RUTHFULLY YOURS

It would be farfetched to expect most political leaders to be thoroughly knowledgeable of the issues they deal with, especially when it comes to international affairs; or to expect them to be particularly rational and ethical. Still, the new Swedish cabinet’s decision to recognize “Palestine” as a state must be singled out for its nastiness and nuttiness.

Prime Minister Stefan Löfven, who leads a minority “Red-Green” coalition of social democrats and greens, explained the move in the following terms:

The conflict between Israel and Palestine can only be solved with a two-state solution, negotiated in accordance with international law. A two-state solution requires mutual recognition and a will to peaceful co-existence. Sweden will therefore recognize the state of Palestine.

Sweden is a member of the European Union, and members are supposed to coordinate their diplomatic moves, especially on such touchy matters as the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict. So far, the EU has not made any common decision about recognizing Palestine as a state. Sweden’s Red-Greens do not seem to be aware of such niceties.

One wonders whether the Red-Greens are aware that a state, to be recognized, needs a clearly defined population, a clearly defined territory, and an effective government that can maintain law and order. None of the above is true of “Palestine,” whatever the current meaning of that word.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) — an autonomous authority established in 1993 according to a Declaration of Principles between the state of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (the Oslo Accords), and the closest thing to a “state of Palestine” – does not effectively rule the West Bank and Gaza, the two distinct territories that pass as “Palestinian territory.” As an effective government, the PA should be able to maintain law and order there. Everybody knows this is not the case in Gaza, which has been controlled by Hamas and Islamic Jihad since 2007. Yet this is hardly the case in the West Bank, either. Parts of it are still administered by Israel and enjoy Israel’s Supreme Court-monitored law and order. In other parts of the West Bank, PA rule — reduced, for all practical matters, to Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party rule — survives only thanks to a modicum of security cooperation with Israel.

In response to Prime Minister Löfven’s statement, one must ask how the two-state solution can work if one of the considered states – the Palestinian state-to-be — is openly opposed to it. Hamas and Islamic Jihad clearly say they will never recognize Israel. The nominal PA government and Fatah say they will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state – implying their strategy is to turn Israel into a binational state. This implication is coherent with their insistence that the so-called 1948 Palestinian refugees (a population they estimate as six million people) must be granted the right to return to Israel proper. When combined with the 1.7 million Israeli Arabs, this number would overwhelm the 6.6 million Israeli Jews.

Colorado Sen. Mark Udall has been called a lot of things, but the nickname highlighted during his Tuesday debate with Republican Cory Gardner deserves some meditation. “Mr. Udall,” said the female debate moderator, “your campaign has been so focused on women’s issues that you’ve been dubbed ‘Mark Uterus’ . . . Have you gone too far?”

Don’t tell Harry Reid , but the “war on women” theme is losing political altitude. Don’t tell the entire Democratic Party, in fact, which this year chose to elevate this attack—that Republicans are hostile to women—to the top of its political strategy. Mr. Reid spent most of the past year holding Senate show votes (on “equal” pay or the Violence Against Women Act) designed to give his candidates further political ammunition. Democrats by some estimates have already devoted as much as 60% of their $120 million in midterm TV advertising to the “war on women”—claiming Republican candidates are anti-birth-control, anti-women’s-health, anti-reproductive rights, anti-equal pay. Even Republicans at the height of anti-ObamaCare fervor were never so monomaniacal.

When a party throws $70 million at an issue, it will move the voter dial. Yet what’s remarkable is how little that dial is moving for Democrats compared with past elections. In Colorado, where Mr. Udall and his allies have beaten the “war on women” drum harder than any campaign, the most recent poll, from Quinnipiac, shows Mr. Gardner down by only three points among women. Colorado Republican Ken Buck, who failed in a Senate bid in 2010, lost women by 17 points.

New Fox News state polls show the same everywhere. Alaska Republican Senate candidate Dan Sullivan is losing women by five points. In Kentucky, GOP Sen. Mitch McConnell is down among women voters by two points—and he’s running against a Democratic woman. Republican Tom Cotton in Arkansas is outright tied among women against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor.

Credit for these tight margins goes partly to the GOP, which after too many thrashings finally came into an election with a counter-strategy. The National Republican Senatorial Committee put a new premium on picking nominees talented enough to avoid saying stupid stuff. This was no small task, given the media’s obsessive focus in interviews and debates on social issues, and thus the endless potential for Republican error. Less than a month from Election Day, the GOP has yet to suffer a Todd Akin moment.

Republican candidates have also gone on offense. Mr. Gardner (as well as a half-dozen other GOP Senate candidates) flummoxed the left with his support for over-the-counter birth control. The position has helped inoculate him from Democratic assaults. Republicans still could—and should—do more to highlight Democratic extremism on social issues. Mr. Udall, for instance, recently refused to say he was opposed to sex-selective abortions, meaning he’s apparently not against terminating girl babies solely because they are girls. War on women?

Karl Rove recently tried to advise Republicans on how the party can more effectively take back the Senate in November. He made two main suggestions.

One was that Republican candidates must “make the case for electing someone new who will be a check and balance in the Senate on Mr. Obama and his agenda, rather than returning a Democratic loyalist who toes his line.” Rove’s second suggestion was that the party should “offer a positive, optimistic conservative agenda to make independents who disapprove of Mr. Obama comfortable voting Republican.”

Rove is right on both counts, especially about offering a positive and optimistic conservative agenda.
But there’s one big problem. This advice is coming from Karl Rove.

Rove has never cared about conservatism and has spent his entire career opposing any Republican who might be successful in promoting or implementing a conservative agenda.

Rove belongs to the same tradition of moderates who fought Barry Goldwater in 1964, who pushed back against Ronald Reagan in 1976 and did everything they could to stop Reagan again in 1980. They said Reagan would be a disaster for the party and even the country.

Today, Reagan is one of the most well-remembered American presidents and remains the standard-bearer for what it means to be a conservative Republican, popularizing a small government message that GOP moderates said was too extreme to resonate with voters. As with Rove’s predictions about Mitt Romney’s chances in 2012, GOP moderates couldn’t have been more wrong about Reagan.

Rove and his ilk have opposed every significant conservative leader who has ever dared to challenge liberal or moderate Republican orthodoxy. A history lesson: Moderates wanted Gerald Ford and then George H.W. Bush over Ronald Reagan in 1976 and 1980. Similarly, Karl Rove and his friends wanted Arlen Specter over Pat Toomey in 2010. They wanted Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio in 2010. They wanted David Dewhurst over Ted Cruz in 2012.

Compared with President Barack Obama, even Jimmy Carter is John McCain. The former president practically synonymous with American weakness and retreat thinks Obama was too slow to act against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and gives his current strategy only “a possibility of success,” provided it involves (unspecified) ground troops.

When you are too passive for Jimmy Carter, it’s time for some soul-searching in the Situation Room. The late-1970s are calling and want their foreign policy back.

The war against ISIL so far is desultory and occasional, a campaign of underwhelming force. ISIL has still been on the verge of taking the Syrian town of Khobani abutting the Turkish border and on the offensive in Iraq. The erstwhile JV team is defying all the military might that the world’s lone superpower is willing to muster.

There has been renewed talk of how, as former secretary of defense Leon Panetta put it the other day, the fight against terrorism will be a 30-year war. At this rate, it will be a generational struggle merely to get ISIL out of Mosul.

As with all the president’s recent foreign policy failures, this wasn’t just predictable, it was predicted.

To this point, almost everything has lent credence to the skeptical interpretation of Obama’s war: That in reaction to a spectacular media event, the horrific ISIL beheadings, the president staged his own media event, an inconsequential bombing campaign accompanied by a tough-sounding, prime-time speech.

The experience of the surge in Afghanistan, the red line fiasco and now this, suggest that Obama is a hawk precisely to the extent he feels the politics don’t allow him to wiggle out of it.

His talk of Afghanistan as the good war in the 2008 campaign was too fresh for him to countenance an immediate defeat. So he ordered the surge and tried never to speak of it again and now wants to completely liquidate our military presence, on the failed model of Iraq.

He had seemed determined to strike Syria after Bashar Assad used chemical weapons last year, then found a way to crab-walk away from his own earnest warnings.

If the White House would falsify records about this, it can deceive the public about larger issues.

In news that must have left my friends at the New York Post — never mind the gang at The Daily Show – with a renewed confidence that ours is a just and beneficent God, the White House has been caught covering up a scandal involving a Cartagena hooker.

The phrase “Cartagena hooker” alone is a mellifluous gift to ink-stained wretches everywhere, but the revelation that the White House reassigned the alleged client of the aforementioned Andean call girl to the State Department’s office of “Global Women’s Issues” is the sort of flourish Tom Wolfe or Chris Buckley wouldn’t dare attempt as satire.

Let us back up for a moment. Two years ago, the Secret Service was humiliated in a terrible scandal. Agents sent to prepare for a presidential trip to Colombia availed themselves of the local service industry, as it were. The local cops were called in when one agent refused to compensate a woman for services rendered, contradicting ancient advice about the oldest profession: You don’t pay for the sex; you pay for the hooker to leave. Hats off to the Cartagena constabulary for their diligence in enforcing contract rights. Ten agents lost their jobs.

On April 23, 2012, then–White House press secretary Jay Carney said there were “no specific, credible allegations of misconduct by anyone on the White House advance team or the White House staff.”

“Nevertheless,” Carney said, “out of due diligence, the White House Counsel’s office has conducted a review . . . [and] came to the conclusion that there’s no indication that any member of the White House advance team engaged in any improper conduct or behavior.”

If the Washington Post’s exhaustive exclusive this week is to believed, that was what experts would call a lie. Secret Service investigators told the White House that Jonathan Dach also had too good a time in Cartagena. Dach, then a Yale law student, was a volunteer for the White House advance team. The lead investigator for the Department of Homeland Security – which oversees the Secret Service – says he was told “to withhold and alter certain information in the report of investigation because it was potentially embarrassing to the administration.”

Among the lengthening list of foreign-policy issues that President Obama has botched or ignored, none is more inexcusable than failing to exploit the bursting economic potential of the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The U.S. and Canada are in the midst of an historic boom of energy discovery and production. Mexico is on the cusp of exploiting its own vast energy resources. Unless the laws of economics have been repealed, the benefits of deepening the integration of these three neighboring economies in new jobs and per-capita wealth would be enormous. What’s missing is the political leadership necessary to start assembling one of the world’s most powerful economic regions.

That’s not entirely fair. There is indeed active political leadership—in Canada. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has decided he can’t wait for an American President who is still giving speeches about building his new economy around solar panels and windmill farms.

In September Mr. Harper visited London to ballyhoo the trade agreement completed between Canada and the European Union. Most notable, and disconcerting, was a remark Mr. Harper made there about the United States: “We know that the United States is unlikely to be a fast-growing economy for many years to come,” Mr. Harper said. “We’re in a globalized economy,” he added, noting it’s imperative to get Canada’s businesses into the global supply chain.

Ouch.

This isn’t just talk. In recent weeks, news has emerged that the Canadians have found a startling alternative to the Obama Keystone XL pipeline refusal: They are going to build a pipeline from the oil sands in Alberta and Saskatchewan to refineries in Saint John, New Brunswick, on the Atlantic Ocean.

The Energy East project will allow the Canadians to ship oil to Europe and points east. A Bloomberg News report says the Canadians are already lining up customers in India. Energy East hopes to be finished in 2018.

Good for Canadians. But we never thought we’d see the day that they’d steal a march on America’s entrepreneurs.

Mounting evidence suggests that basic assumptions about climate change are mistaken: The numbers don’t add up.

At the recent United Nations Climate Summit, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that “Without significant cuts in emissions by all countries, and in key sectors, the window of opportunity to stay within less than 2 degrees [of warming] will soon close forever.” Actually, this window of opportunity may remain open for quite some time. A growing body of evidence suggests that the climate is less sensitive to increases in carbon-dioxide emissions than policy makers generally assume—and that the need for reductions in such emissions is less urgent.

According to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, preventing “dangerous human interference” with the climate is defined, rather arbitrarily, as limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures. The Earth’s surface temperatures have already warmed about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1850-1900. This leaves 1.2 degrees Celsius (about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) to go.

In its most optimistic projections, which assume a substantial decline in emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the “dangerous” level might never be reached. In its most extreme, pessimistic projections, which assume heavy use of coal and rapid population growth, the threshold could be exceeded as early as 2040. But these projections reflect the effects of rising emissions on temperatures simulated by climate models, which are being challenged by recent observations.

Human-caused warming depends not only on increases in greenhouse gases but also on how “sensitive” the climate is to these increases. Climate sensitivity is defined as the global surface warming that occurs when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles. If climate sensitivity is high, then we can expect substantial warming in the coming century as emissions continue to increase. If climate sensitivity is low, then future warming will be substantially lower, and it may be several generations before we reach what the U.N. considers a dangerous level, even with high emissions.

The IPCC’s latest report (published in 2013) concluded that the actual change in 70 years if carbon-dioxide concentrations double, called the transient climate response, is likely in the range of 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. Most climate models have transient climate response values exceeding 1.8 degrees Celsius. But the IPCC report notes the substantial discrepancy between recent observation-based estimates of climate sensitivity and estimates from climate models.

It’s Nobel season again.

There is so much to be grateful for in the United States…..Freedoms,prosperity, capitalism and genius thrive here.

I exclude Nobel peace prizes because they have been awarded to “ignobel” liars and knaves.

In Chemistry: 50

In Economics: 43

In Physics: 66

In Medicine: 70

In Literature: 8

The Nobel Prize is an annual, international prize first awarded in 1901 for achievements in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. A prize in Economics started in 1969. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to over 850 individuals.

P.S. Jews have won a total of 41% of all the Nobel Prizes in economics, 28% of medicine, 26% of Physics, 19% of Chemistry, 13% of Literature and 9% of all peace awards.

Fjordman writes in today, calling attention to “the face of Eurabia” — the Islamic Europe identified and explicated by the great historian of dhimmitude Bat Ye’or, and which has now achieved critical mass before our eyes.

Take Sweden — exhibiting all signs of a police state that enforces ideological conformity on its citizens, most recently having imprisoned an artist for creating verboten artworks that reject establishment narratives on immigration and racism. Note: no such official example made of the gang of thugs whose beating with metal pipes sent a Swedish man to the hospital this summer for displaying an Israeli flag. And no such official agitation over the horrific rape epidemic suffered by Swedish women and girls by disproportinately Muslim rapists.

And so, from an Islamized-Leftist culture, an Islamized-Leftist body politic.

The Times of Israel reports:

Influx of refugees blamed for Sweden recognizing Palestinian state

Israel’s ambassador to Stockholm says Muslims fleeing Middle east have an outsized influence on leftist parties.

Stockholm’s announcement over the weekend that it would recognize the independent state of Palestine was influenced by the vocal and growing Muslim minority in Sweden, Israel’s ambassador to Sweden charged Sunday morning.

According to the ambassador, some 80,000 Arab refugees came to Sweden in 2014, mostly from Iraq and Syria. The Swedish population as a whole, he estimates, includes some 700,000 Muslims. GIven continued Muslim immigration into Sweden, this figure jibes with the US State Department’s estimate of five years ago that some 5 percent, or 500,000 of Sweden’s population of 9 million, was Muslim.

“All this against a social-democratic background, which is pro-Arabic, pro-Islam and anti-Israeli,” [Ambassador] Bachman said. …

“A new darkness is descending upon Europe. Some Europeans seem enthralled by this darkness.Linking Islamic terrorism to American foreign policy or to Israeli policies is also misleading. Muslims have been conducting Jihad continuously for 1400 years. Arabs were raiding and aggressively invading several continents, including Europe, as far back as in the seventh century. Violent Jihad existed over a thousand years before the USA was founded or Israel existed as a state. Presenting Jihad as merely a defense mechanism against the West, the USA or Israel is not only wrong. It is ridiculous, and amounts to falsifying history.What does cause Jihad violence, then? Islam does, including the Koran itself and the personal example of the religion’s founder Mohammed. It is above all the concept of Jihad that makes Islam uniquely dangerous and aggressive among all of the world’s major religions.”

It can become quite tiresome to refute the same falsehoods repeatedly. On behalf of the Obama Administration, in September 2014 the US Secretary of State John Kerry made a plea to wipe out poverty and improve health and education as the most powerful antidote to the “toxic” beliefs of Islamic extremists.

The Marxist-inspired argument that Islamic terrorism is caused by poverty is plain wrong and has been disproven many times. Several studies indicate that Islamic terrorist have above-average education and at least average income. Some come from very wealthy families. Osama bin Laden grew up in Saudi Arabia as a son of a billionaire. Saudi Arabia was never under European colonial rule. Instead, it is the cradle of one of the world’s most brutal imperialist traditions, the Arab cultural imperialism we call Islam.

One may also hear quite a few people in Europe, especially on the political Left, arguing that when Hamas hits Israel with murderous Jihadist attacks, this merely amounts to resistance against “occupation.” To argue like this starts down a very slippery slope. Terrorism is never acceptable, either in the Western world or in the Middle East. One cannot morally denounce Anders Behring Breivik until one has morally denounced Hamas and similar Islamic groups, too. Ultimately, Hamas is fueled by the same Islamic religious beliefs as ISIS, the Islamic State.

Moreover, the suggestion that Islamic terrorism is a reaction to occupation is false. Even tiny Norway, a small country in the far northern reaches of Europe, has already been hit by several Islamic attacks.