Forrmer Ambassador John Bolton speaks of the ramifications of the UN vote condemning Israeli settlements as illegal, and discusses how the US might counter such a move.
Prime Minister Netanyahu says newest UN resolution is most absurd ever, says it pushes peace farther away.
Education Minister says terrorists view UN resolution as approval of terror attacks.
To understand the severity of the situation is, let us recall that in the 1950s about 86% of the population of the Bethlehem area was Christian. Today, we are only 12%.
Samir Qumsieh.
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Kimberly Strassel has a great article in the Wall Street Journal that summarizes the actions taken by President Obama since the election designed to undermine the presidency of Donald Trump by piling thousands of new regulations and executive orders on the new president's desk, daring him to undo them.The proposed regulations and executive orders are directly related to parts of the president's agenda that have been rejected by Congress and the American people
Barack Obama isn’t known for humility, though rarely has his lack of grace been more on display than in his final hours in office. The nation rejected his agenda. The president’s response? To shove more of that agenda down the nation’s gullet.The proposed regulations and executive orders are directly related to parts of the president's agenda that have been rejected by Congress and the American people - most recently in the November presidential election. These "Midnight Regulations" are little more than a spiteful way for President Obama to give the middle finger to Trump and the American people.
The technical definition of a midnight regulation is one issued between Election Day and the inauguration of a new president. The practice is bipartisan. George W. Bush, despite having promised not to do so, pushed through a fair number of rules in his final months. But Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were more aggressive, and Mr. Obama is making them look like pikers.Trump transition people are bitterly complaining about a lack of cooperation from the executive departments. This foot dragging is slowing the transition process, which makes it less likely that Trump can hit the ground running on January 21. Instead, the new president will be forced to deal with a dizzying array of federal rules - most of which will end up in court anyway as businesses fight back against this federal government-wide power grab.
Mr. Obama has devoted his last year to ramming through controversial and far-reaching rules. Whether it was born of a desire to lay groundwork for a Clinton presidency, or as a guard against a Trump White House, the motive makes no difference. According to a Politico story of nearly a year ago, the administration had some 4,000 regulations in the works for Mr. Obama’s last year. They included smaller rules on workplace hazards, gun sellers, nutrition labels and energy efficiency, as well as giant regulations (costing billions) on retirement advice and overtime pay.
Since the election Mr. Obama has broken with all precedent by issuing rules that would be astonishing at any moment and are downright obnoxious at this point. This past week we learned of several sweeping new rules from the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency, including regs on methane on public lands (cost: $2.4 billion); a new anti-coal rule related to streams ($1.2 billion) and renewable fuel standards ($1.5 billion).
This follows Mr. Obama’s extraordinary announcement that he will invoke a dusty old law to place nearly all of the Arctic Ocean, and much of the Atlantic Ocean, off limits to oil or gas drilling. This follows his highly politicized move to shut down the Dakota Access pipeline in North Dakota. And it comes amid reports the administration is rushing to implement last-minute rules on commodities speculation, immigrant workers and for-profit colleges—among others.
Any action that is rushed is likely to be shoddy, especially if it’s from the federal government. The point is for Mr. Obama to have his way and to swamp the Trump administration with a dizzying array of new rules to have to undo. That diverts manpower from bigger and better priorities.
Keith Ellison is a liar and a racist.
As the Washington Times notes, Obama thinks he can get away with it
Vowing that his successor won’t be able to reverse his actions, President Obama on Tuesday used executive authority to permanently ban new offshore drilling in federally owned waters off the Atlantic coast and in the Arctic Ocean.It is ironic that a president who has used executive orders to get around laws now cites a 63-year-old law to justify an offshore drilling ban. Executive orders can be overturned with another executive order. And a 1953 law written when offshore and deep water drilling technology was in its infancy can be amended or repealed. Technology has advanced a lot since 1953. Hydraulic fracturing or fracking didn’t exist six decades ago. Oil drilling technology is safer, more advanced and requires a smaller footprint.
Mr. Obama used authority in a section of the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, a 1953 law, to ban the drilling. The law includes a provision that allows a president to put certain waters off-limits to oil and gas production.
The presidential authority was used in conjunction with similar actions by Canada, which also moved to prohibit drilling in its own Arctic waters. The U.S. move will ban drilling in the vast majority of American waters in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, in addition to areas off the Atlantic coast stretching from New England to Virginia.
Offshore drilling in the Atlantic Ocean has the potential to produce 1.3 million barrels of oil and natural gas per day while generating nearly 280,000 jobs and contribute up to $23.5 billion per year to the U.S. economy, according to a 2013 study by the American Petroleum Institute.And what about the environmental impact to these allegedly fragile ecosystems? What about the polar bears and the caribou? We heard this apocalyptic song before, when oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built to carry it southward. When oil exploration began in Prudhoe Bay, 60 miles to the west of ANWR, environmentalists claimed it would yield only a "few months' supply" of oil and would wreck the ecosystem. Prudhoe Bay turned out to be the largest deposit of oil ever found in North America. As Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes in the Daily Signal:
Would oil and gas drillers kill off the eagles, caribou, and polar bears, as the White House warns? These were the arguments made more than 40 years ago against building the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System -- which carries oil from Alaska’s North Slope to the port of Valdez for shipment to the lower 48 states. Over the last 35 years it has carried more than 17 billion barrels of oil, a quantity worth nearly $1 trillion in today’s dollars. At the time, the Sierra Club moaned that the pipeline would mean “the wilderness is forever broken,” while the Wilderness Society said the project would lead to “imminent, grave and irreparable damage to the ecology, wilderness values, natural resources, recreational potential, and total environment of Alaska.” No bird or caribou would be safe from the carnage. Sound familiar?Despite those photos of polar bears clinging in seeming desperation to small pieces of ice, they are in no danger of extinction, whether from oil drilling or from climate change, as reported in the Daily Caller:
Instead, the impact on Alaska’s wildlife and natural beauty has been almost nonexistent. A study delivered in 2002 to the American Society of Civil Engineers found that “the ecosystems affected by the operation of TAPS and associated activity for almost 25 years are healthy.” Today the size of the caribou herd in Alaska is estimated at about 325,000 -- four times the number before the pipeline was built.
“They appear to be as abundant and as productive as ever, in most populations,” Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a polar bear expert with more than 30 years of experience who teaches at Lakehead University in Canada, told the Roy Green Show….Obama’s Arctic drilling ban has nothing to do with polar bears, caribou, or fragile ecosystems. They are fine and are not threatened. It has everything to do with ideology and an irrational animus towards fossil fuels. It is about climate change zealots clinging on to their inconvenient falsehoods as desperately as those polar bears were said to be clinging to their ice.
Today, there are significantly more polar bears than there were 40 years ago, despite the animal being listed under the Endangered Species act in 2008 over fears global warming would destroy its Arctic habitat. Official estimates put the total number of bears between 20,000 and 25,000, but this number is really just a “qualified guess” and the actual number is likely higher…
“[T]hey’ve said that polar bears were declining in Western Hudson Bay, subsequent surveys showed they were wrong … said polar bears were declining in Western Hudson Bay and polar bears are not declining there, polar bears are staying about the same,” Taylor said. “They’re -- they’re warning that this will happen, that no-one is seeing it happen yet.”
“And for us, living up in the north, where 365 days a year – you know, climate has been evolving over a number of years, bears have been around for hundreds of thousands of years and they’ve gone through various cycles of climate change,” echoed Gabriel Nirlungayuk, the Deputy Minister of the Environment in Nunavut.
“But in my lifetime, anyhow, we haven’t -- I have yet to see declining of polar bears, of climate change,” Gabriel told the Roy Green Show. “And one is Western Hudson Bay, which was projected to be in decline 20 years ago -- up to now, it should be less than 300 bears but we’re seeing that the numbers have not really changed.”
Susan Abeles’ saga began in 2013 when she took time off to observe the last two days of Passover, just as she had done annually for the past 26 years. During those years, Abeles, an Orthodox Jew, worked for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), mainly as a data specialist. The MWAA is the governmentally-created public body that oversees Reagan National Airport in the District of Columbia and Dulles International Airport in Virginia. In 2013, the MWAA stunned Abeles by suddenly labeling her annual Passover time off as “AWOL” absenteeism. The charge arose not because Abeles failed to notify her supervisors in advance, which she did multiple times in writing, but because the authority disapproved of how she reminded her supervisor, who was also on leave and could not be reached.A grotesque distortion of the Civil Rights act. It's apparently okay to mandate that a man [who says he feels like a woman] has the right to use the women's bathroom, but an Orthodox Jew is punished by the authorities for taking vacation days on a Jewish holiday. However, Years of legal frustration may be finally coming to an end.
How the outgoing president has made our holidays hazardous.
The UN and the Western democracies are putting the defense of human rights and freedom in the hands of one the world's worst violators of religious and intellectual freedom.
"My husband has been languishing in a Saudi prison since June 17th, 2012. Our children live with me in the city of Sherbrooke, Québec in Canada. They have not seen their father for five years now... On January 9, 2015, Raif received the first 50 lashes... Will members of the United Nations Human Rights Council join the European Parliament and ask for Raif's release?"Unfortunately, the UN members did not respond to this appeal by Ensaf Haidar, the fearless wife of the most famous blogger of the Arab world, the gentle Raif Badawi, imprisoned and flogged by the Saudis for his secular ideas. A few days after Ensaf's appeal, the United Nations welcomed Badawi's executioners, the Saudis, at the UN Human Rights Council. The Saudi representative, Abdulaziz Alwasil, will be decisive on three major issues at the UN Palace of Nations in Geneva: women, religious freedom and the system of justice.
Raif Badawi and his children, before he was jailed.
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