RUTHFULLY YOURS

This week President Obama is hailing his Clean Power Plan as “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.” Obama is posing as the environment’s savior, just as he did in 2008, when he promised his presidency would mark “the moment when … the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” Seven years later, that messianic legacy is in doubt. Obama’s Clean Power Plan has never had legislative support, even when his own party controlled both houses of Congress. Now he’s trying to impose it without Congress, an audacious ploy his old Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe condemns as “burning the Constitution.”

As his presidency wanes, Obama is desperately burnishing his eco-credentials with environmental zealots like Pope Francis and the leftists at the U.N. and in the European Union. But here at home, his plan would be a disaster economically, which explains its failure in Congress. Hillary Clinton is pledging to support the plan, while Republicans vying for their party’s presidential nomination are vowing to oppose it. The Clean Power Plan will be a fiercely debated issue in coal-consuming swing states like Ohio, Illinois, and Pennsylvania — where the race for the White House is usually decided.

When shouting “Death to America” gets billions of dollars flowing into your coffers.

Iran’s rulers are laughing all the way to the bank as they contemplate the many billions of dollars that will soon begin to flow into their coffers. When not shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Israel,” they are also laughing at us for being out-maneuvered by Iran’s negotiators on every one of their key demands.

“The structure of the sanctions that the US had built based on the UN Security Council’s resolutions was destroyed,” Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told a meeting of Iran’s Strategic Council on Foreign Relations in Tehran on August 3rd, according to the “semi-official” Fars news agency. “And like the 1990s, when no other country complied with the US sanctions against Iran, no one will accept the return of the sanctions (in the future).”

Is there a difference? To the perpetrators, no. To the societies from which the murderers came, the difference is a chasm.

When the Israeli government announced it had suspects, one suspect’s mother said, “I will be proud of him until Judgment Day. If… it is true… My boys are all righteous, pious and pure. The goal of my children is the triumph of Islam.”

This weekend in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, thousands of Israelis protested the murder of the baby Ali Saad Dawabshe.

It is almost ghoulish to compare the deaths of children in war. They were not responsible for the situation in which they found themselves, and they did not deserve their fate. In a healthy society, such deaths are mourned without regard for the children’s nationality, or the politics and misdeeds of their parents.

Are we actually being told, then, that the only way to prevent Iran from having nuclear bombs is to let it have them? If not now, in 10-15 years? And with intercontinental ballistic missiles that can reach the U.S.?

Even supporters of the deal say that yes, at the ten year mark, Iran will be able to breakout and build a weapon’s worth of nuclear fuel in a year or less — in other words, have nuclear bombs.

Iran has never come clean with the IAEA — or anyone else — about its nuclear activities. These were discovered not by IAEA inspectors but by the U.S. and allied law enforcement and intelligence services, as well as by dissident groups within Iran. Are we actually assuming that Iran, under this new deal, will now come clean?

Thus under the July deal the U.S. may not (technically) know if Iran, after a breakout, has a nuclear weapon arsenal until Iran either tests a nuclear warhead or explodes it in an American or Israeli city. Then, of course, the discovery will be “too late” to do anything about, especially if the U.S. is helping Iran with technology assistance designed to prevent attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites.

How Obama is using cloak-and-dagger techniques to hide an unpopular, dangerous policy from the public.

President Obama is surreptitiously colluding with radical anti-growth environmentalists to force ideologically driven carbon-emission controls on the energy industry that will devastate the U.S. economy, congressional investigators have discovered.

As the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drew up rules aimed at limiting carbon emissions from power-generation plants, “key stakeholders — including the American public — had little to no influence over the debate while powerful environmental activist groups were given unprecedented access to and influence over administration officials,” the Washington Times reported yesterday.

A neurosurgeon with an incredible biography but no real experience in governing, 5 Governors all experienced, Walker the most impressive, 3 Senators- Rubio and Cruz and Rand Paul and one buffoon who leads in the polls (so far).

Fox News has announced the ten participants in its primetime Republican debate on Thursday night –Donald Trump; Gov. Jeb Bush; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul; New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie; and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

With all the attention Obama’s disastrous Iran nuclear deal is getting, it is easy to overlook yet another of the president’s many foreign policy success stories: the Taliban.

It is under new leadership, and has strengthened its ties with the decidedly un-“decimated” al-Qaeda terror network.

Recall that just as Obama “ended” the war in Iraq by ceding our hard-won gains to Iran and the Islamic State (the former a longtime al-Qaeda ally, the latter the spawn of al-Qaeda in Iraq), the president is similarly “ending” the war in Afghanistan by consigning the country to the resurgent Taliban.

Much is made of the peer-review of scientific papers; it is frequently held up as the gold standard that assures the quality of scientific publishing. People often ask whether some work has undergone peer-review and are then ready to accept it — confident this makes it kosher. I wish this were really true.

Its proper functioning depends on the integrity of the editor, who chooses two or more anonymous reviewers, at his discretion, and supposedly bases acceptance for publication on their disinterested advice.

But this ideal system is easily misused. If the editor has a bias — as often happens in a controversial area like climate change — then all bets are off. The editor simply selects the reviewers who will give him the opinions he wants. Even if the author objects to particular points in the review, the editor always has the final word — and the paper is rejected.

Some Examples

I have had three recent experiences that have disillusioned me about peer-review — involving prestigious journals; International Journal of Climatology, published by the Royal Meteorological Society; Geophysical Research Letters and Eos, both published by the American Geophysical Union.

1. International Journal of Climatology – Royal Meteorological Society: My co-authors David Douglass (University of Rochester) and John Christy (University of Alabama-Huntsville) on an IJC [2007] paper (that notes the absence of the “Hotspot” in the tropical troposphere, claimed to exist there by B.D. Santer), have recounted in an essay in American Thinker (20Dec2009) their sad experience with IJC editor Glenn McGregor; D&C base their essay on leaked “Climategate” emails between Santer and “team members;” our scientific controversy is fully discussed in Appendix A of their essay: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2009/12/a_climatology_conspiracy.html

The great chronicler of Stalin’s empire and evil was a giant, not least for his honesty in re-evaluating and rejecting the revolutionary passions of his youth. He will be missed.

Robert Conquest, chronicler of Soviet evil and one of the great historians of our age, has died in California at 98. London’s Daily Telegraph reports:

“Conquest personified the truth that there was no anti-communist so dedicated as an ex-communist. His career illustrated also what the Italian writer Ignazio Silone, another former communist, meant when he said to the communist leader Palmiro Togliatti that “the final battle” of the 20th century would have to be fought between the two sides they represented.

An ardent Bolshevik as a young man, Conquest became a bitter foe of Soviet “Socialism”. He had first visited Russia in 1937 as a youthful devotee of the great experiment. It was a half century before he returned in 1989, having spent his life between chronicling the horrors the country had endured, and emerging, in the view of the Oxford historian Mark Almond, as “one of the few Western heroes of the collapse of Soviet Communism”. “He was Solzhenitsyn before Solzhenitsyn,” said Timothy Garton Ash.”

The Iran nuclear deal is a chance for Moscow and China to consolidate their Middle East influence at America’s expense.
There’s considerable debate over whether the Obama administration’s recent accord with Iran will stop the regime from getting a nuclear weapon. But there can be no debate about the fact that the biggest beneficiaries of the accord and the impending lifting of sanctions will be—besides the rulers in Tehran—Russia and China. Beijing and Moscow are already seizing this moment to consolidate their steadily growing influence in the Middle East, through their client Iran, at the expense of the U.S. and its allies.

The emergence of a Moscow-Beijing-Tehran axis is now virtually certain. It’s also the biggest power shift in the Middle East since the Suez crisis of 1956.

This emerging axis comes as no surprise. Russia and China have been important enablers in Iran’s search for a nuclear weapon almost from the start, including Russia’s construction of the nuclear complex at Bashher and China providing key components for Tehran’s centrifuge program. Yet neither regime has suffered any criticism or lasting opprobrium for doing so, not least in the United Nations. On the contrary, the Obama administration assiduously cultivated their cooperation in the U.N. for imposing economic sanctions on Iran, even as Russia and China were sharply criticizing the entire sanctions regime, and China was given an exemption from the sanctions for purchasing Iranian oil.