RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two years after directing the Environmental Protection Agency to come up with federal carbon limits on power plants, President Obama today announced his new climate change plan with a goal that “by 2030, carbon pollution from our power plants will be 32 percent lower than it was a decade ago.”

In his East Room remarks, Obama rattled off a litany of climate change issues, including “shrinking icecaps forced National Geographic to make the biggest change in its atlas since the Soviet Union broke apart.”

“By definition, I don’t deal with issues if they’re easy to solve, because somebody else has already solved them,” he said. “…But this is one of those rare issues, because of its magnitude, because of its scope, that if we don’t get it right, we may not be able to reverse and we may not be able to adapt sufficiently. There is such a thing as being too late when it comes to climate change.”

HERE IS JUST THE A- LIST…GO TO THE SITE FOR THE ALSO RANS

14. MARCO RUBIO: These two guys back-to-back were the stars of the evening. Rubio’s strong positions on foreign policy are well known, but it was on a subject for which he is often criticized that he shined on Monday night. He had by far the most detailed and cogent position on solving the eternal immigration problem, which he broke down into three phases. 1. Complete border control that would have to be proven to the American public before anything else goes forward. That would include electronic verification for visas, a bigger problem in many ways than the border. 2. Modernize legal immigration by not basing it any longer on family relationship but on actual contributions to our society. 3. Once this is established, offer work permits (not citizenship) to those illegals who remain and are not criminals. Makes sense to me. Grade: A-.

13. TED CRUZ: Cruz was on his game Monday night, crisp, intelligent, to the point in his opposition to what he he calls the Washington Cartel. He also made clear his opposition to the Iran deal in strong terms, calling Obama the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism for releasing over $100 billion to the Iranians to finance Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and who knows who else. They say Cruz has lost the most from the Trump ascendancy. Maybe he’ll come back. Grade: A-.

Rarely do American Presidents display the raw willfulness that President Obama did Monday in rolling out his plan to reorganize the economy in the name of climate change. Without a vote in Congress or even much public debate, Mr. Obama is using his last 18 months to dictate U.S. energy choices for the next 20 or 30 years. This abuse of power is regulation without representation.

The so-called Clean Power Plan commands states to cut carbon emissions by 32% (from 2005 levels) by 2030. This final mandate is 9% steeper than the draft the Environmental Protection Agency issued in June 2014. The damage to growth, consumer incomes and U.S. competitiveness will be immense—assuming the rule isn’t tossed by the courts or rescinded by the next Administration.

President Obama says his nuclear deal with Iran depends on verification, not trust. But what if Iran has a very different interpretation of what verification entails than does Mr. Obama?

Take Ali Akar Velayati, a top adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who appeared on Al-Jazeera on July 31 and was asked about U.N. inspections of Iran’s military sites. Here’s how he replied, according to the Memri translation service:

“Regardless of how the P5+1 countries interpret the nuclear agreement, their entry into our military sites is absolutely forbidden. The entry of any foreigner, including IAEA inspectors or any other inspector, to the sensitive military sites of the Islamic Republic is forbidden, no matter what.”

The democratic world won the Cold War but has underestimated the tenacity of the new threats to freedom.
For the democracies to triumph in the long battle against Soviet communism enormous commitment was necessary. Both geopolitical and ideological, the struggle called for military investment, patience and resolve. As crucially, this challenge required a reserve of imagination for understanding and responding to the Soviet challenge with the ideas, media instruments and technology that were part of the democratic world’s natural competitive advantage.

In the aftermath of this exacting project, the United States and other established democracies exhaled, believing in the post-Cold War period that the world had indelibly changed and the forces of illiberalism were defeated.

Given the extent of the investment and duration of the struggle, the impulse to relax was understandable. With hindsight, however, a harsh reality has become clear: The democratic West won the Cold War but in the process lost its political imagination.

Today, a set of anti-democratic forces that we have found to be beyond the realm of our imagination have gathered momentum and are seeking to reshape the world order.
Russian President Vladimir Putin; an Islamic State militant; Chinese President Xi Jinping. ENLARGE

The headline of this column is lifted from a 1981 essay by the late Paul Fussell, the cultural critic and war memoirist. In 1945 Fussell was a 21-year-old second lieutenant in the U.S. Army who had fought his way through Europe only to learn that he would soon be shipped to the Pacific to take part in Operation Downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands scheduled to begin in November 1945.

Then the atom bomb intervened. Japan would not surrender after Hiroshima, but it did after Nagasaki.

I brought Fussell’s essay with me on my flight to Hiroshima and was stopped by this: “When we learned to our astonishment that we would not be obliged in a few months to rush up the beaches near Tokyo assault-firing while being machine-gunned, mortared, and shelled, for all the practiced phlegm of our tough facades we broke down and cried with relief and joy. We were going to live.”

Recently, my black brother shared an unfortunate incident. Years ago, police in two unmarked cars blocked his car. They jumped out pointing guns, demanding that he exit his car. My brother immediately raised his hands, but did not exit his car because he was frozen with fear. An officer pulled him out of his car onto the ground. My brother said, “Calm down! I am not resisting!”

After checking him out, the officers realized he was not their suspect. Rather than sending my brother on his way with an apology, the police framed him. My brother had an unopened six-pack of beer on the floor. An officer opened one of the beers and said, “You’re under arrest for drunk driving.” The bogus charge did not stick and my brother was released hours later, angry, and with a bitter taste in his mouth.

Ironically, my brother’s reason for telling me about the incident was to defend the police in the recent shooting and arrests covered 24/7 on CNN. He said the cops who framed him were a few bad apples which are everywhere in every profession. Amen to that. Jesus had 12 disciples and one was a bad apple. My brother made the point that he was not harmed because he submitted to the police’s authority. He noted that the blacks in the videos shown on TV did not submit to the police.

Then this anger should be channeled to support Ted Cruz not an oaf like Trump….rsk
Most of the Republicans attacking Donald Trump are missing the real significance of the Donald and his popularity. A lot of Republicans and independents don’t like establishment Republicans. They see them as an entitled elite that talks big but then compromises their principles in order to serve the interests of big business and to get along with their fellow social elites in the other party. They look at a Republican Congress’s record so far and see very little legislative pushback against an arrogant, lawless Progressive administration under which the federal Leviathan has waxed ever fatter and more intrusive.

That view may be simplistic, unfair, or or even untrue, but that’s irrelevant. It is the perception many voters have, and there is a lot of evidence that makes it plausible. Start with the confirmation of Loretta Lynch for Attorney General. The Senate should have voted her down and told Obama to come back when he had a servant of the law rather than a slavish minion of an imperial presidency. But too many Senators, frightened at appearing “racist” and “sexist,” and eager to display their bipartisan bona fides, folded their strong Constitutional hand when Obama shrewdly played both the race and the sex cards. An opportunity was lost to show Obama that Republicans were now going to play by his rules in order to reclaim their Constitutional authority.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/259676/legal-and-academic-equality-nonsense-walter-williams

A particular act or policy might not have a discriminatory intent, but that doesn’t let you off the hook. If it has a disproportionately negative impact on so-called protected classes, it is said to have a disparate impact and risks being prohibited by law. The uninformed assumption made by judges, lawyers and academics is that but for the fact of racial and sex discrimination, we all would be distributed across occupations, educational backgrounds and other socio-economic characteristics according to our percentages in the population. Such a vision is absolute nonsense. There is no evidence, anywhere, at any time, that but for the fact of discrimination, there would be proportional representation among various socio-economic characteristics. Let’s look at some disproportionalities, with an eye toward discovering the causes and then deciding what to do about them.

Every day brings America closer to the next presidential election. Every day also brings us closer to the debates in which candidates for America’s highest elected office will be questioned about their goals and visions for the future of our nation.

So many important questions that will need to be answered. Where will the moderators begin?

If the moderators are thoughtful and honest, they will begin by asking questions about that most important topic that plays a vital role in all of the other challenges and threats facing America and Americans today. That singular topic is immigration.