RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is this the beginning … of RICO?

Okay, so that’s not quite as catchy as Edward G. Robinson’s immortal line. But it is what a good prosecutor would be asking while pondering the growing cloud around the Clinton Foundation.

Among Little Ceasar’s imprints on popular culture is that Robinson’s mobster character, Cesare Enrico Bandello, inspired Congress to name its seminal anti-organized crime legislation “RICO” — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1971. The mafia was its most infamous target, but far from its only target.

RICO makes it a crime to run an organization through what’s called a “pattern of racketeering activity.” The term racketeering is extensively defined in the statute. It includes acts involving bribery, fraud, and obstruction of justice, to name just a few.

When Ayatollah Ali Khamenei speaks, the world should listen. He has a much keener sense of the direction of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program than the president of the United States, and is evidently much more forthright about it.

When the Iranians and the United States cut what was portrayed as a tentative deal on the Iranian nuclear program, they described it differently. The U.S. emphasized that sanctions would only be phased out gradually and that inspections would ensure complete transparency. Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted that there wasn’t really a deal, and oh yeah, sanctions would be lifted immediately and inspections wouldn’t be allowed to impinge on Iran’s security — in other words, would not include military sites. In a similar vein, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif attacked a U.S. fact sheet on the alleged deal as inaccurate. “There is no need to spin using ‘fact sheets’ so early on,” Zarif lectured on Twitter. Zarif was right to put sneer quotes around “fact sheets,” but his political analysis was off.

I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast – Revelation 20:4 The caliphate wages jihad against Christians. Victims are beheaded, crucified, and burned alive. Christian girls are sold into slavery. Centuries-old monuments are destroyed by jihadis. These events are ripped from the headlines — of 1915. Friday marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide. On April 24, 1915, the Ottoman Caliphate launched a “decapitation strike” against the Armenian people by arresting and killing hundreds of their intellectual, political, religious, and business leaders in Constantinople, so as to make organized resistance impossible.

That done, the extermination campaign began in earnest in the following weeks. More than 1 million Armenians were murdered, along with large numbers of Christian Assyrians and Greeks, with the goal of engineering a Christenrein Anatolia. The remainder would have been killed as well — and the very name “Armenia” relegated to historical atlases, like Babylonia or Gaul — had not makeshift Armenian forces defeated the Ottomans trying to finish the job in the formerly Russian-occupied sliver of Armenia in 1918, after the withdrawal of Russian forces following the Bolshevik coup d’état six months earlier.

Will the stock Clinton scandal response be enough to weather this storm?

Say this about Bill and Hillary Clinton: They are predictable. Some politicians dare to change, even to evolve, but not the former first couple. In these uncertain political times, Team Clinton’s lack of ethics—and its stock response when caught—is our one constant.

The details change, of course. In 1978 it was lucrative cattle futures; in 2014 it was lucrative speeches. In the 1990s it was missing Whitewater and Rose Law firm records; today it is missing emails. In 2000 it was cash for pardons; now it’s cash for Russian uranium mines. In Little Rock, it was Bill’s presidential campaign vehicle; in New York, it’s Hillary’s—and now known as the Clinton Foundation. Details.

The standard operating procedure never changes, however. It is as if the Clintons have—filed within easy reach on a shelf—a book titled “Clinton Scandals for Dummies.”

Even China is now raising flags about nuclear proliferation. Beijing helped Pakistan get the bomb in the 1980s and has been North Korea’s patron from one Dear Leader to the next. But in February Chinese officials warned a group of Americans that Pyongyang has many more nuclear warheads than previously believed: up to 20 already, perhaps 40 by next year.

The new Chinese assessment, reported Thursday by the Journal, is based on updated intelligence concerning North Korea’s ability to enrich uranium. The North Koreans had no such capability when they signed the 1994 Agreed Framework with the Clinton Administration, which required them to stop their nuclear-weapons efforts.

We’re not the first to make the comparison, but Bill and Hillary Clinton’s adventures in the uranium trade recall nothing as much as Tammany Hall’s concept of “honest graft.” Except maybe their never-ending use of power and status for personal and political gain requires a new special terminology. Dishonest graft?

The New York Times reported Thursday on the foreign cash that flowed into the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 as subsidiaries of the Russian state nuclear energy agency Rosatom acquired control of a Canada-based mining company called Uranium One. The story features the familiar Clinton touches: lucrative Kazakh mining concessions for the tycoon Frank Giustra, with Bill along as a character reference; a half-million-dollar-a-pop speech by the former President in Moscow for a Kremlin-linked bank; $2.35 million in secret donations from one family foundation to another. Our Kim Strassel has more nearby.

“The intellectual dishonesty of senior administration officials who are unwilling to admit when they are wrong is astounding. When assessing climate change, we should focus on good science, not politically correct science.”

‘Today, our planet faces new challenges, but none pose a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama wrote in his proclamation for Earth Day on Wednesday. “As a Nation, we must act before it is too late.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, in an Earth Day op-ed for USA Today, declared that climate change has put America “on a dangerous path—along with the rest of the world.”

Both the president and Mr. Kerry cited rapidly warming global temperatures and ever-more-severe storms caused by climate change as reasons for urgent action.

Given that for the past decade and a half global-temperature increases have been negligible, and that the worsening-storms scenario has been widely debunked, the pronouncements from the Obama administration sound more like scare tactics than fact-based declarations.

At least the United Nations’ then-top climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, acknowledged—however inadvertently—the faith-based nature of climate-change rhetoric when he resigned amid scandal in February. In a farewell letter, he said that “the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”

Instead of letting political ideology or climate “religion” guide government policy, we should focus on good science. The facts alone should determine what climate policy options the U.S. considers. That is what the scientific method calls for: inquiry based on measurable evidence. Unfortunately this administration’s climate plans ignore good science and seek only to advance a political agenda.

Climate reports from the U.N.—which the Obama administration consistently embraces—are designed to provide scientific cover for a preordained policy. This is not good science. Christiana Figueres, the official leading the U.N.’s effort to forge a new international climate treaty later this year in Paris, told reporters in February that the real goal is “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years.” In other words, a central objective of these negotiations is the redistribution of wealth among nations. It is apparent that President Obama shares this vision.

Judith Curry is Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Stripped of dogma and green evangelism, the key issue is this: the inadequacies of current policies based on emissions reduction are leaving the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events largely unaddressed, whether caused by humans or natural variability.
Noted climate scientist Judith Curry neatly set out the weaknesses of the human-caused catastrophic global warming excitement when she testified this month before a US House of Representatives committee. Her written submission is here , but her verbal introduction is below:

THE central issue in the scientific debate on climate change is the extent to which the recent (and future) warming is caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions versus natural climate variability that are caused by variations from the sun, volcanic eruptions, and large-scale ocean circulations.

Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. This includes

The slow down in global warming since 1998
Reduced estimates of the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide
Climate models that are predicting much more warming than has been observed so far in the 21st century

While there are substantial uncertainties in our understanding of climate change, it is clear that humans are influencing climate in the direction of warming. However this simple truth is essentially meaningless in itself in terms of alarm, and does not mandate a particular policy response. We have made some questionable choices in defining the problem of climate change and its solution:

JUST FOR THE RECORD: LAMAR SMITH RANKS A MINUS 4 FROM THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE INDICATING A STRONG PRO-ISRAEL RECORD…..RSK
The United States is now the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, having recently overtaken both Saudi Arabia and Russia. Two decades ago, no one would have believed it. The practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has fueled this energy boom. Fracking has unlocked vast amounts of what used to be considered economically inaccessible oil and gas. Increased domestic energy production has benefited the environment, the economy and hardworking families who now enjoy reduced energy prices.
Natural gas provides affordable, clean and abundant energy that heats our homes and cooks our food. U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions have also fallen dramatically in recent years, in large part because of the use of natural gas in generating electricity.

California doesn’t need a global carbon-emissions regime; it needs a better water system.

That California’s catastrophic drought is a result of global warming has become a commonplace of contemporary political rhetoric. That truism isn’t true: Most scientific accounts of California’s current dry spell link recent low precipitation to naturally occurring atmospheric cycles, not to global warming. Indeed, most of the global-warming models relied upon by those advocating more-invasive environmental policies predict that warming would leave California with wetter winters — winter precipitation being critical to the snowpack-dependent state — rather than the drier winters at the root of the state’s current water crisis. What some studies do suggest is that warmer temperatures make the effects of scanty precipitation more intense for California’s end users of water, a reasonably straightforward proposition — higher temperatures will probably contribute to higher demand for water and will certainly contribute to the much more significant problem of evaporation, which steals tremendous amounts of water away from California’s outdated storage-and-conveyance infrastructure and imposes substantial water losses on old-fashioned irrigation systems.