RUTHFULLY YOURS

Never Waste a Crisis
How was the city of Medellín transformed from the murder capital of South America into a thriving urban center? Escalators.

We’ve just had an election that was in part about government competence in dealing with crises. Think ISIS, health care, Ebola. So perhaps it’s the perfect moment for a book that carries the subtitle “Being Strong in a World Where Things Go Wrong.”

The title of the book is “The Resilience Dividend,” a phrase coined by the author, Judith Rodin, who defines it as “the capacity to bounce back from a crisis, learn from it, and achieve revitalization.” Most of the examples she offers pertain to cities and governance, though she also discusses businesses overcoming unexpected challenges. She is especially worried about the problems created by urbanization, climate change and globalization, which she sees as the “three disruptive phenomena” of the 21st century.

Ms. Rodin is president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which runs a program called 100 Resilient Cities from which she draws a number of the examples she cites. She is also a psychologist with an academic background—she was president of the University of Pennsylvania—and her professor’s tendency to overanalyze gets a little tedious. But she is a good story teller, and her stories from the United States and around the world form the heart of the book.

The most compelling of them focus on success—that is, on positive examples of how communities have responded to “disruptions” such as severe weather, a terrorist attack or a health scare. In some cases, the disruptions grew into full-blown crises; in others, they were contained before they got worse. Either way, they provide models from which others can learn.

One is the example with which Ms. Rodin begins: the transformation of the city of Medellín, Columbia, into a thriving urban center and international tourist destination. Anyone who remembers Medellín from the 1980s and 1990s, when it was the drug and murder capital of South America, will understand just how impressive that city’s reinvention is.

There are many reasons for the revival of Medellín, above all the integrated nature of the effort, which involved government, businesses and NGOs. The revival entailed a lot of creative thinking, such as that which led to the construction of giant escalators up and down a hillside slum, making it possible for residents to connect easily with the city’s public transportation system and travel safely and quickly to jobs that had previously been inaccessible. The social and economic effect of the escalators was enormous.

Russia’s military assault on Ukraine threatens the survival of an independent state and peace in Europe. Often overlooked is what the invasion—and that’s what it is even if President Obama and the Europeans are afraid to utter the “i word”—has meant for Ukrainians in lands taken by Vladimir Putin ’s forces.

In a report Thursday, the United Nations provided a bracing look behind the new Putin curtain. Life for people there is brutish and dangerous. The “cease fire” signed in early September in eastern Ukraine is a farce: In that time, 957 people have died, or about 13 every day, says the U.N.Altogether, since well-armed men in camouflage came out of nowhere in April and claimed to rule the regions of Donetsk and Luhansk on Russia’s behalf, 4,317 people have been killed and 9,921 wounded. All these lives are on the docket, if not conscience, of Russian President Putin. His spies, soldiers and media disinformers conjured a conflict in eastern Ukraine from nothing.

“New Russia,” per Moscow’s preferred phrase, is in the hands of Russian soldiers, mercenaries and local gangsters. The U.N. reports that their rule is bringing about “the total breakdown of law and order.” This is Mad Max territory of summary executions, kidnappings and torture. Monitors found evidence of three mass graves.

The situation in Crimea, which Russia claimed to annex in March, is underreported but also grim. The victims of Moscow’s satraps in the peninsula are the remaining opponents of Russian rule, primarily the Muslim Crimean Tatar minority. Their leaders have been expelled, their media outlets threatened.

The immigration order is an abuse of power that fails as a policy reform.

President Obama ’s decision to legalize millions of undocumented immigrants by his own decree is a sorry day for America’s republic. We say that even though we agree with the cause of immigration reform. But process matters to self-government—sometimes it is the only barrier to tyranny—and Mr. Obama’s policy by executive order is tearing at the fabric of national consent.

The first question to address is Mr. Obama’s legal rationale. At least he finally rolled out a memo from the experts on presidential power in the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, but it’s fair to wonder how much time he gave them. The OLC made its justification public about an hour before the speech.

The President’s rationale is “prosecutorial discretion,” but he is stretching that legal concept beyond normal understanding. The executive branch does have discretion about whom to prosecute. But this typically extends to individual cases, or to setting priorities due to limited resources such as prosecuting cocaine but not marijuana use.

Mr. Obama claims he is using his discretion to focus on such high deportation priorities as criminals, but he is going much further and is issuing an order exempting from deportation entire classes of people—as many as five million. Justice’s OLC memo claims there is no such categorical exemption, and that immigration officials can still deport someone if they want to, but the memo offers no measures by which to make that “complex judgment.” In practice it will almost never happen.
The Reagan and Bush precedents cited by the Obama lawyers are different in kind and degree. They involved far fewer people and they were intended to fulfill the policy set by Congress—not, as Mr. Obama intends, to defy Congress. That is why their actions were done with little controversy.

On Thursday, Ashkelon Mayor Itamar Shimoni announced that he would suspend the work of Arab laborers renovating bomb shelters in a small number of nursery schools in his city. He also said he would be posting security guards at kindergartens near construction sites where Arabs are employed.

The storm that ensued makes the snowfall in Buffalo look like a flurry. Ironically, it is a tempest that resulted in a rare case of consensus among Israeli politicians, nearly all of whom immediately denounced Shimoni.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that there was “no place in Israel for discrimination against its Arab citizens.”

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni asked Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein to investigate Shimoni for violating the Equal Opportunities in the Workplace Law.

Interior Minister Gilad Erdan, Economy Minister Naftali Bennet and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon stressed that “only a tiny minority” of Israeli Arabs are violent and warned against the evils of discrimination and racism.

Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz bemoaned the souring of relations between Arabs and Jews over the actions of a few jihadists.

Opposition Leader MK Isaac Herzog declared that even during difficult times, Israel has never taken discriminatory measures against its Arab citizens.

Meretz leader MK Zehava Gal-On called Shimoni’s edict illegal and immoral.

Ra’am-Ta’al MK Ahmad Tibi said that security should not constantly serve as an excuse for racism and apartheid.

The Israeli media also went ballistic, accusing Shimoni not only of criminal racism, but of engaging in it to “regain the spotlight he lost” when Operation Protective Edge ended and he was no longer in the news every day.

First, He Waves ISIS Flag on Campus. Watch What Happens When He Switches to An Israel Flag.

Read more at http://conservativevideos.com/first-waves-islamic-state-flag-campus-switches-israel-flag/#mCMRWXOftp7CELhA.99
I have always thought that there was no connection between intellect and wisdom. To put this theory to the test, I headed out to the University of California, Berkeley. Students at Berkeley clearly have a lot of intellect; it is one of the most prestigious and selective universities in the country. But do they have wisdom? I went to the bucolic campus armed with a flag that represents the greatest evil known today, ISIS. If these are our best and brightest then we should all be afraid, very afraid. The shocking video above unfortunately proves once and for all that there is in fact no connection between intellect and wisdom.
Read more at http://conservativevideos.com/first-waves-islamic-state-flag-campus-switches-israel-flag/#mCMRWXOftp7CELhA.99

Giving thanks for the counter-jihad network

I am giving special thanks this year for the hard work of patriots who toil without recompense to expose the many vectors of Islamic subversion currently eroding the already hollowed-out institutions of Western society.

To this end, I will tell a story about a story. It concerns the first Muslim prayer service ever held at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. As I wrote last week, this weirdly “invitation-only” service, which took place on Friday, Nov. 14, gathered representatives of Muslim groups with proven links to Hamas and to Hamas’ parent group, the Muslim Brotherhood. This means that, however briefly, jihad-linked groups took over the National Cathedral, where presidents and other great Americans have lain in state. These terror links led some media to label the event overall a “Muslim Brotherhood event,” or an “Islamist” or “extremist” event. As the service itself demonstrated, however, it was all strictly Islamic.

How do I know that? Not from 24/7 media, national or local. Not from the armies of think tanks that occupy Washington and its environs. Not from religious or political leaders, either. No professional organization with experts or a newsroom that I am aware of bothered to analyze the Muslim service at the National Cathedral, even though it was live-streamed on the Internet and available to all.

I am able to tell you about the contents of the service only thanks to the incredible international counter-jihad movement. This movement lives and breathes in the ether of the Internet, on an array of blogs, on YouTube. This case of Islam at the cathedral shows how the network works.

First, the blog Vlad Tepes captured the streaming footage of the 80-minute Muslim service. Next, Arabic translator Rita Malik assessed the English and Arabic service for Gates of Vienna and provided a summary that was posted there. Enter Islamic expert Andrew Bostom, author of several indispensable books on Islamic jihad, anti-Semitism and Islamic totalitarianism, who analyzed several of the Quranic verses used in the service by consulting some of the essential Quranic commentaries Muslims use to understand their religious book. Bostom posted his findings at his blog, AndrewBostom.org.

I understand we’ve turned the page to the next controversy — Obama’s unconstitutional immigration pander — but I’d like to dwell a little longer on the previous travesty.

Obama administration health-care consultant Jonathan Gruber was discovered to have boasted that Obamacare was designed to exploit the “stupidity” of American voters and elude honest accounting by hiding both its cost and the taxes necessary to pay for it.

When asked about this in Brisbane, Australia, the president rolled his eyes at the controversy.

“I just heard about this,” Obama said. “The fact that some adviser who never worked on our staff expressed an opinion that I completely disagree with . . . is no reflection on the actual process that was run.”

“We had a year-long debate,” Obama exasperatedly continued. “Go look back at your stories. One thing we can’t say is that we didn’t have a lengthy debate over health care in the United States. . . . It’s fair to say there is not a provision in the health-care law that was not extensively debated and was not fully transparent.”

This statement is a falsehood, punctuated by deceits, supported by half-truths, in defense of a scam.

Let’s give Obama the benefit of the doubt that he had “just heard about this.” After all, he doesn’t hear about a lot of terrible things he’s ultimately responsible for — the IRS scandal, mismanagement at the VA, etc. — until they appear, often tardily, in the newspapers.

Historic. Such is the ubiquitous description of the climate agreement recently announced in Beijing between Barack Obama and Xi Jinping in which China promised for the first time to cap carbon emissions.

If this were a real breakthrough, I’d be an enthusiastic supporter. I have long advocated for a tangible global agreement to curb carbon. I do remain skeptical about the arrogant, ignorant claim that climate science is “settled,” that it can predict with accuracy future “global warming” effects, and that therefore we must cut emissions radically, immediately, and unilaterally if necessary, even at potentially ruinous economic and social cost.

I nonetheless believe (and have written since 1988) that pumping increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere cannot be a good thing. We don’t know nearly enough about the planet’s homeostatic mechanisms for dealing with it, but prudence would dictate reducing CO2 emissions when and where we can.

However, anything beyond that, especially the radical unilateralism advocated by climate alarmists, would be not just economic suicide but economic suicide without purpose. It would do nothing to reduce atmospheric CO2 as long as China, India, and the other developing nations more than make up for our cuts with their huge and increasing carbon emissions.

China alone is firing up a new coal plant every eight to ten days. We could close every coal mine in Kentucky and West Virginia and achieve absolutely nothing except devastating Appalachia and, in effect, shipping its economic lifeblood to China.

The only way forward on greenhouse gases is global reduction by global agreement. A pact with China would be a good start.

Unfortunately, the Obama–Xi agreement is nothing of the sort. It is a fraud of Gruberian (as in Jonathan) proportions. Its main plank commits China to begin cutting carbon emissions 16 years from now. On the other hand, the United States must double its current rate of carbon cutting to meet a new, more restrictive goal by 2025, in return for which China will keep increasing its carbon emissions year after year throughout that period — and for five years beyond.

Obama’s speech announcing the his immigration diktat was the usual pabulum: “our immigration system is broken,” can’t let illegals “remain in the shadows,” “commonsense middle-ground approach,” blah, blah, blah. ​If I didn’t have to go on TV right afterwards, I would have played a drinking game.

But the speech was notable for some of the things Obama didn’t mention. For instance, he lied about what his non-amnesty amnesty consisted of: “All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.” As polling has suggested, this is less likely to provoke opposition than the truth: “All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you — and also, here’s a work permit, a Social Security number, and a driver’s license.”

He didn’t mention that his scheme will pull the plug on the Secure Communities program. The program checks the fingerprints of arrested criminal suspects against DHS records at the same time as they’re checked against FBI records. It is the lowest-common-denominator of immigration enforcement — if you oppose Secure Communities, you oppose immigration enforcement. But the anti-borders activist groups around the country do, in fact, oppose immigration controls of any kind, and reject the notion that illegal aliens who are arrested for drunk driving, assaulting police offices, beating their wives, and so on, should be subject to deportation. And Obama is one of them — but he has enough political sense not to mention that on national television.

Another part of his edict that wasn’t mentioned was the extension of the validity of the “temporary” grant of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) from two years to three, eliminating the upper age limit to qualify, and extending it to those who entered before age 18 instead of the previous 16. These are details, for sure, but they highlight an important truth — he just set these parameters two years ago in an earlier edict and now he’s changing them. Why? Because he feels like it. These changes highlight the ad hoc nature of Obama’s lawmaking and point to the virtual certainty that any restrictions or limitations that may be included in the current directive can, and will, be changed whenever it’s politically convenient. He says you have to have arrived by 2010 to get this new amnesty? Well, he’ll just change it to 2013 next week. Didn’t include the parents of DACAs in this round of executive lawmaking? Maybe he’ll announce that in March.

None of the criteria Obama has laid out to qualify for amnesty benefits has any basis in law or even logic — they’re simply the result of political give and take, i.e., legislation. It’s just that instead of the people’s elected representatives debating and compromising and finally approving a measure, it is Obama’s staff that debates and compromises and finally approves something. Because Congress is now an advisory body with some residual powers, like the British House of Lords. Real law emanates from the White House.

The Immigration Position that Dare Not Speak Its Name — as Usual

An iron-clad rule of the the immigration debate is that advocates of amnesty are never willing to describe their own proposals as amnesty, although they will throw the word around about everything else. Marco Rubio, for instance, vociferously denied that the Gang of Eight bill was an amnesty, while he called the (functionally very similar) 1986 law an amnesty and called the status quo an amnesty. President Obama played by the same rules tonight:

I know some of the critics of this action call it amnesty. Well, it’s not. Amnesty is the immigration system we have today — millions of people who live here without paying their taxes or playing by the rules, while politicians use the issue to scare people and whip up votes at election time.

Going further, he said “mass amnesty would be unfair,” and called his proposal to give previously illegal immigrants some of the most important benefits enjoyed by legal immigrants “accountability.” It’s a sign of the enduring vulnerability of the pro-amnesty position that its supporters feel compelled to engage in this wordplay.

We’ve heard a lot about prosecutorial discretion the last few days, but, clearly, what the president is doing isn’t simply declining to enforce the law in certain instances; it is a new system, or as the president described it, a new “deal”:

So we’re going to offer the following deal: If you’ve been in America for more than five years; if you have children who are American citizens or legal residents; if you register, pass a criminal background check, and you’re willing to pay your fair share of taxes — you’ll be able to apply to stay in this country temporarily, without fear of deportation. You can come out of the shadows and get right with the law.

His rejoinder to those who doubt his power to unilaterally rewrite the law was a reiteration of his blackmail:

And to those Members of Congress who question my authority to make our immigration system work better, or question the wisdom of me acting where Congress has failed, I have one answer: Pass a bill.

The speech had some nice rhetorical touches, especially toward the end, but otherwise was standard Obama fare. His position is, of course, the middle ground between mass amnesty and mass deportation; his opponents are consumed with grubby political considerations — they “scare people and whip up votes at election time”; as ever, he called for an end to “politics as usual.”

Altogether it would have been a wholly adequate pitch for Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, in the normal give-and-take over proposed legislation. But he’s out of that business. Now he proposes and disposes, and the only alternative is assent.