RUTHFULLY YOURS

Will the stock Clinton scandal response be enough to weather this storm?

Say this about Bill and Hillary Clinton: They are predictable. Some politicians dare to change, even to evolve, but not the former first couple. In these uncertain political times, Team Clinton’s lack of ethics—and its stock response when caught—is our one constant.

The details change, of course. In 1978 it was lucrative cattle futures; in 2014 it was lucrative speeches. In the 1990s it was missing Whitewater and Rose Law firm records; today it is missing emails. In 2000 it was cash for pardons; now it’s cash for Russian uranium mines. In Little Rock, it was Bill’s presidential campaign vehicle; in New York, it’s Hillary’s—and now known as the Clinton Foundation. Details.

The standard operating procedure never changes, however. It is as if the Clintons have—filed within easy reach on a shelf—a book titled “Clinton Scandals for Dummies.”

Even China is now raising flags about nuclear proliferation. Beijing helped Pakistan get the bomb in the 1980s and has been North Korea’s patron from one Dear Leader to the next. But in February Chinese officials warned a group of Americans that Pyongyang has many more nuclear warheads than previously believed: up to 20 already, perhaps 40 by next year.

The new Chinese assessment, reported Thursday by the Journal, is based on updated intelligence concerning North Korea’s ability to enrich uranium. The North Koreans had no such capability when they signed the 1994 Agreed Framework with the Clinton Administration, which required them to stop their nuclear-weapons efforts.

We’re not the first to make the comparison, but Bill and Hillary Clinton’s adventures in the uranium trade recall nothing as much as Tammany Hall’s concept of “honest graft.” Except maybe their never-ending use of power and status for personal and political gain requires a new special terminology. Dishonest graft?

The New York Times reported Thursday on the foreign cash that flowed into the Clinton Foundation between 2009 and 2013 as subsidiaries of the Russian state nuclear energy agency Rosatom acquired control of a Canada-based mining company called Uranium One. The story features the familiar Clinton touches: lucrative Kazakh mining concessions for the tycoon Frank Giustra, with Bill along as a character reference; a half-million-dollar-a-pop speech by the former President in Moscow for a Kremlin-linked bank; $2.35 million in secret donations from one family foundation to another. Our Kim Strassel has more nearby.

“The intellectual dishonesty of senior administration officials who are unwilling to admit when they are wrong is astounding. When assessing climate change, we should focus on good science, not politically correct science.”

‘Today, our planet faces new challenges, but none pose a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” President Obama wrote in his proclamation for Earth Day on Wednesday. “As a Nation, we must act before it is too late.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, in an Earth Day op-ed for USA Today, declared that climate change has put America “on a dangerous path—along with the rest of the world.”

Both the president and Mr. Kerry cited rapidly warming global temperatures and ever-more-severe storms caused by climate change as reasons for urgent action.

Given that for the past decade and a half global-temperature increases have been negligible, and that the worsening-storms scenario has been widely debunked, the pronouncements from the Obama administration sound more like scare tactics than fact-based declarations.

At least the United Nations’ then-top climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, acknowledged—however inadvertently—the faith-based nature of climate-change rhetoric when he resigned amid scandal in February. In a farewell letter, he said that “the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”

Instead of letting political ideology or climate “religion” guide government policy, we should focus on good science. The facts alone should determine what climate policy options the U.S. considers. That is what the scientific method calls for: inquiry based on measurable evidence. Unfortunately this administration’s climate plans ignore good science and seek only to advance a political agenda.

Climate reports from the U.N.—which the Obama administration consistently embraces—are designed to provide scientific cover for a preordained policy. This is not good science. Christiana Figueres, the official leading the U.N.’s effort to forge a new international climate treaty later this year in Paris, told reporters in February that the real goal is “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years.” In other words, a central objective of these negotiations is the redistribution of wealth among nations. It is apparent that President Obama shares this vision.

Judith Curry is Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

Stripped of dogma and green evangelism, the key issue is this: the inadequacies of current policies based on emissions reduction are leaving the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events largely unaddressed, whether caused by humans or natural variability.
Noted climate scientist Judith Curry neatly set out the weaknesses of the human-caused catastrophic global warming excitement when she testified this month before a US House of Representatives committee. Her written submission is here , but her verbal introduction is below:

THE central issue in the scientific debate on climate change is the extent to which the recent (and future) warming is caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions versus natural climate variability that are caused by variations from the sun, volcanic eruptions, and large-scale ocean circulations.

Recent data and research supports the importance of natural climate variability and calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. This includes

The slow down in global warming since 1998
Reduced estimates of the sensitivity of climate to carbon dioxide
Climate models that are predicting much more warming than has been observed so far in the 21st century

While there are substantial uncertainties in our understanding of climate change, it is clear that humans are influencing climate in the direction of warming. However this simple truth is essentially meaningless in itself in terms of alarm, and does not mandate a particular policy response. We have made some questionable choices in defining the problem of climate change and its solution:

JUST FOR THE RECORD: LAMAR SMITH RANKS A MINUS 4 FROM THE ARAB AMERICAN INSTITUTE INDICATING A STRONG PRO-ISRAEL RECORD…..RSK
The United States is now the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer, having recently overtaken both Saudi Arabia and Russia. Two decades ago, no one would have believed it. The practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has fueled this energy boom. Fracking has unlocked vast amounts of what used to be considered economically inaccessible oil and gas. Increased domestic energy production has benefited the environment, the economy and hardworking families who now enjoy reduced energy prices.
Natural gas provides affordable, clean and abundant energy that heats our homes and cooks our food. U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions have also fallen dramatically in recent years, in large part because of the use of natural gas in generating electricity.

California doesn’t need a global carbon-emissions regime; it needs a better water system.

That California’s catastrophic drought is a result of global warming has become a commonplace of contemporary political rhetoric. That truism isn’t true: Most scientific accounts of California’s current dry spell link recent low precipitation to naturally occurring atmospheric cycles, not to global warming. Indeed, most of the global-warming models relied upon by those advocating more-invasive environmental policies predict that warming would leave California with wetter winters — winter precipitation being critical to the snowpack-dependent state — rather than the drier winters at the root of the state’s current water crisis. What some studies do suggest is that warmer temperatures make the effects of scanty precipitation more intense for California’s end users of water, a reasonably straightforward proposition — higher temperatures will probably contribute to higher demand for water and will certainly contribute to the much more significant problem of evaporation, which steals tremendous amounts of water away from California’s outdated storage-and-conveyance infrastructure and imposes substantial water losses on old-fashioned irrigation systems.

How should one think about the unfolding allegations rocking the Clinton-Industrial Complex (which includes both her campaign and her foundation)? By now, you may have heard about Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. The book isn’t even out yet, and Clinton’s team is already sheltering in place like Churchill’s cabinet during the Blitz. That’s in part because Schweizer, a conservative author and dogged investigative journalist, has teamed up with the notorious right-wing rags the New York Times and the Washington Post to essentially re-report and expand on allegations made in the book.

Because it would be absurd to claim that these papers are part of the “vast right-wing conspiracy” — which won’t stop flacks from saying it — they are much better equipped to drop the payload over the target. Even Lawrence O’Donnell, a Democratic water-carrier of such sterling reliability that he makes Gunga Din look like a slacker, had to concede on MSNBC’s Morning Joe that the Clinton campaign no longer has a Schweizer problem. It has “a New York Times problem.” It’s hard to boil down the Times’ deeply detailed account, but the broad brushstrokes are as follows: A Canadian business wanted to sell its uranium mines in Kazakhstan and the U.S. to a Russian state-run — i.e., Vladimir Putin–run — firm. I know what you’re thinking: What could go wrong? In order to grease the skids — allegedly, of course — Canadian uranium moguls Frank Giustra and Ian Telfer gave millions to the Clinton Foundation and arranged for $500,000 speech by Bill Clinton (whose speaking fees mysteriously skyrocketed after his wife became secretary of state), bankrolled by a Russian investment bank with interests in the deal. While in Kazakhstan, former president Clinton agreed to hold a joint press conference with president-for-life Nursultan A. Nazarbayev. (He’s been getting “re-elected” with just shy of 100 percent of the vote since 1989.)

This is a vote of no confidence in Abbas and Fatah.

When you tell your people that Jews are awful, and do not want peace, and just want to kill Arabs and destroy their homes and holy sites, then people say, “This means Hamas is right. We should be killing the Jews and not making peace with them.”

Hamas has now apparently realigned with Iran, which is “rebuilding relations with the military wing of Hamas,” and has recently sent Hamas “tens of millions of dollars.”

Hamas’s crushing victory in the April 22 student council election at Bir Zeit University shows that the Islamist movement continues to maintain a strong presence in the West Bank.

Hamas supporters on campus won 26 seats, compared to 16 for their rivals in the Fatah faction, headed by Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas.

The results of the election mean that Bilal Barghouti, who is serving 16 life terms in prison for his role in a series of suicide attacks against Israel, has become the “Honorary Chairman of the Bir Zeit University Student Council.”

There are moments in history when we are called upon to stand up in behalf of a great and transcendent cause. Now is such a moment. Today, April 23rd, 2015 marks the 67th year of Israel’s independence. For many, Israel’s survival and success represents Ground Zero in our fight to save the world from the barbarism marching across the globe under the banner of the Crescent.

The battle raging today between those who wish to delegitimize and destroy Israel, as opposed to those who see its establishment as a miraculous and inspired saga (the Hand of God), is another chapter in that old battle between the forces of light vs. the forces of darkness, the spirit of the Divine against the stench of idolatry, freedom and dignity vs. tyranny and debasement of humankind. It is our battle, and it’s our once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to fight the good fight and stand against the impurity of the cynics and scoffers on the left and the barbarians at the gate. We are lucky to be living in a time when our turn at the plate is crucial and all-defining.