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2016

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Palestinian Attacks Against Israel at Home and Abroad (January 13-20, 2016) By Rachel Ehrenfeld

By on January 21st, 2016

The Palestinian leadership is very busy waging political, economic and propaganda warfare against Israel.

In Ramallah, the Palestinian Authority is holding official funerals to “heroes” who stabbed to death Israelis, and encouraging others to also become martyrs.

In the International arena, the Palestinian Authority is working hard to obtain an Arab League, EU and the UN Security Council resolution that will condemn and declare all Israeli West Bank “settlements” illegal under international law and an obstacle to peace. However, at the same time, Palestinian supporters in Europe and the U.S. are making efforts to delegitimize the Jewish State of Israel. They are successfully lobbying professional groups and universities to ban Israelis.

Today, “71 British doctors have submitted a request to the World Medical Association to have the Israel Medical Association expelled. In London’s Kings College, on January 16, 2016, a group of KCL Action Palestine, stormed an event where the former head of the Israeli secret service Shin Bet and commander-in-chief of the navy, Ami Ayalon was speaking. They threw chairs, smashed windows and set off fire alarms. At least 15 MET police officers were needed to evacuate the building. Despite the violence, and damage to property no arrest were made. Apparently, the police considered this a free-speech demonstration.

Elsewhere in Europe and the U.S. the Palestinians BDS movement to ban Israelis in Academia and business, as well as Israeli products of Jews from Judea and Samaria and the Golan Hights, is in full swing. Last November the European Union decided to allow such warning labels and supermarket chains throughout Europe stopped carrying Israeli products. In the U.S., the latest to join the BDS movement, was the pension fund for the United Methodist Church, one of the largest Protestant denominations in the United States. It has removed five Israeli banks from its investment portfolio.

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The Democrats’ Filthy Flint Water Dirty politics lead to dirty water. Daniel Greenfield

By on January 21st, 2016

Mayor Dayne Walling, a Democrat, led a cheerful countdown at the Flint water treatment plant to press the button moving the city over to river water. Walling and Darnell Earley, the Democratic emergency manager, even raised glasses in a toast and drank the water to show that it was safe.

“It’s a historic moment for the city of Flint to return to its roots and use our own river as our drinking water supply,” Walling said. “The water quality speaks for itself.”

Flint’s city council had voted in favor of the move 7-1. Despite claims about the power of the emergency manager, the switch could not have gone forward without that vote.

Even once the problem had surfaced, the EPA knew and kept quiet. It was only once the crisis broke, that the Democratic establishment attempted to redirect the blame at Michigan’s efforts to fix broken Democratic cities like Flint using emergency managers. The war against the emergency managers is not about clean water; it’s about protecting the dirty Democratic politics that destroyed these cities.

Flint’s dirty water had its origins in dirty politics. The Democratic Party had badly mismanaged the city.

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Hillary’s Saps by Mark Steyn (Kasich????)

By on January 21st, 2016

Charles McCullough, the Inspector General of the US Intelligence Community, has informed Congress that Hillary Clinton had “several dozen emails containing classified information determined by the IC element to be at the confidential, secret, and top secret/sap levels” on that private homebrew server she kept in some guy’s bathroom closet in Colorado. “Sap” stands for “special access program” and is the level above “top secret” – or, in laymen’s terms, super-duper extra-top secret. It’s generally accepted that much of that “sap” material made its way from Hillary’s inbox to hostile intelligence agencies around the world.

Had anybody else treated years’ worth of the most confidential material so recklessly, they would now be in jail awaiting trial. By comparison, General Petraeus shared a tiny amount of “sap” material with just one person – his biographer-cum-mistress. He was prosecuted for breaching exactly the same non-disclosure agreement Hillary signed. As further punishment, it now seems the four-star general is likely to be demoted:

Reducing Petraeus’s rank, most likely to lieutenant general, could mean he’d have to pay back the difference in pension payments and other benefits that he received as a retired four-star general. That would amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars over his retirement. According to Pentagon figures, a four-star general with roughly the same years of experience as Petraeus was entitled to receive a yearly pension of nearly $220,000. A three-star officer would receive about $170,000.

I doubt he needs that extra 50 grand. Even so, I wonder how America’s best known general of the post-9/11 era feels at being demoted while Hillary is headed for the ultimate promotion. In his shoes, I’d rip off the three remaining stars, hurl them in Ash Carter’s face, and demote myself to private.

But look at that new poll from New Hampshire: Bernie 60 per cent, Hillary 33 per cent. Will President Sanders be willing to pardon Mrs Clinton? Or will it be left to Goldman Sachs to demote one zero from her “speaking fee”?

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American Colleges Are Forgetting to Teach Citizenship By Wilfred M. McClay

By on January 21st, 2016

Over a long teaching career, I have seen a lot of change in our colleges and universities—some of it good, but much of it not. In the not-good category I would put the decline of our commitment to educate our young people for American citizenship.

Those of us old enough to remember the 1970s recall the crisis higher education was then facing. The stupendous growth of colleges and universities in the post-World War II-era was coming to an end and the future looked grim.

But American higher education did not curl up and die. It didn’t even shrink. Instead, it maintained and added to its bulk, including a steadily growing flow of foreign students (more on them later).

It did what businesses always do when supply outstrips demand: it found, exploited, and even created new markets for its goods, meaning new students.

The resulting gains in access to higher education and genuine diversity in the student body have on balance been a real advance. But our redefinition of higher education has also presented us with certain dilemmas, and these must be faced up to.

For example, we need to pay more attention to the internationalization of the American academy, including the steadily growing number of foreign students in our universities. Those students represent a source of much-needed enrollment and tuition revenues. Their presence gives enlivening variety to our campuses, exposing the American-born to a taste of the larger world. What is not to like about that?

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Iran Played the Obama Administration in the Hostage-Release Negotiations, Again By Arthur L. Herman

By on January 21st, 2016

Earlier this week, the big breaking news was the release of five Americans that had been held hostage in Iran, just days after I ran a column in this space asking why the administration wasn’t doing more to release them. That led the Village Voice to slam me for not understanding how hostage negotiations really work — and for daring to suggest that President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry weren’t doing enough to handle the problem.

Then, bit by bit, the truth began to come out. Now we know Obama and Kerry weren’t up to the job, and instead have managed to — once again — make us foolish in the eyes of the Iranians, and everyone else involved.

We’ve learned that in exchange for the release of the five Americans, the administration agreed to drop all charges against seven Iranians accused of helping Tehran dodge sanctions on its military and nuclear-weapons program — the same program Iran isn’t supposed to have anymore.

The administration also included a sweetener in the form for a $1.7 billion settlement on claims relating to the sale of military equipment to Iran before the 1979 revolution — that is, in the days of the hated Shah. That’s in addition to the $100 billion in unfrozen assets Tehran has access to, now that sanctions are lifted — lifted the same day, as it happens, as the prisoners were released.

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The Many Contradictions of Hillary Clinton By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 21st, 2016

Hillary Clinton recently said she would go after offshore tax “schemes” in the Caribbean. That is a worthy endeavor, given the loss of billions of dollars in U.S. tax revenue.

Yet her husband, Bill Clinton, reportedly made $10 million as an advisor and an occasional partner in the Yucaipa Global Partnership, a fund registered in the Cayman Islands.

Is Ms. Clinton’s implicit argument that she knows offshore tax dodging is unethical because her family has benefited from it? Does she plan to return millions of dollars of her family’s offshore-generated income?

Clinton is calling for “huge campaign-finance reform,” apparently to end the excessive and often pernicious role of big money in politics. But no candidate, Republican or Democrat, raised more than the $112 million that Clinton collected in 2015 for her primary campaign.

In 2013, Clinton earned nearly $1.6 million in speaking fees from Wall Street banks. She raked in $675,000 from Goldman Sachs, and $225,000 apiece from Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, and UBS Wealth Management. Did that profiteering finally make Clinton sour on Wall Street’s pay-for-play ethics?

Clinton has also vowed to raise taxes on hedge-fund managers. Is that a way of expressing displeasure with her son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky, who operates a $400 million hedge fund?

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President Obama, Meet the ‘Take Care’ Clause The Supreme Court orders the president to prove that he is faithfully executing the law. By Josh Blackman

By on January 21st, 2016

On four separate occasions, President Obama swore that he would “faithfully execute the Office of President.” Yesterday, the Supreme Court told him to prove it. As expected, the justices voted to review Texas’s challenge to Obama’s executive action on immigration, known as DAPA (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans). Critically, the Court ordered the Obama administration to answer a pivotal question: Whether DAPA “violates the Take Care Clause of the Constitution.” In 225 years, the Supreme Court has never had occasion to ask the president whether he has reneged on his oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. However, with pens-and-phones replacing checks-and-balances, the Supreme Court is now poised to break new constitutional ground in order to preserve our embattled separation of powers.

On November 20, 2014, President Obama announced DAPA. This executive action purported to rely on “prosecutorial discretion” to defer the deportations of up to 5 million aliens and grant them work authorization. Two weeks later, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott (who had just been elected governor and would take office in January 2015) challenged DAPA in federal court in Brownsville. Two months later — and two days before the Department of Homeland Security would have begun accepting new applicants — Judge Andrew Hanen put DAPA on hold nationwide.

Judge Hanen found fatal the government’s failure to comply with the notice-and-comment requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act (APA). Because Hanen ruled on narrow grounds, the court did not need to address whether the president had failed to comply with the Constitution’s requirement that he “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The case was then appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. In July, a divided court affirmed Judge Hanen’s ruling on administrative-law grounds. It, too, did not reach the constitutional question.

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Clinton Campaign Accuses Obama-Appointed IG of Conspiring with GOP on E-mail Report By Brendan Bordelon

By on January 21st, 2016

Hillary Clinton’s campaign went on the attack Wednesday morning against a new inspector general’s report that affirms the presence of “several dozen” highly classified e-mails on the former secretary of state’s private server, accusing the government watchdog of spearheading a “very coordinated leak” with Senate Republicans to damage her reputation.

On Tuesday, Fox News reported that last week, intelligence community inspector general I. Charles McCullough sent an unclassified response to an inquiry from two Republican senators. McCullough’s letter is said to contain two sworn declarations from an “intelligence community element,” asserting that dozens of e-mails found on Clinton’s server were classified — including several judged to contain intelligence on so-called “special access programs,” which exists at a more rarefied level of classification than even the two “top secret” e-mails discovered on the server last summer.

On CNN Wednesday morning, Clinton campaign spokesman Brian Fallon said McCullough was the ringleader behind an operation to “trump it up and resurface these allegations,” calling the new report “a very coordinated leak” between the inspector general and GOP lawmakers.

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The Enigma of Germany By Victor Davis Hanson —

By on January 21st, 2016

What to fear in Germany — an ideologically driven leader who unilaterally is changing the demographics of the nation without public support, or an angry populist counter-movement that vows to keep Germans safe by any means necessary when the government won’t? Both, or neither? Is Germany postmodern in erasing borders, or premodern in bullying its neighbors to do the same?

Does the world want Germans to stand up, reassert their pride in Western liberality and tolerance, and insist that migrants either integrate and follow Western values or go back home and stay there? Or does it want Germans to more or less continue to repress any expressions of cultural confidence?

To even the least-informed observer, German chancellor Angela Merkel’s recent decision to allow tens of thousands of young Muslim migrants — about two-thirds of them young men — into Germany from the war-torn and terrorist-infested Middle East seemed unhinged. Over a million migrants entered Germany in 2015 alone, the vast majority of them young, male, Muslim, from the Middle East. They were not refugees by any classical definition. Apparently Merkel in particular, and Germans in general, must assert that they are the most recklessly postmodern of all Western nations in order to reassure the world, 77 years after the outbreak of World War II, that they are no longer the most recklessly nationalistic.

Even a cynic who saw Germany’s demographic crisis and need for unskilled labor as the catalyst for welcoming in hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern males could not figure out why Merkel would bring such chaos to what is otherwise usually the least chaotic nation in the world. That migrants are currently harassing and, at worst, assaulting German women is the logical, not the aberrant result of dumping thousands of young Muslim men from the Middle East into one of Europe’s most affluent and most progressive cultures.

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Bob Carter: Lysenkoism and Climate Science

By on January 21st, 2016

Bob Carter’s defence of truth came with consequences. In 2010, The Drum solicited his thoughts on James Hansen, one of warmism’s original fabulists. The piece was spiked, demonstrating yet again that authorised lies corrupt all that they touch, even down to mere journalism. As a tribute to Carter, Quadrant Online today republishes that piece
Bob Carter was a geologist and environmental scientist who studied ancient climate change. It was his curse to be a man of integrity in a field colonised by careerists and charlatans.

Editor’s note: Yesterday, just as Warmist Inc was poised to announce that — surprise! surprise! — 2015 was the latest “hottest year on record” and why the oceans will soon be cursed with drunken fish as a consequence, news broke that a genuine man of science, a sceptic and dear friend of Quadrant, Bob Carter (left), had died. Had Quadrant Online’s publishing system not been on the fritz (please subscribe so we can afford a new one) , we would have re-posted the piece below immediately. Written in 2010, it was solicited by The Drum, then summarily rejected. Then as now, the national broadcaster knows what the little people need to know, should know and will be told.

Carter was not surprised. How could he have been? He had watched with dismay and disgust as science was prostituted in the cause of a political cause, so the related corruption of journalism was mere collateral damage. Yet he never lost his good humour. As Mark Steyn observes, Carter was “no caricature of a wild-eyed denier, but in almost any discussion invariably the most sane and sensible man on the panel.”
“On June 23, 1988, a young and previously unknown NASA computer modeller, James Hansen, appeared before a United States Congressional hearing on climate change. On that occasion, Dr. Hansen used a graph to convince his listeners that late 20th century warming was taking place at an accelerated rate, which, it being a scorching summer’s day in Washington, a glance out of the window appeared to confirm.

He wrote later in justification, in the Washington Post (February 11, 1989), that

“the evidence for an increasing greenhouse effect is now sufficiently strong that it would have been irresponsible if I had not attempted to alert political leaders”.

Hansen’s testimony was taken up as a lead news story, and within days the great majority of the American public believed that a climate apocalypse was at hand, and the global warming hare was off and running. Thereby, Dr. Hansen became transformed into the climate media star who is shortly going to wow the ingenues in the Adelaide Festival audience.

Fifteen years later, in the Scientific American in March, 2004, Hansen came to write that

“Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue. Now, however, the need is for demonstrably objective climate forcing scenarios consistent with what is realistic”.

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