RUTHFULLY YOURS

The economic punishment from President Obama’s green agenda continued Tuesday as the Environmental Protection Agency issued a new regulation on ozone, among the most costly in U.S. history.

The final rule is wholly discretionary, and none other than President Obama overruled the EPA on ozone in 2011 in the name of “reducing regulatory burdens and regulatory uncertainty.” But that was headed into an election year, and Mr. Obama is making amends to burnish his eco-legacy.

Ozone in the ambient air can contribute to smog and respiratory ailments, but the U.S. has worked hard to control O3 to the point of virtual nonexistence. “Back in 1979, Los Angeles still was so full of smog that there were days where people who were vulnerable just could not go outside,” Mr. Obama said in August. “And you fast-forward 30, 40 years later, and we solved those problems.”

Sure enough, the EPA’s latest measures show most of the U.S. is meeting the 2008 standards of ozone concentrations of 75 parts per billion (ppb) or less, except for pockets in Texas and the northeast. Only green-happy California is in “extreme non-attainment.”

The EPA is nonetheless lowering the standard to 70 ppb and the green lobby wanted 65 ppb or even 60 ppb. So while avoiding the worst-case scenario, the factories, utilities, refineries, farms, cars and trucks that produce the man-made emissions that cause ozone to form will need to install expensive retrofits. New ones will be more expensive. The EPA estimated the 2011 draft proposal would cost the private economy anywhere from $19 billion to $90 billion.

Hillary Clinton hopes you are busy. Hillary Clinton hopes you are confused. Hillary Clinton hopes the endless stories about her private email server—and her endless, fabulist explanations—will make your head hurt, make your eyes cross, make you give up trying to figure it out.

All you really need to know at this point is this: Pretty much every claim Mrs. Clinton made at her initial March news conference, and since then, is false. In the spirit of keeping it simple, here’s the Complete Busy Person’s Guide to the Clinton Email Scandal. Stick it on the fridge.

Why she kept a private server.
Clinton: It was for “convenience.” “I thought it would be easier to carry just one device for my work and for my personal emails instead of two.”

Truth: Mrs. Clinton’s team acknowledged in July that she traveled with both a BlackBerry and an iPad while secretary of state, and that she had her private email set up on both.

Why she finally gave her emails to the State Department.

Those who rushed to declare the death of the Oslo Accords fell into Abbas’s trap.

Abbas’s threats are mainly designed to scare the international community into pressuring Israel to offer Abbas more concessions. He is hoping that inaccurate headlines concerning the purported abrogation of the Oslo Accords will cause panic in Washington and European capitals, prompting world leaders to demand that Israel give Abbas everything he asks for.

Abbas knows that cancelling the agreements with Israel would mean dissolving his Palestinian Authority, and the end of his political career.

The tens of thousands of Arab refugees now seeking asylum in Europe could not care less about the “occupation” and settlements.

Ironically, Abbas declared that, “We are working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence between our people and in our region.” But his harsh words against Israel, in addition to continued anti-Israel incitement in the Palestinian media, prove that he is moving in the opposite direction. This form of incitement destroys any chance of peace.

After weeks of threatening to drop a bombshell during his speech before the UN General Assembly, Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas on September 30 proved once again that he is an expert in the art of bluffing.

In the end, the bombshell he and his aides promised to detonate at the UN turned out to be a collection of old threats to abrogate signed agreements and a smear campaign against Israel.

There was nothing dramatic or new in Abbas’s speech. During the past few years, he and some of his aides have been openly talking about the possibility of cancelling the Oslo Accords if Israel does not fulfill its obligations towards the peace process.

On Wednesday the Obama administration was caught off guard by Russia’s rapid rise in Syria. As the Russians began bombing a US-supported militia along the Damascus-Homs highway, Secretary of State John Kerry was meeting with his Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov, at the UN. Just hours before their meeting Kerry was insisting that Russia’s presence in Syria would likely be a positive development.

Reacting to the administration’s humiliation, Republican Sen. John McCain said, “This administration has confused our friends, encouraged our enemies, mistaken an excess of caution for prudence and replaced the risks of action with the perils of inaction.”

McCain added that Russian President Vladimir Putin had stepped “into the wreckage of this administration’s Middle East policy.”

While directed at the administration, McCain’s general point is universally applicable. Today is no time for an overabundance of caution.

The Palestinian press has been saying for weeks that Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas would “drop a bombshell” when he spoke to the United National General Assembly today. In the event, the bomb did not go off. The speech was mostly a rehash of tired complaints about Israel, some of them linked to reality (occupation is never popular) and others entirely manufactured and irresponsible.

Abbas’s low point came right at the beginning of the speech, when he accused Israel of various crimes defiling the Temple Mount. He said Israel is trying “to impose its plans to undermine the Islamic and Christian sanctuaries in Jerusalem, particularly its actions at Al-Aqsa Mosque.” This is a lie, and given the violence around the Temple Mount in recent weeks it is the kind of lie that can create injuries and loss of life.

Abbas continues to say that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are swallowing it up, which is simply false: the settlements are growing in population but not expanding territorially. As to Gaza, he said Israel “continues its blockade of the Gaza Strip.” But his listeners surely know that it is Egypt that is maintaining a strict blockade, while Israel supplies the vast bulk of food, water, and electricity to Gaza. Abbas’s claim that the PA is “working on spreading the culture of peace and coexistence” is remarkable in view of the repeated glorification of terrorist murderers in school books and the naming of parks and schools after them. A moment of humor, unintentional to be sure, arrived when Abbas said “we seek to hold presidential and legislative elections.” Elected in 2005, he is now in the eleventh year of his own four year term and has shown zero desire to submit himself to the polls again.

Much credit/blame is heaped on Obama for the destruction of American ideals, the demise of our constitutional republic and the loss of our position as the premiere world power. However, the transformation of the U.S. has been a gradual one that preceded Obama by decades. By shortsightedly focusing on Obama’s role, we blind ourselves to the historical context of our downfall as a nation and absolve ourselves of the responsibility for the eternal vigilance required of all free societies. Most importantly for the present, a narrow view that targets Obama leads to magical thinking about the impact of presidential elections.

Obama is clearly the coup de grace in the “fundamental transformation of America,” a process that began in the 1950s with the U.S. visit of Muslim Brotherhood godfather, Sayyed Qutb (one could argue that the downfall began in 1928 with the founding of the Muslim Brotherhood) AND the rise of the radical Left in America in the 60s (SDS, Black Panthers, Weathermen, etc.) Of course, Diana West would argue (correctly so) that the genesis was in the early 1930s with the infiltration by Stalinist agents and fellow travelers and their influence over the White House (Roosevelt) and throughout the government, media and Hollywood. (See Red Star Over Hollywood).

Finally, a speech from the podium of the United Nations General Assembly in which the speaker speaks the truth.

The speaker? Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu. The truth?

1. The Iran Deal will bring war, not peace.

2. Iran promises to wipe out Israel, and not one nation said a word – instead, deafening silence.

3. The United Nations is obsessed with attacking Israel.

4. The threat to the Temple Mount is not from Israelis praying there, it is from militant Islamists bringing in explosives to the al-Aksa mosque.

5. Israeli military doctors are treating thousands of wounded from the killing fields of Syria.

6. Israel is civilization’s front line in the battle against barbarism.

7. Israel will not allow Iran to threaten its future, no matter how many Resolutions of condemnation the UN issues against Israel.

Do yourself a favor. Read the whole speech. Feel pride that this is the person representing the Jewish people. And share it with those who need a reminder about Jewish dignity, as well as with those who think Netanyahu, or Israel, is the problem in the Middle East.

World events in the last few years have a habit of making President Obama look foolish.

Take the president’s speech Monday before the U.N. General Assembly. There, Obama spoke solemnly about the limits of U.S. unilateral military power and the importance of international cooperation. Half a world away in Afghanistan, the Taliban took the major city of Kunduz.

Kunduz fell this week, and remains contested, because of the absence of unilateral U.S. military power. In Obama’s second term, he decided on a military strategy to get U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by the time he left office. With conventional forces leaving, the U.S. special operations forces left places like Kunduz to the Afghan local police.

Leaving Afghanistan

The U.S. trained and fought alongside these local police to harness the strength of local fighters to stabilize rural villages and provinces. The program expanded in 2010 when Gen. Stanley McChrystal focused his strategy on earning the trust of the local population.

But without the U.S. special operations forces on the ground, the Afghan local police became bandits. In theory, they were supposed to be under the authority of the national police and the ministry of interior. The reality didn’t work out that way. The International Crisis Group reported in June that the local police, more often than not, contributed to instability and were often outside the reach of the government in Kabul.

Breitbart News has learned that President Obama called U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power into a video conference before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Speech to the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday.

“Ambassador Power and Secretary Kerry were unable to attend Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech before the General Assembly because they were called into a meeting with President Obama, which they participated in via video teleconference,” a State Department Official told Breitbart News.

Although they were both in New York for the United Nations General Assembly meetings, the two high-ranking U.S. officials were notably absent for the entirety of the Israeli Prime Minister’s speech.

“The United States was represented at the speech by Ambassador David Pressman, Alternate Representative of the United States to the United Nations for Special Political Affairs, Ambassador to Israel Daniel Shapiro, and Ambassador Richard Erdman, Alternate Representative to the UN General Assembly,” the official added.

RCP contributor Charles Lipson is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor of Political Science and the founder and director of the Program on International Politicis, Economics and Security at the University of Chicago.

A small incident during Bernie Sanders’ recent talk at the University of Chicago reveals how the progressive left has turned against Israel. The venue was the largest on campus, and it was packed with enthusiastic supporters. During a Q&A, one student said that he and his friends liked Bernie’s progressive politics but didn’t much like his views on the Middle East. Bernie’s response, and the crowd’s, are worth pondering.

First of all, Bernie said, Israel has a right to exist. It was supposed to be an applause line, but it fell flat. There was only a smattering. That changed when he said he strongly favored a Palestinian state. For that, the applause was loud and sustained.

It’s only a small incident, but it captures a movement that has been developing for years at elite universities and is now spreading to cultural and media institutions. Their views are surely encouraged by President Obama’s diffidence toward the Jewish state. But he is less a leader than an accurate weather gauge. The left loves Israel about as much as it loves fracking, the Keystone pipeline, Goldman Sachs, voter IDs, Clarence Thomas, and deer hunting.

What has happened on campus, aside from the well-documented suppression of pro-Israel views, is the formation of a durable coalition opposed not only to Benjamin Netanyahu and specific Israeli policies but to Israel itself. The coalition is composed of the two fundamental groups on all elite campuses: the self-professed “victims” and the self-flagellating “guilty.” One of the main purposes of orientation week is to sort students into one of these two groups and to educate them in their assigned roles.