RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Obama Administration has made a two-year career of dismissing concern about IRS policies targeting conservative tax-exempt groups. That evasion just got harder. New information shows the agency may have shown similar bias in tax audits.

A new Government Accountability Office report says protocols in place at the IRS Exempt Organizations unit made it possible for groups to be unfairly targeted for audit “based on the organization’s religious, educational, political, or other views.” That’s our emphasis. The report also shows a process that allowed reviewers to wield significant discretion over whether certain groups were selected for scrutiny.
GAO says that once the audit targets were chosen, the process lacked transparency and documentation, including why the groups were selected. Of the audits that came in from outside referrals, the agency had no documentation for around 25% of the original complaints. This raises the possibility that some groups may have been flagged for audits by political opponents who disapproved of their tax-exempt purpose. In some cases, the GAO says the IRS never disclosed why a group was selected for audit.

Obama is hoping that the nuclear pact will lead to equilibrium in the Middle East. All the evidence points the other way.

In making the case for his nuclear-arms-control deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, President Obama has confronted Congress with a stark choice. “There really are only two alternatives here,” he declared at last week’s press conference. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war.”

This binary argument is so central to his administration’s case that the president provided a second formulation: Without the deal, he said, “we risk even more war in the Middle East, and other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.”
The president insists that the Iran deal is tightly focused on “making sure” that the Iranians “don’t have a bomb.” It is not, he says, “contingent on Iran changing its behavior” in any other respect—notably the funding of proxy armies and terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. “The incremental additional money that they’ve got to try to destabilize the region,” according to Mr. Obama, is not “more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”

“One of this week’s big political stories is that Mrs. Clinton is now trailing three GOP presidential candidates in head-to-head polling in three swing states. More dangerous for Democrats, a majority in those states say they don’t believe Mrs. Clinton is honest or trustworthy. Perhaps that’s because she has proven so often that she isn’t.”

When Hillary Clinton called a press conference on March 10 to defend her use of private email for official State Department business, she was categorical in saying that as Secretary of State she “did not email any classified material to anyone on my email. There is no classified material.”

Mark that down as another Clinton untruth, along with coming under fire on a tarmac in Bosnia, suddenly discovering the Rose Law Firm billing records in the upstairs bedroom after years of saying they’d been lost, earning a 10,000% profit trading cattle futures after having read the Wall Street Journal, and so many more.

Review Finds Intelligence watchdog finds former secretary of state sent at least four emails from her personal account containing classified information

WASHINGTON—A government intelligence watchdog found that Hillary Clinton sent at least four emails from her personal account containing classified information during her tenure as secretary of state.

In a letter to members of Congress on Thursday, the inspector general of the intelligence community concluded that Mrs. Clinton’s email contains material from the intelligence community that should have been considered “secret”—the second-highest level of classification—at the time it was sent. A copy of the letter to Congress was provided to The Wall Street Journal by a spokeswoman for the inspector general.

The four emails in question “were classified when they were sent and are classified now,” said Andrea Williams, a spokeswoman for the inspector general. The inspector general’s review covered about 40 emails in Mrs. Clinton’s inbox, which suggests the trove of more than 30,000 emails may contain more potentially confidential, secret or top-secret information.

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) and University of Colorado researchers have developed a dynamic “smart” drug that targets inflammation in a site-specific manner and could enhance the body’s natural ability to fight infection and reduce side effects.

The uniqueness of this novel anti-inflammatory molecule, reported in the current issue of Journal of Immunology, can be found in a singular property. When injected, it is as a non-active drug. However, a localized site with excessive inflammation will activate it. Most other anti-inflammatory agents effectively inhibit inflammatory processes, though in a non-specific manner and in areas that include sites of necessary normal inflammatory homeostasis.

“This development is important because inhibition of inflammation in a non-specific manner reduces the natural ability to fight infections and is a common side effect of anti-inflammatory biologic therapeutics,” says Dr. Peleg Rider of BGU’s Department of Clinical Biochemistry and Pharmacology.

Edward Alexander’s most recent book is Jews Against Themselves (Transaction Publishers, 2015).
President Obama’s decision to send the potentially catastrophic “executive agreement” (formerly known to speakers of English as a “treaty”) with Iran for immediate unanimous approval by the UN Security Council before it could even be considered (much less voted on) by the legislature of his own country is only the latest (albeit the most brazen) of his relentless assaults on the American system of checks and balances. It is the culmination of an Iranian policy evident from June 2009 when Iranians who took to the streets en masse to protest the results of a fraudulent election were savagely beaten,by government order. On June 15 Obama said he was watching the news from Iran. But, he quickly added, it is “up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran’s leaders will be,” not Americans, adding that “we respect Iranian sovereignty and want to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.” He would not be swerved from his policy of “engagement” and “outreach” to the Islamist regime of technically competent barbarians, a regime to which he has now assigned the role of dominant power in the Middle East.

In Michael Oren’s new book, Ally, (which I like quite a lot), he expresses a sentiment that is often heard in Israeli discourse:

If the First Intifada was not sufficiently convincing, the Second thoroughly persuaded me that Israel had to change the status quo in the territories. Yes, these were our tribal lands. The Bible speaks of the West Bank cities Bethlehem, Shiloh, and Hebron, not of Tel Aviv or Haifa. And many of the settlements helped thicken our pre-1967 lines, which were as narrow as nine miles across. But Israel had to weigh its historic rights and security needs against [a] the moral and political costs of dominating another people. It had to reconcile its real fears of the West Bank becoming a terrorist haven similar to South Lebanon, with [b] its need to preserve its right to defend itself and its international legitimacy as a sovereign Jewish state. [p. 36, my emphasis]

I don’t reproduce this to criticize Oren in particular. It is a view that many Israelis share, and Oren has earned his right to think and say what he wants about his country, both as a public servant and as a combat soldier. But I think if we look at precisely what this statement means, we can see that it is wrong, even self-contradictory.

What he says is that Judea and Samaria are our historic homeland, we have a right under international law to be there, and withdrawal would seriously impact our security. But he adds that a) the continued conflict with the Arabs there damages us morally, and b) the international community will take away our sovereign rights if we don’t make them happy.

This article originally appeared in Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ. Reprinted with permission.

“The prophets and saints of sustainability seem certain that they know what lies ahead. They know how much carbon dioxide—350 parts per million—the Earth’s atmosphere can hold before catastrophic global warming overtakes us. They know which resources should remain in the ground: four-fifths of all fossil fuels. They know what technologies the future will depend on: solar and wind generation.None of these views rests on a secure scientific footing, though they are often paraded as backed by solid science. But they have astonishing currency—enough to undermine the ideals of academic and intellectual freedom on campus.”

“Sustainability” is like a religion. Or, sustainability is a religion.

Both claims come up often among critical observers of this powerful and popular social movement. Though secular, sustainability is like a religion in that it offers a view of the Earth as once pristine and pure but now fallen. It recognizes the sinfulness of humanity, offers forms of expiation and absolution, and puts these elements together in a master narrative of an impending catastrophe that will punish mankind for its iniquity.

The stronger claim, that sustainability is a religion, takes its warrant from the adherents to the movement who personify Earth as a deity. This claim also emphasizes the cult-like zealotry of sustainability advocates, who imagine they possess an accurate knowledge of the future that goes beyond what is actually knowable, and who regard any dissent from this orthodoxy as intolerable.

It’s easy to find examples of sustainability advocates who make clear that their doctrine is, in their own eyes, religious. The former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, has said, “For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.” When tens of thousands joined in the September 2014 “People’s Climate March,” the festivities included votaries of Mother Earth (presented as a giant grandmotherly puppet) and other neo-pagan worshippers offering obeisance to their gods.

Sustainability as Ideology

“Obama’s vindictive energy agenda has become a rear-guard assault on neutralizing, if not reversing, one of the great industrial achievements of our time.”

The clock is ticking on the Obama Administration. With only 18 months remaining in his final term, federal energy planners and agency regulators are working as quickly as possible to impose new rules on the oil and natural gas industry.

As one industry lobbyist told the Houston Chronicle, “The agencies are all in hyperdrive to get the rules across the finish line or have them well-positioned in the regulatory queue so that their path forward past Jan. 20, 2017, is clearly established.”

The rush to increase regulations on oil and natural gas is nothing but bad news for an industry that has already contracted because of a large drop in wellhead revenues. Ditto for consumers who need infrastructure investments today for affordable, plentiful energy tomorrow.

Twenty-nine states, more than half the stars on the American flag, have filed lawsuits against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for redefining the “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS, erasing “navigable” and usurping states’ rights by including local seasonal streams, farm irrigation ponds, roadside ditches, and even “connective” dry lands placed under authority of the Clean Water Act.

The WOTUS rule, published the morning of June 29, potentially subjects every food, energy, transportation and manufacturing industry in the nation to high-handed regulation by one of the most reviled and least trusted federal agencies, dreaded for its cadre of “revolving door” officials hired from anti-industry green groups.