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January 2017

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

‘Homeland,’ Season 6 Review: A Politically Correct Carrie Gone is the series’ original vitality, replaced with predictable politeness.By Dorothy Rabinowitz

By on January 14th, 2017

It’s a far from familiar Carrie, bipolar scourge of terrorists, who shows up in season 6 of “Homeland,’’ set in that destination strivers around the world dream of living in—namely, Brooklyn. She’s there having abandoned any further service to the CIA, because—she makes clear in the show’s opening episodes—she’s become increasingly dismayed by America’s policies in the Middle East. Not to mention at home, where she’s appalled to discover that the U.S government has been taking the threat of homegrown terrorism seriously and going so far as to investigate enthusiasts of jihad, creators of websites for the dissemination of messages from Islamic State, devotees of suicide bombers, and even charging some suspected of connection with terror networks abroad.

So it is that we find an even more chronically infuriated Carrie than the one of previous seasons. Instead of chasing around the capitals of the world hunting down terrorists about to set off explosions intended to take the lives of tens of thousands of unbelievers, she’s now spending her days in her Brooklyn offices devoted to legal defense of Muslim males she considers unjustly charged victims of the U.S. government. Unjustly charged in many ways, in Carrie’s view—the most remarkable aspect of which is her complaint that the government investigators aiming to prevent the next mass murder of Americans never stopped to consider the emotional factors driving these subjects, or to take into account the fact that the efforts of some of the would-be perpetrators bent on grand-scale terror assaults turned out to be ineffectual anyway. It’s around about this point in her reasoning that you begin to miss the other Carrie who used to pop pills by the handful, and to wish she’d go and find that bottle she used to keep handy.

In episode 1, awash in introductions to Carrie’s new views, she’s furious about the fate of one man convicted of trying to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, using a blowtorch. “He’s doing 20 years essentially for being an idiot,” she broods. She goes into action in the case of a young Muslim, of Nigerian background, arrested as an online fan of jihadists and celebrator of suicide bombers, with a busy website—a possible material supporter of terror networks abroad. But in Carrie’s assessment, “just an angry kid.” In the unlikely event anybody has, within the first five minutes, not grasped the re-education mission of the series’ new season, the writers once given to obliqueness in the interest of mystery and style have Carrie hammering the messaging home. “Law enforcement,” Carrie declaims, “has to stop harassing and demonizing an entire community.”

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

The Climate Intelligence Agency Democratic CO2 obsessions reach new comic heights.

By on January 14th, 2017

Democrats must have concluded that climate change will defeat Donald Trump’s nominees, or perhaps the subject’s omnipresence at the confirmation hearings merely reflects their own political preoccupations, or their rich donors’. Whatever the reason, no job is too irrelevant for global warming to intrude.

Perhaps you think Mr. Trump named Mike Pompeo to the Central Intelligence Agency because of his spycraft expertise, or to defeat terror groups. Kamala Harris has other ideas. The new California Senator burned her question time on Thursday cross-examining Mr. Pompeo about “the scientific consensus” on global warming.

Citing NASA and “most of the leading scientific organizations world-wide,” Ms. Harris repeatedly asked about the human contribution to climate trends. “Do you have any reason to doubt NASA’s findings?” Mr. Pompeo replied that “I, frankly, as the director of CIA would prefer today not to get into the details of climate debate and science. It just seems—my role is going to be so different.”

When Ms. Harris kept pressing, Mr. Pompeo dryly replied, “I do know the agency’s role. Its role is to collect foreign intelligence.”

Meanwhile, in a nine-page questionnaire to Ben Carson, who is being sent to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Elizabeth Warren wanted to learn what the doctor thought about “C0 2 and other greenhouse gas emissions,” because extreme weather like flooding poses “a significant risk to public housing.”

“What other actions will you take to adapt to or prevent climate change while you are HUD Secretary?” Ms. Warren wondered. Maybe Dr. Carson’s tenure will be the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal.

At least Rex Tillerson would have some relation to climate policy at the State Department, such as the Paris carbon deal. But Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley wanted to know about the mountain pine beetle, an invasive forest species he claimed was expanding as a result of warming.

Mr. Tillerson called warming a “serious risk” and added that “the facts on the ground are indisputable in terms of what’s happening with drought, disease, uh, insects, all the things you cite,” though he also mentioned “uncertainty” about the scientific models and the economic cost of a response. That was too much for Mr. Merkley, who said he’d oppose the nomination.

The real meltdown is scheduled for next week, when Scott Pruitt will be grilled about leading the Environmental Protection Agency. Washington’s Patty Murray has called the Oklahoma Attorney General “a climate change denier,” New Hampshire’s Jeanne Shaheen claimed the nomination was “a capitulation to polluters,” and Bernie Sanders said on CNN that “it is rather ironic that Mr. Trump has nominated somebody to head the EPA who doesn’t much believe in environmental protection.”

Mr. Pruitt has a scrappy legal background, including a constitutional challenge to the EPA’s abusive Clean Power Plan, but the real irony is that his environmental record, as traditionally understood, is strong. As AG, he negotiated a state compact with Arkansas to clean up phosphorous pollution in the Illinois River, lobbied for the federal 2016 Frank Lautenberg Chemical Safety Act, and sued poultry farms that didn’t control waste runoff as well as oil companies with leaking underground storage tanks.

That these achievements no longer count as environmental protection shows how far the progressive carbon panic has gone.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Trump May Herald a New Political Order Seldom does a presidential election mark a permanent shift. The last time it happened was 1932. By John Steele Gordon

By on January 14th, 2017

For all their noise and news dominance, presidential elections typically don’t change the country all that much. That isn’t a bad thing but a sign of how strong American democracy is. It rarely veers far from the center, where successful policy usually lies. But on rare occasions, deep historical currents and extraordinary political talents produce an entirely new order. It happened in the presidential elections of 1828, 1860, 1896, 1932—and, quite probably, 2016.

Denied the presidency in 1824 by what he called a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives, Tennessee’s Andrew Jackson swept to a landslide four years later. He was the first president from west of the Appalachians—indeed, the first from anywhere other than Virginia or Massachusetts. Born dirt-poor, Jackson was also the first president to rise to affluence solely by his own effort.

It soon became clear that the country had entered a new political era. “Jacksonian democracy” moved the locus of power sharply down the socioeconomic scale. Soon most states repealed property requirements for voting, a first step toward universal suffrage.

Jackson created the modern Democratic Party, and the intense opposition to his policies coalesced into the Whig Party, establishing the two-party norm that prevails to this day. No wonder the great 19th-century American historian George Bancroft considered Jackson the last of the Founding Fathers.

The next great shift came with Abraham Lincoln. By the 1850s, slavery had become the dominant issue in American politics. The Republican Party, founded in 1854 as an expressly abolitionist party, grew rapidly as the Whigs collapsed. When Lincoln, the Republican nominee, won the presidency in 1860, the Union quickly came apart. South Carolina seceded barely a month after the election. Six more states were gone by Feb. 1, 1861, with a month still to go before Lincoln’s March 4 inauguration.

It would take the greatest war in American history to reunite the country. By the time the Civil War was over, the nation had been transformed. The South, impoverished and politically crippled, would be effectively a Third World country inside a First World one for 100 years. The North, with its rapidly expanding industry and growing population, was politically dominant. More than half the antebellum presidents had been Southern. In the century after the war ended, only two Southerners were elected to the White House: Woodrow Wilson, a Virginia native who made his career in New Jersey, and Texas’ Lyndon B. Johnson.

Presidential elections in the decades after the Civil War tended to be close. Grover Cleveland barely beat James G. Blaine in 1884. Four years later, Cleveland earned a popular-vote plurality while losing to Benjamin Harrison. In an 1892 rematch, Cleveland narrowly beat Harrison, becoming the only president to serve nonconsecutive terms.

But William McKinley’s decisive victory in 1896 marked the dawn of an era of Republican dominance that lasted more than a generation. McKinley ran on a platform of “Sound Money, Protection, and Prosperity,” a doctrine that suited the interests of the nation’s fast-rising affluent classes. His opponent, the Democratic nominee William Jennings Bryan, was one of the great orators of American politics. Bryan railed against the gold standard and called for an inflationary monetary policy, which would have benefited debtors, including most farmers in the West and South.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: A Strategy of Lies and Deception by Bassam Tawil

By on January 14th, 2017

Abbas here lied twice. First, it is a lie that he is prepared to return to the negotiating table with Israel. In the past few years, Abbas has repeatedly rejected Israeli offers to resume the stalled peace negotiations.

Abbas’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, claimed this week that his boss was ready to resume the peace talks with Israel in Moscow….Indeed, Abbas had “earlier” voiced his readiness to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in Moscow. But Abbas once again outlined his preconditions for such a summit… This means that Abbas has not abandoned his preconditions for resuming the peace talks with Israel. The timing of Erekat’s announcement in Moscow is clearly linked to the Paris peace conference. It is part of the Palestinian strategy to depict Israel as the party opposed to the resumption of the peace talks.

Abbas has in the past reluctantly condemned some of the terror attacks against Israel. But these statements were made under duress, after being pressured by the US or EU.

In fact, his “condemnations” are nothing but political pablum, a sop to the West.

The Palestinian terrorist who rammed his truck into a group of young Israeli soldiers last week was doing exactly what his president urged Palestinians to do.

The Germans and French should not believe Abbas when he says that he condemns truck terror attacks in their countries. The scenes of Palestinians celebrating carnage in Jerusalem should serve as a wake-up call to the international community. The message of the call? That the overall Palestinian strategy – like the jihad strategy – is built on lies. Both continue to feature terror as one their main pillars.

What members of the international community do not seem to understand is that… [t]he terrorist who rammed his truck into a German Christmas market did not carry out his attack in outrage at a German settlement or a checkpoint. The terrorist who mowed down French people celebrating Bastille day was not protesting French “occupation.” Abbas and his cohorts, like the terrorists in Europe, are part of just one big global jihad against all “infidels” – including them.

The Palestinian Authority and its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, still believe that they can fool all of the people all of the time. This has always been the Palestinian strategy: nothing new here. Yet one likes to think that world leaders and decision-makers in the West will eventually – perhaps today? – wake up to the fact that the Palestinians are playing them for fools.

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