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Ruth King

Obama’s Illegal Guantanamo Power Play The president plans to close the facility and ship detainees to U.S. soil, despite a ban by Congress. By David B. Rivkin Jr. And Lee A. Casey

Two days after terrorists rampaged in Paris, the Obama administration announced that it had transferred five prisoners—including a former Osama bin Laden bodyguard—from the U.S. prison facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the United Arab Emirates.

In the past several days, the White House has signaled that a more significant step is coming soon: the complete shutdown of the facility and the transfer of the remaining detainees—there are 107 at the moment—to sites on the U.S. mainland. Obama-administration surrogates say the president will effect the change by using his favorite tool, an executive order. But this would be utterly illegal, since Congress has specifically prohibited the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to U.S. soil.

Although the president’s war powers are broad and formidable, so are those of Congress. In particular, the Constitution specifically vests the legislative branch with the powers to “declare War”; to “raise and support Armies”; to “make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water”; to “make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces”; and to appropriate funds for all of these purposes.

Tony Thomas: Third World Kleptocrats Do Paris ****

If you want to make a big noise and rattle a bigger cup at the latest climate fest, it pays to be a dictator with a history of bloodshed, oppression, graft and ballot-rigging. Just ask Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or the Maldives’ Abdulla Yameen Gayoom
Two important blocs posturing at the Paris climate talks are the Alliance of Small Island States bloc ( AOSIS, 44 countries) and the African bloc (54 countries). The island-states’ representative since January is the strongman president of the Maldives, Abdulla Yameen Gayoom, whose democracy-friendly predecessor, Mahomed Nasheed, is now doing a 13-year term in an insanitary Maldives prison. The African bloc’s spokesman is Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe, who needs no introduction.

It’s hard to plumb the depths of the hypocrisy involved, especially about the proposed $US100 billion annual green handouts to Third World despots and kleptocrats. But I’ll give it a try.

Maldives President Yameen has sent a message to Paris describing AOSIS as the “moral voice” of the UN Paris talks, and he has called for the $US100 billion per annum to be “scaled up in the years to come”. And that not all that he and his AOSIS team want. In 2013, the Warsaw climate conference waffled about an extra fund for the likes of Maldives, called “an international mechanism on Loss & Damage”. This will require further ratification in 2016 and Yameen is very keen on it.

Hubris with a computer model

Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say, but as 20,000-or-so warmists congeal in Paris for their latest round of posturing and room service, it remains difficult to grasp in full the means by which a trace gas has come to prompt so much fear on the part of fools and so many climate dollars for the settled scientists and their hangers-on. In his latest post at the Black Jay blog, physicist John Reid sheds some light:

So the fluid dynamics people, who already used fluid dynamic computer models to make weather forecasts, told everybody they could do the same thing for climate. Obviously, they thought, if you can predict the weather a week ahead, with a bit of tweaking you can predict the climate centuries into the future and so estimate the effect that CO2 will have on the planet.

Fatah Knives and ISIS Knives: Palestinian Child-Sacrifice by Bassam Tawil

Instead of educating our children, as they do in the West, to be part of the Startup Generation, we follow the lead of darkest Africa, where children are armed with assault rifles and sent out to kill other children.

If the Palestinians really want to pick a fight with Israel, why do they send children to fight a “holy war” instead of fighting it themselves, like men?

The only difference is that the members of ISIS go out themselves to kill; the Palestinians send their young. Why are these not “war crimes”?

We sacrifice our sons and daughters in the name of Allah, as though Allah were a pagan statue with an altar and had to be appeased with the blood of children.

Here, the Islamists want to “liberate” Jerusalem from the infidel Zionist-Crusader occupation. Next, they want to “liberate” occupied Spain, once Muslim Andalusia, and return it to the bosom of Islam. After that, they want to occupy the Vatican and establish the Islamic Emirate on the ruins of Christianity.

We could be facing civil war, and our security forces are crippled By Michel Gurfinkiel

A state of emergency has been declared in France.

So far, everyone, right and left, seems to agree that the country must resort to drastic means to restore safety. Commentators frequently point to Israel as an example to be followed.

Border controls loosened under the Schengen regime have been re-established, there have been arrests, mosques seen as hotbeds of radicalism may be closed, and some foreign imams may be expelled. Security forces in combat gear have been guarding public buildings and public spaces.

Still, one wonders how effective such policies can be.

According to Vincent Desportes, a former general and author of a book on national defence, France’s security apparatus is crippled and overstretched.

Black Lives Matter: What If They’re Gay, Sick and Contagious? By Marilyn Penn

With all the marching in cities and demonstrating on campus, it might be helpful to look at some actual statistics about Black Lives. According to the Bureau of Justice for the year 2009 (the last for which data is available), 218 Black men died during the course of arrest or while in the custody of the law. This does not distinguish between armed or unarmed men nor does it justify any wrongful death. In the same year, Blacks accounted for 56% of deaths due to HIV/AIDS, the vast majority being young gay black men. In 2012, there were 6,540 Black deaths from HIV/AIDS according to the CDC (Center for Disease Control); although Blacks are only 12% of the population, this represents 50% of the 13,712 people who died of this disease.

While medicines are improving and people are living longer with HIV, there are 45,000 new HIV infections each year and the rate is rising for the most at risk demographic – young gay black men. 72% of Black men with HIV contract it thru sex with other men. High risk, invasive and unprotected sex is common among this group as is non-compliance with taking medication and lack of concern about infecting others.

Solar Energy Gives Investors a Shock By Susan Shelley

The operators of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System were recently surprised by state air quality regulators, who informed them that the $2.2 billion solar energy plant is a carbon polluter.

Solar energy doesn’t emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s the whole point of California’s increasingly mandatory and wildly expensive push to replace fossil fuels with solar and wind energy.

But as it turns out, the sun does not shine at night. This is what happens when governors don’t do any research before they sign legislation.

The Ivanpah plant is located on five square miles of the Mojave Desert near the Nevada border. You can see it from Interstate 15 — it’s that alien-looking landscape of shiny circles surrounding three skeletal towers topped with black-and-white capsules.

Muslim “No-go Zones” in Europe? by Daniel Pipes

The existence of “no-go zones” in predominantly Muslim areas in Europe has been a major topic of conversation since the latest Paris massacre on Nov. 13, primarily due to the assailants’ many connections to Molenbeek, a heavily Muslim district of Brussels. This discussion brings to mind my visit to a drug- and crime-infested slum of 7,000 inhabitants in Marseilles, France, on Jan. 29, to see the situation for myself.

A typical housing block for immigrants in Marseille, France.

I entered the housing complex in an unmarked but recognizable city-owned car driven by a city employee who had been tasked with showing me around. Unfortunately, being mostly a paper-pusher and not experienced in the field, he got spooked and abruptly turned around to leave, raising suspicions among the drug dealers around us, who proceeded to set off the alarm.

A motorcyclist and a truck then zipped ahead of us and boxed us in on a nearby highway. Sitting in the car’s front passenger seat, I was accosted and threatened by four young thugs. The city rep pleaded with them, telling them I was a visiting sociologist. They responded first with threatening comments and then by throwing a piece of concrete the size of a football through the back window. Luckily no on was injured, and they let us leave after the intimidating incident had concluded. I provided the mayor’s office with audio, video, and still photographs of the thugs and their license plates.

I have kept quiet about this incident for ten months in the hopes that the French judicial system would function. As of today, however no one has been apprehended, no charges have been filed, and to my knowledge, no real investigation ever took place.

America at Obama’s End Hope and change was the promise. What happened?By Daniel Henninger

We are near the end of the seventh year of Barack Obama’s presidency, and by any measure the United States is a fractured nation. Its people are more divided politically than any time in recent memory. Personally, many are anxious, angry or just down.

Whatever Mr. Obama promised in that famous first Inaugural Address, any sense of a nation united and raised up is gone. This isn’t normal second-term blues. It’s a sense of bust.

The formal measure of all this appeared last week with the release of the Pew Research poll, whose headline message is that trust in government is kaput. Forget the old joke about the government coming to “help.” There’s a darker version now: We’re the government, and we’re here to screw you.

In a normal presidential transition year, voters would be excited at the mere prospect of new leadership. Instead, the American people are grasping for straw men.

Why Murder Becomes a National Sport Jonathan S. Tobin

Foreign observers are somewhat puzzled by the latest twist in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They are used to seeing angry young Palestinian men lashing out in violence. But they are surprised by the fact that young women appear to be the backbone of the “stabling intifada” in which, in addition to shootings, gasoline bomb and rock throwing attacks, individual Palestinian terrorists are going out every day and seeking out Jews on the street to murder with knives.

What drives young girls and women to do murder and to usually sacrifice their own lives when, as has often happened, Israelis defend themselves against attempted butchery with armed force? In its feature on the subject published today, the New York Times attempts to answer the question with the usual explanations about Israel being to blame: “anger over decades of Israeli military occupation, fading hopes of statehood and a rebellion against Palestinian leaders.” But, the piece, written by the paper’s Palestinian stringers, also alludes to the drumbeat of incitement from those same leaders as well as the popular culture of hate that is part of the daily fare of the media controlled by them. When you strip away the usual cant about the conflict, it’s clear that it takes more than political grievances to make young people abandon their own lives in order to shed the blood of strangers. Tired talking points about statehood or borders aren’t a sufficient explanation. Only religious fervor and pure hatred can motivate a person to behave in such an inhuman fashion.