RUTHFULLY YOURS

Rarely do American Presidents display the raw willfulness that President Obama did Monday in rolling out his plan to reorganize the economy in the name of climate change. Without a vote in Congress or even much public debate, Mr. Obama is using his last 18 months to dictate U.S. energy choices for the next 20 or 30 years. This abuse of power is regulation without representation.

The so-called Clean Power Plan commands states to cut carbon emissions by 32% (from 2005 levels) by 2030. This final mandate is 9% steeper than the draft the Environmental Protection Agency issued in June 2014. The damage to growth, consumer incomes and U.S. competitiveness will be immense—assuming the rule isn’t tossed by the courts or rescinded by the next Administration.

President Obama says his nuclear deal with Iran depends on verification, not trust. But what if Iran has a very different interpretation of what verification entails than does Mr. Obama?

Take Ali Akar Velayati, a top adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who appeared on Al-Jazeera on July 31 and was asked about U.N. inspections of Iran’s military sites. Here’s how he replied, according to the Memri translation service:

“Regardless of how the P5+1 countries interpret the nuclear agreement, their entry into our military sites is absolutely forbidden. The entry of any foreigner, including IAEA inspectors or any other inspector, to the sensitive military sites of the Islamic Republic is forbidden, no matter what.”

The democratic world won the Cold War but has underestimated the tenacity of the new threats to freedom.
For the democracies to triumph in the long battle against Soviet communism enormous commitment was necessary. Both geopolitical and ideological, the struggle called for military investment, patience and resolve. As crucially, this challenge required a reserve of imagination for understanding and responding to the Soviet challenge with the ideas, media instruments and technology that were part of the democratic world’s natural competitive advantage.

In the aftermath of this exacting project, the United States and other established democracies exhaled, believing in the post-Cold War period that the world had indelibly changed and the forces of illiberalism were defeated.

Given the extent of the investment and duration of the struggle, the impulse to relax was understandable. With hindsight, however, a harsh reality has become clear: The democratic West won the Cold War but in the process lost its political imagination.

Today, a set of anti-democratic forces that we have found to be beyond the realm of our imagination have gathered momentum and are seeking to reshape the world order.
Russian President Vladimir Putin; an Islamic State militant; Chinese President Xi Jinping. ENLARGE

The headline of this column is lifted from a 1981 essay by the late Paul Fussell, the cultural critic and war memoirist. In 1945 Fussell was a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army who had fought his way through Europe only to learn that he would soon be shipped to the Pacific to take part in Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands scheduled to begin in November 1945.

Then the atom bomb intervened. Japan would not surrender after Hiroshima, but it did after Nagasaki.

I brought Fussell’s essay with me on my flight to Hiroshima and was stopped by this: “When we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live.”

Recently, my black brother shared an unfortunate incident. Years ago, police in two unmarked cars blocked his car. They jumped out pointing guns, demanding that he exit his car. My brother immediately raised his hands, but did not exit his car because he was frozen with fear. An officer pulled him out of his car onto the ground. My brother said, “Calm down! I am not resisting!”

After checking him out, the officers realized he was not their suspect. Rather than sending my brother on his way with an apology, the police framed him. My brother had an unopened six-pack of beer on the floor. An officer opened one of the beers and said, “You’re under arrest for drunk driving.” The bogus charge did not stick and my brother was released hours later, angry, and with a bitter taste in his mouth.

Ironically, my brother’s reason for telling me about the incident was to defend the police in the recent shooting and arrests covered 24/7 on CNN. He said the cops who framed him were a few bad apples which are everywhere in every profession. Amen to that. Jesus had 12 disciples and one was a bad apple. My brother made the point that he was not harmed because he submitted to the police’s authority. He noted that the blacks in the videos shown on TV did not submit to the police.

Then this anger should be channeled to support Ted Cruz not an oaf like Trump….rsk
Most of the Republicans attacking Donald Trump are missing the real significance of the Donald and his popularity. A lot of Republicans and independents don’t like establishment Republicans. They see them as an entitled elite that talks big but then compromises their principles in order to serve the interests of big business and to get along with their fellow social elites in the other party. They look at a Republican Congress’s record so far and see very little legislative pushback against an arrogant, lawless Progressive administration under which the federal Leviathan has waxed ever fatter and more intrusive.

That view may be simplistic, unfair, or or even untrue, but that’s irrelevant. It is the perception many voters have, and there is a lot of evidence that makes it plausible. Start with the confirmation of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General. The Senate should have voted her down and told Obama to come back when he had a servant of the law rather than a slavish minion of an imperial presidency. But too many Senators, frightened at appearing “racist” and “sexist,” and eager to display their bipartisan bona fides, folded their strong Constitutional hand when Obama shrewdly played both the race and the sex cards. An opportunity was lost to show Obama that Republicans were now going to play by his rules in order to reclaim their Constitutional authority.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259676/legal-and-academic-equality-nonsense-walter-williams

A particular act or policy might not have a discriminatory intent, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. If it has a disproportionately negative impact on so-called protected classes, it is said to have a disparate impact and risks being prohibited by law. The uninformed assumption made by judges, lawyers and academics is that but for the fact of racial and sex discrimination, we all would be distributed across occupations, educational backgrounds and other socio-economic characteristics according to our percentages in the population. Such a vision is absolute nonsense. There is no evidence, anywhere, at any time, that but for the fact of discrimination, there would be proportional representation among various socio-economic characteristics. Let’s look at some disproportionalities, with an eye toward discovering the causes and then deciding what to do about them.

Every day brings America closer to the next presidential election. Every day also brings us closer to the debates in which candidates for America’s highest elected office will be questioned about their goals and visions for the future of our nation.

So many important questions that will need to be answered. Where will the moderators begin?

If the moderators are thoughtful and honest, they will begin by asking questions about that most important topic that plays a vital role in all of the other challenges and threats facing America and Americans today. That singular topic is immigration.

When do black lives matter? When white people take them.

That’s the theme of #BlackLivesMatter, a racist movement which claims to care about black lives, but actually helps take them by weakening the police officers who are the only thing standing between armed gang members and black urban residents.

Bill O’Reilly’s willingness to take on #BlackLivesMatter’s greatest hypocrisy, its lack of concern for the victims of black crime as it not only ignores them, but enables their killers, is important.

#BlackLivesMatter claims that police shootings are black genocide. The closest things to black genocide can be found in Planned Parenthood and prison. The lawyer who helps put criminals back on the street is responsible for more black deaths than an entire police department.

We Palestinians have failed to educate our people on the principles of tolerance and peace. Instead, we condone and applaud terrorism, especially when it is directed against Jews. We want the world to condemn terrorism only when it claims the lives of Palestinians.

Abbas’s ambiguous, half-hearted condemnations of attacks by Palestinians against Israelis are only intended for public consumption and are primarily aimed at appeasing Western donors so that they will continue channeling funds to the Palestinian Authority. In addition, his condemnations seek to blame Israel for Palestinian terror attacks.

Netanyahu’s strong and clear condemnation left me and other Palestinians wondering when was the last time we heard similar statements from our leaders. I cannot remember Abbas or any other Palestinian leader ever expressing shock and outrage over the killing of a Jew in a Palestinian terror attack, nor the last time a Palestinian official visited the Israeli victims of a Palestinian terror attack.

Each time Abbas reluctantly condemns a Palestinian terror attack, he faces a wave of criticism from many Palestinians. Unlike the Israeli public, many Palestinians often rush to justify, and even welcome, terror attacks against Jews. Has there ever been a Palestinian activist who dared to hold a rally in a Palestinian city to condemn suicide bombings or the murder of an entire Jewish family? The Israeli president has good reason to feel ashamed for the murder of the baby. But when will we Palestinians ever have a sense of shame over the way we react to the murder of Jews?