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December 2016

FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

John Kerry to Give Speech Wednesday on Middle East Peace Process Speech expected to lay out administration’s vision for resolving conflict between Israel, Palestinians By Felicia Schwartz

By on December 28th, 2016

WASHINGTON—Secretary of State John Kerry will give a speech Wednesday laying out the Obama administration’s vision for resolving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, State Department spokesman Mark Toner said.

Mr. Kerry’s speech comes nearly a week after the Obama administration allowed the passage of a United Nations resolution harshly criticizing Israel’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, a move that inflamed tensions between the longtime allies. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu summoned the U.S. ambassador to Israel over the weekend to lodge a formal complaint.

Mr. Toner said Tuesday that Mr. Kerry would touch on the United Nations resolution, but that he would more broadly address a path forward toward peace. Frank Lowenstein, the State Department’s special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, told reporters Friday that Mr. Kerry’s talk would be informed by his experience trying to broker peace between the Israelis and Palestinians while serving as the U.S.’s top diplomat.

“The secretary has obviously put a great deal of time and effort over the course of the last four years to negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians…not only with the parties but also with key players in the region and other stakeholders around the world,” Mr. Lowenstein said. “Out of that, I think he’s got some ideas about where we go from here.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

‘If I Had Run Again’ Coach Obama says his team’s big loss wasn’t his fault.

By on December 28th, 2016

In the post-election annals of “woulda, coulda, shoulda,” it will be hard to top departing President Barack Obama’s boast that he would have defeated Donald Trump “if I had run again.”

This, it goes without saying, triggered a tweet from Mr. Trump: “He should say that but I say NO WAY!”

How edifying to witness an American President and President-elect exchanging taunts like two eighth-graders in the schoolyard.

Mr. Obama unburdened himself of this analysis in a podcast with his former White House adviser David Axelrod. Though Mr. Obama is fond of sports analogies, one he seems not to have noticed is that most coaches after a Super Bowl loss don’t blame it on their own quarterback, the diabolical opposition or the media.

Mr. Obama said that Hillary Clinton, who ran as a third Obama term, “played it safe.” People felt the country was on the wrong track because Mitch McConnell threw “sand in the gears” of Washington. His advice to Democrats now is “not thinking that somehow just a great set of progressive policies that we present to the New York Times editorial board will win the day.”

The serious thought inside Mr. Obama’s late hit is whether progressive ideas need revision, or merely need to be recycled with a different messenger, like him. We doubt all Democrats will be as enthusiastic about running again on the economic and foreign-policy record of 2009-2016.

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FOREIGN POLICY, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump Could Be Even More Wrong on Israel Rejecting a two-state solution would be worse than Obama’s U.N. abstention. By William A. Galston see note please

By on December 28th, 2016

But Mr. Galston was also outraged when Netanayhu addressed the U. S. Congress in 2015…
Netanyahu’s Capitol Hill Debacle The Israeli leader and House speaker are risking a rupture in U.S.-Israel relations.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-a-galston-netanyahus-capitol-hill-debacle-1424218804
Netanyahu’s Forceful but Misguided Address His logic should lead him to urge an Iranian regime change, but he knows that won’t sell in the U.S.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/william-a-galston-netanyahus-forceful-but-misguided-address-1425427204

As children we are taught that two wrongs don’t make a right. And when we grow up, we learn that this maxim harbors a deep, sad truth—nowhere more so than in the Middle East.

The Obama administration’s decision to abstain on U.N. Security Council resolution 2334, which condemns Israel for its settlements on the West Bank and east Jerusalem, was a mistake. Understandable, perhaps, but still a mistake. It has given false hope to Israel’s adversaries while uniting Israelis across the political spectrum against an institution they see as one-sided and hypocritical.

The resolution makes no discernible contribution to the cause of peace in the Middle East. Most Israelis regard it as the final act of an expiring administration, not a long-term change in U.S. policy.

The recent resolution is most accurately understood as a continuation of past Security Council and U.S. policy in the region. As my Brookings colleague Natan Sachs points out, by abstaining in 1987, the Reagan administration allowed the passage of the Security Council’s Resolution 605, which included “Jerusalem” in the “Palestinian and Arab Territories, occupied by Israel since 1967.”

When it comes to the Middle East, it is Donald Trump who represents a breach with the past, not Barack Obama. blah,blah, blah….

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Climateers Can’t Handle the Truth Lee Raymond’s 1997 climate speech in China is looking better than ever. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

By on December 28th, 2016

Congrats are due for the term “climate denialist,” which in 2016 migrated from Paul Krugman’s column to the news pages of the New York Times.

On Dec. 7, the term ascended to a place of ultimate honor when it figured in the headline, “Trump Picks Scott Pruitt, Climate Change Denialist, to Lead E.P.A.”

Unfortunately, never to be explained is precisely which climate propositions one must deny in order to qualify as a denialist. In zinging Mr. Pruitt, currently Oklahoma’s attorney general, the Times rests its unspoken case on a quote from an article this year in National Review, in which he and a coauthor wrote: “Scientists continue to disagree about the degree and extent of global warming and its connection to the actions of mankind.”

But this statement is plainly true. No climate scientist would dispute it. Through all five “assessment reports” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—sharer of Al Gore’s Nobel prize—the central puzzle has been “climate sensitivity,” aka the “degree and extent” of human impact on climate.

Greenpeace adopts the same National Review article to attack Mr. Pruitt, lying that he and a coauthor “claimed the science of climate change is ‘far from settled.’”

The science is not settled (science never is), but this is not what Mr. Pruitt was referring to. His plain, unmistakable words refer to a “major policy debate” that is “far from settled”—a statement that indisputably applies even among ardent believers in climate doom. Witness the battle between wings of the environmental movement over the role of nuclear power. Witness veteran campaigner James Hansen’s dismissal of the Paris agreement, which other climate campaigners celebrate, as “worthless words.”

These lies about what Mr. Pruitt wrote in a widely available article aren’t the lies of authors carried away by enthusiasm for their cause. They are the lies of people who know their employers and audiences are beyond caring.

Which brings us a two-part article in the New York Review of Books by representatives of the Rockefeller family charity, desperately trying to make the world care about their fantasy that Exxon is somehow a decisive player in the policy debate—Exxon, not voters who oppose higher energy taxes; Exxon, not the governments that control 80% of the world’s fossil fuel reserves and show no tendency to forgo the money available from them.

The Rockefeller family’s charitable attachment to the climate cause is understandable, though. Their money might instead be used to bring clean water to poor villages, immunize kids against disease, or improve education. But such programs can be evaluated and found wanting due to fraud or incompetence, whereas climate change is a cause to which money can safely be devoted to no effect whatsoever without fear of criticism. CONTINUE AT SITE

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The EU vs. the Nation State? by George Igler

By on December 28th, 2016

The question remains, however, why any nation would want to throw out its sovereignty to institutions that are fundamentally unaccountable, that provide no mechanism for reversing direction, and whose only “solution” to problems involves arrogating to itself ever more authoritarian, rather than democratically legitimate, power.

Previous worries over unemployment and the economy have been side-lined: the issues now vexing European voters the most, according to the EU’s own figures, are mass immigration (45%) and terrorism (32%).

The Netherlands’ Partij Voor de Vrijheid, France’s Front National and Germany’s Alternativ für Deutschland are each pushing for a referendum on EU membership in their respective nations.

Given that the EU’s institutions have been so instrumental as a causal factor in the mass migration and terrorism that are now dominating the minds of national electorates, some might argue that the sooner Europeans get rid of the EU, which is now doing more harm than good, the better.

Attention is beginning to focus on elections due to take place in three separate European countries in 2017. The outcomes in the Netherlands, France and Germany will determine the likely future of the European Union (EU).

In the Netherlands, on March 15, all 150 members of the country’s House of Representatives will face the ballot box. The nation is currently led by Prime Minister Mark Rutte, whose VVD party holds 40 seats in the legislative chamber, ruling in a coalition with the Dutch Labour party, which holds 35 seats.

In contrast, the Party for Freedom – Partij Voor de Vrijheid (PVV) – led by Geert Wilders, currently holds 12 seats.

According to an opinion poll, issued on December 21, Wilders’s party has leapt to 24% in the polls, while Rutte’s party has slid to 15%. Were an election to happen now, this would translate to 23 MPs for Rutte’s VVD, and 36 MPs for Wilders’s PVV.

Given the strict formula of proportional representation in the Netherlands, however, coalition governments are the norm. Should Wilders’s PVV come first in March, he will likely need to negotiate with one of his staunchest critics to form a government.

In France, two rounds of voting in the presidential elections are set to take place on April 23 and May 7 – with the two leading candidates from the first round facing each other in a runoff in the second round.

The most likely candidates to make it through to the second round, François Fillon, of the centre-right Les Républicains, and Marine Le Pen, of the populist Front National, remain tied in first-round polling.

A survey, published on December 7, gave each candidate 24%. Le Pen’s party, however, has previously fallen afoul of France’s dual-round voting system, in which voters for other parties have used the second round to swing behind the more moderate candidate.

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