist historian, Dr. Catharine Hall, refused a half a million dollars because the money is connected to an Israel-based foundation.

The Dan David Foundation had absolutely no trouble finding two other European feminist historians (Drs. Arlette Farge and Dr. Inga Clendinnen) and awarding them the distinguished prize.

The matter is a curious one. First, because Hall herself not only declined the prize; her supporters, the British Committee for the Universities of Palestine, released the news of her rejection. Hall and her supporters/handlers clearly want credit for her “politically correct” sacrifice. Perhaps a pro-Islamic or a British anti-Zionist foundation will soon find a way to reward her. Perhaps others will then follow suit.

The British Committee for the Universities of Palestine described Hall’s decision as “a significant endorsement of the campaign to end ties with Israeli institutions.”

The matter is also curious because the Committee posted a press release on May 10th—andHa’aretz did not report this until May 22nd. Ha’aretz states that Hall declines this prize “after many discussions with those who are deeply involved with the politics of Israel-Palestine.”

The Dan David Prize was founded in 2000 with a one hundred million dollar endowment and awards were given for the first time in 2002. It seems to be an end-of-career or a later-in-one’s-career kind of award. Scientists, novelists, musicians, thinkers, and academics, mainly historians, have been recipients of this largesse. Many undeniably great historians have received this prize such as Sir Martin Gilbert and Robert Conquest, who shared the prize in 2012.

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Defense Secretary Ponders How to Change ‘Unmanned’ Job Titles to Gender-Neutral Wording By Bridget Johnson (????!!!!)

By on May 26th, 2016

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter expressed openness today to editing military job titles to make “man” more gender-neutral, even as he struggled with a way to make “unmanned” less masculine.

The Marine Corps Times reported last week that the service is reviewing its job titles — rifleman, infantryman, etc. — in the wake of all combat roles being opened to women and a January directive from Navy Secretary Ray Mabus for the Corps and the Navy to ensure those job descriptions are gender-neutral.

Every job title that includes “man” is up for review and potentially on the editing block.

Meeting with reporters today at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, R.I., Carter was asked whether he saw “a benefit or a need to do that throughout the military.”

Carter said it was “a very good question.”

“And, you know, of course one wants to signify a reality, which is a very favorable reality for us in defense, of the modern era, which is that we’re making full use of the wonderful talents of half of the population of the country,” he said.

“And it would be a huge mistake not to do so. And that’s why I wanted to see all military operational specialties opened to qualified females. That doesn’t mean that they’ll get in and it doesn’t mean that they’ll choose to do it. But it does mean that I have the opportunity to pick from the entire population of the country. And since it’s an all-volunteer force, I would be — wouldn’t be fulfilling the needs of having the best force if I weren’t fishing in the widest possible pond.”

Carter stressed “that’s the logic behind the position of women in our Department of Defense in today’s world.”

“And signifying that in all appropriate ways is I think exactly that — very appropriate and needed,” he added. CONTINUE AT SITE

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War wounds are not the stuff of Mickey and Minnie Dr. Robin McFee

By on May 26th, 2016

Comparing the disastrous, dysfunctional and damaged Veterans Administration (VA) to Disneyland only makes sense in Fantasyland. Such was a key component of the message conveyed by, and that apparently was important to the latest Secretary of the VA – Bob McDonald. He was speaking at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast in Washington, DC just days ago when he tried to downplay wait times veterans must endure to obtain medical care from the VA, using a comparison with Disney. To everyone’s horror, except apparently the Secretary or his speechwriters and supporters (Daffy, Daisy, Pluto, Dopey and Grumpy), the blow back has been swift and loud, as it should be. Let me allow you to decide. Here is his full statement:

“When you go to Disney, do they measure the number of hours you wait in line? Or what’s important?” “What’s important is what’s your satisfaction with the experience.” “And that’s really the kind of measure I want to move to”, he said.”The days to an appointment is really not what we should be measuring”. “What really counts is how does the veteran feel about their encounter with the VA”, he said. McDonald continued to say that the “create date” metric, which measures how long a veteran has to wait from the moment they first ask for care, is not a “valid measure” of wait time. In March, the Government Accounting Office released a report citing delays in treatment for newly enrolled veterans.

Days to an appointment DO matter if you have a time critical illness. Call me crazy, but that’s kind of a basic thing we learn in med school. Just sayin!

One has to wonder what on earth the Secretary been doing these last 2 years in terms of revamping the VA. One has to hope he is not resting all the hopes and fears of wounded and damaged veterans on how a veteran “feels” about his or her encounter, on the off chance they can obtain medical care before the coroner is called. OK that was maybe a tad harsh. But seriously – 2 years on the job, with tons of cash at his disposal, and still the VA fails too many veterans on a daily basis. And these are people who NEED help. Secretary McDonald – this isn’t rocket science. Come on…three guys with slide rules and prehistoric computers brought back Apollo 13 from over 100,000 miles in space in less than a week. You had 2 years to institute change that would matter. Yet you are still relying on more studies? Give me a 100 billion dollar budget, and I would wager 10 of my best med students could come up with serious, effective solutions quicker.

Although not a newsflash to readers at FSM, the VA has been fraught with problems for years, with cover ups galore, and a government only too happy to toss more money at the issues instead of insisting upon real change. In recent times the dysfunction has become all too deadly for far too many veterans. Yet we continue to toss money at the VA without better outcomes. Consider for a moment that the annual budget for the VA is over $160,000,000,000. That’s the equivalent of 16 Donald Trumps, or several US states combined. But what has this largesse purchased for our vets? According to the NY Times and other sources, estimates as high as 100,000 veterans are denied critical services in a timely manner. And when anyone has the temerity to put restrictions or expectations for better outcomes as conditions for funding, the usual suspects cry injustice (government unions, politicians).

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Has the Pope Abandoned Europe to Islam? by Giulio Meotti

By on May 26th, 2016

In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI said what no Pope had ever dared to say — that there is a link between violence and Islam. Ten years later, Pope Francis never calls those responsible for anti-Christian violence by name and never mentions the word “Islam.”

Pope Francis does not even try to re-evangelize or reconquer Europe. He seems deeply to believe that the future of Christianity is in the Philippines, in Brazil and in Africa. Probably for the same reason, the Pope is spending less time and effort in denouncing the terrible fate of Christians in the Middle East.

“Multiculturalism” in Europe is the mosque standing on the ruins of the church. It is not the synthesis requested by Pope Francis. It is the road to becoming extinct.

Asking Europe to be “multicultural” while it experiences a dramatic de-Christianization is extremely risky. In Germany, a new report found that “Germany has become demographically a multi-religious country.” In the UK, a major inquiry recently declared that “Britain is no longer a Christian country.” In France, Islam is also overtaking Christianity as the dominant religion.

To scroll the list of Pope Francis’s apostolic trips — Brazil, South Korea, Albania, Turkey, Sri Lanka, Ecuador, Cuba, United States, Mexico, Kenya, Uganda, Philippines — one could say that Europe is not exactly at the top of his agenda.

The two previous pontiffs both fought for the cradle of Christendom. Pope John Paul II took on Communism by toppling the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. Benedict XVI took on “the dictatorship of relativism” (the belief that truth is in the eye of the beholder) and bet everything on re-evangelizing the continent by traveling through it (he visited Spain three times) and in speeches such as the magnificent ones at Regensburg, where he spoke bluntly about the threat of Islam, and the German Bundestag, where he warned the gathered politicians against declining religiosity and “sacrificing their own ideals for the sake of power.”

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The Lie of “Disproportionality” by Fred Maroun

By on May 26th, 2016

By making an accusation of disproportionality without defining the meaning of the term, Bernie Sanders and Haaretz betrayed not only the Palestinians and the Israelis, but also their professions. They made false and unsubstantiated accusations while ignoring the thousands more deaths that the Palestinians are inflicting on their own people — by training toddlers and children for war, using their own people as human shields and failing to provide shelters for them, as the Israelis do for their citizens.

Unsubstantiated claims of disproportionality divert attention from the fact that preventing more wars requires replacing Gaza’s Iranian-backed terrorist regime with a regime that is interested in the well-being of the Palestinians.

In addition to helping Bernie Sanders attract the naïve and anti-Israel vote, and helping Haaretz attract anti-Semitic readers, unsubstantiated claims of disproportionality divert attention from the fact that preventing more wars requires replacing Gaza’s Iranian-backed terrorist regime with a regime that is interested in the well-being of the Palestinians.

As a fourth Gaza war looms on the horizon, we should be aware of the hypocrisy and demagoguery of past Gaza wars: because we are likely to see more of the same.
The Accusation

U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a candidate in the Democratic primaries for president, claimed that Israel’s response in the 2014 Gaza war was “disproportionate,” and Haaretz columnist Asher Schechter agreed. Yet neither Sanders nor Haaretz provided evidence to back that claim.

Schechter made one point worth mentioning: the claim of “extremely permissive rules of engagement during the operation that aimed to protect the lives of IDF soldiers even if the cost was a greater loss of civilian lives.” If true, it simply means that IDF soldiers, as all soldiers, have to make split-second decisions, and when they do so in a situation when confronted with Palestinians who appear to be terrorists, they err on the side of assuming they are terrorists in order to protect their own lives. That is not unexpected, and Israel has no obligation to do otherwise.

Israel has repeatedly demonstrated how much it values the civilian lives of the people it is fighting. No other military force drops leaflets, telephones its adversaries and “knocks on the roof” to warn them of an imminent attack, so that civilians will have time to evacuate. Israel values the lives of Palestinian civilians, but naturally, it values the lives of its own soldiers more. Israel has repeatedly demonstrated how much it values its soldiers, for example when it freed more than one thousand Palestinian criminals. Why would anyone expect Israel to suddenly to value its soldiers less when forced to fight terrorism in Gaza?

What is disgraceful is not that Israel cares about its soldiers, most of whom have families at home — in many cases dependent on them for their livelihood. What would morale in any military be if soldiers felt they were merely regarded as cannon-fodder, not cared about?

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