RUTHFULLY YOURS

The $8-billion-a-year agency gives us a chance to see whether we need it at all.
The Environmental Protection Agency wants to reinterpret the Clean Water Act; according to Congressman Bill Shuster, its new interpretation will “open the door for the federal government to regulate just about any place where water collects.” Till now, the EPA has been able to impose itself only on “navigable waterways.” The EPA wants to drop the word “navigable.”

That would give the agency authority not only over every body of water in the country, flowing, standing, or tidal, but it would also — allegedly — give it control over any land where water temporarily pools: NRO has already posted a good piece on the subject, by clean-water expert Andrew Langer. Last Wednesday, during a joint House–Senate hearing on the agency’s plans, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy said that the EPA’s powers-that-be “are in fact narrowing the jurisdiction of the Clean Water Act.” This, then, is the latest chapter in the long story of federal agencies voluntarily relinquishing power.

Since 1980, ground-level ozone pollution has dropped by one-third, to a nationwide average level of 68 parts per billion (ppb) in 2014. But for the Environmental Protection Agency’s bureaucrats, that reduction isn’t enough. Thus, the agency announced its newest standard, which reduces the allowable level of ground-level ozone from the current 75 parts per billion (ppb) to 70 ppb.

According to the EPA, by 2025, the new ozone standard will provide annual benefits of between $2.9 billion and $5.9 billion, at an annual cost of only $1.4 billion. One can almost hear one of those late-night announcers shouting: “You get all this — fewer premature deaths, fewer missed school days, fewer asthma attacks, all for the low, low price of just $1.4 billion. But wait, there’s more!”

So how did the EPA, which recently spent $92 million on new office furniture for its employees, determine that the benefits of the proposed ozone rule would greatly exceed the costs? Simple: The EPA adds in the “co-benefits” associated with reducing particulate emissions that the agency assumes also will occur when ozone levels are reduced.

Mixed messages and hand-wringing over Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire prospects are splitting her campaign, and may cause it to pull out of the state altogether.

According to a Tuesday report from Politico, some Clinton insiders and DC-based fundraisers are pushing the Democratic front-runner to abandon her New Hampshire campaign. Clinton now trails Vermont senator Bernie Sanders by 14 points in the Granite State, and the skeptics don’t see that changing before the state’s primary next February. By continuing to invest in costly campaign infrastructure, they say she risks throwing time and money into a “lost cause.”

The same goes for Iowa, where Clinton’s lead shrank precipitously over the summer. The critics argue that, like New Hampshire’s, Iowa’s overwhelmingly white electorate and parochial political style naturally favor Sanders. Clinton, they say, might be better served deploying her resources elsewhere.

University of Pennsylvania’s Anthea Butler has also called God a “white racist.”
A professor at the University of Pennsylvania called presidential candidate Ben Carson a “coon” because he said he’s cool with NASCAR flying Confederate flags during races if that’s what its fans want.

“If only there was a ‘coon of the year’ award . . .” Religious Studies professor Anthea Butler tweeted last Tuesday in response to a tweet sharing a Sports Illustrated article about Carson’s comments.

Her post has since been deleted, but not before a screenshot of it was captured, according to an article in Campus Reform.

Butler is hardly a new to making inflammatory comments on Twitter. In 2013, she declared that God is a “white racist . . . carrying a gun and stalking young black men.” When controversy ensued, she responded by bragging at the Harlem Book Fair that she had tenure and therefore couldn’t be fired.

Why Obama Prefers Politicizing to Actual Politics
President Obama was right. He was right when, just a few hours after the horrible shooting in Oregon, he decried the fact that such slaughters have become “routine.” He was even right, in a sense, when he defended politicizing the tragedy.

“Of course,” Obama said Thursday night, “what’s also routine is that somebody, somewhere, will comment and say, ‘Obama politicized this issue.’ Well, this is something we should politicize. It is relevant to our common life together, to the body politic.”

This was a nice Aristotelian flourish. “Man is a political animal,” Aristotle said, and it is through politics that we decide how we should all live together.

But ultimately Obama was just paying lip service to an ideal he does not live by. He’s not about to try building consensus on gun policy among people of good faith. He’ll take the same approach he’s taken throughout his presidency: He’ll delegitimize opponents of his sweeping agenda as irrational, self-interested enemies of decency and progress.

Unless definitions are narrow, rigid and clear, any attempt to limit freedom of expression because some opinions are deemed intolerable inevitably leads to the suppression of free and frank discussion. Unfortunately, our world is not made for narrow, rigid and clear definitions
As is by now clear, the Society for the Suppression of Vice was not entirely successful in its endeavours, but attempts to reform the behaviour of mankind nevertheless continue, yet another triumph of Man’s hope over his experience. And since virtue is now thought to consist mainly of the expression of the right opinions and eschewal of the wrong ones, it is hardly surprising that strenuous efforts are now made, by means of speech codes and even by laws, to suppress the latter and make them inexpressible. The hope is that what cannot be said will soon become unthinkable also, and everyone will be nice.

There are occasions when such attempts seem to be motivated by common human decency and are almost justified. In Romania, for example, a law has been proposed to make it illegal to indulge publicly in apologetics for anyone who has been convicted, or was guilty, of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes. The law will also make it illegal publicly to promote by any means whatever ideas, concepts or doctrines that are deemed to be fascist, racist or xenophobic.

Romania as a country has many charms, but during the twentieth century political virtue was certainly not one of them. During the 1920s and 1930s, its intelligentsia was almost entirely enthralled and enthused by nationalism of the most virulent and xenophobic kind, viciously anti-Semitic, and did not confine its support entirely to words. The careers of two of the Romania’s greatest literary ornaments of the twentieth century, Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran, might be interpreted by the morally rigorous as attempts to cover up (rather than atone for) their fervent support for figures such as Codreanu and Hitler. The Romanian occupation of Odessa and the surrounding territory during the war was brutal even by the standards of the time. Half of the Jews under Romanian jurisdiction during the war were killed (fewer as a proportion than in, say, Holland, but many more in number). After a brief intervening period following the war, the king was deposed and a communist regime installed by the usual means of eliminating enemies, real and supposed, intimidation and suppression of any but its own shifting doctrines.

PLO Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s speech to the UN General Assembly last week contained a concoction of half-truths and outright lies that everyone listening to him should question.
Here are some prize porkies:

1. “The question of Palestine was one of the first just issues brought before the United Nations from the time of its inception, and yet it remains unresolved until this moment”

Abbas failed to mention that it has remained unresolved since then because:

(i) The Arabs did not accept the 1947 UN Partition Plan to partition western Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab State – whilst the Jews did.

(ii) The Arabs – instead – unsuccessfully sent six Arab armies to invade Palestine in May 1948 to rout the newly declared Jewish State – Israel – and drive its Jewish population into the sea

(iii) Jordan and Egypt successfully drove out and permanently expelled the Jewish population living in the Gaza Strip, East Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria (later termed “the West Bank”) – keeping those areas Jew-free from 1948 until 1967

The terrorists did not need permission from Hamas leaders to murder the first Jews they ran into. The inflammatory rhetoric of Abbas and Palestinian Authority (PA) officials and media outlets was sufficient to drive any Palestinian to go out and murder Jews.

Instead of condemning the murder of the Jews, the PA denounced Israel for killing the two Palestinians who carried out the Jerusalem attacks.

The Palestinian Authority and its leaders are in no position today to condemn the murder of any Jews, simply because the PA itself has been encouraging such terrorist attacks through its ceaseless campaign of incitement against Israel.

The PA is playing a double game: it tells the world that it wants peace and coexistence with Israel; meanwhile it incites Palestinians against Israel, driving some to set out with guns and knives to murder Jews.

As the world faces the rising threat of Islamic supremacy, the number of leaders speaking the whole hideous truth about this evil can be counted on one hand. If GOP presidential candidates are our future, will any of them rise to the occasion and be a bold voice for truth when speaking about this force that seeks to destroy us? I decided to find out. Below is a snapshot of where the top six candidates stand on the threat of jihad, with a focus on four sub-topics noted below:

Islamic law (sharia)
Immigration jihad (hijra), addressed in the context of the current “Syrian refugee crisis”
Response to Ben Carson’s statements on Muslims, sharia law, the Constitution, and the presidency
Miscellany (additional noteworthy points that vary from one candidate to the next)

The summer of 2015 will be remembered as the season when water—or the lack thereof—finally broke through into Americans’ political consciousness. Devastating droughts in the American West and predictions of worse to come have created a sense of crisis with no obvious solutions. And the problem isn’t just domestic: From Brazil to South Africa, water shortages are a growing cause of economic stress and social upheaval.

One of the few places where we might look for solutions is a country with seemingly insurmountable water problems: Israel. Since its founding in 1948, Israel, which is 60% desert, has become a water superpower. This is the unlikely story recounted by Seth M. Siegel in his insightful “Let There Be Water.” He argues that Israel’s example of making the desert bloom through a mixture of grit, smart regulation, technology and free-market incentives can offer a model for the rest of the world.