RUTHFULLY YOURS

It will ensure access to overseas markets for American companies and products

By almost every standard, America’s economic recovery following the 2008 recession has been disappointing. In fact, the Commerce Department just released revised estimates showing negative growth in the first quarter of this year. Under President Obama’s leadership, Washington has unleashed an avalanche of anti-growth regulations onto Main Street that impact virtually every sector of our economy. Combined with an anti-growth tax code, this economic agenda has stalled America’s post-recession economic growth and left hard-working taxpayers struggling as a result.

While it’s unlikely there will be any significant change in the status quo for the remaining two years of this administration, there remain a few areas where Republicans and Democrats can agree and can work together.

The late Saul Alinsky, the father of the community-organizing model that inspired both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, would be delighted. The man who championed moral relativism in tearing down the establishment (“In war, the end justifies almost any means”) is calling the tune of the Democratic party on voting issues.

Last March, President Obama rhapsodized about what would happen under mandatory voting: “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.” Obama once served as the lawyer for the disgraced and defunct voter-registration group ACORN, and he is still toeing its line.

Then last week, Hillary Clinton demanded that the federal government override state laws and automatically register everyone to vote and then offer at least 20 days of early voting, turning Election Day into an Election Month. Both would dramatically complicate the job of already-overburdened voter registrars and make it harder to catch potential fraud. In the case of New York v. United States (1992) and other cases, the Supreme Court has clearly ruled that it is beyond Congress’s power to do what Hillary wants.

This week, the journal Science, publishing a paper by US government scientists, reported [2] that there has been no global warming “pause” over the last 18 years, and the 2013 UN/IPCC report [3] claiming the presence of such an ongoing pause is wrong. But it’s more that Science journal is wrong.

This is going to get geeky, so bear with me a moment. According to the authors of the Science study, however, the UN/IPCC’s data was flawed. Using “corrected” measurements, they claim that temperatures rose at a rather significant rate of 0.106°C per decade between 1998 and 2014, more than twice the rate the IPCC reported the year before. The Science article, after all, “adjusted” the data for biases, and the IPCC didn’t.

“I hope that this study helps to put this false idea of a hiatus to rest,” sniffed [4] Stefan Rahmstorf, a professor of ocean physics at Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, who was not involved in the study. “It didn’t have any merit in the first place.”

In his interview to Israeli TV [2] last Tuesday night, President Obama emphasized the theme of what he considers excessive Israeli fear. He referred to “balanc[ing] a politics of hope and a politics of fear,” said that “politics and…fears are driving the [Israeli] government’s response” to regional developments, and referred to “an Israeli politics that’s motivated only by fear….”

The upshot: if Israelis weren’t so full of fears, instilled by their government under four-times-elected Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, they would make peace with the Palestinians, help get a Palestinian state established in the West Bank and Gaza with a corridor between those two parts, and then have little or nothing to fear.

Obama’s words have been well picked apart by (among others) Times of Israel editor-in-chief David Horovitz—who is not a right-winger—in this riposte [3]. Horovitz refers, among other things, to the upcoming Iran deal, which basically lets Iran keep all its nuclear facilities and indeed evokes wall-to-wall fears in Israel; to Obama’s negotiators’ failure to get a good deal with Iran when it was truly reeling from the sanctions; to the “Arab Spring” and what would have happened if Israel had given the Golan Heights away to Syria back when it was constantly hectored to do so; and to Obama’s failure to take the Palestinian Authority to task publicly for one single iota of its ongoing annihilationist incitement against Israel.

Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.

You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.

Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the atrocities. And the cause of those atrocities is buried inside Directive 11.

With Obama’s typical use of technicalities to avoid transparency, Directive 11 was used to guide policy in the Middle East without being officially submitted. It is possible that it will never be submitted. And yet the Directive 11 group was described [2] as “just finishing its work” when the Arab Spring began.

That is certainly one way of looking at it.

This week the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law published my new research paper, “Economic Dealings With Occupied Territories.”

The gist (from the abstract):

This Article conducts a comprehensive survey of the relevant current state practice and judicial precedent regarding occupied territories, aside from the well-examined case of Israel. Much of this practice has never been considered by scholars, let alone examined holistically. Clear patterns emerge when state practice is examined globally, and the principles they suggest are in turn reaffirmed by recent path-breaking decisions of European national courts.

State practice and decisions of important national courts support a fully permissive approach to economic dealings by third-party states or nationals in territories under prolonged occupation or illegal annexation. There is no obligation on third-party states to block such activity, or to insist on particular language on product labels, or to ensure that their foreign aid funds do not cross into occupied territory.

Can Israel Unite?

Here in Jerusalem there are pensioners old enough to remember how, almost a half-century ago, Israel’s first national-unity government was born. You might say its father was Gamal Abdel Nasser, president of Egypt. He’d blockaded the Straits of Tiran via which Israel got oil from Iran, booted the UN peacekeepers from Sinai, massed his army there, and declared that his objective in any resulting war would be the end of the Zionist entity. “Death to Israel!” chanted the multitudes in Tahrir Square. Meanwhile the U.S., which ten years before had promised to keep the straits open, was too busy in Vietnam to keep its word.

Things in 1967 were clear. We faced an emergency, faced it by ourselves, and faced it with a government most of us didn’t trust anymore. “The government in its present composition,” said the editors of Haaretz, referring to the coalition headed by the Mapai party (the precursor of today’s Labor) under Levi Eshkol, “cannot lead the nation in its time of danger.” A few days after this call for a change, Eshkol and the Mapai barons who’d founded, built, defended, and run the country practically by themselves for its first nineteen years did what had to be done. They brought into the cabinet not just the one-eyed Moshe Dayan of the breakaway Rafi party but the radioactive Menachem Begin, founder and chief of Herut, the successor of the pre-state Irgun and precursor of Likud.

This week health insurers announced they will hike premiums on ObamaCare plans by double digits in 2016. Yet it’s not ObamaCare buyers who are getting gouged.
For the most part, what consumers have to pay is calculated based on their income.
They don’t pay the sticker price. It’s you – the taxpayers – who get taken to the cleaners, because you foot the bill for the subsidies paid directly to the insurers.
That makes the Supreme Court ruling in King v. Burwell, expected this month, even more consequential. It will determine the fate of these subsidies in 37 states.
Without subsidies, ObamaCare buyers in those states will have to pay the actual – and unaffordable – sticker price of ObamaCare. And you – taxpayers – will not have to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars to subsidize insurers over the next decade.

Friday evening I spoke in Daphne Alabama to the Baldwin County GOP on the subject of the individual responsibility to preserve liberty. It was their “Celebration of Patriotism” event but one thing we must re-learn in America is the call of patriots. An integral part of being a true patriot is the moral courage to make a stand against the tentacles of tyranny – after all that is how our nation began. But what perplexes me is how our culture has become so confused on what courage really is.

This past week there were so many – including our own president – who took to the airwaves to profess the courageous actions of one person who decided to transform from being a man into a woman. I found that response to be rather, well, shall we say, quite over the top. Then again, somewhere in hidden rooms people are deciding the new standards of courage, coolness, and acceptance. So I think that at this late hour, 11:24pm Central Time. I will offer a reminder to America of what courage was and still is.

The great attraction of Siberia for three centuries of settlers, free and otherwise, had been the chance to start afresh in a land where no one would ask too many questions about a person’s past. Shaking off history remains the oldest tradition of them all
It was at one of the smaller towns along the Trans-Siberian Railway, one of the two-minute stops that are so easy to miss altogether between Novosibirsk and Krasnoyarsk, that the government inspectors boarded our train. My husband Timothy and I were alerted to their presence when the stewardess who had taken our tickets came to our cabin shortly after 9 p.m. and told us that “inspectors of the regime” were aboard, and could we please lock our door and not open it for any reason until she came to fetch us. We did as she said, and also closed the window curtains. It was not necessary to turn out the lights, for we had not figured out how to turn them on or indeed whether they were working or broken. The last thing Timothy said before we lapsed into silence was, “This supports my bribe theory.”