RUTHFULLY YOURS

Although El Niño has increased the snowpack in the Sierra Nevadas, the Golden State’s historic drought isn’t over. Yet the Obama administration has decided to block a privately financed project that could supply water to 400,000 Californians, even though the project has been approved by an alphabet soup of state and local agencies. The result will be to trap vast amounts of a precious resource beneath the Mojave Desert. Is water the new fossil fuel?

This tale of political and regulatory obstructionism begins in 1998, when Cadiz Inc., a Los Angeles-based company, developed plans for a groundwater bank and well-field on 70 square miles of private land overlying the base of the Mojave’s massive Fenner Valley and Orange Blossom Wash watersheds. Over centuries the aquifers there have amassed as much as 34 million acre feet of water, enough to sustain all of California’s households for several years.

However, tens of thousands of acre feet percolate into salty dry lakes and evaporate each year. Cadiz proposed capturing and exporting the groundwater to Southern California residents. The Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project could also help store occasional excess flows from the Colorado River that would otherwise drain to the Pacific Ocean.

Water experts such as those at the Public Policy Institute of California have recommended using groundwater banks to recharge aquifers during wet years and expand the state’s storage capacity. Relative to dams, storing water underground reduces evaporation and environmental harm.

None of this mattered to various green lobbies and California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who complained that the water project would deplete mountain springs and harm wildlife. But environmental reviews by hydrogeologists confirm that the nearest spring—located 11 miles away and 1,000 feet above the aquifer—would not be affected. Nor would fauna, which don’t rely on groundwater. After an exhaustive review, the U.S. Interior Department approved the project in 2002, but Sen. Feinstein maintained her opposition. CONTINUE AT SITE

Dannel Malloy: Fighting the Real Eneny By Matthew Hennessey —

Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy is a big fan of the meaningless political gesture. When it comes to virtue signaling, he prefers it to be as divorced from tangible consequences as possible. To the extent that his showboating can be timed to distract attention from Connecticut’s imbalanced budget and crumbling economy, all the better.

Last year, Malloy signed an executive order banning official travel to Indiana, which had just passed a Religious Freedom Restoration Act. He did this in response to the demands of precisely no one in his state. Somehow it never got through to the former Stamford mayor that Connecticut has had a RFRA of its own on the books since 1993. Turns out that Nutmeggers enjoy even sturdier religious-freedom protections than Hoosiers do.

Malloy must have enjoyed the afternoon of attention that the Indiana incident brought, because last month he leapt at another juicy opportunity to grab the mic and advertise his pristine virtue. This time it was North Carolina’s democratically elected legislature that no one in Connecticut was demanding be punished. Tar Heel State lawmakers drew the ire of righteous liberals everywhere when they passed a bill requiring that people use bathrooms and changing facilities according to their biological gender.

You could practically taste Malloy’s joy as he again reached for his executive pen and signed an order banning official travel from Connecticut to North Carolina. “This law is not just wrong,” he said. “It poses a public-safety risk to Connecticut residents traveling through North Carolina.” That’s right — a public-safety risk.

RELATED: Connecticut’s Progressive Nutmegs: Liberals Policies Are Driving a Great State to Economic Suicide

This week — just because why not — Malloy also banned non-essential official travel to Mississippi, because of a law passed there under the principle known as representative democracy. Conveniently, Mississippi is a state that no Connecticut official really needs to visit, and about whose legislature no Connecticut resident gives a flying finger sandwich.

These invitations to empty gesture couldn’t come at a finer time for Governor Malloy. You may think of Connecticut as a wealthy place, and you’re not wrong. It is the state with the highest per capita income in the country. But it’s also a basket case. Here’s a little rundown on just how well Connecticut is faring under Malloy’s leadership.

Connecticut has a $900 million, union-shaped hole in its budget that some Democratic state lawmakers would like to fill by seizing part of Yale University’s massive endowment. Malloy has been slashing services and warning that the milliony deficit will very shortly become a billiony one. The state’s ravenous public-pension system is only half funded. It swallows up $1.5 billion annually in public money, a figure my colleague Steven Malanga projects could double within a decade.

The de facto immigration policy of the United States is to rapidly increase the number of Muslims in this country. I doubt very much that this has been articulated, but it is what is happening, beneath the radar. Donald Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim entry has riled the elites but received majority support in every poll that I have seen. The plain fact is that Islam is a political ideology that requires its adherents to support the imposition of sharia law, which is deeply antithetical to our Constitution.

Now comes a report from the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest that the Daily Caller News Foundation has gained access to:

From 2009 to 2013, the U.S. issued 680,000 green cards to migrants from Muslim countries, more than twice the approximately 270,000 green cards issued to migrants from European countries. Green cards entitle migrants to legal permanent residency in the country and work authorization, federal benefits, and the chance to apply for citizenship.

The numbers are illustrated in a chart below by the Senate Subcommittee on Immigration and the National Interest, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation. If laws are not changed, the U.S. is expected to issue another 680,000 green cards in the following five-year period.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-civil-illiberties-union-targets-a-yeshiva-1460069202

Rabbi Aharon Kotler arrived in the U.S. on April 10, 1941, having escaped Lithuania as the Nazis approached. Even as the Holocaust proceeded to destroy Jewish life in Europe, Rabbi Kotler declared that he would rebuild it in America.

He convinced 13 students to join him in Lakewood, N.J., where in 1943 he founded Beth Medrash Govoha. Today, BMG enrolls more than 6,800. Another mark of its success is that the school now has become caught up in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union.

In 2013 the state of New Jersey decided to give grants to colleges and universities to promote business and job opportunities. BMG was awarded $10.6 million to help build a new library and improve other of its facilities.

But the ACLU filed a lawsuit against New Jersey, objecting that the grant violates the state constitution. It is also offended that BMG is an all-male school, even though that is perfectly legal. After years of procedural wrangling, the lawsuit will be heard in a New Jersey appellate court on Monday—75 years, almost to the day, since Rabbi Kotler debarked in San Francisco and set about to transform Jewish life in America.

If that isn’t a sufficient good omen, there is also Harvard Law School Prof. Noah Feldman’s prediction, in a Bloomberg article shortly after the lawsuit was filed, that the ACLU’s challenge “is on shaky constitutional grounds and will probably fail.”

Let’s start with a stated purpose of the grants, which were intended to help spur economic development. BMG’s primary achievement is as an academic institution, but along the way it has transformed its hometown. Thousands of its alumni have purchased homes, raised families and created businesses in Lakewood and across New Jersey.

A 2015 report commissioned by the school shows that its alumni have created more than 3,000 businesses and employ about 11,000 people in Lakewood alone. The report credits the BMG community with paying more than $100 million in annual property and other local taxes. All of which is to say that the yeshiva fits the profile to be eligible for the grant. CONTINUE AT SITE

Hillary Clinton is good at imagining partisan plots, and to listen to her team, no less than several inspectors general, the intelligence community, and the entire Republican ecosphere are colluding to turn her home-brew email system into a fake scandal. To this conspiracy, she must now add the federal judiciary.

In recent weeks, not one, but two, esteemed federal judges have granted an outside group—Judicial Watch—the right to conduct discovery into the origins and handling of her private email system. It’s a reminder that Mrs. Clinton’s biggest problem this election isn’t Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Her problem is a 1966 statute known as the Freedom of Information Act, and the judges who enforce it.

The judges have taken unprecedented steps to resolve this case. It is exceedingly rare—almost unheard of—for a judge to allow discovery in a FOIA proceeding. This is a testament to how grave Mrs. Clinton’s email problem is. In the usual course of things, an outside group demands documents, a judge requires a federal department to hand them over, and the public learns something.

In this case—as we all know—the problem is that the State Department doesn’t have the documents. Or rather, it can’t confirm that it has them all, because State left it to Mrs. Clinton and her aides to possess them, and then to unilaterally decide what to hand over. To Judge Royce Lamberth, this is cut and dry “evidence of government wrong-doing and bad faith,” and the law demands a full accounting of how this situation came to be, what records exist, and where they are now.

Speaking of the judge’s words, they too are a testament to Mrs. Clinton’s mess. Judge Lamberth was unplugged in his order, calling the former secretary of state’s email set up “extraordinary,” and slamming “constantly shifting admissions by the government and former government officials” about the setup. Judge Emmet Sullivan, the first to allow discovery, referred in his own hearing to Mrs. Clinton’s “totally atypical system” and noted that it “boggles the mind that the State Department allowed this circumstance to arise in the first place. It’s just very, very, very troubling.”CONTINUE AT SITE

The attorneys general of New York and California are on the warpath. They’re fed up with dissent over the science and politics of global warming, and they’re ready to investigate the liars. California’s Kamala Harris and New York’s Eric Schneiderman have Exxon in their sights, and they’re trying to pry open the books to see whether the corporation properly warned shareholders “about the risk to its business from climate change.” Not to be outdone, Attorney General Loretta Lynch revealed that the federal Department of Justice has “discussed” the possibility of civil suits against the fossil-fuel industry. The smell of litigation is in the air.

Some people are worried about little things like the “First Amendment,” “academic freedom,” and “scientific integrity.” Not me. I hate unscientific nonsense. So if Harris and Schneiderman are up for suing people who’ve made piles of cash peddling exaggerations and distortions, let’s roll out some test cases. I’ve got three ideas:

United States v. Al Gore. Ten years ago, the former vice president of the United States launched an extraordinarily lucrative career by selling climate doomsday. While promoting his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, he made a shockingly false statement. He said that unless the world took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gases, it would reach a “point of no return” in ten years.

Ten years have passed. Is there a scientific consensus that the world has reached a “point of no return?” No? Gore’s documentary grossed almost $50 million worldwide. I’d suggest that number as a starting point for damages. But of course you’ll need to subpoena all his business records and communications. We wouldn’t want him hiding his ill-gotten gains, and goodness knows that public schools could use some cash.

New York v. ABC/Walt Disney Company: If you thought the case against Gore was compelling, I present to you this complete absurdity from ABC:

The Veterans Affairs–​scandal headlines speak for themselves. The Daily Beast: “Veteran Burned Himself Alive outside VA Clinic”; azfamily.com: “Dead veterans canceling their own appointments?”; New York Times: “Report Finds Sharp Increase in Veterans Denied V.A. Benefits,” “More than 125,000 U.S. veterans are being denied crucial mental health services,” and “Rubio, Miller ask committee to back VA accountability bills.”

Are these headlines from 2014, when the VA scandal broke? The sad answer is no. All these headlines — and so many more — are from the past ten days, a fact that also speaks for itself.

Two years ago this week — thanks to courageous whistleblowers in Phoenix and a fed-up House Veterans Affairs Committee chairman — the world was finally exposed to rampant VA dysfunction and corruption. Dozens of veterans had died while waiting for care at the Phoenix VA — which was, unfortunately, just the tip of the iceberg. Across the country, VA officials had manipulated lists to hide real health-care wait times. In total, thousands — and possibly far more — met the same fate: waiting, and dying, at the hands of a calcified and soulless bureaucracy. Investigations were launched, and VA Secretary Eric Shinseki eventually resigned.

Even the reflexively defensive Obama administration confirmed the obvious in a June 2014 report, admitting that “a corrosive [VA] culture has led to personnel problems across the Department that are seriously impacting morale and by extension, the timeliness of health care,” with “problems . . . exacerbated by poor management and communication structures, distrust between some VA employees and management, a history of retaliation toward employees raising issues, and a lack of accountability across all grade levels.” The report flatly states that the VA must be “restructured and reformed.”

Yet, two years after the VA scandal broke, no such restructuring or reform has occurred. Instead, almost nothing has changed at the failing Department of Veterans Affairs. VA officials have kept their jobs, and veterans continue to be treated like second-class citizens inside their own system. But after two years of committee hearings, two years of investigations, and two years of funding increases for the VA, how bad could it really still be? Judge for yourself.

Welcome murderers, rapists, and thieves as your tenants or you will face huge monetary penalties, the Obama administration said in a new threat aimed at the nation’s landlords.

Among convicted criminals, only drug dealers and drug manufacturers will be excluded from special protection as tenants under the administration’s novel interpretation of housing law.

“The fact that you were arrested shouldn’t keep you from getting a job and it shouldn’t keep you from renting a home,” Obama’s far-left Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Julian Castro, told the annual meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition this week.

This is part of the campaign by the most radical left-wing president in American history to de-stigmatize criminality itself. The Left views criminals — especially minorities — as victims of society, oppressed for mere nonconformism. Lawbreakers, they believe, should be treated the same as law-abiding citizens.

Obama’s policies strike at the very heart of the criminal law system. Removing the stigma of a criminal record undermines the system and respect for the law and attacks the underpinnings of civilization itself.

Of course, a criminal record carries with it a degree of social stigma, as it should. Removing or watering down that socially beneficial stigma reduces disincentives to commit crimes and hinders the marginalization of the antisocial. Without stigma and social ostracism, society would eventually collapse.

But this administration treats criminals as a protected class. It wants felons’ voting rights restored. It supports legislation “banning the box,” that is, banning employment applications that ask if the applicant has a criminal record. It wants to empty the prisons and afford illegal aliens special protection by frustrating law enforcement in so-called sanctuary cities.

Refusing a prospective tenant is now fraught with danger in the Obama era. Since minorities are over-represented in America’s criminal cohort, landlords are automatically deemed racist if they balk at housing criminals.

President Obama’s regulators aren’t slowing down, alas. And on Wednesday they unveiled another part of their plan to push Americans out of private investment accounts and into government-run plans.

The Department of Labor says its so-called fiduciary rule will make financial advisers act in the best interests of clients. What Labor doesn’t say is that the rule carries such enormous potential legal liability and demands such a high standard of care that many advisers will shun non-affluent accounts. Middle-income investors may be forced to look elsewhere for financial advice even as Team Obama is enabling a raft of new government-run competitors for retirement savings. This is no coincidence.

Labor’s new rule will start biting in January as the President is leaving office. Under the rule, financial firms advising workers moving money out of company 401(k) plans into Individual Retirement Accounts will have to follow the new higher standards. But Labor has already proposed waivers from the federal Erisa law so new state-run retirement plans don’t have the same regulatory burden as private employers do.

This competitive advantage could be significant. Last month the board of California’s new “Secure Choice” retirement plan wrote to state legislators about their “exciting win” in Washington. They reported that employers enrolling workers in the new government-run plan “would have no liability or fiduciary duty for the plan.” Score! The California bureaucrats added that “we have been given the green light to auto-enroll workers into an Individual Retirement Account (IRA).”

Meanwhile, there are only losses for private competitors. The final rule Labor Secretary Tom Perez unveiled Wednesday is being marketed as less onerous than an earlier draft. Thus much of the financial industry is going to take a few weeks to decide on its response. But the main question is exactly how many billions of dollars in costs and lost opportunities will be visited upon investors. And how big the incentive will be to seek government options.

The White House claims it is solving a $17 billion problem for consumers who suffer from “conflicted advice,” but the investment advisory industry is already among the most regulated. The $17 billion figure was assembled from a variety of data sets, many of which weren’t measuring the alleged problem that Team Obama says it can solve, and some of which were generated by people who don’t endorse the White House analysis. In any case government-run plans will have their own conflicts of interest—politicians want the money—and will be expensive. CONTINUE AT SITE