POLITICS Comments turned off

The Real Ted Cruz By Theodore A. Gebhard

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Contrary to some who have expressed concerns about Ted Cruz’s temperament and qualifications to be an effective president, my experience in working with the Texas senator and Republican presidential candidate during the early 2000s convinces me that he is the right person at the right time for the job.

Although not a close friend of Senator Cruz, I got to know him reasonably well as a colleague at the Federal Trade Commission from mid-2001 until he left the commission to return to Texas in 2003. During that time, we worked together on a number of projects, including efforts to curtail anticompetitive legislation pending in several states to protect incumbent businesses such as gasoline retailers and automobile dealerships, and a task force established by the FTC’s Chairman charged with looking into litigants’ abuses of legal immunities to the antitrust laws. The Chairman appointed Cruz to lead that task force, and I was one of several members.

In this capacity, I was able to observe Ted’s professional skills, his personal characteristics, and, significantly, his commitment to constitutionalism, the rule of law, and free-market economics. These personal observations impel me to conclude not only that Ted possesses the qualifications to be president in terms of intellect, temperament, and knowledge of the issues facing the country; but even more importantly, that he is uniquely the right person to lead America at this time in its history.

POLITICS Comments turned off

The Bloomberg View Why the former New York mayor may think he can win as a third-party presidential candidate. See note please

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

As a resident of New York I resent a billionaire who literally bought a third term despite term limits. After 9/11 when Giuliani suggested remaining on the job for a few months to complete the cleanup after the downing of the World Trade Center-Bloomberg ungraciously reminded Rudy that New York City had term limits ….What a hypocrite….rsk
You read it here last week. As the odds rise of extreme outcomes in the presidential election, so do the chances of a serious third-party candidate getting into the race, especially Michael Bloomberg. Now word has leaked that the former three-term mayor of New York is actively exploring the possibility.

Mr. Bloomberg considered a run in 2008 and 2012, only to conclude he couldn’t win, and that may be what happens this year too. The U.S. political system is tilted against third-party candidates, which is why the last one to take the White House was Abraham Lincoln in 1860 as the nominee of the antislavery Republicans.

Third-party candidates have made other notable runs but their influence has mainly been as spoilers or to force the major-party candidates to confront issues they’d ignored. Teddy Roosevelt ruined William Howard Taft’s chances for re-election in 1912, and Ross Perot contributed to George H.W. Bush’s defeat in 1992 though he won no electoral votes. He split the Reagan coalition by winning 19% of the vote and helped Bill Clinton win with only 43%.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Where Does All That Aid for Palestinians Go? An outsize share of per capita international aid, even as the Palestinian Authority funds terrorists. By Tzipi Hotovely

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Ms. Hotovely is the deputy foreign minister of Israel.

One often-cited key to peace between Israel and the Palestinians is economic development. To that end, there seems to be broad agreement about the importance of extending development aid to help the Palestinians build the physical and social infrastructure that will enable the emergence of a sustainable, prosperous society. But few have seriously questioned how much money is sent and how it is used.

Such assistance will only promote peace if it is spent to foster tolerance and coexistence. If it is used to strengthen intransigence it does more harm than good—and the more aid that comes in, the worse the outcome. This is exactly what has been transpiring over the past few decades. Large amounts of foreign aid to the Palestinians are spent to support terrorists and deepen hostility.

For years the most senior figures in the Palestinian Authority have supported, condoned and glorified terror. “Every drop of blood that has been spilled in Jerusalem,” President Mahmoud Abbas said last September on Palestinian television, “is holy blood as long as it was for Allah.” Countless Palestinian officials and state-run television have repeatedly hailed the murder of Jews.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How the Feds Use Title IX to Bully Universities Lowering the burden of proof for sex-assault cases isn’t required—but schools don’t dare challenge it. By Jacob E. Gersen

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Mr. Gersen is a professor at Harvard Law School.

In the past several years politicians have lined up to condemn an epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses. But there is a genuine question of whether the Education Department has exceeded its legal authority in the way it has used Title IX to dictate colleges’ response to the serious problem of sexual assault.

When an administrative agency makes rules and regulations—which are a form of law every bit as binding as those passed by Congress—it must follow the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act, the bible of the bureaucracy. The process most often used involves “notice and comment”: The agency must publish the proposed regulation and respond to comments before issuing the final rule. This can take months or years, and at the end of the process parties affected by the new rule can challenge it in court.

There’s a point to making the government jump through these hoops: By demanding transparency and facilitating public participation and judicial review, we can be more confident that the bureaucracy is up to good rather than ill.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Clinton’s Tactic of Emphasizing Experience Is Questioned Focus on credentials as secretary of state and senator gives Sanders an edge with his message of change, some say By Peter Nicholas

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

CLINTON, Iowa—In her closing pitch to Iowa voters, Hillary Clinton is casting herself as the one Democrat who has the experience to make the life-or-death choices that come with the presidency.

It echoes the argument she made in 2008, when she ran an ad saying a president must be ready for a “3 a.m. phone call” warning of imminent peril. It didn’t work then and some people close to the Clintons worry it won’t succeed now.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has narrowed Mrs. Clinton’s lead in Iowa ahead of the state’s Feb. 1 caucuses. He could scramble the race should he notch a victory there and in New Hampshire. His theme is direct: He is the champion of voters who are disillusioned with Washington politics and impatient with an economy that lavishes rewards on a tiny fraction of families.

“I am angry…and the American people are angry,” Mr. Sanders said Sunday on CBS.

He is promising a political “revolution.” Even if his ideas may be difficult to achieve in a polarized, Republican-controlled Congress—a point Mrs. Clinton often makes—his message is overshadowing Mrs. Clinton’s focus on experience, some Clinton allies said. They want to see her return to an argument more central to her campaign when she entered the race nine months ago: that she will shake up the system.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Syrian Forces, Helped by Russian Airstrikes, Seize Rebel Stronghold Advances in northwestern Lataika province put Assad regime in striking distance of region under opposition control By Raja Abdulrahim

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

BEIRUT—Syrian regime forces backed by Russian airstrikes seized control of a rebel stronghold on Sunday, the latest in a series of gains in northwestern Latakia province aided by Moscow’s intervention in the conflict.

The advances in the heartland of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s Alawite minority put the regime within striking distance of neighboring Idlib, the only province almost entirely under rebel control. Just a few months ago, rebel fighters were advancing through the Idlib countryside toward Latakia and looked poised to deal more blows to the regime. But the Russian intervention in late September has given the regime’s military the upper hand there.

These gains have given the regime a stronger hand ahead of peace talks that had been set for this week in Geneva, if they go ahead as planned.

“All of the regime and Russian plan and all of the operations that the Russian officers are overseeing are with the goal of advancing before the talks,” said Fadi Ahmad, a spokesman with the U.S.-backed First Coastal Division, a faction of the Free Syrian Army rebel group, which has received training from the Central Intelligence Agency and American antitank missiles.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama vs. Manatees Evading the Endangered Species Act to impose new climate rules.

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service this month proposed a new rule to crack down on predator control in Alaska, claiming it wants to better protect wildlife on national refuges. If only the Obama Administration cared as much about the protected critters that are getting in the way of its climate-change agenda.

President Obama’s Clean Power Plan imposes new rules to force the closure of coal-fired power plants in the name of climate change. Among those most likely to be shut down are the Big Bend Power Station and the Crystal River Plant in Florida. Problem is, both plants have been designated as primary warm-water refuges for manatees—listed as endangered in the 1960s and now considered “threatened.”

One threat to manatees is a plunge in water temperature, which causes lesions, gastrointestinal disorders, infections and death. The Fish & Wildlife Service, which runs a manatee recovery plan, estimates that two-thirds of manatees rely on coal plants that discharge heated water. Many plants are required to have Manatee Protection Plans, which are embedded in their federal Clean Water Act permits.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Climate Snow Job A blizzard! The hottest year ever! More signs that global warming and its extreme effects are beyond debate, right? Not even close. By Patrick J. Michaels

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

An East Coast blizzard howling, global temperatures peaking, the desert Southwest flooding, drought-stricken California drying up—surely there’s a common thread tying together this “extreme” weather. There is. But it has little to do with what recent headlines have been saying about the hottest year ever. It is called business as usual.

Surface temperatures are indeed increasing slightly: They’ve been going up, in fits and starts, for more than 150 years, or since a miserably cold and pestilential period known as the Little Ice Age. Before carbon dioxide from economic activity could have warmed us up, temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit between 1910 and World War II. They then cooled down a bit, only to warm again from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, about the same amount as earlier in the century.

Whether temperatures have warmed much since then depends on what you look at. Until last June, most scientists acknowledged that warming reached a peak in the late 1990s, and since then had plateaued in a “hiatus.” There are about 60 different explanations for this in the refereed literature.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Saudi-Iran Relations By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

Secretary Kerry’s Sunday visit to Riyadh to diffuse the tension between the Saudis and Iran tried reassuring the Saudis that “Nothing has changed because we worked to eliminate a nuclear weapon with a country in the region.” But that has done little to lessen the Saudi Kingdom’s anxiety regarding Iran’s new status in the region and their resentment of the Obama administration for strengthening their sworn enemy, Iran.

On the same day, Saudi foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir told reporters that Iran has to stop its hostilities against the Arabs. It should “change its 35 years old policies meddling in their Arab neighbors’ internal affairs, sowing sectarian strife and backing terrorism as confirmed by numerous strong evidence.” Only then “the path will be open to building better relations with its neighbors,”

Some watchers of the growing tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia predict further escalation. But most are venturing to predict no open war,
According to the ICIT, Iran’s encouragement of “Shi’ite separatism and its relentless subversive activities in neighbouring countries contributed to the worsening of its relations with the Sunni Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia, which also seeks regional hegemony. Ever present are the age-old Sunni-Shi’ite religious rift, the ethnic-cultural conflict (Arab vs. Persian). But the nuclear agreement between Iran and the West and the lifting of the sanctions on Iran, are making the Gulf States more fearful of Iran’s growing power. In addition, the significant changes in the Saudi leadership resulted in transforming Saudi Arabian regional policy from passive to active, and clearly anti-Iranian.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

And We Sang, ‘We Won’t Get Fooled Again’ By Frank Salvato

Posted By on January 25th, 2016

There is always an inherent danger in embracing a populist candidate for any office. Inclined to grandiose rhetoric and unfulfillable promises, populist candidates feed off the fears, hopes and frustrations of the general population. Calculating populist politicians can weave rhetoric that touches generally on topics and caters to the room that they are addressing, usually without saying anything that can pin their ears back at a later date. The danger in being mesmerized by the populist political creature is that, in the end, you find yourself among the many, stampeding over the lemming-cliff’s edge, wondering how this could have happened.

By definition, Populism is:

“…a doctrine that appeals to the interests and conceptions (such as hopes and fears) of the general population, especially when contrasting any new collective consciousness push against the prevailing status quo interests of any predominant political sector.”