RUTHFULLY YOURS

— John Thune is a United States senator representing South Dakota and chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.

Last week, President Obama delivered his final State of the Union address. In the lead-up to the speech, there was a lot of discussion about the nature of the president’s legacy. Less discussed, however, was that most of the president’s so-called legacy may not outlast his presidency, since most of his supposed achievements have never been enacted into law.

Early on in his presidency, it became clear that the president didn’t have much interest in working with Congress in a bipartisan manner, and after losing large majorities in the House and Senate, he made it clear that he did not want to listen to the American people, who had overwhelmingly rejected his far-left agenda. His determination to circumvent Congress and ignore the American people has not only been an affront to the democratic process and an attack on the balance of power our Founding Fathers envisioned, it has also failed as a strategy for securing long-lasting achievements.

As a result of his contempt for Congress and his unwillingness to engage with the legislative process, the vast majority of the items that make up the president’s “legacy” — including the national energy tax, executive amnesty, and the flawed Iran deal — are not actual laws. Instead, the president’s legacy is largely made up of regulations, executive actions, and executive agreements, most of which can be easily overturned by the next administration.

After Congress and the American people rejected Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal, he turned to the EPA to impose his will through heavy-handed regulations, including the national energy tax that will increase energy costs for those who can afford it the least. But because these regulations have been imposed through the administration’s rulemaking process instead of through congressional action, a new president could start the process of repealing these rules as soon as he or she takes office. In fact, at least two of these rules could be eliminated even sooner, since they are currently being challenged in the courts.

A U.S. District Court has ordered the NYPD to purge extensive documentation that outlines the rise of Islamic terror in the West and threats to the United States. The report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, focused on providing law enforcement and policy-makers with vital intelligence on domestic terror operations. A key component of the document outlined how jihadists get into the country and carry out terror attacks. Many experts have described the report as “critical” to our national security. The court order is a huge victory for the ACLU (who spearheaded the effort two-and-one-half years ago) and Islamic supremacists.

The Free Beacon reports on key areas reached in the settlement, including the following mandates:

The NYPD must purge the report on the department’s understanding of “radical Islam” along with how best to police the threat.

The NYPD must “remove the publication from its database and vow not to rely on it in the future” and that they will not open or extend investigations based on it.

The NYPD must implement measures to “mitigate the impact of future terror investigations on certain religious and political groups,” such as those in the Muslim-American community.

Needless to say, many legal experts have pointed out that this action “could hamper future terrorism investigations.”

The court ties law enforcement’s hands behind their back, blindfolds them, and performs a lobotomy.

How low can oil prices go? When pundits start competing to predict where the barrel will hit bottom, you know that a rebound is inevitable. It’s the inverse of what happens before a high-price bubble bursts. Only a few years ago forecasters were suggesting that oil might hit $300 a barrel.

The unpleasant reality is that petroleum prices are cyclical. Starting with the 1973-74 Arab oil embargo, they have been through six extremes. Because the peaks and the valleys both wreak financial havoc, producers and politicians imagine a Goldilocks ideal, with prices “just right”—not so high that legislators feel pressure to claw back “windfall profits,” and not so low that suppliers fall like dominoes, destroying jobs and tax revenue.

The latter is what we’re seeing now, with oil falling below $30 a barrel. Survey the damage so far: More than 100,000 jobs are gone, most of them last year. The number of shale rigs in service has collapsed by 60%. Banks are worried about their oil loans. Shale states are readjusting budgets for shortfalls. About $200 billion of oil and gas assets are up for sale world-wide.

American shale oil companies—whose booming production is a principal cause of the global glut—have been hit hard. Last year two dozen defaulted and 15 filed for bankruptcy. Standard & Poor’s puts junk ratings on three-fourths of the oil and gas producers it monitors.

Here’s the big question, the one that makes this cycle different: What happens to shale oil? The jobs and revenues from America’s newest industry literally kept the country out of recession during the years of tepid growth that have characterized the current administration.

A year-long study found that the present legal and regulatory approach to EMP/Space weather threat to America’s nuclear power plants are inadequate and dangerous. This sorry state is anchored in the industry efforts to maintain safety regulations dating back to the 1980s, and a national security mentality relevant at the end of the Cold War.
This has been successful, in part, due to a campaign to brand nuclear power as a clean, safe source of energy. To their credit, the NRC and industry have demonstrated a commitment to safety where design basis events are concerned. However, EMP and GMD are beyond design basis events. Once these occur, there are no guarantees and few strategies with which to cope.

There has only been a handful of nuclear disasters in history, and only one in the U.S. – TMI. It is, therefore, understandable from an economic standpoint that industry is resistant to change. However, this inertia has given rise to a complacent regulatory climate absent adaptive and progressive analysis. More than 30 years have elapsed since this topic was last openly addressed.

Unfortunately, the assumptions borne of the highly controversial 1982 report continue to misinform decision makers even as recent as 2015. Despite these challenges and an NRC and industry galvanized to maintain the status quo, there are signs of progress. Some push for increased standards and regulations has occurred since Fukushima.

However, these efforts have been met with a tepid response from the nuclear industry. To stave off costly infrastructure updates, the industry responded by holding out the FLEX, a plan that is both impractical and dangerous due to an over-reliance on a functioning national infrastructure. Congress recently found, “The current strategy for recovery leaves the United States ill-prepared to respond effectively to an EMP attack that would potentially result in damage to vast numbers of components nearly simultaneously over an unprecedented geographic scale.”

On January 13, 2015 President Obama delivered his last State of the Union Address. His assessment of the state of the union was nothing less than astonishing.

As I listening, incredulously, to his address laden with fabrications, boasts and accusations, I found myself thinking back to my days as an INS agent (when I would question individuals who were suspected of committing crimes and being frustrated that they not only lied but that they would often dodge and weave to avoid directly answering my questions).

I recalled interrogating criminals who seemed delusional, providing supposed justification for committing crimes that ignored the facts or reality or reasonableness. They lived in a parallel universe.

One of my fellow agents- with whom I worked regularly for many years, would listen to such an individual we were questioning, turn to me as say, “I wonder what the color of the sky is in this guy’s world- because it sure as hell isn’t blue!”

On Tuesday night, I found myself wondering at the color of the sky in Mr. Obama’s world.

Within minutes of beginning his speech he said:

Our unique strengths as a nation — our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law — these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.

In fact, it’s that spirit that made the progress of these past seven years possible. It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. It’s how we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.

Under his administration’s executive orders that undermined our immigration laws, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens were provided with employment authorization- often displacing American workers and undermining our national security by providing these illegal aliens with official identity documents without interviewing them or conducting field investigations.

I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

—Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 2016.

Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him. Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn’t the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up?

To play the old “what if” game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers? What if Bush had also declared that the singer’s hit song—perhaps a celebration of the Cliven Bundy protest—was the president’s favorite in 2008, from an album whose grotesque cover had a crowd of NASCAR-looking, white redneck youth bunched up with an African-American official dead at their feet? And what if the next day, Bush told the nation that he regretted not being able to bring the country together? Would there have been media calls for Bush’s impeachment?

It is particularly telling that Barack Obama spent part of his State of the Union speech telling us that the state of our Union is strong while Iranian pirates seized two U.S. Navy vessels and then, as pointed out by Rick Moran, violated the Geneva Conventions by publishing a photo of the captured sailors on their knees with their hands on their heads.

The Iranian action was both piracy and an intentional act of war against the United States. If the boats strayed into Iranian waters due to navigational or mechanical problems, Iran was obliged under international law to render them assistance. “Accidents in international air or sea traffic, even those involving military vessels, generally require nations to assist the victims and keep hands off the stricken planes or ships, the experts said.” Note also that “Iranian officials searched [the boats] for advanced technology and sensitive communications.”

If this is not enough to define Iran’s behavior as piracy and an act of war, Moran also pointed out that an Iranian general said openly that its purpose was to teach the United States a lesson. “‘This incident in the Persian Gulf, which probably will not be the American forces’ last mistake in the region, should be a lesson to troublemakers in the U.S. Congress,’ Major General Hassan Firouzabadi, head of Iran’s armed forces, was quoted as saying by Tasnim news agency.”

The Iranian pirates then drove this point home by publishing humiliating images of our service members on their knees with their hands over their heads (a war crime) as well as captured American weapons. In addition, we have to ask how the pirates managed to capture the boats in the first place.

Yellow-cab rides could soon be driving New Yorkers completely crazy if the City Council passes a new bill that would eliminate written English tests for aspiring hacks.

The proposal would allow drivers to get their hack licenses with just a cursory oral exam and without offering any proof they can read or write the language, including traffic signs.

Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez (D-Manhattan), chair of the council Transportation Committee, introduced the bill amid an exodus of yellow-cab drivers to app-based car services like Uber and Lyft.

He insisted cab riders wouldn’t notice a difference.

“Effective communication between rider and driver is key for any ride and this is not in jeopardy with this bill,” Rodriguez said.

Cab riders were skeptical on Friday Nicholas Grimaldi, a development specialist from Chelsea, said hacks need to be more than just barely conversational in English.

http://jamieglazov.com/2016/01/16/daniel-greenfield-moment-islams-american-identity-crisis/

This special edition of The Glazov Gang presents The Daniel Greenfield Moment with Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center who writes the blog The Point at Frontpagemag.com.

Daniel discussed Islam’s American Identity Crisis, explaining the pathological process of confusing your way to theocracy.

Don’t miss it!

Yes, it’s now gotten to the point where the Muslim student president of the self-described “pro-Israel” J Street U is given the forum of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency to tell Jews to be better pro-Israel advocates by fighting Israel’s “Occupation.”

J Street U gave this University of Maryland student a megaphone which she’s using to attack Israel, and now she’s being given a “Jewish” media outlet to amplify her anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian Arab message.

Amna Farooqi, the J Street U president, seized upon another editorial from another leader of a Jewish organization brought to you by the JTA, David Bernstein of the Jewish Council on Public Affairs.

Bernstein, in turn, was warning Jewish Americans that in order to defeat the BDS (Boycott of, Divestment from and Sanctions against Israel) Movement, Jews should start developing partnerships with various social justice groups “on the mainstream left.”

Bernstein wrote that the BDS movement is teaming up with other “social justice” organizations to together fight against Israel, and so he urged pro-Israel folks to ape this coalition building and thereby fight this “intersectionality” of “other oppressed groups” making alliances with anti-Israel groups.

Farooqi added the next step, which is that the best thing pro-Israel groups can do to defeat this intersectionality dilemma would be to join up with other groups opposing…what, other anti-Israel groups? Nope. Maybe pro-Israel groups should join together with organizations fighting against ISIS? Nope. How about suggesting pro-Israel groups create a coalition with organizations fighting for human rights for persecuted Christians in the Middle East? Nope.

Farooqi suggests the coalition pro-Israel groups should join are those progressives who are attacking Israel for engaging in the “Occupation” of Palestinian Arab land. No joke.