RUTHFULLY YOURS

How Taxing Organic Products Could Solve California’s Water Shortage
— Terry L. Anderson is the William A. Dunn Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center and the John and Jean DeNault Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. Henry I. Miller is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at the Hoover Institution.

California is in the fourth year of record-setting dearth of rain, with virtually the entire state experiencing “exceptional drought.” In response, Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a 25 percent reduction in the state’s water use — a mandate that is long on directives and short on incentives. The governor proposes to reduce acreage in lawns, prohibit new homes from irrigating with potable water, and offer rebates for replacing old toilets. Nowhere to be found are increases in water prices to induce conservation.

We have a better idea.

One of the few things economists can agree on is that increasing the price of a good will decrease the quantity demanded. For this reason, virtually every policy wonk who worries about global warming agrees that pricing carbon with a revenue-neutral carbon tax is a way to get us out of our cars and onto our bikes. Similarly, water-policy analysts agree that California’s thirst for water won’t be significantly reduced until consumers are faced with a more realistic price for the “clear gold.”

In that spirit, we propose a revenue-neutral tax on all organic products — food, linens, clothing, pillows, tobacco, etc.

How will taxing organic products help to conserve water? The answer is that organic agriculture uses more of critical inputs — labor, land, and water — than conventional agriculture. Taxation would reduce the demand for water-wasting organic products relative to non-organic alternatives, and thereby reduce some of the pressure on California’s dwindling water supplies.

Applicable precedent clearly shows that the president is going way beyond his constitutionally limited powers.
With the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals soon to decide on whether to keep the freeze on President Obama’s new and expanded amnesty programs, the Immigration Reform Law Institute — along with The Remembrance Project, The Federation for American Immigration Reform, and The National Sheriffs’ Association — has filed a friend-of-the-court brief outlining some of the weakest and most misleading legal arguments made by the Department of Justice. New research shows that the programs are even more in conflict with legal precedent and even farther outside the president’s constitutional powers than previously thought.

If George Stephanopoulos had simply donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation while also serving as one of its favorite media panelists, the controversy over his conflicts of interest would be much less. Stephanopoulos would be guilty of a clear error, but he also would have had a lot of media company.

What makes his scandal different is that he himself chose to interrogate Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash, the new exposé on the Clinton Foundation. If you watch the interview, it’s pretty obvious that Stephanopoulos is playing prosecuting attorney against Schweizer while also declining to ask key questions, for instance, about Hugh Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother and his highly questionable dealings involving the foundation. In an op-ed today in USA Today, Schweizer says he views himself as a victim of “hidden hand journalism” in which his work was undermined without the audience’s knowing the interviewer’s biases.

That is no doubt one reason that Carole Simpson, a former colleague of Stephanopoulos’s at ABC News, decided to drop a bomb on him today on Reliable Sources, CNN’s media-criticism show. “There is a coziness that George cannot escape,” Simpson explained. “While he did try to separate himself from his political background to become a journalist, he really isn’t a journalist. . . . And I am sorry that again the public trust in the media is being challenged and frayed because of the actions of some of the top people in the business.”

What to think about George Stephanopoulos?

Some years ago, I worked with a young man who would later become momentarily infamous, during the season of Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair, when he was found to have fabricated aspects of stories for a very high-profile national news outlet. I found all those episodes maddening: As a writer for small community newspapers, I was used to being blown off by sources, accustomed to politicians and other worthies refusing to return my calls. But if you’re a writer for the Washington Post or The New Yorker, people pick up the phone when you ring.

There’s no excuse for the small fry, and there’s really, really no excuse for bigfoot reporters from the majors.

Call me a snob, but I have always been mystified when fabrications show up in the pages of prestigious publications such as the New York Times or The New Republic. I recently taught a seminar at Hillsdale, partly on the subject of Rolling Stone’s shameful, fictitious account of a brutal gang rape at the University of Virginia, a crime that did not in reality happen. How does this sort of thing make it into print, not in some backwater weekly but in a magazine with real editorial resources? We all make errors, and sometimes we make embarrassing errors, and the potential for making embarrassing errors increases the higher up the journalistic food chain one goes, simply because nobody is paying much attention to youngsters writing business features for the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Rolling Stone’s Sabrina Rubin Erdely got badly snookered by a source. That happens. I once got badly snookered by a source and published a caustic editorial criticizing the University of Texas for doing something that it hadn’t actually done. That was when I was in college, and that is, to some extent, what college newspapers are for.

The cloth that obliterates the face sends a message of separation and rejection, so it is no surprise that Australians of non-Muslim backgrounds are appalled. By blacking-out and demeaning womanhood, an implanted culture bares its contempt for a tolerant and easy-going host

It is said that within hours of birth a baby will respond to a human face. Adults can instantly recognise hundreds of faces. As we move among other people we constantly study faces and react to them. In any social interaction our gaze rarely moves away from the face or faces in front of us. And we are equally self-conscious of the effect our own face may be having on others. Our faces are the door to our identity, the first road to the person and mind behind that mobile and flexible mask of skin that may be the instrument of both revelation and concealment. It is the screen on which our emotions may be read and our motives guessed. It is canvas and billboard communicating an infinite variety of messages to others. We never cease to wonder what others are making of us. The idea of a faceless human society is unthinkable.

So the face may be used for all sorts of intentions; such as attracting attention, or admiration, or curiosity, or friendship, or displaying enmity or disgust, and for a thousand other purposes. It is the silent companion of the voice in every human transaction.

If Christians were apt to lop heads every time Jesus was lampooned, the moral obligation would be to pile on even more ridicule until they accepted that giving offence is a basic freedom. Muslims who wish to live in the secular West need to absorb that same lesson.

By holding a Mohammad cartoon-drawing competition, Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer deliberately set out to offend the religious sensibilities of Muslims. That is clear. It is also clear that the hand-wringing over the event was a pathetic betrayal of our Western values.

It goes without saying, or it should, that those who will kill because their religious beliefs are mocked must be continually subject to such mocking. The only question is whether people are brave enough, like Ms Geller and Mr Spencer. This is not just free speech in action; it is refusing to kowtow to barbarians.

The warmth and hospitality that Pope Francis showed to Raúl Castro at the Vatican last week has baffled many Catholics—and for good reason. The dictator went to Rome for a PR boost. The pontiff obliged him.

During their encounter Castro mocked the faith with a quip about returning to the church if the pope behaved. He also mocked every Cuban refugee, dead or alive, by giving the pope, of all things, a piece of art depicting a migrant at prayer.

Pope Francis gave the dictator a copy of his 2013 apostolic exhortation titled “The Joy of the Gospel,” in which he sharply criticizes economic freedom. Talk about preaching to the converted. As Raúl put it, “The pontiff is a Jesuit, and I, in some way, am too. I studied at Jesuit schools.” No kidding.

BAGHDAD—Islamic State seized control of the capital of Iraq’s largest province, killing hundreds of government forces and dealing a crushing setback to U.S.-backed efforts to halt the spread of the extremist group.

The fall of the western city of Ramadi, once home to nearly half a million people, represents Islamic State’s biggest military victory this year, gaining it another major Iraqi city among the territory it controls in Iraq as well as Syria.

The advance, a day after a U.S. special-operations team in Syria killed Islamic State’s finance leader, has exposed the fragility of Iraqi forces, despite U.S. efforts to train them. Just as army units melted away in the Iraqi city of Mosul last summer, local police fled by the hundreds from Ramadi.

In Washington, neither the situation in Anbar nor the developments in Syria were seen as likely to alter the timing or tempo of U.S. operations. Both the U.S. raid in Syria and the apparent fall of Ramadi reflect President Barack Obama’s attempts to minimize the chances of large-scale involvement by American forces, and are unlikely to lead to deeper U.S. action in either country.

Competing with the WSJ’s coup in first publicizing the Asian Tiger Mom, the Times has captured Wednesday Martin, an anthropologist whose subject has been the super-rich slender mothers of the upper east side. She has also covered the same demographic in London but for the interest of their local readers, the Times has focused on the local “Poor Little Rich Women” who have been coined by Ms. Martin with the cliche’d acronym Glam SAHMS – glamorous stay at home moms. (SundayReviewNYT5/17) From the pictures on her website, we see that Wednesday has obviously learned a thing or two from her life among the savages – the best place to get her hair colored, where to buy de rigeur high heels and brightly colored sleeveless dresses and how to get a professional make-up job before embarking on a public relations campaign. Despite her insistence that she was up front with her subjects about writing a book, she clearly felt the need to look just like the women she was preparing to eviscerate.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs staged a highly successful
event at the 5th Global Forum for Combating Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem
between 12-14 May.

Delegates from around the world gathered to hear an impressive array
of speakers, led by Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. The
conference was intense. Even the lunches during the three days became
platforms for keynote speakers including Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive
Vice Chairman of the Confederation of Presidents of Major American
Jewish Organization, Robert Wistrich,