RUTHFULLY YOURS

Wind energy undercuts coal and nuclear power, harms the land and wastes money.

The U.S. Senate is poised to resurrect Washington’s most conspicuous, wasteful taxpayer subsidy—the wind-production tax credit.

This giveaway expired in December. Yet on April 3 the Senate Finance Committee gave it new life by approving a $13 billion, two-year renewal within a package of 55 “tax extenders.” Once again, Washington is proving Ronald Reagan’s observation that “the nearest thing to eternal life that we’ll ever see on this Earth is a government program.”

The wind-production tax credit was first enacted in 1992. At the time, wind-power was considered a kind of “infant industry,” needing help to bring its technology up to speed and lead to lower costs. The tax credit has since been reborn eight times, even though President Obama’s Energy Secretary Stephen Chu in 2011 said that wind power is a “mature technology.” A mature technology should stand on its own in the marketplace.

The 2.3-cent tax credit for each kilowatt-hour of wind-power electricity produced is sometimes worth more than the energy it subsidizes. Sometimes in some markets, for example in Texas and Illinois, the subsidy is so large that wind producers have paid utilities to take their electricity and still make a profit.

The wind-production tax credit should not be renewed for three principal reasons:

1) It wastes money. The proposed two-year extension would cost taxpayers nearly $13 billion over the next 10 years, according to the Joint Congressional Committee on Taxation. In 2013, when Congress renewed the subsidy for one year, the cost was nearly $12 billion over 10 years. This is more than the federal government spends on energy research in one year.

How the government created a federal hunting license for the far left.

In the U.S., the politics of the left versus the right rolls on with the predictability of traffic jams at the George Washington Bridge. It’s a lot of honking. Until now. All of a sudden, the left has hit ramming speed across a broad swath of American life—in the universities, in politics and in government. People fingered as out of line with the far left’s increasingly bizarre claims are being hit and hit hard.

Commencement-speaker bans are obligatory. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice withdrew as Rutgers’s speaker after two months of protests over Iraq, the left’s long-sought replacement for the Vietnam War. Brandeis terminated its invitation to Somali writer Hirsi Ali, whose criticisms of radical Islam violated the school’s “core values.”

Azusa Pacific University “postponed” an April speech by political scientist Charles Murray to avoid “hurting our faculty and students of color.” Come again? It will “hurt” them? Oh yes. In a recent New Republic essay, Jennie Jarvie described the rise of “trigger warnings” that professors are expected to post with their courses to avoid “traumatizing” students.

Oberlin College earlier this year proposed that its teachers “be aware of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other issues of privilege and oppression.” The co-chair of Oberlin’s Sexual Offense Policy Task Force said last month that this part of the guide is now under revision.

I think it’s fair to say something has snapped.

Mozilla co-founder Brendan Eich was driven out as CEO for donating money to support California’s Prop. 8. An online protest tried to kill Condi Rice’s appointment to the Dropbox board of directors over Internet surveillance. Incredibly, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston didn’t cave.

Earlier this year, faculty and students held a meeting at Vassar College to discuss a particularly bitter internal battle over the school’s boycott-Israel movement. Before the meeting, an English professor announced the dialogue “would not be guided by cardboard notions of civility.”

http://www.romirowsky.com/14741/palestinian-refugee-crisis

Perhaps the most insurmountable and explosive issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the so-called “right of return”—the demand that millions of Palestinians must be allowed to “return” to the State of Israel under any peace agreement. While Israel has made clear that it cannot agree to this, since it would effectively destroy Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians have steadfastly refused to compromise on the issue. This has made the “right of return” the primary obstacle to any peace agreement.

Despite the latest round of peace talks, there is little sign that the Palestinians are willing to change their stance. Indeed, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has unequivocally stated, “Let me put it simply: the right of return is a personal decision. What does this mean? That neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu Mazen [Abbas’ nom de guerre], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right to deprive someone from his right to return.” Abbas is by no means alone in this. In fact, whenever it appears that Abbas might waver, the reaction tends to be swift and ferocious.

At one point, for example, Ali Huwaidi, director of the Palestinian Organization for the Right of Return (“Thabit”) in Beirut, lashed out at Abbas, saying,

Regardless of Abbas’ statements, the right of return is guaranteed, individually and collectively, through UN resolutions. The refugees will not give up their right no matter where they are living today. Abbas is worried about flooding Israel with five million refugees while Israel has brought one million people from the former Soviet Union and no one complained about this. Our refugees will not accept any alternative to their right to return to their homeland and we do not care what Abbas’ position is.

But how many actual refugees are there? Surely over the years, many of those displaced have passed away, and such status does not normally transfer from generation to generation.

The issue is so emotive because, in many ways, Palestinian identity itself is embodied in the collective belief in a “right of return” to “Palestine.” Along with the belief that resistance to Israel is permanent and holy, Palestinian identity is largely based on the idea that the Palestinians are, individually and communally, refugees; that they have been made so by Israel; and that the United Nations should support these refugees until they can return to what is now Israel.

This belief is passionately safeguarded by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). The organization was established in 1949 following the failure of the Arab war against Israel’s independence, and its original mandate was to provide services to the approximately 650,000 Arabs displaced by the conflict. Today, it is essentially a massive social welfare system serving millions of Palestinians, primarily in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. At the same time, its activities go well beyond simple humanitarianism. It plays a distinctly political role in Palestinian society, working to further the cause of Palestinian nationalism through politicized education, activism, anti-Israel propaganda, and other activities.

In effect, UNRWA has come to depend on the refugee problem itself. While the refugees benefit from its services, the organization benefits even more from the refugees. They are, of course, the organization’s raison d’être. UNRWA has no incentive whatsoever to resolve the Palestinian refugee problem, since doing so would render it obsolete. As a result, the agency not only perpetuates the refugee problem, but has, in many ways, exacerbated it. In doing so, it has made Israeli-Palestinian peace all but impossible.

UNRWA’s role in perpetuating and even expanding the refugee problem is a complex one; but, more than anything else, it is the result of the agency’s own definition of a Palestinian refugee—which is unique in world history. The standard definition of a refugee, which applies in every case except that of the Palestinians, includes only those actually displaced in any given conflict. UNRWA has defined a Palestinian refugee as anyone whose “normal place of residence was Palestine during the period 1 June 1946 to 15 May 1948 and who lost both home and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948 conflict.” But it has also continually expanded this definition, now stating “the children or grandchildren of such refugees are eligible for agency assistance if they are (a) registered with UNRWA, (b) living in the area of UNRWA’s operations, and (c) in need.”

As a result, the number of official Palestinian refugees—according to UNRWA— has expanded almost to the point of absurdity. The best estimates are that perhaps 650,000 Palestinians became refugees in 1948-1949; but UNRWA now defines virtually every Palestinian born since that time as a refugee. That number now reaches well into the millions. This is quite simply unprecedented. In no other case has refugee status been expanded to include subsequent generations over a period of decades.

UNRWA’s involvement in Palestinian society is equally unique. Its role there has expanded from simple refugee relief to one of the most important and influential Palestinian institutions. In particular, the agency now employs nearly 30,000 people, most of whom are Palestinian. This makes UNRWA the single largest employer in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and indispensable to the Palestinian economy. As such, there is a strong economic incentive to keep the prosperous organization afloat.

It cannot be said that the agency is ungenerous to its subjects. When the world hears words like “refugees” and “refugee camps,” it instinctively pictures desperate people living in tents or shantytowns. This generates automatic sympathy and financial support for organizations like UNRWA, which regularly receives monetary contributions amounting to millions of dollars. All this is due to the belief that these funds provide humanitarian aid and help with the assimilation of Palestinian refugees. In many cases, the reality is entirely different. UNRWA-administered refugee camps are often fully-functioning suburbs of Palestinian cities, with water, electricity, and even satellite television.

A new documentary, “The J Street Challenge,” is being shown in a series of cities in North America, including Chicago, where I attended a screening this past weekend. The movie focuses on the left-wing Obama-supporting group that was founded in 2008 by Jeremy Ben-Ami, and that has successfully marketed itself as a pro-Israel, pro-peace organization, or merely pro-peace (when pro-Israel is less readily saleable on some college campuses).

As the film convincingly demonstrates, J Street has been anything but a pro-Israel group, and has been unremittingly hostile to the current government of Israel on pretty much every issue — from opposing sanctions (and even the threat of military action by either the United States or Israel) in dealing with the Iranian nuclear program, to exclusively blaming settlements in Judea and Samaria for the absence of peace, to advancing the Goldstone Report in Congress, to demanding that pressure be applied by the United States on Israel to accept the negotiating demands of the Palestinian Authority.

J Street has attracted a large number of members in its first few years, and has established branches or chapters in many cities and college campuses. It has been heavily funded in its first few years by anti-Zionist hedge fund billionaire George Soros (a fact denied by Ben-Ami for several years, until tax filings revealed his lies), some donors who may be fronting for Soros (including a woman from Hong Kong no one knows who gave close to $1 million), and a leading figure in a front group for the Iranian regime, the National Iranian American Council. It is an unusual collection of people who in any case would never be described as pro-Israel. Jeremy Ben-Ami himself came to J Street after a career in public relations, with firms that have represented the government of Saudi Arabia, among others.

In the case of Soros, he has never been a shrinking violet on the subject of Israel. He has been a consistent critic, and has always wanted the United States to follow the lead of the European nations in distancing itself from Israel. So far, America has resisted this path, though President Barack Obama almost certainly would prefer to follow the European approach — which involves pressuring Israel to make the concessions necessary to achieve a two-state solution, assuming there are any concessions that would ever get the Palestinians to say yes to a deal that would end the conflict (with no more claims) and leave Israel as a Jewish-majority state. Most importantly, J Street has provided a vehicle to begin the work on changing the narrative on Israel within the Jewish community — in synagogues, Jewish federations, and Hillels, and more broadly, in colleges, the media, and Congress.

These politically correct activists are all supposed to be anti-racists and multiculturalists. Yet when artists are banned just because they happened to be born in Israel, it tears apart the very basis of both anti-racism and multiculturalism.

As you doubtless know, many in Europe loathe the United States. Their invective down the years has been an assault on reason and emotional stability, whether directed against the Vietnam war, the response to 9/11 or to the Iraq war. Yet there is no boycott of the United States.

So, despite a hatred for America — and a perverse love of Iran, Hezbollah, and the PLO — we come back to the Israeli exception, to the singling out of just one country. However charitable we may try to be, it is hard not to detect the reek of anti-Semitism. Am I being unfair? To people who marched through the streets of European cities chanting, “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas,” (and here and here at Dutch football matches) was that just simple folly — or proof of intention?

The international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement [BDS] against Israel is so determined to hurt Israel abroad, that the boycotters also put pressure on performers who even consider holding concerts in Israel.

The pressure works. An endless stream of artists, mainly musicians, have cancelled concerts or simply turned down invitations to play in Tel Aviv or elsewhere in Israel.

Carlos Santana caved in to pressure from the BDS crowd, as did Elvis Costello, Gil Scott-Heron, Annie Lennox, Stevie Wonder, and writers such as Iain Banks and Alice Walker, a crusader against racism who flies the flag of anti-Semitism as though Jews are suitable victims. Five hundred artists from Montreal, Canada have joined the campaign. Actors such as Vanessa Paradis and her husband Johnny Depp stayed at home in 2011 — under the threat that, if they turned up in Israel, they would face a boycott, too.

Roger Waters, former lead singer and lyricist for the rock band Pink Floyd, is a hardline anti-Israel activist who demands a boycott until Israel ends “the occupation” (presumably on Palestinian terms). He also demands that Israel grants full equality to Israel’s Arabs — notwithstanding that Israel’s Arabs already have full equality both in law and in practice. Waters would also give all Palestinians the “right of return” — a condition that guarantees the end of Israel should millions of Muslim non-refugees overrun it.

http://us1.campaign-archive1.com/?u=87b74a936c723115dfa298cf3&id=24258af1fa&e=552053f981

The United States 2014 “National Climate Assessment” is out and it is a blemish on the honor of science.It appears President Obama is trying to pivot national attention to global warming to distract the public from Obamacare, his rickety foreign policy and other controversial failures.This shoddy unscientific report pretends that facts, data and history don’t exist, and goes all in on a pure global warming scare fantasy.This all out global warming push by the Obama administration places American freedom, independence and prosperity all in jeopardy.

The media needs to fact check this bogus report and end blind support of the global warming campaign.They should ask the inconvenient questions. What does data show to be the best estimate of actual global temperature? How does measured temperature compare to computer model predictions? How does today’s weather compare to historical weather?

Fact checking does not mean quoting some global warming researcher. It means rolling up your sleeves, delving into the real-world data, and comparing what warming advocates say to reality.

This is serious.

Obama’s EPA and the rest of the bureaucracy are under executive order to bypass Congress and make war on America’s energy supply. John Kerry’s State Department is working to bring the U.S. under the United Nation’s climate regime at next year’s Paris climate summit.CFACT’s Marc Morano summed it up powerfully in a just-released statement: You should take a look.
‘This report is a misdirection.
Obama has entered his second term lame duck status and with climate executive orders he does not need Congress to ‘do something’ about global warming.
This report is contrary to peer-reviewed studies and observations. By every measure, so called extreme weather is showing no trend or declining trends on 50-100 year timescales. Droughts, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes are not increasing due to man-made global warming.
Why does the report now call ‘global warming’ a new name, so-called ‘climate disruption’? Simple answer: Due to earth’s failure to warm — no global warming for nearly 18 years – another name was necessary to attempt to gin up fear. Now every storm is offered up as some sort of ‘proof’ of global warming.
This report is pre-determined science. They chose scientists and activists who agreed with their climate narrative and they endorsed scary predictions of the future.’

Hello Everyone,

You’ll be mortified to learn that Steven Spielberg, determined to uphold the tradition started by the Nobel Prize committee of awarding President Obama prizes for doing nothing, is awarding the Shoah Foundation’s “Ambassador for Humanity Award” to Obama here in L.A. this evening.

I hope you’re sitting down as you read this otherwise you might collapse laughing. Even so you might still fall of our… chair in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Spielberg says His Fraudulency, Obama, has been awarded this honor due to 1) ” global efforts to protect human rights ( Say what?!! Tell that to all the Coptic Christians who have been killed and had their churches burned in Egypt since he championed the Muslim Brotherhood’s ascent to power under Morsi, the 4000 Iranians who fled into Syria after he failed to support the Green revolution in Iran in 2009 not to mention the 150 Iranians who were subsequently executed by Ahmadinejad or his failure to pressure Hamas to stop the unprovoked rocket attacks on Israel’s civilian townships), 2) his commitment to education ( Tell that to the charter schools in Washington DC) and 3) expanding educational technology ( aided by the NSA no doubt!) and 4) his work advancing opportunities for all people” ( Surely he’s joking….like the extra 25 million people who are now on food stamps since he became president, the 100 million people who are either unemployed or who have left the work-force and the crushing debt that our great grandchildren won’t even be able to come close to paying off. If he isn’t actually a fool then Spielberg is being played for one. Seldom has there been such servility}.

Olympic athletes need not worry about being deprived of their gold medals just in case Obama ever decided to compete. At the Olympics you really have to be seen running in the race and actually winning it before you are presented with the award.

Best regards,Paul Schnee

For over a month, the U.N.’s top human rights body has been struggling with a major dilemma. How much prior Israel-bashing experience is necessary to be appointed U.N. “independent expert” on Israel?

On Wednesday we found out. Indonesian Makarim Wibisono has just the right mix of confirmed anti-Israel bias and diplomatic cover to replace outgoing U.N. “expert” Richard Falk.

Falk was a notorious anti-Semite, infamous 9/11 conspiracy theorist, and Boston Marathon apologist. But at the U.N., a six-year time limit forced his retirement — and not a matter of principle.

Former Indonesian U.N. ambassador Wibisono is from a country that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. He served as the president of the U.N. Human Rights Commission in its last year of operation in 2005 – a body that even U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said “cast a shadow on the reputation of the United Nations system as a whole.”

In a 2006 statement to the new Human Rights Council, Wibisono, described Israel as showing “ruthless contempt for the lives of the innocent,” and perpetrating “callous attacks against terrorized and defenseless civilians.”

A biography says that until January 2014 (and his application for the job) he was “active in the private sector as an advisor to the Third World Network.”

That NGO spews out hysterical anti-Semitic vitriol – such as Israel is guilty of “bestiality, barbarity,” AIPAC pays “cash and other perks” for “towing the Zionist line,” and “the US plays the role of God in modern times” holding “back the sun to enable Israel…to finish the job” against its Arab victims.

And there’s more. Wibisono’s appointment was part of larger deal, because the U.N. Human Rights Council had 19 openings for the job of U.N. human rights expert or “special rapporteur” on a variety of subjects.