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November 2015

MY SAY: THE UN HAS DESIGNATED NOVEMBER 19 AS “WORLD TOILET DAY”

http://www.wateraid.org/us/get-involved/world-toilet-day?utm_source=GAW&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=WorldToiletDay&utm_campaign=GAW&gclid=Cj0KEQiAg7ayBRD8qqSGt-fj6uYBEiQAucjOwbnirc5qrWYlD0LFP2QMqrunRwZcaABtmJ_NM3sqDbcaAixj8P8HAQ
How fitting…coming from the cesspool of international politics….rsk

There’s a problem no one’s talking about

There’s a problem that affects 2.3 billion people, or 1 in 3 people worldwide. It’s one of the world’s greatest obstacles to public health and environmental sustainability, and it costs the world’s poorest countries 260 billion dollars every year. It’s the lack of a basic human right.

It’s the lack of access to water and toilets.

At WaterAid we love talking about toilets. So we were thrilled when, last year, the UN officially created a day to recognize the importance of sanitation: World Toilet Day. Get ready to help us spread the message that toilets save lives.

A New Bipartisan Education Bill Curbs Obama-Era Overreach By Frederick M. Hess & Max Eden —

Last week, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who is soon to depart, gave a swan-song address in Boston. Recounting a tenure spent treating the U.S. Department of Education like a national school board, he took special pains to celebrate four federal adventures: the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, its dubious new $6 billion School Improvement Grant program, his attempts to micro-manage teacher evaluation in the states via waivers from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, and his efforts to push states to adopt the Common Core standards.

This afternoon, House and Senate negotiators will sit down to finalize the conference bill that would replace No Child Left Behind. To understand how profoundly the bill shrinks the federal role, one need only ask what it means for the overreaching, progressives-at-play education legacy of Obama and Duncan. Race to the Top? Gone. School Improvement Grants? Gone. Federal bureaucrats no longer have the ability to dictate to states on teacher policy. And, when it comes to the Common Core, federal officials are henceforth barred from “encouraging” or “incentivizing” states to adopt certain standards.

Indeed, one can read the bill as a massive, bipartisan repudiation of the Obama administration’s Washington-centric education excesses. More fundamentally, the bill is an important victory for principled, limited government even as it addresses practical concerns about over-testing and ill-conceived federal mandates.

Pay Up, and Up, and Up: Developing Nations Set to Make Demands at Climate-Change Talks in Paris : Sen.Mike Lee (R-UT) Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA)

Mike Lee represents Utah in the U.S. Senate. Mike Kelly represents Pennsylvania’s third district in the U.S. House of Representatives.

‘What will it take to get an agreement in Paris?”

That’s the question on the minds of environmental activists, U.S. State Department officials, and foreign bureaucrats as we approach the latest round of United Nations climate-change negotiations in France’s capital city.

It was also the question asked of Sam Kutesa, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, at an event on April 17, 2015, according to an e-mail obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

The author of the e-mail — subject line: “Best answer of night” — was President Obama’s chief climate-change negotiator, Todd Stern. Stern was writing to a colleague to recount how President Kutesa responded to this all-important question.

His answer? One word: “Money.”

There Are Serious, Unbigoted Reasons to Be Wary of a Flood of Syrian Refugees By Ian Tuttle

Among politicians and their clingers-on, journalists, nothing takes hold like a bad historical analogy. Thus as politicians — 29 governors chief among them — call for a halt to our Syrian-refugee-resettlement program on the grounds that it might be exploited as a conduit for terrorists, pundits are invoking the plight of Jewish refugees fleeing Adolf Hitler’s Germany in an effort to soften American hearts. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote Monday, “This growing cry to turn away people fleeing for their lives brings to mind the SS St. Louis, the ship of Jewish refugees turned away from Florida in 1939,” while his colleague Ishaan Tharoor contended: “Today’s 3-year-old Syrian orphan, it seems, is 1939’s German Jewish child.” Meanwhile, a Daily Kos headline shouts: “Replace ‘Syrian’ with ‘Jewish’ and we’re back to 1939.”

This is prima facie nonsense, which should be obvious from the terms being compared: Jews, an ethnic group, with Syrians, a national one. An honest, apples-to-apples comparison would line up German Jews and Syrian Muslims — the relevant ethnic group within the relevant political entity. But do this, and the failure of the analogy becomes clear.

Did O’Reilly Finally Go Too Far? By Victor Davis Hanson

Earlier this month, premier Fox newsman Bill O’Reilly became unhinged on live television. A red-faced O’Reilly loudly and repeatedly called his invited guest, Washington Post columnist and fellow conservative Fox News journalist George Will, a “hack” and accused him of lying.

It was a surreal moment, with stunned viewers no doubt muttering to themselves, “Is the jig finally up?”

Will had written a negative review of the fifth of O’Reilly’s co-authored “Killing” books, Killing Reagan. So O’Reilly dared Will to appear on his “No Spin Zone” hot seat.

Will did — and quietly punched some holes in O’Reilly’s strange thesis that President Ronald Reagan had been metaphorically “killed” after a March 30, 1981, assassination attempt. According to Killing Reagan, even years later the president may not have recovered enough to meet the demands of the office.

The Pink Guards on Campus The rise of the teacup totalitarian. By Kevin D. Williamson

The Red Guards were the terrorist vanguard, mainly teenagers and people in their 20s, who helped Mao Tse-Tung execute the Cultural Revolution. Their first skirmishes were waged against the administrations of Tsinghua University and Peking University, which they accused of being blind to what we may as well go ahead and call “privilege,” though the language of the time was probably closer to “elitism” and “bourgeois” tendencies. They were fond of public-criticism sessions and reeducation programs, and the movement they helped launch would eventually persecute tens of millions of people and murder a million and a half. Among those were 23,000 members of minority groups, beaten to death after being judged insufficiently committed to the prevalent ideas of social justice based on their ethnic background.

The idiot children running amok on our college campuses right now aren’t exactly the Red Guards — they’re far too weak and wishy-washy for that. Call them the Pink Guards.

Radical Islam: The Invisible Enemy Caroline Glick

As the cleaning crews were mopping the dried blood from the stage and the seats of the Bataclan concert hall in Paris, a depressing act appeared on stage in distant Iowa.

Saturday night the three contenders for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination took to the stage in Iowa for a debate. The moderator asked them whether they would be willing to use the term “radical Islam” to describe the ideology motivating Islamic terrorists to massacre innocents. All refused.

Like her former boss, US President Barack Obama, former secretary of state and Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton not only refused to accept the relevance of the term. Clinton refused to acknowledge what radical Islam stands for.

She merely noted some of what it rejects.

In her words, “I think this kind of barbarism and nihilism, it’s very hard to understand, other than the lust for power, the rejection of modernity, the total disregard for human rights, freedom, or any other value that we know and respect.”

Obama Inc: Refuses to Give Law Enforcement Info on Syrian Refugees That’s how extreme Obama is Daniel Greenfield

Two points here.

1. Obama Inc. is predictably refusing to slow down or stop Syrian migrant dumping in US states. Including those states which have said no to it.

2. Obama Inc. is refusing to even work with Democratic governors who are pro-resettlement, like Jerry Brown in California, to provide local law enforcement with information about risks.

In a call with senior Obama administration officials Tuesday evening, several governors demanded they be given access to information about Syrian refugees about to be resettled by the federal government in their states. Top White House officials refused…

On the call several Republican governors and two Democrats — New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan and California’s Jerry Brown — repeatedly pressed administration officials to share more information about Syrian refugees entering the United States. The governors wanted notifications whenever refugees were resettled in their states, as well as access to classified information collected when the refugees were vetted…

That’s the surprising thing. Obama won’t even throw Jerry Brown a bone.

Obama’s Permanent Protest Why the rise in rioting and civil unrest under Obama is no coincidence, but part of the plan. Matthew Vadum

After making America poorer, weaker, less free, more race-obsessed and balkanized throughout his tumultuous presidency, Barack Obama is gearing up to use his two tax-exempt nonprofits to continue attacking what remains of the republic’s civil society after he leaves office in 14 months.

Obama’s presidency “has been pockmarked by rioting, looting and protests,” as he “encouraged the nonstop civil unrest exhausting the nation,” writes the Hoover Institution’s Paul Sperry. Obama and his “army of social justice bullies” are going to make things worse before he leaves office on Jan. 20, 2017.

Our indefatigable Community Organizer-in-Chief is planning to use Organizing for Action (OfA) and the Barack Obama Foundation to continue punishing America for its imaginary sins and to promote manufactured controversies long after he leaves the White House.

Chicago-based OfA has trained “more than 10,000 leftist organizers, who, in turn, are training more than 2 million youths in [Saul] Alinsky street tactics,” according to Sperry. This “army of social justice bullies” will carry on Obama’s campaign to fundamentally transform America.

U.S vs China: Showdown in the South China Sea? The U.S. seems wary about provoking China even as it builds militarised outputs astride the world’s most heavily trafficked waterways.Michael Auslin

Michael Auslin is a resident scholar and the director of Japan Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he specializes in Asian regional security and political issues. Before joining AEI, Auslin was an associate professor of history at Yale University.
There is a real threat here to peace in Asia, and the U.S. must not allow allies such as the Philippines to be browbeaten.
“Expect more.” That is the succinct response of a senior U.S. defense official when asked informally whether the dispatch in October of a U.S. Navy ship within 12 nautical miles of one of China’s newly constructed islands in the Spratly Island chainwas a one-off event.

Officials in the Obama Administration seem well aware that failure to follow on with their highly publicized freedom of navigation operations will send a signal of irresolve to China and Asia. The sail-through did little to settle the issue of Sino-U.S. tussling over the South China Sea, and the question now, is how will China respond.

From one perspective, the length of time that it took Washington to make the decision to send the USS Lassen near Subi and Mischief Reefs itself is an admission that the Obama Administration remains wary of provoking China. Months of public comments by officials from the president on down resulted in no action until last week, and even then, it was but a lone U.S. destroyer sent to transit what until a few months ago had always been considered international waters.

Even worse, claims that the destroyer engaged simply in “innocent passage” as opposed to any legally-allowed military activity on the high-seas further undermines the administration’s argument that it is not tacitly conceding China’s territorial claims.