RUTHFULLY YOURS

Some in the media are alarmed that the just-approved Republican-party platform takes a positive view of fossil fuels. “The platform tosses aside an environmental regulatory structure built on congressional legislation and judicial rulings over more than four decades,” wrote Steven Mufson of the Washington Post. It’s no surprise that mainstream media and its friends on the political left would feel that way — especially after they have been vilifying oil, gas, and especially coal for more than a generation. It’s on that last fuel that the platform takes perhaps its most remarkable position, declaring coal “an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource.”

It doesn’t meet with the approval of the environmentalist Left — but it does happen to be true.

Although this Environmental Protection Agency never acknowledges it, a slew of state-of-the art technologies has led to dramatic reductions in emissions from coal-fired power plants. In this respect, coal is quite clean. Since 1970, emissions of key pollutants per kilowatt hour (electric) have fallen 89 percent. Use of low-NOx boilers, selective catalytic reduction, wet and dry electrostatic precipitators, scrubbers, and sorbent injection, while not popular topics at cocktail parties, have led to huge reductions in genuine pollutants that impact human health under certain concentrations and exposures.

In 2007, during my tenure as chairman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, I signed the first permit for a lignite-fired coal-power plant in more than two decades. The elaborate emissions controls for this new plant have achieved amazing efficiencies comparable to those of plants powered by natural gas, and they continue to reduce real emissions. Yet EPA’s Clean Power Plan may force closure of this modern plant, trashing the hundreds of millions invested in reducing real pollutants.

Although now viewed by the EPA as dirty carbon pollution, carbon dioxide (CO2) lacks any of the characteristics of a real pollutant. CO2 is an odorless, invisible, and beneficial natural gas and the catalyst for photosynthesis, the most vital energy conversion in our biosphere. How soon we forget eight-grade science! CO2’s life-amplifying potency is why greenhouses pump CO2 to levels over four times that of the natural concentration in the air we breathe.

Officialdom’s constant use of the word “clean” masks the many details about energy that keep the lights on. In most cases, “clean energy” is a general designation for low-to-zero carbon-energy resources, the most prevalent forms being wind and solar power. The public has been led to believe that coal and other fossil fuels are dirty and that wind and solar are clean.

Cleveland — For the better part of four days, the Republican National Convention had been less about Donald Trump than about the flotsam of the Republican party left in his wake — and the attempts of its members to cobble together a life raft in the middle of an angry sea.

Then, for an hour and 15 minutes on Thursday night, Trump brought a modicum of normality to the proceedings with remarks that were tightly scripted and tightly focused, even if they were delivered in a shouted staccato. He took the stage wearing a gleaming red tie as the delegates on the floor broke out into a chant: “Trump! Trump! Trump!”

Trump’s appearance, which followed a flawless introduction from his daughter Ivanka, brought an unfamiliar feeling of order to the convention, and on stage he promised to do the same for the country and the world. He cast President Obama’s administration as the cause of the chaos that has roiled the country for the past several years, from the murder of American citizens at the hands of illegal immigrants to the assassination of law-enforcement officers on city streets.

“The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,” he said. “Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored.”

As if on cue, when a protester began to disrupt his remarks, police whisked her off the floor before the crowd could figure out what was happening. Looking down on the kerfuffle, Trump ad-libbed, “How great are our police and how great is Cleveland?” The crowd went wild.

Trump also faulted the president and the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, for sowing turmoil around the world. From the nuclear deal with Iran to the non-enforcement of the “red line” in Syria to the murders of four Americans in Benghazi, the U.S. has been suckered and embarrassed on the international stage, he said. When he made mention of the terrorist attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, the crowd began to chant, “Lock her up!” Trump, in a remarkable display of restraint, raised an index finger to silence them. “Let’s defeat her in November,” he said. The crowd erupted in cheers.

The speech, delivered from a black-and-white teleprompter in the center of Quicken Loans Arena, dragged near the end, and included some 4,500 words. But Trump stuck almost entirely to the script. Both in substance and in style, the speech exhibited a discipline at odds with a convention otherwise characterized by disarray.

Just hours before Trump took the stage, a pro-Clinton super PAC, Correct the Record, obtained and leaked the transcript of his speech. It was the capstone to a convention that has been defined by the party’s squabbling disunity, enhanced by the Trump campaign’s disorganization and repeated political miscalculations.

There was plagiarism, there were grudge matches, and there were more than a few awkward embraces.

Janet Creighton, a longtime Ohio GOP official who formerly served in the George W. Bush administration, was attending her fifth convention as a Republican delegate. Creighton says she has always worn red, white, and blue during all four days of past conventions, but decided not to this year. “This is a different Republican convention. It doesn’t have the same Republican feel,” she says. “People are holding their breath because we’ve never done it like this before.” She smiles and shrugs her shoulders. “It’s his convention,” she says of Trump. “He can do what he wants.”

Trump, of course, has done just that. The campaign’s worst self-inflicted wound this week came the first night of the convention, when Melania Trump delivered an impressive speech that, it soon turned out, included passages lifted from first lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Democratic convention in 2008. The incident dominated cable-news headlines for nearly 48 hours as the Trump campaign denied and demurred before finally issuing a mea culpa from an unknown speechwriter mid-day Wednesday. In the interim, talking heads denounced the campaign’s amateurishness and incompetence. “The highlight of tonight’s activities was Melania Trump’s speech,” Republican strategist Steve Schmidt told MSNBC. “This turns this night into a catastrophe.” Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly took to the airwaves the next night to declare that the speechwriter should be fired. “There’s no excuse for plagiarism,” he said. “There’s just none. You can’t do it.”

A separate black nation in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina, which would sever Florida from the rest of the nation, might sound crazy or at least complicated. On the other hand, according to Christian Davenport, professor of political science at the University of Michigan, it’s simple and sensible.

“Actually, I think that it is fairly easily for African-Americans to form a Black nation within the United States,” professor Davenport told David Love of the Atlanta Black Star. “There are large sections of the United States that have nothing but Black people in them already. There are cults and militias as well as private corporations that do whatever they want behind their closed doors.”

Davenport, author of How Social Movements Die: Repression and Demobilization of the Republic of New Africa, explained that “from my time in New York in Chicago, it is clear that organizations like the Nation of Islam occupy decent size areas in American cities. The idea of Black folk coming together thus does not seem that difficult to me.”

For the professor, also a faculty associate at the UM’s Center for Political Studies, “The Republic of New Africa actually had several innovative ways to seek territorial control. One involved something akin to electoral empowerment whereby Blacks would get individuals elected who would, in turn, deputize and otherwise bring in members of the RNA to govern. Another involved something akin to stepping into situations of state failure. Here, the RNA would find locales where the U.S. government has basically stepped out and/or can no longer maintain control. The RNA had the idea of stepping into this vacuum. Now, the difficult part becomes arming that nation in an organized fashion and getting recognition from the United States as well as other nations. This is where the difficulty will come from.”

So maybe the separate black nation is not so simple after all. “The minute you go aggressive and militaristic, you cannot wind the clock back,” the professor told the Atlanta Black Star. “Nation-building is incredibly hard to do and it involves diverse tasks.”

In the same article, Gen. Babu Omowale, national minister of defense for the People’s New Black Panther Party and co-founder of the Huey P. Newton Gun Club, explained that since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, “we’ve been constantly attacked by white society and white supremacy. We’ve never been left alone, so I think it is important for Black people to arm ourselves.”

CLEVELAND — Republican presidential candidate Donald John Trump gave a masterful acceptance speech last night as he savaged Hillary Clinton for her seemingly congenital corruption, assailed Barack Obama’s failed policies and the civil unrest he has fomented, and optimistically laid out an ambitious roadmap to the future.

Trump did an admirable job staying on-message.

“Together, we will lead our party back to the White House, and we will lead our country back to safety, prosperity, and peace,” he said. “We will be a country of generosity and warmth. But we will also be a country of law and order.”

America is being overrun by “violence in our streets and the chaos in our communities,” he said. “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement.”

The number of police officers killed in the line of duty is up nearly 50 percent compared to this point last year, he said. Although 180,000 illegal aliens with criminal records have been order deported, they “are tonight roaming free to threaten peaceful citizens.”

Border crossings by illegals are out of control and these aliens “are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.”

Some of these illegals have been murdering Americans and that’s fine with Hillary Clinton, he implied. Clinton supports lawless sanctuary cities and favors open borders, he said.

“I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon, and I mean very soon, come to an end. Beginning on January 20th, 2017, safety will be restored. The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.”

He said he would be “the law and order candidate.”

Americans need a straightforward assessment of the state of the nation, he said. “I will present the facts plainly and honestly. We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”

Black unemployment rates are sky-high and Latino poverty rates are higher than when President Obama took the oath of office in 2009, he said, adding that “another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely.”

Hope. Confidence. Resolve.

As the country reels from its crises, facing domestic and international terrorism, culture wars orchestrated by the powerful machinery of the left and economic decline robbing generations, these are the qualities that a nation on the edge of despair is desperately looking for.

If there is one defining quality for Donald Trump that sums up his essence, it is confidence. And that is also the quality that the Republican National Convention has also come to embody.

Day after day, speaker after speaker has boldly laid out a confident case for a national resurgence.

This has been an unapologetic convention. A convocation of men and women who refuse to back away from their beliefs. Proudly politically incorrect, the convention rocked Cleveland. Defying the threats and predictions of violence, the protests proved to amount to little more than a nuisance showing once again that confidence and courage can achieve success where compromise and appeasement fail.

Tonight the pattern held true as Sheriff Joe Arpaio told a cheering crowd the simple truth. “We are the only country in the world whose immigration systems put the needs of other nations ahead of ours. We are more concerned with the rights of illegal aliens and criminals than we are with protecting our own country.”

“When I was a kid, the great debate was about how to defeat the Soviet Union. And we won. Now we are told that the great debate is about who gets to use which bathroom,” Peter Thiel declared.

African-American pastor Mark Burns proudly led a chant of, “All lives matter.” And he told a cheering crowd, “Despite the color you were born with, here in America, the only colors that matter are the colors red, white, and blue.”

This was exactly the sort of uncompromising tone with which Donald Trump took the stage, telling those in attendance that, “Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored. The most basic duty of government is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.”

I was born in the midst of the Great Depression, when no one could imagine the revolutionary technological advances that we now take for granted. Innovations in countless fields have transformed society and radically improved individual well-being, especially for the least fortunate. Every American’s life is now immeasurably better than it was 80 years ago.

What made these dramatic improvements possible was America’s uniquely free and open society, which has brought the country to the cusp of another explosion of life-changing innovation. But there are dangerous signs that the U.S. is turning its back on the principles that foster such advances, particularly in education, business and government. Which path will the country take?

When I attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s, I quickly came to appreciate that scientific and technological progress requires the free and open exchange of ideas. The same holds true for moral and social progress. I have spent more than a half-century trying to apply this lesson in business and my personal life.

It was once widely accepted that progress depends on people challenging and testing each other’s hypotheses. This leads to the creation of knowledge that, when shared, inspires others and spurs the innovation that moves society forward and improves lives. It is a spontaneous process that is deeply collaborative and dependent on the contributions of others. Recall Sir Isaac Newton’s statement that he achieved so much by “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Scientific progress in seemingly disparate fields creates opportunities for fusion, which is where the greatest innovations often occur. The British writer Matt Ridley has brilliantly described this process as “ideas having sex.” Today, this creation-from-coupling is evident in, for example, the development of driverless cars, which combine advances in transportation and artificial intelligence. When seen through this prism, the opportunities for life-altering innovation are limitless. CONTINUE AT SITE

Donald Trump accepted the Republican nomination in Cleveland Thursday, and he is a figure without precedent in modern U.S. politics. Thus even in his unlikely hour of triumph, the polls show that independents and many Republicans are still ambivalent or undecided voters. Readers may have detected some of the same ambivalence in these columns.

This is the great paradox of the Trump phenomenon: The billionaire is disrupting one political norm after another, which is the source of his appeal as an agent of change. But the uncertainty he creates along the way is also the largest obstacle he must now overcome.

Voters tend to prefer more self-discipline, policy knowledge and predictability in their potential Presidents, or at least a better idea of what they would do in office. Could 2016 be the year they break with tradition and decide that Mr. Trump is a risk worth taking if he will topple the political and economic status quo? Aside from elegant and classy, as the candidate might describe it, what would a Trump Presidency be like?
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Mr. Trump has an opening because of poor, arrogant governance in Washington and a decade of slow economic growth. Some 69% of Americans believe the country is on the wrong track in the Real Clear Politics average, and only 23% say the right track. Such pessimism hasn’t been seen since the 1970s.

This week the White House revised its growth projections down to 1.9% for this year and 2.5% in 2017. GDP numbers can seem like abstractions, but in human terms the difference between a 3%-4% economy and the 1%-2% trend of the last decade is millions of citizens denied the opportunity to fulfill their potential. CONTINUE AT SITE

Watch the ABC investigation | “Play” the embedded video above

Last night, we helped expose more egregious waste at Veterans Affairs.

Partnering with the COX Media Washington, D.C. News Bureau; ABC affiliate station WSB-TV Atlanta; and investigative reporter Justin Gray, we found millions of dollars in VA spending on luxury art.

It’s millions of dollars on high-end artwork spent by the VA, and that’s just a fraction of the waste…

Now, the VA administrators say they are going to institute new rules to stop the waste on expensive artwork. They promised a new policy over the next 90-days.

Watch the ABC investigation | “Play” the embedded video above

While veterans wait in line to see a doctor, the VA is busy purchasing:

A twenty-seven foot artificial Christmas tree costing: $21,000.
‘Local image’ pics for the San Francisco VA facility costing: $34,000.
Artwork for the new VA medical center in Puerto Rico costing: $500,000.
A landscape rock for the VA Palo Alto, CA center costing: $500,000.
$6.0 million in artwork purchased for new California VA centers.

At OpenTheBooks.com, we are committed to holding the VA accountable.

Last month, we debuted our OpenTheBooks Snapshot Oversight Report – The VA Scandal Two Years Later, with a column at Forbes, Read it here.

We found that the VA created 40,000 new positions, but less than one in eleven of those new positions were doctors. Today, up to 500,000 veterans still wait to see a doctor.

Search by work location our OpenTheBooks interactive map of the 354,000 VA employees with name, position, salary and bonus, click here.