NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

A Strategic Political Petroleum Release Biden tries everything to cut gas prices, except what would work.

Posted By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-strategic-political-petroleum-release-oil-joe-biden-gas-prices-11648762807?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

President Biden knows inflation and gasoline prices are killing Democrats in the polls, and he’s scrambling to show he’s doing something about it. Except he still won’t do what would really make a difference: Take his foot off the neck of the U.S. oil and gas industry.

His latest gambit on Thursday was to say he’ll release 180 million barrels from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve in the next six months. This would be the biggest release in history and reduce the reserve to its lowest level since 1984. But the oil will need to be replaced, which will push up future demand.

This is one reason markets responded with a yawn. Crude prices fell a mere 4.9%. Markets don’t respond only to short-term demand and supply fluctuations. They also take into account long-term expectations and policy signals. And the Administration continues to signal that its goal is to bankrupt oil and gas producers. But before shooting them, Mr. Biden wants their political help.

The White House underscored Thursday that it wants to “immediately increase supply” while accelerating the “clean energy” transition. The President also said he wants to make companies pay fees on wells from leases that they haven’t used in years and on acres of public land that “they are hoarding without producing.” But the law already requires companies to produce oil or gas on leases or return their leases to the government.

HISTORY, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Chabad’s Ukraine Mission The story of the Jews plays an outsize role in the country’s history and present. By Dovid Margolin

Posted By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.wsj.com/articles/chabads-ukraine-communism-ussr-tsar-de-nazification-russia-invasion-hasidic-movement-jewish-community-repression-persecution-antisemitism-refugee-11648745664?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

History has been a battleground between Russia and Ukraine for years, and the story of the Jews has been part of that fight. This can be heard today in Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric about “de-Nazification” or Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s exhortations, amid Russian bombing, to remember Babyn Yar’s murdered Jews. But the past is more than a backdrop for geopolitical maneuvering.

The founding of the Hasidic movement by Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov (1698-1760) in what is today western Ukraine revolutionized Jewish life. And Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson—the Rebbe, or the seventh leader of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement—was born in Ukraine 120 years ago and later helped spark Judaism’s post-Holocaust religious revival.

The Rebbe was born in Mykolaiv on April 18, 1902, to Rabbi Levi Yitzchak and Chana Schneerson. His maternal forefathers had been the city’s chief rabbis since 1854. During a 1905 pogrom, his mother hid in a cellar with other women, whose children’s terrified screams risked attracting the anti-Semitic marauders outside. Years later, she would recall her 3-year-old son soothing the other children.

In 1908 Levi Yitzchak Schneerson was elected chief rabbi of what is now Dnipro. There the future Rebbe celebrated his bar mitzvah while helping his parents care for Jewish World War I refugees forcibly expelled from the Russian Empire’s western provinces. But Czarist persecution paled in comparison with the destruction of Jewish religious and communal life under communism.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

China Takes Over the Solomon Islands — And the Pacific by Gordon G. Chang

Posted By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18384/china-takes-over-solomon-islands

China, after years of persistent commercial, diplomatic, and military efforts, is taking over the Pacific.

Beijing is moving from island group to island group, and soon the People’s Liberation Army will be in striking distance of Hawaii.

The five-year deal, subject to automatic renewals, will allow Beijing to use the islands to base its military and to do pretty much what the Chinese military wants.

If implemented to its full extent, the Framework Agreement will give China the ability to sever shipping lanes and air links connecting the U.S. with its treaty ally Australia and partner New Zealand.

For decades, Washington allowed Canberra and Wellington to manage the Solomons and its region…. Beijing, through payoffs now detailed in public, essentially owns Sogavare’s government.

There is now talk that China will ink a security agreement with Papua New Guinea, just north of Australia.

Moreover, China wants to upgrade an airstrip in Kiribati. Beijing says the improvements are for civilian purposes only, yet the military uses are apparent and no one believes the Chinese assurances.

The facility is just 1,900 miles south of Hawaii. In Pacific terms, Kiribati is America’s next-door neighbor.

On March 25, the Solomon Islands announced it was “expanding” security arrangements, “diversifying the country’s security partnership including with China.”

ISRAEL Comments turned off

‘Pay-for-slay’ Abbas takes his cue from ‘Iran-Deal’ Blinken By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on April 1st, 2022

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-702916

Following Tuesday night’s terrorist attack in Bnei Brak, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued what the media reported as a “rare condemnation.” While it’s true that Abbas doesn’t usually come out against the murder of Israelis (though, in this case, three of the five people killed were not Jewish), his statement should not be viewed as cause for optimism.

On the contrary, the PA chief hasn’t changed his colors one iota. Nor has he ceased the stipends for “martyrs for Allah” through his proud “pay-for-slay” program. No, the message he conveyed, allegedly due to pressure by Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz, was carefully worded in a way that would satisfy the powers-that-be in Washington.

“The killing of Palestinian and Israeli civilians will only lead to further deterioration of the situation, especially as we are approaching the holy month of Ramadan and the Christian and Jewish holidays,” he declared, going on to warn “Israeli settlers” and others not to use the “incident” as an excuse to carry out assaults on “our Palestinian people.”

He then referred to the “cycle of violence,” asserting that a “permanent, comprehensive and just peace is the shortest way to provide security and stability for the Palestinian and Israeli peoples and the peoples of the entire region.”

As a consistent rejectionist of peace with the Jewish state, whose very existence he opposes, Abbas was simply parroting US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

At a joint press conference on Monday in Jerusalem with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Blinken reported that he and the Israeli premier had “discussed ways to foster a peaceful Passover, Ramadan and Easter across Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, particularly in Jerusalem, a city of such profound importance to Jews, to Christians, to Muslims.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Can Ukraine Kill Climate Change? The war in Ukraine may cause the climate movement to meet its end. by Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on April 1st, 2022

https://spectator.org/can-ukraine-kill-climate-change/

All apocalyptic movements end in failure, but often only after they have wreaked untold damage on the societies that believe in them. That’s the takeaway from Richard Landes’s Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience, which explores the appeal of these movements over the centuries, their chief characteristics, and how they take over societies and eventually run out of steam.

Global warming, for all its scientific veneer, has the basic characteristics of an apocalyptic movement: there is a prophecy of impending doom, a demand for repentance and societal self-sacrifice (in this case, giving up the fossil fuels upon which industrial society depends), and a sense of urgency that if action is not taken immediately, it will be too late. In the end, if the required sacrifices are made, there is an idyllic future. In this case, it’s a green new world, powered by sun and wind. Since its emergence in the 1980s, the global warming apocalypse has shown remarkable resilience, emerging stronger than ever from a near-death experience in November 2009 when leaked emails between top climate scientists exposed their shenanigans in suppressing scientific dissent and deleting data.

What probably saved the movement was that the West’s political elite had by then committed themselves. At the beginning of 2009, global warming had scored its most important convert: President Barack Obama. The hacked emails became news just before 40,000 delegates, including over 100 heads of state, Obama among them, converged on Copenhagen for the 15th annual UN climate conference.

In 2018, the movement obtained a major public relations boost when Greta Thunberg launched an international children’s crusade. President Donald Trump took the United States on a brief time out, but even while still on the campaign trail, now-President Joe Biden promised, “We are going to get rid of fossil fuels.” At the 2021 UN climate conference in Glasgow, Biden showed up from Rome in an 85-car emissions-spewing cavalcade. This time, along with the unusually huge number of delegates — including 27 from Palau (total population: 18,000) — he was one of 120 heads of state. Today, the movement would seem by most measures to be at its peak, riding what Landes would call its “cresting wave.” Yet, it is possible that the crisis in Ukraine may mark the beginning of its end.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Crocodile tears and American delusions By Barry Shaw

Posted By on March 30th, 2022

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/03/crocodile_tears_and_american_delusions.html

Five killed, many more injured in a terror attack outside Tel Aviv, after Biden restores American funding that the Palestinians use to reward those who kill Jews

Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, was forced to apologize by his two main patrons, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken and the king of Jordan, for the deadly Palestinian terror attack in the Bnei Brak residential suburb of Tel Aviv on Tuesday night, 29 March, that killed five people and injured others.

We all know, at least those of us close to the action and who do not live in fantasy land, that the background to the slaughter was the Palestinian leader’s constant incitement against Jews and Israel to his brainwashed people.

This indoctrination is laced with many incentives, some religious, some financial, to pick up a knife or a gun.  Recently, the Palestinian population has been exploited into pre-Ramadan violence by its political and religious leaders.

Sadly, tragically, Ramadan for Palestinians has become a religious ritual of Jewish bloodletting in a nationalistic cause.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Smearing of Clarence Thomas By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on March 30th, 2022

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/03/the-smearing-of-clarence-thomas/

Those demanding recusal over Ginni Thomas’s activism are engaged in transparently partisan politics, nothing more.

D emocrats should not get away with their shameless political gambit to force Justice Clarence Thomas’s recusal from Supreme Court cases based on the political activism of his wife, Ginni Thomas.

Supreme Court justices are not even subject to disqualification over their own activities that bear directly on cases. This never upsets Democrats when the justices have been appointed by Democratic presidents. Consequently, Justice Elena Kagan did not recuse herself from the Obamacare case, providing the critical vote to uphold it despite having served as President Obama’s solicitor general when the administration was formulating the legal strategy to defend the Affordable Care Act. (See Ed Whelan’s analysis, here.)

Justice Stephen Breyer has been aptly described as the primary architect of the federal sentencing guidelines. He steered them through Congress in 1984 as the Senate Judiciary Committee’s chief counsel before serving, as a federal appeals court judge, on the Sentencing Commission that created the guidelines. Yet, after being appointed to the high court by President Clinton, Breyer declined to recuse himself when the Supreme Court weighed the constitutionality of the guidelines. Indeed, he wrote a 5–4 majority opinion in 2005 that sustained the guidelines scheme, though declaring it advisory rather than mandatory.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Back in the safe space of Hollywood scandal By Steve Israel

Posted By on March 30th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/600332-back-in-the-safe-space-of-hollywood-scandal

There’s nothing like a good Hollywood slap in the face to distract us from our looming dystopia. As bombs continue to fall on Ukraine and mothers shepherd their children through mine fields, it took Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to return us to our safe space: the latest Hollywood scandal. Nothing says escapism like two celebrities in a made-for-television brouhaha.

“The slap heard ‘round the world,” as it’s been heralded in the media, smacks of the self-absorption of our popular culture. Heard ‘round the world, really? Heard in Lviv, against the groaning of bulldozers plying through wreckage? Heard in the clatter of refugee camps in Europe? In El Salvador, where 62 people were murdered in gang violence over the weekend?

After the incident, social media erupted, memes formed, newspaper headlines blared and actual crises were, well, upstaged. “BEST SMACKTOR,” snarked the front page of the New York Post. Facebook, the most self-centered communications platform since the mirror, exploded with our completely uninformed but no less authoritative positions and diagnoses: Smith needs anger management therapy…Rock provoked Smith…the whole thing was a conspiracy to hoist the Oscar’s anemic ratings.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

The SEC tries its hand at climate policy By Rupert Darwall,

Posted By on March 30th, 2022

https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/600203-the-sec-tries-its-hand-at-climate-policy

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) remit includes ensuring candor, honesty and transparency in what public companies tell investors. Yet it will spend the next few weeks and months trying to fool us into believing that its new 510-page proposal on mandatory climate disclosure is solely about protecting investors and has nothing to do with climate policy or achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

No one should be fooled.

Materiality is the governing principle of corporate disclosure requirements. In 2010, the SEC issued 29 pages of guidance on climate-change disclosures. With respect to what is now called climate-transition risk, the guidance requires that companies “should consider specific risks they may face as a result of climate change legislation or regulations and avoid generic risk factor disclosure that could apply to any company.”

This common-sense approach is now being superseded by an SEC-specified climate-risk reporting and accounting framework that will run in parallel with traditional financial reporting requirements, with its own verification and attestation regime necessitating the employment of legions of climate consultants.

At the heart of the SEC’s new climate-disclosure regime is quantification of a company’s greenhouse gas emissions, at three levels: those emitted directly as a result of its own operations (Scope 1); those emitted from generating the electricity it consumes (Scope 2); and those emitted by its suppliers and customers (Scope 3). “Greenhouse gas emissions in many respects resemble financial statement disclosures,” writes Commissioner Allison Herren Lee, who, as the SEC’s acting chair in March 2021, initiated the process that led to the current proposal. Such disclosures, she claims, provide “critically important insights into a company’s operations.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Emboldened Enemies and Disappointed Allies: America’s Decaying Status in the Middle East The image of the United States in the Middle East eroded enough over the past year to embolden its enemies and demoralize its allies.  By Hicham Tohme

Posted By on March 30th, 2022

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/29/emboldened-enemies-and-disappointed-allies-americas-decaying-status-in-the-middle-east/

On March 12, Iran launched 12 missiles, targeting Erbil in northern Iraq. The missiles landed near the U.S. consulate there and most reports indicated that the strike’s impact was restricted to material damages, with only one civilian injured by the attack. According to the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps, their target was an Israeli Mossad operational center, which they described as “the Zionists’ strategic center of plotting and evil.”

This brazen and aggressive action on behalf of Iran against neighboring Iraq is far from a rare occurrence. This was the first time in recent years, however, that Iran openly acknowledged its responsibility for such an attack. The wording of the IRGC’s statement, along with the timing of this dangerous escalation in the region can only be understood in light of global developments, particularly given the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine, which the Kremlin also framed as a military action against evil, neo-Nazism in this case.

Simply put, as Iran’s current hawkish leadership witnessed the feckless Western response to Putin’s military adventurism, it felt emboldened to test the waters and target the American consulate or an Israeli operational center in Erbil. Either possible target was probably good enough to make the point that Iran is capable of inflicting enough hurt on Western interests in the Middle East and that it anticipated no serious retaliation, another parallel with Russian expectations when they invaded Ukraine. In fact, no retaliation followed and Iran’s aggression against its neighbor went unpunished.

As it happens, I was on a trip to Lebanon when the events in question took place. Wanting to hear people’s opinions on Iran’s actions, I was not very surprised to witness a general consensus concerning rationalizations of Iran’s deed.