Displaying posts published in

April 2016

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Failure of Sanctions Against North Korea Good luck trying to scuttle Pyongyang’s nuclear program when sanctions are full of loopholes. By Claudia Rosett

By on April 27th, 2016

In the latest push to stop North Korea’s rogue nuclear and missile programs, the United Nations Security Council on March 2 passed a sanctions resolution widely hailed as the toughest in decades. U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said “this resolution is so comprehensive, there are many provisions that leave no gap, no window.” But when it comes to North Korea’s merchant shipping ventures, these sanctions are a sieve.

True, the North Korean ships specifically blacklisted by the U.N. currently appear restricted in their movements, clustered around North Korea. But the blacklist omits more than half of the country’s relevant fleet.

Setting aside North Korean ships operating under foreign flags of convenience, there are more than 100 active ships flagged to North Korea, in a fleet regularly replenished by second-hand vessels, according to a report last year by the U.N.’s own panel of experts on North Korea sanctions. Currently the U.N. has blacklisted a total of 27 North Korea-linked ships. The U.S. has blacklisted 38 (including five that appear to have been scrapped).

Among the vessels excluded from either blacklist are three small general-cargo ships, all flagged to North Korea—the Deniz, the Shaima and the Yekta—that have been plying the Persian Gulf for roughly a year, making port calls at Iran. Two of these ships are registered in Dubai and one—the Deniz—in care of a company in Iran, according to information from maritime databases including Lloyd’s and Equasis.
The North Korean cargo vessel Jin Teng docks at Subic Bay, in Zambales province, northwest of Manila, Philippines on March 4. ENLARGE
The North Korean cargo vessel Jin Teng docks at Subic Bay, in Zambales province, northwest of Manila, Philippines on March 4. Photo: Associated Press

All three share intriguing common features. They were renamed and reflagged to North Korea within the past 18 months. The Deniz was reflagged from Japan, the Shaima and Yekta from Mongolia—which North Korea has used as a flag of convenience. The ships can be identified by their hull numbers, known as IMO numbers, issued under the authority of the U.N.’s International Maritime Organization. Attempts to contact their owners were unsuccessful.

Since March 2015, the Deniz has made at least 10 calls at Iran, including at least four this year, shuttling among Turkey, Kuwait and Iran’s Bushehr port and Kharg and Sarooj terminals. According to Equasis, the Deniz’s registered owner since February 2015 is H. Khedri—or Hadri Khedri, according to the IMO’s shipping-company database—with an address for Siri Maritime Services in Tehran. The Yekta and the Shaima have been making runs between Dubai and the Iranian port of Abadan, which the Yekta visited as recently as April 5. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Can I Get That With Extra GMO? A Vermont labeling law will burden industry and encourage baseless fears about scientific progress. By Jayson Lusk

By on April 27th, 2016

The small state of Vermont is poised this summer to upend national policy—and it doesn’t have anything to do with Bernie Sanders. Starting July 1, many foods sold in the Green Mountain State must carry a label if they are made with genetically modified ingredients. The law is full of carve-outs: It applies to grocery stores, but not restaurants, and to packaged foods, but not meat or cheese. Nonetheless, it will have nationwide implications. Because food manufacturers may not want to create separate packaging for different regions of the country, or to risk the legal liability if a non-labeled GMO winds up in Vermont, they will probably adjust their supply chains far beyond New England.

Lawsuits and bills in Congress have attempted to nullify the Vermont measure, but they have been unsuccessful. Those in favor of labeling and those against have tussled over philosophical and legal matters. What is the consumer’s right to know? Can the government compel speech when the best science suggests that GMOs pose no safety risk? Proponents argue that the only cost of labeling is the price of ink. Opponents worry that labeling GMOs will stigmatize them, causing food manufacturers to switch to more expensive non-genetically engineered ingredients.

Polls do show that 80% or more of consumers support labeling GMOs. But this is a dubious argument in favor, since most know little about the issue. A survey that I conducted on food preferences in January asked more than 1,000 Americans about an absurd hypothetical policy mandating labels for foods containing DNA. Eighty percent supported the idea. A follow-up last February asked another 1,000 people whether they thought that the statement “all vegetables contain DNA” was true or false. More than half, 52%, said “false.” For the record, the correct answer is “true.”

My research shows that when people are directly asked how they want the issue of GMO labeling to be decided, they do not defer to politicians or their fellow citizens. In a survey last May, a strong majority, 61%, preferred to put the matter to experts at the Food and Drug Administration. This seems to be borne out at the ballot box: To date, referendums on mandatory labeling have been held in five states, and none has passed. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Submarines Down Under Australia rejects a Japanese bid after Chinese pressure.

By on April 27th, 2016

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced Tuesday that the biggest military contract in Australia’s history, a $40 billion tender to build 12 submarines, will go to a French naval contractor. That’s a defeat for Japan’s bid, and with it a lost opportunity to deepen cooperation among the leading Pacific democracies facing China’s rising military.

Mr. Turnbull said he based his decision on an “unequivocal” recommendation from defense officials “that the French offer represented the capabilities best able to meet Australia’s unique needs,” including the imperative to operate across long distances. France’s state-owned DCNS will build a 4,500-ton diesel-electric version of its existing 5,000-ton Barracuda nuclear-powered sub, including a quiet pump-jet propulsion system rather than a traditional propeller.

As important, especially with national elections looming in July, is what’s in it for domestic labor. Mr. Turnbull promises “Australian workers building Australian submarines with Australian steel,” especially in swing districts facing auto-factory closures amid state subsidy cuts. Unions have been on edge since then-Defense Minister David Johnston said in 2014 he couldn’t trust state-owned shipbuilder ASC “to build a canoe.” Hence the need for foreign bids.

But all bidders agreed to build in Australia, so that doesn’t account for France’s win over Japan, which offered a version of its sophisticated 4,000-ton Soryu sub built by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Australian sources say Japan’s problems ranged from insufficient crew space in its design to inexperience among executives and officials in exporting complex military technology, as Tokyo banned such exports until two years ago.

The most significant influence may have been China, Australia’s largest trading partner, which openly campaigned against Japan’s bid. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi warned his Australian counterpart in February to remember World War II and “consider the feelings of Asian countries,” arguing that Japan’s military-export ambitions represent a failure to “uphold its pacifist constitution.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Hillary’s Debt to Sanders and Trump Next to her rivals’ gloomy rhetoric about America the bleak, she almost looks like a beacon of hope. Dorothy Rabinowitz

By on April 27th, 2016

Even before the air-clearing April 19 New York primary in which Bernie Sanders was trounced and Donald Trump was a big winner, word had come of a more presidential Trump soon to be revealed. The unveiling came with Mr. Trump’s victory speech, an event that occasioned near-universal excitement when the candidate used the word “senator” in front of Ted Cruz’s name—a reaction that said a good deal about Mr. Trump and his campaign, all of it deeply familiar.

Mr. Trump’s image refurbishing promises to become a show all its own, fascinating to behold, albeit with slim prospects of success. The same would be true for Bernie Sanders, also being pressed now to improve his tone—the nudging being another of the many things the two have in common in addition to the main thing, namely the enormous role both have played in advancing Hillary Clinton’s progress toward the White House.

Mr. Sanders is being urged, in the interest of Democratic unity, to temper his assaults on Hillary Clinton as a pawn of Wall Street and servant of special interests—no easy matter for a lifelong ideologue of the far left. But no accusation transmits more of a sense of high moral indignation than the regular reminders that Mrs. Clinton voted for the Iraq war in 2002 and that he did not—a fact Mr. Sanders cites, by way of response, when facing questions about his qualifications for the presidency as compared with those of Mrs. Clinton.

To hear him again and again on Sen. Clinton’s war vote is to be struck by the unvarying intensity Mr. Sanders brings to the charge, the tone of a man delivering a bombshell, and one, for him, that never loses its power. His capacity to stay on message to the exclusion of all other concerns has been conspicuous throughout his campaign.

When news came in November that the topics for the Des Moines, Iowa, debate among the Democratic contenders would be reordered to include national security and terrorism, no one was taken aback. No one that is but the Sanders campaign, which made bitter protest to CBS, the debate host, over this sudden change in the agreed-on lineup of subjects. CONTINUE AT SITE

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Trump and the First Stone There are many reasons to oppose Trump. But those aren’t the reasons being cited. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on April 26th, 2016

Count the reasons to oppose Donald Trump’s candidacy for the Republican nomination for president. His conservative credentials are thin, recent, and often haphazard. His brash style will likely alienate more voters than it will attract. What he calls being “direct” translates as gratuitously mean-spirited, rude, and even cruel. His knowledge of the issues, at least in traditional terms or compared with that of his Republican rivals, varies from spotty to nonexistent. And Trump often, like Hillary Clinton (e.g., dodging bullets in the Balkans) or Barack Obama (cf. the mythoi of his “memoir”), seems to make up details about his long business career.

All that said, there are two strains of opposition to Trump that seem incoherent. First is the suggestion that the majority of his supporters, the “Trumpsters,” are deluded — the naïve fooled by a buffoon. The second is the suggestion that the Trump candidacy marks a new low in American politics, in terms of decency and competence.

Let us quickly dispense with the second writ. Trump is a reflection of, not a catalyst for, a dishonest age. To illustrate my point, take a few of our contemporary public figures who are running for office on their assumed superior character and ethics. There is no need to dwell on the inveterate dissembler Hillary Clinton, with her labyrinth of e-mail, Benghazi, Clinton Foundation, and Wall Street speaking-fees deceit. Bernie Sanders, the archetypal socialist, calls for the wealthy to pay exorbitant income-tax rates. Yet Sanders himself paid an effective rate of about 13 percent, after taking thousands of dollars of itemized deductions, including a mortgage-interest deduction on a second home — all legal, and all just the sort of self-interested tax planning routinely embraced by Americans in the upper brackets, whose resulting reduced taxes the socialist Sanders is on record as abhorring. In recent interviews, the supposedly cerebral Sanders proved himself a veritable dunce, clueless about the U.S. banking system, current U.S. financial statutes, and the basics of how the U.S. criminal- and civil-justice systems work. I suppose if he were Trump, Sanders would argue that he was too busy making “huge” profits to sweat such details, but what is Sanders’s excuse for being so ill-informed? That he was too occupied as a U.S. senator to learn anything about the nation’s banking and legal systems?

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

American Jewry Will No Longer Be the Center of the Jewish World : Elliott Abrams

By on April 26th, 2016

In the 20th century the American Jewish community was the world’s largest and strongest, and helped establish and protect the Jewish state. The 21st century will be different.

In late fall 1940, as World War II raged in Europe and despite the parlous situation of the Jews in British-Mandate Palestine, their leader David Ben-Gurion spent three and a half months in the United States, returning again in November 1941 for a far longer stay of more than nine months. The wartime route from Palestine to the U.S. was lengthy and dangerous, but Ben-Gurion keenly understood not only the prime importance of relations with America but also the fact that the American Jewish community had now become the center of world Jewry.

Indeed, soon enough—and for decades to come—that same Jewish community, the world’s largest and strongest, would play a critical role in the establishment and subsequent support and protection of the first Jewish state in 2,000 years.

But that was the 20th century; the 21st will be different. That is the conclusion of my essay in Mosaic, “If American Jews and Israel are Drifting Apart, What’s the Reason?”

I’m grateful to Daniel Gordis, Martin Kramer, and Jack Wertheimerfor their kind words about the essay itself and especially for their thoughtful comments on its thesis. Taken together, those comments affirm but also broaden and deepen my argument.

All three of my respondents note the remarkable change in the relationship between Israel and American Jewry since 1948, some of which is due to sheer demographics. At the time of Israel’s founding, as Martin Kramer explains, its Jewish population was one-ninth the size of American Jewry, and was also largely poor and needy. Today, the population ratio is one to one, Israel’s economic situation has improved immeasurably, and its population is growing—even as our numbers in America are being reduced by low birth rates and intermarriage.

As Daniel Gordis puts it, “Israeli Jews have worked out a successful survival strategy,” while, by contrast, the “American Jewish survival strategy is struggling.” The trend lines are clear—which is why I suggested in my essay that we American Jews may end up needing what amounts to foreign aid, with the Israelis trying to rescue us, or anyway some of us, as best they can.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed — on The Glazov Gang. Stephen Coughlin unveils the disgraceful and deadly cost America pays for obeying Islamic laws in Afghanistan.

By on April 26th, 2016

This special edition of The Glazov Gang was joined by Stephen Coughlin, the co-founder of UnconstrainedAnalytics.org and the author of the new book, Catastrophic Failure.

He came on the show to discuss How “Rules of Engagement” Get U.S. Soldiers Killed, unveiling the disgraceful and deadly cost America pays for obeying Islamic laws in Afghanistan.

Don’t miss it!http://jamieglazov.com/2016/04/26/how-rules-of-engagement-get-u-s-soldiers-killed-on-the-glazov-gang-2/

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION, POLITICS Comments turned off

The Criminal Constituency McAuliffe is a lawless governor in a party of felons. By Kevin D. Williamson

By on April 26th, 2016

Terry McAuliffe was a Clinton henchman before he was governor of Virginia. He would be a Clinton henchman afterward, too, which means that he must be one during his governorship, to which end he has ordered — without legal authority — the automatic re-enfranchisement of felons stripped of their voting rights. Virginia is a swing state, Mrs. Clinton needs it, and Governor McAuliffe is therefore determined to deliver it to her.

It is difficult to say which is more woeful: McAuliffe’s cynical political calculation or the fact that it is entirely accurate.

McAuliffe is here following the example of Barack Obama, another chief executive who has attempted to use particularistic powers entrusted him in a categorical rather than discrete fashion, thereby transforming exercises in executive privilege into policy changes that would normally require changes in the law. In the case of our ever-more-imperial president, the issue was illegal immigration: The federal government is under no particular obligation to prosecute every instance of illegal immigration — prosecutorial discretion is an ordinary feature of the law — but President Obama’s general application of that discrete power amounted to a change in the law (an executive amnesty) and a usurpation of legislative authority. The matter is going to the Supreme Court; so far, the lower courts have looked upon the Obama administration’s policy adventuring with skepticism.

McAuliffe may believe that the Commonwealth of Virginia should change its law and automatically reinstate the civil rights (some of them, anyway) of felons who have completed their sentences and whatever probation or parole conditions were attached to them. He might even be right. But the Commonwealth of Virginia has not done that. Doing so would require a bill to be introduced in its state legislature, passed, and signed by the governor. No such thing has happened. The governor’s executive privileges including granting clemency in certain criminal cases and restoring the civil rights (some of them, anyway) of rehabilitated criminals on a case-by-case basis. The ability to restore a felon’s voting rights does not grant the governor the power to do so universally any more than his ability to pardon a convicted murderer empowers him to legalize murder.

Voting rights are not the only rights that felons lose, and some of their civil rights — prominently, those guaranteed under the Second Amendment — are forfeited for life with no particular controversy. But it isn’t only gun rights: Those who commit sex offenses, especially offenses against children, may find their privacy compromised and their ability to move about freely restricted indefinitely, or until such a time as their mode of transport is a pine box carried by six strong men.

We restrict the gun rights of violent criminals, including those who have (in the inescapable cliché) “paid their debt to society” because they have proved themselves to be dangerous, and therefore not to be trusted with instruments of violence. They should not be trusted with firearms, or with the ultimate instrument of violence: political power.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

President Obama: Accessory to the Crimes Committed By Illegal Aliens? The grim findings unveiled by a House congressional hearing. Michael Cutler

By on April 26th, 2016

On Tuesday, April 19, 2016, the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security conducted a hearing on the topic, “The Real Victims of a Reckless and Lawless Immigration Policy: Families and Survivors Speak Out on the Real Cost of This Administration’s Policies.”

I urge you to watch the entire video of that important hearing. And then I recommend that you provide information about that hearing to as many folks as possible.

The witnesses at this hearing were: Sheriff Charles Jenkins of Frederick County, Maryland; Michelle Root, the mother of Sarah Root; Laura Wilkerson, the mother of Joshua Wilkerson; and Bishop Minerva Carcaño of the United Methodist Church.

The timing of the hearing could not have been better because the day before, on Monday, April 18th, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the administration’s implementation of the DAPA program (Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents). A CNN news report, “Supreme Court divided on Obama’s immigration actions,” focused on this program, which is a follow-on to the DACA program (Deferred Action, Childhood Arrival), which largely paralleled the failed DREAM Act.

To provide my perspectives on the use (or, rather, misuse) of prosecutorial discretion, I wrote an op-ed for Fox News Latino, “Obama Invokes Prosecutorial Discretion to Circumvent Constitution and Congress” that was published on June 17, 2012 — two days after President Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden to proclaim that “since Congress failed to act” he was going to take action. Of course to Obama, his concept of a “failure of Congress to act” was the refusal of Congress to pass bad legislation. When Congress votes down bad legislation, they most certainly are acting.

Obama also deceptively said that this was about children, kids and young people, even though illegal aliens as old as 31 years of age could apply for this program, provided that they claimed that they entered the United States prior to their 16thbirthdays. Without any interviews or field investigations being conducted, fraud likely permeates this program that has an approval rate of more than 95%.

In my Fox News Latino piece, I noted that what Mr. Obama referred to as “Prosecutorial Discretion” should be more properly referred to as “Prosecutorial Deception.” Incidentally, I cannot pass up the opportunity to note that while the term “alien” has come under attack by Obama and his supporters, the open borders anarchists, the term “DREAMers” is derived from the acronym for the “Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors” Act.

Continue reading →
ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

The Laws Of Human Nature How the Left rejected an ancient wisdom — to our detriment. Bruce Thornton

By on April 26th, 2016

Reprinted from Hoover.org.

The sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has reminded us of the great divide in opinion over how the Constitution should be interpreted. Scalia was the most influential and consequential adherent of “originalism” or “textualism.” In Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992), he succinctly defined this approach: “Texts and traditions are facts to study, not convictions to demonstrate about.” Since the Constitution is a written text, a judge has the obligation to discern “the plain, original meaning of the constitutional text,” as he said later in NLRB vs. Canning (2014). The alternative is to substitute “freewheeling interpretations” that serve politics and ideology rather than the Constitution’s precepts and principles, and the traditional understanding of its words. “The Constitution,” Scalia said in a speech in 2012, “is not a living organism. It’s a legal document, and it says what it says and doesn’t say what it doesn’t say.”

Scalia was a foe of the idea of the “living Constitution,” as his phrase “living organism” shows. Progressive President Woodrow Wilson was one of the first to espouse the view Scalia rejects. The Founders’ Constitution, with its balance of powers, Wilson said, was a “variety of mechanics” founded on the “law of gravitation.” But a government is a “living thing” that falls under “the theory of organic life” and so is “modified by its environment, necessitated by its tasks, [and] shaped to its functions by the sheer pressure of life.” Thus, according to the influential progressive writer Herbert Croly, to better govern and improve the nation, the people had to discard the “strong, almost dominant tendency to regard the existing Constitution with superstitious awe, and to shrink with horror from modifying it even in the smallest degree.” The assumption is that the Founders could never have anticipated the novel technological and social changes in America that had rendered the Constitution an anachronism.

That same assumption underlies much “living Constitution” jurisprudence today. Changing social mores have led Supreme Court justices to tease out of the Constitution “rights” it never mentions. In Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), Justice William O. Douglas discovered a right to privacy in the Constitution’s “emanations” and “penumbras,” and in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood (1992), Anthony Kennedy found “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Subsequent decisions on issues like abortion and same-sex marriage have followed the same imperative to “plug the gaps,” as Judge Richard Posner has put it, left in the Constitution by changes in technology and progress in social habits, values, and beliefs.

This conflict between how the Constitution should be interpreted, however, is the result of a deeper, more ancient clash of ideas––how we understand human nature. Are core human attributes––particularly the destructive appetites and passions––permanent aspects of the human condition? Or is human nature “plastic” and able to be improved once environmental obstacles like poverty or ignorance are removed, and after better political, economic, and social institutions are created?

Continue reading →