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March 2022

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Crocodile tears and American delusions By Barry Shaw

By on March 30th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/crocodile_tears_and_american_delusions.html

Five killed, many more injured in a terror attack outside Tel Aviv, after Biden restores American funding that the Palestinians use to reward those who kill Jews

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was forced to apologize by his two main patrons, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and the king of Jordan, for the deadly Palestinian terror attack in the Bnei Brak residential suburb of Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, 29 March, that killed five people and injured others.

We all know, at least those of us close to the action and who do not live in fantasy land, that the background to the slaughter was the Palestinian leader’s constant incitement against Jews and Israel to his brainwashed people.

This indoctrination is laced with many incentives, some religious, some financial, to pick up a knife or a gun.  Recently, the Palestinian population has been exploited into pre-Ramadan violence by its political and religious leaders.

Sadly, tragically, Ramadan for Palestinians has become a religious ritual of Jewish bloodletting in a nationalistic cause.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Smearing of Clarence Thomas By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on March 30th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-smearing-of-clarence-thomas/

Those demanding recusal over Ginni Thomas’s activism are engaged in transparently partisan politics, nothing more.

D emocrats should not get away with their shameless political gambit to force Justice Clarence Thomas’s recusal from Supreme Court cases based on the political activism of his wife, Ginni Thomas.

Supreme Court justices are not even subject to disqualification over their own activities that bear directly on cases. This never upsets Democrats when the justices have been appointed by Democratic presidents. Consequently, Justice Elena Kagan did not recuse herself from the Obamacare case, providing the critical vote to uphold it despite having served as President Obama’s solicitor general when the administration was formulating the legal strategy to defend the Affordable Care Act. (See Ed Whelan’s analysis, here.)

Justice Stephen Breyer has been aptly described as the primary architect of the federal sentencing guidelines. He steered them through Congress in 1984 as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chief counsel before serving, as a federal appeals court judge, on the Sentencing Commission that created the guidelines. Yet, after being appointed to the high court by President Clinton, Breyer declined to recuse himself when the Supreme Court weighed the constitutionality of the guidelines. Indeed, he wrote a 5–4 majority opinion in 2005 that sustained the guidelines scheme, though declaring it advisory rather than mandatory.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back in the safe space of Hollywood scandal By Steve Israel

By on March 30th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/600332-back-in-the-safe-space-of-hollywood-scandal

There’s nothing like a good Hollywood slap in the face to distract us from our looming dystopia. As bombs continue to fall on Ukraine and mothers shepherd their children through mine fields, it took Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to return us to our safe space: the latest Hollywood scandal. Nothing says escapism like two celebrities in a made-for-television brouhaha.

“The slap heard ‘round the world,” as it’s been heralded in the media, smacks of the self-absorption of our popular culture. Heard ‘round the world, really? Heard in Lviv, against the groaning of bulldozers plying through wreckage? Heard in the clatter of refugee camps in Europe? In El Salvador, where 62 people were murdered in gang violence over the weekend?

After the incident, social media erupted, memes formed, newspaper headlines blared and actual crises were, well, upstaged. “BEST SMACKTOR,” snarked the front page of the New York Post. Facebook, the most self-centered communications platform since the mirror, exploded with our completely uninformed but no less authoritative positions and diagnoses: Smith needs anger management therapy…Rock provoked Smith…the whole thing was a conspiracy to hoist the Oscar’s anemic ratings.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The SEC tries its hand at climate policy By Rupert Darwall,

By on March 30th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/600203-the-sec-tries-its-hand-at-climate-policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) remit includes ensuring candor, honesty and transparency in what public companies tell investors. Yet it will spend the next few weeks and months trying to fool us into believing that its new 510-page proposal on mandatory climate disclosure is solely about protecting investors and has nothing to do with climate policy or achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

No one should be fooled.

Materiality is the governing principle of corporate disclosure requirements. In 2010, the SEC issued 29 pages of guidance on climate-change disclosures. With respect to what is now called climate-transition risk, the guidance requires that companies “should consider specific risks they may face as a result of climate change legislation or regulations and avoid generic risk factor disclosure that could apply to any company.”

This common-sense approach is now being superseded by an SEC-specified climate-risk reporting and accounting framework that will run in parallel with traditional financial reporting requirements, with its own verification and attestation regime necessitating the employment of legions of climate consultants.

At the heart of the SEC’s new climate-disclosure regime is quantification of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, at three levels: those emitted directly as a result of its own operations (Scope 1); those emitted from generating the electricity it consumes (Scope 2); and those emitted by its suppliers and customers (Scope 3). “Greenhouse gas emissions in many respects resemble financial statement disclosures,” writes Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who, as the SEC’s acting chair in March 2021, initiated the process that led to the current proposal. Such disclosures, she claims, provide “critically important insights into a company’s operations.”

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Emboldened Enemies and Disappointed Allies: America’s Decaying Status in the Middle East The image of the United States in the Middle East eroded enough over the past year to embolden its enemies and demoralize its allies.  By Hicham Tohme

By on March 30th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/29/emboldened-enemies-and-disappointed-allies-americas-decaying-status-in-the-middle-east/

On March 12, Iran launched 12 missiles, targeting Erbil in northern Iraq. The missiles landed near the U.S. consulate there and most reports indicated that the strike’s impact was restricted to material damages, with only one civilian injured by the attack. According to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, their target was an Israeli Mossad operational center, which they described as “the Zionists’ strategic center of plotting and evil.”

This brazen and aggressive action on behalf of Iran against neighboring Iraq is far from a rare occurrence. This was the first time in recent years, however, that Iran openly acknowledged its responsibility for such an attack. The wording of the IRGC’s statement, along with the timing of this dangerous escalation in the region can only be understood in light of global developments, particularly given the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin also framed as a military action against evil, neo-Nazism in this case.

Simply put, as Iran’s current hawkish leadership witnessed the feckless Western response to Putin’s military adventurism, it felt emboldened to test the waters and target the American consulate or an Israeli operational center in Erbil. Either possible target was probably good enough to make the point that Iran is capable of inflicting enough hurt on Western interests in the Middle East and that it anticipated no serious retaliation, another parallel with Russian expectations when they invaded Ukraine. In fact, no retaliation followed and Iran’s aggression against its neighbor went unpunished.

As it happens, I was on a trip to Lebanon when the events in question took place. Wanting to hear people’s opinions on Iran’s actions, I was not very surprised to witness a general consensus concerning rationalizations of Iran’s deed.

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FOREIGN POLICY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Arabs: Biden Administration Harming US interests by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on March 30th, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18376/arabs-biden-us-interests

“In 1979 Iranian students established their own group, which over time turned into an extremist military organization under the name of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The group seized control of the US Embassy in Tehran. Two years later the Iranian Revolutionary Guard…. struck buildings in Lebanon that housed American… soldiers, killing of 307 individuals, including 241 Americans…. In 1996, terrorists linked to Iran and the Revolutionary Guards, and their Hezbollah proxy attacked a residential complex in Al-Khobar, eastern Saudi Arabia, killing and wounding many American experts and other innocent people. Since 1990, Iran has turned into an incubator for Al-Qaeda and ISIS.” — Mohammed Al-Saed, Saudi writer, Okaz, March 24, 2022.

“The events of September 11 [2001] came on top of those crimes, which were committed by Osama bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri, all of whom had the support of Iran. In the aftermath of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran fueled the horrific killings and bombings that affected the US Army through different cells that were driven by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. Thousands of American soldiers were killed.” — Mohammed Al-Saed, Okaz, March 24, 2022.

“[T]he Democratic administration headed by Barack Obama is not happy with what Trump did….” — Mohammed Al-Saed, Okaz, March 24, 2022.

“The Houthis bomb Jeddah, Biden rewards Iran….The Biden administration knows that Iran finances the Houthi group and supplies it with missiles.” — Sawsan Al-Sha’er, Bahraini journalist, Al-Watan, March 22, 2022.

“[T]here is no American policy in Syria other than placing Syria entirely in the hands of Iran.” — Nadim Koteich, Lebanese TV presenter and journalist, Asharq Al-Awsat, March 22, 2022.

The Houthi militia rejects any settlement to the civil war in Yemen and seeks to assist Iran in establishing a foothold in the Arab region. “This is what the US administrations could never comprehend… It encouraged Iran to turn Yemen into a base for Iranian missiles and drones. — Kheirallah Kheirallah, veteran Lebanese journalist, Al-Arab, March 28, 2022.

The crisis between the Biden administration and the Arab countries, especially the Gulf states, is so deep that it could take years, if not decades, to repair the damage caused to America’s interests in the Middle East.

Many Arabs are continuing to express deep disappointment with the policies of the Biden administration in the Middle East, especially regarding Iran’s role in destabilizing security and stability in Arab countries that once trusted the US as a reliable and trustworthy ally.

These Arabs say that President Joe Biden is following in the footsteps of former President Barack Obama, who preferred to reach a nuclear deal with Iran at the expense of Washington’s Arab friends and allies in the Middle East.

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