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Ruth King

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Peter O’Brien: Climate Change and Mute Conservatives

By on October 19th, 2015

The increase in global temperatures, touted by warmists but nowhere evident in almost 19 years of flat-lining satellite readings, is said to inflict many dubious ills, from shark attacks to hermaphroditic lizards. Its only demonstrable consequence, however, is the cowardice of those who dare not speak up
At the essence of conservatism is the philosophy that, while accepting change as inevitable, it should be for the good or, at the very least, do no harm. Coupled with this should be a healthy scepticism and an insistence that any case for significant disruption of society and the economy be first subjected to rigorous examination. This raises the matter of what we now routinely refer to as “climate change” – catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW), to use one of the climateers’ favoured and emotionally laden descriptors.

Tony Abbott, speaking frankly, once conceded that “climate change is crap”. It’s difficult to know just how many conservative voters share that conviction if one goes only by the polls. Take as one example a recent Lowy survey that posed two questions. The first asked what Australia’s approach to the upcoming Paris climate conference should be, with 63% of respondents agreeing we need to “commit to significant reduction” in greenhouse gas emissions pour encourager les autres. Only 35% believe we should not make commitments ahead of other countries. But this result seems to fly in the face of responses to the second question, relating to belief in global warming. While 50% of respondents rate climate change a serious problem, 40% believe its effects will be gradual and can be dealt with by taking less costly and disruptive steps over time. The remaining 10% believe that “unless we are sure that global warming is a problem” we should take no steps at all.

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Clinton Coronation Back on Track? Not So Fast By John Fund

By on October 19th, 2015

In the Perils of Pauline–like cliffhanger serial that is Hillary Clinton’s career, she has once again escaped and is declaring herself safe.

A strong debate performance — aided by chief rival Bernie Sanders’s dismissal of her e-mail scandal — has Clinton backers claiming the scandal is a dead issue in the Democratic primaries. Clinton’s pollster, Joel Berenson, notes that some 75 percent of Democrats approve of her, even though 31 percent of them also think she is lying about the e-mail scandal. Her questioners on the House Benghazi Committee, this line of thinking goes, have revealed their partisanship, and she ought to have no trouble besting them in her appearance before the committee this Thursday.

Not so fast. An intelligence source told Fox News the FBI is focusing on evidence that Clinton may have engaged in “gross negligence” in her mishandling of government documents, a violation of the Espionage Act. FBI agents are also looking at obstruction-of-justice allegations. More than 400 e-mails containing classified information flowed through Hillary’s homebrew server, but she continues to insist that she handled no classified material on it. But the mishandling-of-government-documents charge doesn’t even require that any of them be classified.

As for Hillary’s new political peril, Vice President Biden leaked his interest in running for president to columnist Maureen Dowd in early August, knowing that the e-mail revelations would spool out over months. As new revelations are pried out of the State Department, the scandal has taken on new dimension. All appearances to the contrary, its resolution is still beyond Clinton’s control: It lies with the FBI and the national-security establishment, as it always has. Biden might not enter the primaries now, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t fully aware new twists in the story could have party leaders begging him to jump in and replace a badly crippled front-runner at some point in the near future.

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Resistance Then and Now, According to Dietrich von Hildebrand By John O’Sullivan

By on October 19th, 2015

Editor’s Note: The following article is adapted from one that ran in the September 21, 2015, issue of National Review.

German opposition to Hitler, though it never enjoyed mass support, drew on three main sources: the Communists and Social Democrats, the army, and the churches. Each of them had occasional successes; none seriously threatened the Third Reich. The Left, though brave, was penetrated by the Gestapo and not very effectual. Senior army officers were largely hostile to Hitler, discussing politics freely in private, protecting their own anti-Nazi dissidents, and hatching several plots to remove or assassinate him. But their caution, political unrealism, and aversion to “revolution” ensured that most of their plots fizzled out. Only Claus von Stauffenberg’s assassination attempt came near to success. The relative independence of the churches until very late in the war enabled them to resist the regime on specific issues — notably, its euthanasia of disabled and mentally ill people — but they failed to mount any kind of general resistance to Hitlerism. Indeed, they were shamefully divided among themselves, both within and between denominations, in their overall attitude to Nazism. Some churchmen bravely defied it; some supported it enthusiastically; some equivocated.

My Battle against Hitler: Faith, Truth, and Defiance in the Shadow of the Third Reich helps to explain why the churches, in particular the Catholic Church, failed so lamentably. It consists of the memoirs of Dietrich von Hildebrand, a German theologian and philosopher who mounted a consistent campaign of resistance to Nazism from academic posts in Munich and Vienna, together with a selection of his articles for the anti-Nazi Austrian journal Der Christliche Ständestaat (“The Christian Corporate State”), which he edited between 1934 and 1938. Faithfully translated and edited by the father-son team of John Henry Crosby and John F. Crosby, it gives us one dedicated Christian’s privileged insight into how Nazism both corrupted and overcame Catholic intellectual resistance in Central Europe.

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Iran and Obama’s Ballistic Delusion By Tom Rogan

By on October 19th, 2015

Yesterday, President Obama signed off on sanctions relief for Iran. The relief will take effect when the International Atomic Energy Agency verifies Iran has cut its enriched-uranium stocks, restructured its heavy-water facility at Arak, and dismantled its centrifuges. In a statement, the president promised that the U.S. will be ‘‘closely monitoring’’ Iranian compliance ‘‘to ensure Iran fully fulfills each and every one of its commitments.’’

But this is fiction. Recent facts on the ground — and in the air — already prove President Obama is allowing Iran to bend the deal into mush. First off, consider Iran’s ballistic-missile test on October 10. According to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., the test breached international law and the missile was “inherently capable of delivering a nuclear weapon.” But White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest claimed Iran’s breach was ‘‘altogether separate’’ from its responsibilities under the nuclear deal. While the Obama administration says it will take Iran to task at the U.N., we can expect any action will, in true U.N. form, be deafeningly pathetic.

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Using Biden to Block the Clintons from Regaining the White House – Barack Obama’s last act By Kevin D. Williamson

By on October 19th, 2015

For Progressives, It’s Personnel over Policy

As he approaches the end of his career in elected office, Barack Obama is in a truly precarious position: He is going to exit the White House having accomplished almost nothing substantive on the policy front — his health-care program is not going to survive, Gitmo is not going to be closed, we are not leaving Afghanistan, and he is sending troops into Iraq — and outside of his perch at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his party is in ruins: In Congress and the states, the Democrats are in their weakest position in modern political history. If the Democrats do not win the presidency in 2016, there are going to be some very uncomfortable questions about what exactly Obama & Co. accomplished, and at what price.

What to do? Throw Herself to the wolves, of course.

Barack Obama isn’t a policy guy; he’s a personnel guy. An underappreciated aspect of Barack Obama’s politics is that he has been trying to convert the Democratic party from a party that lives in Congress to a party that lives in the White House.

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Clinton’s ‘Please Hack Me’ Server Lawmakers this week should ask her about the potential damage. By L. Gordon Crovitz

By on October 19th, 2015

“I’m still clinging to my BlackBerry, ” President-elect Obama said in early 2009. “They’re trying to pry it out of my hands.” The National Security Agency was so anxious about foreign intelligence agents gaining access to classified information that it assigned dozens of technologists to work for months before the inauguration to modify a BlackBerry Mr. Obama could use. The new president was told his device could safely communicate with fewer than a dozen other people, after their devices were loaded with special encryption.

His secretary of state took a different approach.

Hillary Clinton set up her own private email server. By avoiding use of government servers, she succeeded in keeping emails off-limits to information requests from congressional overseers and journalists—but American counterintelligence agents must now assume that Chinese, Russian and possibly other agents had full access. A Pentagon counterintelligence official told the Daily Beast that if he were in charge of a foreign intelligence agency, “I’d fire my staff if they weren’t getting all this.”

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Taiwan’s Election Drama Is a Message to Beijing An intraparty putsch shows the limits of detente with Beijing. By Rupert Hammond-Chambers

By on October 19th, 2015

In an emergency congress convened on Saturday, Taiwan’s ruling Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, or KMT) ousted Hung Hsiu-chu from its presidential ticket and formally endorsed Party Chairman Eric Chu for January’s presidential election.

Ms. Hung, vice president of the legislature, suffered from low opinion polls and an ever-widening gap with the opposition candidate Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), who was ahead by nearly 30 percentage points in September. Ms. Hung’s strongly China-leaning policy turned off voters and risked undermining the KMT effort to retain control of the legislature, which the party has held for more than a decade.

Mr. Chu, a popular centrist figure, should improve the fortunes of the KMT’s legislative candidates. At 54 he is relatively young, with a reputation for clean government and focusing on economic development. He is currently the mayor of New Taipei City, which he was re-elected to last year in a tight race.

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Will Canada Drop Harper for Trudeau? The prime minister has cut taxes. His challenger wants to cut emissions. By Mary Anastasia O’Grady

By on October 19th, 2015

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s management style seems to have alienated a lot of people on his own side of the aisle during his nine-and-a-half years at the helm of the Conservative government. Now, as he faces an election on Monday, his reputation as a not-very-likable fellow could cost him and his party—and also cost Canadians their future prosperity.

None of Canada’s top three national parties is expected to come away from the election with a majority government. For most of the campaign the Conservatives were given a reasonable chance of winning a plurality of seats in Parliament. If that happens, Mr. Harper would have to govern by looking for allies on a vote-by-vote basis until he is forced to call another election.

But in recent days internal polling began to suggest that the center-left Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau—the eldest son of former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—could finish first past the post with enough seats for a minority government. This is partly the result of a late-stage slump by the further-left New Democratic Party (NDP). A Liberal majority is unlikely but not impossible. The contest is now said to be down to suburban Vancouver and Toronto electoral districts.

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Abbas: ‘We Welcome Every Drop of Blood Spilled in Jerusalem’ By Tzipi Hotovely

By on October 19th, 2015

Ms. Hotovley is deputy foreign minister of Israel.

Palestinian leaders have created a culture of death that is motivating the latest violent terrorism.

The latest surge of Palestinian terror attacks against Israelis has come in the immediate wake of explicit calls by the Palestinian leadership to “spill blood.” This well-orchestrated campaign of violence follows many years in which Palestinian children have been taught to idolize the murder of Jews as a sacred value and to regard their own death in this “jihad” as the pinnacle of their aspirations.

Such violence has deep roots. It goes back to the rampages at the behest of Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Muslim activist and at one point grand mufti of Jerusalem, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s. It continued with the fedayeen Palestinian militants in the 1950s and ’60s, and evolved into the terrorism of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah under Yasser Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas. Anyone who claims that Palestinian terror against Jews dates only to 1967, or is a response to Israeli settlements, should become more informed of the conflict’s history.

Yet the apathy shown by the international community to the death-culture fostered by Palestinian elites, and the unbalanced manner in which subsequent violence is often treated by the international media—as if there is any kind of symmetry between terrorists and their victims—is doing long-term, and possibly irrevocable, harm to generations of Palestinians.

A few recent examples underscore the depth of the problem.

Mr. Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, said the following on Palestinian television on Sept. 16: “We welcome every drop of blood spilled in Jerusalem. This is pure blood, clean blood, blood on its way to Allah. With the help of Allah, every martyr will be in heaven, and every wounded will get his reward.”

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Amid Slumping Economy, Canada’s Stephen Harper Braces for Tight Election Race By Jacquie McNish and Paul Vieira…see note please

By on October 19th, 2015

P.M. Stephen Harper has been Israel’s staunchest ally during his entire tenure. Justin Trudeau his liberal opposition, is the son of the late P.M. Pierre Trudeau and has been, like his father, warm to Israel but not with the commitment of Harper….stay tuned….rsk

Economic slump and voter fatigue with ruling Conservatives help Liberals make gains ahead of Monday vote

LONDON, Ontario—Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, after nearly a decade in power, heads into Monday’s federal election caught in a tight race for his political survival.

One of the West’s longest serving leaders, Mr. Harper is seeking to win a fourth term. But voter fatigue with his ruling Conservative party and a slump driven by a collapse in oil and metal prices have helped the opposition Liberals—led by Justin Trudeau, son of the former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—edge ahead in polls in the last weeks of the race.

Issues beyond Canada’s slumping economy have also dogged Mr. Harper’s campaign, including a scandal over lawmakers’ expense accounts and controversies over his government’s recent decision not to take in more Syrian refugees and to push for a ban on the right of women to wear the face-covering niqab while taking citizenship oaths. In a survey of 1,000 Canadians by Ottawa pollster Nanos Research last week, 71% said it was time for a change in government.

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