Solar Flare Near Miss EMP enevible

Massive solar flare narrowly misses Earth, EMP disaster barely avoided

By PAUL BEDARD | JULY 31, 2013 AT 5:35 PM

 

The earth barely missed taking a massive solar punch in the teeth two weeks ago, an "electromagnetic pulse" so big that it could have knocked out power, cars and iPhones throughout the United States.

Two EMP experts told Secrets that the EMP flashed through earth's typical orbit around the sun about two weeks before the planet got there.

"The world escaped an EMP catastrophe," said Henry Cooper, who led strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union under President Reagan, and who now heads High Frontier, a group pushing for missile defense.

"There had been a near miss about two weeks ago, a Carrington-class coronal mass ejection crossed the orbit of the Earth and basically just missed us," said Peter Vincent Pry, who served on the Congressional EMP Threat Commission from 2001-2008. He was referring to the 1859 EMP named after astronomer Richard Carrington that melted telegraph lines in Europe and North America.

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"Basically this is a Russian roulette thing," added Pry. "We narrowly escape from a Carrington-class disaster."

Pry, Cooper, and former CIA Director James Woolsey have been recently demanding that Washington prepare the nation's electric grid for an EMP, either from the sun or an enemy's nuclear bomb. They want the 2,000-3,000 transformers in the grid protected with a high-tech metal box and spares ready to rebuild the system. Woolsey said knocking out just 20 would shut down electricity to parts of the nation "for a long time."

But Washington is giving them the cold shoulder, especially the administration. Woolsey told Secrets that some in Congress are interested in the issue, but the administration is just in the "beginnings" of paying attention.

Woolsey said that Air Force One and aircraft used by the Strategic Air Command to control nuclear-tipped missiles are hardened against an EMP.

The EMP effect is not rare. One occurred in Canada in 1989, knocking out Quebec's electric transmission system. And North Korea is reportedly testing a device to attack the U.S. with an EMP attack.

The trio appeared at an event in Washington this week, but Pry said getting the nation's leaders interested in the issue is difficult and educating the public about EMP hard too. "The education curve isn't going up fast enough," he said.

At the event, Cooper suggested that North Korea might already have the capability to launch an EMP against the United States. He said in December, North Korea tested its so-called Space Launch Vehicle which could deliver a stealthy nuclear attack on the United States by orbiting a nuclear weapon over the South Pole where the U.S. has no radar or missile interceptors facing south. North Korea, he said, apparently orbited a satellite over the south polar region on a trajectory and altitude consistent with making a surprise nuclear EMP attack against the United States.

Woolsey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich are the honorary co-chairs of a new EMP Coalition pushing for protections to the electric grid, national security, and civilian infrastructures.

Paul Bedard, The Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com.




 

Solar Flare poses huge threat: Column

Glenn Harlan Reynolds 1:53 p.m. EDT June 28, 2013

A solar flare could wipe out the communications and electrical grids while frying a wide variety of electronics, quickly sending us back to the 19th Century.

(Photo: NASA via AP)

Story Highlights

• A solar flare could send us back to the 19th Century.
• Big chunks of the planet might be without electricity for a year or longer.
• In 1989 a smaller flare wiped out Hydro Quebec's grid, leaving many Canadians without power.

So this week the news is consumed with the Supreme Court, the immigration bill, Edward Snowden and the NSA scandals, and the IRS scandal and the lingering Benghazi scandal. But behind the scenes there are things going on that may be much more important. Earth-shakingly important, even.

No, I'm not talking about the threat from asteroid strikes. This time, though, I'm talking about a different kind of civilizational threat: A solar flare that could wipe out the communications and electrical grids while frying a wide variety of electronics, quickly sending us back to the 19th Century.

That's happened before. In fact, it happened in the 19th Century, with the "Carrington Event" of 1859. A massive solar flare sent a cloud of charged particles that struck the Earth squarely, creating massive currents in the Earth's magnetic field and sending brilliant auroras south as far as Cuba and Hawaii. About the only thing electrical back then was the telegraph network, and the Carrington event had a literally shocking impact -- causing some operators to be shocked, and inducing strong enough currents in the telegraph wires that operators could disconnect the batteries and operate the telegraph off of the flare-induced electrical flow.

Modern electronics are a lot more sensitive, of course, and a similar event today would fry computers, cell phones, new cars and more.

More worryingly, it would probably melt major transformers in the power net, transformers that take months or years to replace and that are expensive enough that few spares are kept. Big chunks of the planet -- all of North America, for example -- might be without electricity for a year or longer.

The disruption would kill a lot of people -- some quickly, as medical devices failed, others later as food supplies and clean water became scarce. Without electricity, pretty much everything in our civilization comes to a stop. The economic damage would be incalculable.

We don't know how common Carrington Events are, since they probably wouldn't have made much of an impact in pre-industrial years.

But in 1989 a smaller flare wiped out Hydro Quebec's grid, leaving many Canadians without power for an extended period. And similar flares have been near misses -- a Class X flare (the most powerful kind) sideswiped the Earth back in May.

Space is big, and the Earth is small, so most of these will miss us. But the consequences of being hit are serious. And there's also the possibility that an enemy nation might detonate a nuclear weapon at high altitude over the United States, generating a similar effect via the nuclear Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP). (For a scary but realistic story of an EMP attack on the USA, read William Forstchen's disaster novel, One Second After.)

These kinds of worries have gone from science columns and Internet speculation, to serious worries by the National Academy of Sciences and big insurers like Lloyd's.And now Congress is taking a hand.

There's now a bill aimed at doing something to harden our systems and prepare for such events. It's called the Secure High-voltage Infrastructure for Electricity from Lethal Damage Act (SHIELD Act for short, in one of those now-unavoidable legislative acronyms).

It is aimed at seeing that those big transformers basically get the heavy-duty equivalent of surge protectors to prevent damage in the event of either a solar storm or EMP attack.

Perhaps because I lived through the Great Northeastern Blackout when I was a kid, I've always been aware of the risk of power going out. I'm glad that folks in Washington are starting to pay attention, too.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds is professor of law at the University of Tennessee. He blogs at InstaPundit.com.
In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors

When Did Normal Become EXTREME Weather ????

The Age of Hyperbole: How Normal Weather Became ‘Extreme’

                        Posted By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris On July 30, 2013  

Said Thomas Jefferson: “The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” Jefferson’s comment may be expanded to include most of today’s mass media; this is especially true of television. As American linguist Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa said: “In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.” It is effectively visual lying, dictated by Marshall McLuhan’s observation: “The medium is the message.” For example, TV news programs often illustrate air pollution with a smoke stack emitting water vapor, implying it is pollution when it is anything but.

Distortion and deception are accentuated by hyperbole. Television news and documentaries frequently report normal weather as “extreme weather,” implying it is abnormal and caused by human activity. But while a hurricane, for example, may inflict serious damage to our structures and cause major loss of life, it is a normal event in hurricane-prone regions, where it is foolish to live without preparing for the weather patterns of the area.

The problem is accentuated when supposedly prestigious newspapers like the New York Times present provably false information. “Summer’s Beast is Loose ^[1],” published in the Times on July 16, was an obvious attempt to sensationalize warm, but normal, summer temperatures:

Humans have always been used to the normal fluctuations in weather — including the anomalies that seem to confirm the norm. But now, to the routine, cyclic variations of weather, there has been added a more or less steady, more or less linear change, the result of the way we are altering our climate.

It appears that the Times editorial board didn’t bother to look at the historic climate record — or hoped none of their readers would. Aside from a slight year-to-year increase in temperature variation, the graph of temperatures for July for New York State ^[2] shows no meaningful overall trend, warming or cooling, since 1900:

Figure 1. Source NOAA National Climate Data Center
^[3]

Before expressing their opinion that today’s weather is unusual, you would think that the Times’ editors would have also looked at some basic research, an example being weather expert Dr. David Ludlum’s ^[4] fascinating works: Early American Tornadoes, 1586-1870 and Early American Hurricanes, 1492-1870. The Times clearly knew of Dr. Ludlum, praising him as “the nation’s foremost historian of American weather” in his obituary ^[5] published by the newspaper in 1996.  But they pay no attention to what Dr. Ludlum actually wrote.

Here is a challenge for New York Times editors – identify the year from which the following statistics are derived:

In the U.S. 254 people died in tornadoes: 30 in Marquette Kansas; 87 in Snyder Oklahoma; 97 in Southwest Oklahoma; and 40 in Montague Texas. In addition, 40 people died in a November storm in Minnesota.

Globally, typhoons struck the Philippines in July, August, and September; a June typhoon in the Marshall Islands with 500 reported deaths; a storm killed 33 in the Republic of Salvador; severe storms and flooding in Ireland.

Record low temperatures occurred as follows: February 13, -33°C at Pond, Arkansas, -40°C at Lebanon, Kansas, and –40°C at Warsaw, Missouri. In Sydney, Australia lowest monthly averages in September and October joined the lowest spring minimums.

Record high temperatures: An estimated 91 people died of a July heat wave in New York City. On July 7th Parker, Arizona recorded 53°C. Rivadivia, Argentina recorded 49°C on 11th December. The heat caused an outbreak of the tropical disease Yellow Fever in New Orleans that spread north to Indiana.

Precipitation: Flooding in Ireland; Taylor Texas, received 2.4 inches in fifteen minutes on April 29th; on July 29th 11 inches of rain in southwest Connecticut resulted in extensive flooding that caused a dam to burst.

Arctic ice retreated dramatically allowing an explorer to be the first to enter waters previously inaccessible.

The year was 1905. Note that 254 people died from tornadoes, when the population density was much less than today.

Besides categorizing normal weather events as extreme, terms were created to increase the impression of abnormality. For example, the below map used by ^[6] Alex Sosnowski, the so-called “expert senior meteorologist” at Accuweather, shows very high temperatures. But it is pure deception:

^[7]

Most readers would naturally assume that actual air temperatures are being shown, but they are being tricked. Instead, a contrived measure called the “heat index” ^[8] is displayed. Heat index, a statistic Sosnowski refers as the “RealFeel” temperature, is created by combining air temperature and relative humidity. It presumably reflects the capability of sweat to cool the body — but it ignores wind speed, which is a critical cooling agent that makes it seem less hot than it actually is. Of course, in the winter, media meteorologists always cite the “wind chill,” since that makes low temperatures seem even lower. Both heat index and wind chill are simply propaganda tools designed to make viewers think conditions are more extreme than they really are.

The following sensational and misleading illustration also appears in Sosnowski’s article:

^[9]

It is completely inappropriate to title the figure “Heat is more lethal.” In reality, more people die from the cold ^[10] each year than do from the heat.

It may very well be true that there was a higher “percent of increase of death rates” due to heat waves than due to cold periods in whatever time period Sosnowski is speaking of (he does not define the time frame). But this has nothing to do with the actual numbers of deaths. For example, in the warming period from 1980 to 1997, the percentage of heat wave deaths would logically increase more than cold wave deaths, even though cold weather deaths still vastly exceeded deaths due to hot weather.

National energy policies based on deceptions such as this have devastating consequences. Because of President Barack Obama’s dangerously misguided “war on coal,” America’s least expensive and most important source of electric power, electricity costs are rising — making the poor less able to afford air conditioning. This is especially true of those living in poverty in inner city areas where temperatures are already higher because of the urban heat island effect. This situation will only worsen as Obama implements his plan to eliminate coal stations and power costs consequently soar.

The distortion and outright lying in the media’s coverage of weather and climate change have increased dramatically in the past year.

This is because the global warming narrative has been exposed as false, making it harder to sell without resorting to hyperbole and cherry-picking data that supports the alarmist agenda. So, publications such as the New York Times are not reporting news any more when it comes to weather and climate. Instead, they are spinning a false narrative to create their version of the news, much like the state-controlled media of communist China.

Sadly, most of the public has been taken in by mainstream media’s climate propaganda. The latest Rasmussen polls show the highest level of support for global warming alarmism since 2008. We can therefore expect Obama to take advantage of the public’s misunderstanding to bring in even more draconian controls on conventional energy sources to “stop extreme weather and climate change.”

If the U.S. eventually collapses into energy poverty, broad sweeping unemployment, and bankruptcy, we will know who to blame.

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Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/the-age-of-hyperbole/
URLs in this post:

[1] Summer’s Beast is Loose: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/17/opinion/summers-beast-is-loose.html?_r=0

[2] July for New York State: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/

[3] Image: http://pjmedia.com/files/2013/07/a1.jpg

[4] David Ludlum’s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_M._Ludlum

[5] his obituary: http://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/29/nyregion/david-ludlum-weather-expert-dies-at-86.html

[6] used by: http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/summers-worst-week-of-heat-nyc/15290909

[7] Image: http://pjmedia.com/files/2013/07/b.jpg

[8] “heat index”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_index

[9] Image: http://pjmedia.com/files/2013/07/c.jpg

[10] more people die from the cold: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/07/19/some-facts-about-deaths-due-to-heat-waves/

Chicago: The Next Detroit

It looks like Detroit may yet have competition for the distinction of America’s most poorly run city. The unprecedented triple-drop in Chicago’s bond rating and the city’s shiny new long-term debt figure—$29 billion—should have pols quaking in their boots. The
Chicago Sun-Times has published some distressing numbers from Chicago’s recent audits:

    •    The number of “physical arrests” by Chicago Police officers declined again — from 152,740 in 2011 to 145,390 in 2012. That continues a six-year trend that coincides with the hiring slowdown that caused a dramatic decline in the number of police officers. Police made 227,576 arrests in 2006. The number of arrests has been dropping like a rock ever since….

    •    Emergency responses continued their steady rise — to 472,752. That’s up from 300,971 in 2006.…

    •    The 55 percent subsidy to retiree health care that Emanuel wants to phase out and retirees are suing to maintain cost the city $97.5 million in 2012.
 
  •    The condition of Chicago’s four city employee pension funds is growing ever more precarious. The firefighters pension fund has assets to cover just 25 percent of liabilities, followed by: Police (31 percent); Municipal Employees (38 percent) and Laborers (56 percent).

In addition to the pension, law enforcement, and emergency response concerns that remind us of a certain bankrupt city across the lake, the report notes that three of Chicago’s four largest private employers (JP Morgan, Accenture LLP, and Northern Trust) are in finance. It seems like blue cities have a codependent relationship with the one percenters progressives claim to hate.

It hasn’t all hit the fan quite yet, but Chicago seems perilously close to real trouble. The city is all out of money, and with an imploding public education system and harrowing levels of violence, it is losing residents fast. Illinois, which itself lost more than 800,000 people to out-migration in the past two decades, is essentially Chicago on a larger scale, with hundreds of billions in unfunded pension liabilities and complete political sclerosis. The state cannot bail out Chicago, and judging by the feds’ reluctance to even lift a finger for Detroit, Chicago shouldn’t expect much more.

Stories like these tend to expose the pointlessness of a lot of American political debate. Defenders of the blue social model will prattle on about its many virtues, and they certainly have some accomplishments to point to. But ultimately the blue model is no longer a matter of choice: cities like Detroit and Chicago and states like Illinois will eventually have to shift away from blue policies whether they like them or not. When the money runs out, one of the luxuries you can no longer afford is self-deception.

We hope that an economic recovery will give cities like Chicago some more time to make adjustments, but if the past is any guide to future behavior, any new income the city sees will be spent on maintaining a Potemkin façade, with the next inevitable downturn finding Chicago in worse shape than ever.

American Twilight

Life in the Twilight

Posted By Victor Davis Hanson On July 29, 2013 

The Good News

America is in great shape energy-wise. We have more gas and oil reserves than ever before. Indeed, the United States could shortly become the world’s largest exporter of coal. Our cheaper power rates may bring energy-intensive industry back from Europe and Asia.

If America’s small colleges are nearly broke and our public schools failing, nonetheless our blue-chip universities’ math, science, and engineering departments, and professional schools, remain the best in the world. California alone has more centers of higher learning rated among the world’s top 20 universities than does any other single nation save the United States itself.

Agriculture is booming. Net food exports are at record levels. Our military, despite the sequestration cuts, stays preeminent. We are not witnessing the sort of social unrest that is now common from Greece to the Middle East to Brazil, thanks to the Founders’ brilliant Constitution and a popular culture that is still more inclusive than tribal. The U.S. may be the global nexus for modernist disruption, but it is of the enormously profitable sort, typified by the cultural domination of Twitter, Facebook, Apple, Google, and Starbucks. Even Egyptian protestors in jeans and T-shirts look like those on Venice Beach. If they were not rioting in between texting, they could be rollerblading along the Pacific.

The Bad News

Yet most Americans remain politically unhappy. Polls show record dislike of the Congress. There is growing irritation with Barack Obama, and a general sense that the country is moving in the wrong direction. There are many causes of the depression — the mounting debt, the chronic deficits, the serially high unemployment, the weak growth in the economy, the up and down housing market — but surely one catalyst is the sense that we increasingly are all living in an alternate universe, one of nodding “yes” when we know the opposite to be true.

In some sense, our whole way of life is changing. Wide-open, upbeat America is turning into a neurotic, look-over-your-shoulder society. Kids stay home until 30. Part-time work is OK. Having one child in your late 30s is a burden — all papered over by a veneer of iPhones, latte, and nice-looking imported cars.

At work, every American is one thoughtless remark away from ruin, one incorrect thought on the environment, gays, race, or feminism away from social ostracism. Paula Deen kept popping up on the screen in her version of reeducation camp to beg forgiveness for an improper word. In her serial contrition, you would have thought she was running for mayor of America’s largest city after texting photos of her groin.

Then there are the lies of our age all put to the purpose of egalitarian “fairness,” but they are lies nonetheless. Of course, this is not entirely new: the Rosenbergs were really guilty of selling us out. So was Alger Hiss ^[1]. Mumia Abu-Jamal was a cop killer. Che was a sadist. Castro killed more than did Pinochet. Woodrow Wilson was a classic racist ^[2] at a time many of his background were not anymore. I could go on, but the legendary and politically exempt icons the left gave us were mostly lies ^[3].

In our age, Nobel laureate, exempt Al Gore proved a fraud: the feminist who was accused of groping a woman in crazed sex-poodle fashion ^[4]; the stern green scold who cashed out ^[5] to a fossil-fuel exporting sheikdom; the tax raiser who scrambled to sell out before capital gains taxes rose; the humanitarian who profited from anti-Semitic authoritarians; the man of the people who hyped a crisis and then offered a high-priced carbon-offset remedy for it.

If Todd Akin helped to spark a pseudo-war on women, what did the current careers of Eliot “Client #9” Spitzer, Anthony Weiner, and Bob Filner prompt — the idea that progressive and feminist men, if they are really going to enact hope and change, from time to time should have sabbaticals from their careers after frequenting young prostitutes, sending photos of their genitalia to women, or twisting and squeezing the posteriors and breasts of female employees? Is there a creepy squeeze, and then again a politically correct one?  Should there be a camp where John Edwards, Bill Clinton, Weiner, Spitzer, and Filner are taught to behave?

I think the answer goes something like this: “Of course Spitzer, Weiner, and Filner are creeps, but until the public turns on them ^[6], they are our creeps and still good point men in the war against reactionary America.”

We are not publicly to confess other disturbing truths. The vastly inordinate rates of criminality in parts of the inner city cannot serve as an alternate exegesis to racism to explain why Americans of all races make the necessary adjustments of where, when, and how they navigate. That thoughtcrime is “racist.” ^[7]

Yet it is an old thoughtcrime dating back at least to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 paper titled “The Negro Family: the Case for National Action,” ^[8] which predicted our present tragedies ^[9] based on the government-fed dissolution of the black family through much higher than average rates of illegitimacy, single-parent households, and rates of criminality and incarceration. After that,

Moynihan was persona non grata for two decades: not for lying, but for not lying. None of this is to deny the burdens of racism and the fumes of it that persist; only to suggest that a half-century after the start of the Great Society there is only so much government can do ^[10], or rather there is too much government can do — and we are not supposed to say that.

We suspect that if citizens were to do what too many illegal aliens do with some regularity — break U.S. immigration law (remember the stern faces of those customs officials who stamp your passport upon reentry?), forge documents, create false identities, or leave the scene of an accident — we would face felony charges and the end of careers. I take seriously those scary warnings on government documents that I sign and date and notarize “under penalty of perjury.” But why do millions not?

When I get hit by an errant motorist in my environs (and it has happened more than once), or have some one run off the road onto my property, the strange thing is not that I expect him to flee, leaving no ID, no registration, and no insurance behind — that is de rigueur.

The odd thing is that the officer on the scene nonchalantly assumes the same thing, too. Yet his shrug does not hide the lie that if I were to do that, I would be charged with felony hit and run, while my victim that night would be contacted by a lawyer to sue me. We all know this and we all know, like good Eastern Europeans circa 1970, never to say that aloud. In Los Angeles, hit-and-run is kinda like jaywalking elsewhere.

The Ugly News

We accept all this, scuttling along like Eliot’s ragged claws ^[11], or we look downward to avoid the talking head on Orwell’s big screen.
I have a vague memory that Eric Holder and Barack Obama have resorted to divisive racial rhetoric (“typical white person,” acted “stupidly,” “punish our enemies,” “cowards,” “my people”), but I say vague because we seem to shrug as if to say: “so what?” Did they ever really say that at all?

That mind-washing might explain why, when on the eve of a racially charged trial, the president prejudicially weighed in, claiming racial affinity with the deceased victim. After the trial, at a time of heightened tensions and of an ongoing investigation by his own Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, he doubled down and did it again. He knew that we would shrug as if it were all expected, as if he were just Bill Clinton eyeing another intern.

So it is with the “phony” scandals. The beaten-down public sighs that four of its personnel were killed in Libya due to that awful “video.” So what that the IRS is now a necessary arm of the administration, or that reporters are monitored? Big deal — the NSA is an out-of-control octopus. Duh?

We are becoming like Eastern Europeans who were oblivious that the faces on the May Day dais had sometimes changed. In other words, the evil and Islamophobic Nakoula did it in Benghazi, the overzealous (but otherwise understandably progressive) Cincinnati rogue agents alone did the improper audits, the evil (Fox News) James Rosen perhaps deserved the monitoring — all enemies of social justice.

Statism and the voices of megaphones like Jay Carney wear down a population. If the Great Leader says that there is a war on women because hip young affluent females like Sandra Fluke have trouble getting free condoms, then there surely is — and elevator-owning, dog-torturing, and equestrian-marrying Mitt Romney is waging it.

But there is no war when a Philadelphia abortionist, under the nose of state authorities, murders fetuses as they cry and gasp for air — and sometimes their laboring mothers along with them. If guns that are black and plastic and look scary are “automatic” assault weapons whose banning will save the children, then by all means ban these machine guns. If the planet has not warmed up in 15 years, then it is still warming up, and companies like Solyndra need more subsidies.

Still, the human psyche is a strange thing. It needs to feel transcendent, either spiritually or by confidence in children or through the reputation of a life lived well. Crush that spirit through government obfuscation, and the people become the walking dead of a dreary Warsaw Pact Budapest or Prague, given that there is no hope for those who follow.

The soul appreciates equality, but not of the enforced kind that destroy individual liberty. Insult the voter, call him names, regulate him, lecture him about his various -ologies and -isms, regiment his youth with proper thinking, curb his speech, and he becomes a mute, a dead soul, a Brit in about 1955 ^[12], a Hungarian in 1956, a Russian in about 1970, or today’s Cuban.

To keep America exceptional, we need eccentrics, contrarians, doubters, politically incorrect truth-tellers. Take them away, and we are a nation of head-nodders like most other states.

Go to sleep in 2009 and wake up now. The world has changed: golf is the people’s game; racist, sexist, homophobic thought and speech are predicated on the ideology of who says it; the IRS, the NSA, and the Justice Department are watching you; the State Department is run like a campaign organization; the president offers politically correct thoughts on local trials; the attorney general worries about “my people”; the government is producing more oil and gas by trying to stop it; wind and solar are the way of the future; gropes and pornography are either career-ending or cause for needed sabbaticals; and high unemployment, debt, and low growth are proof of a robust recovery.

The model of our future will be a landscape like Detroit, as those on MSNBC or on NPR find ever more clever ways to assure us that the city is “saved” from the free-market capitalist and racist buccaneers. We will shuffle on, as the voices go in one ear and out the other, as they screech that Big Brother saved us at last from the reactionary Goldsteins ^[13] of the world who nearly destroyed it.

Random Thoughts

Random thoughts from wise thinkers:

"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." (F.A. Hayek)

"Many respectable writers agree that if a man reasonably believes that he is in immediate danger of death or grievous bodily harm from his assailant he may stand his ground and that if he kills him he has not exceeded the bounds of lawful self-defense. That has been the decision of this court." (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Brown v. United States, 1921)

"Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence." (John Adams)

"A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence." (Jean-Francois Revel)

"The first thing a man will do for his ideals is lie." (J.A. Schumpeter)

"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves." (T.S. Eliot)

"The study of human institutions is always a search for the most tolerable imperfections." (Richard A. Epstein)

"There is no safety for honest men, but by believing all possible evil of evil men, and by acting with promptitude, decision, and steadiness on that belief." (Edmund Burke)

"We do not live in the past, but the past in us." (U.B. Phillips)

"It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is today, can guess what it will be to-morrow." (James Madison)
"A society that puts equality -- in the sense of equality of outcome -- ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.

The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests." (Milton Friedman)
"...leniency toward criminals contrasted starkly with severity toward the law-abiding citizen's right to defend himself or herself." (Joyce Lee Malcolm)

"A government with all this mass of favours to give or to withhold, however free in name, wields a power of bribery scarcely surpassed by an avowed autocracy, rendering it master of the elections in almost any circumstances but those of rare and extraordinary public excitement." (John Stuart Mill)

"Criticism is easy; achievement is more difficult." (Winston Churchill)

"Everybody has asked the question ... 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us!" (Frederick Douglass)

"The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false." (Paul Johnson)

"It is difficult for men in high office to avoid the malady of self-delusion. They are always surrounded by worshipers. They are constantly, and for the most part sincerely, assured of their greatness. They live in an artificial atmosphere of adulation and exaltation which sooner or later impairs their judgment. They are in grave danger of becoming careless and arrogant." (President Calvin Coolidge)

Detroit Ran Into The Inviolable Rule Of Economics

Detroit Ran Into The Inviolable Rule Of Economics
By Charles Krauthammer


http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | If there's an iron rule in economics, it is Stein's Law (named after 

Herb, former chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers):

"If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."

Detroit, for example, can no longer go on borrowing, spending, raising taxes and dangerously cutting such essential services as street lighting and police protection. So it stops. It goes bust.

Cause of death? Corruption, both legal and illegal, plus a classic case of reactionary liberalism in which the governing Democrats — there's been no Republican mayor in half a century — simply refused to adapt to the straitened economic circumstances that followed the post-World War II auto boom.

Corruption of the criminal sort was legendary. The former mayor currently serving time engaged in a breathtaking range of fraud, extortion and racketeering. And he didn't act alone. The legal corruption was the cozy symbiosis of Democratic politicians and powerful unions, especially the public-sector unions that gave money to elect the politicians who negotiated their contracts — with wildly unsustainable health and pension benefits.

When our great industrial competitors were digging out from the rubble of World War II, Detroit's automakers ruled the world. Their imagined sense of inherent superiority bred complacency. Management grew increasingly bureaucratic and inflexible. Unions felt entitled to the extraordinary wages, benefits and work rules they'd bargained for in the fat years. In time, they all found themselves being overtaken by more efficient, more adaptable, more hungry foreign producers.

The market ultimately forced the car makers into reform, restructuring, the occasional bankruptcy and eventual recovery.

The city, however, lacking market constraints, just kept overspending — $100 million annually since 2008. The city now has about $19 billion in obligations it has no chance of meeting. So much city revenue had to be diverted to creditors and pensioners that there was practically nothing left to run the city. Forty percent of the streetlights don't work, two-thirds of the parks are closed and emergency police response time averages nearly an hour — if it ever comes at all.

Bankruptcy, which will radically cut payments to bondholders and retirees, is the only chance to start over.

Yet, if a Detroit bankruptcy succeeds, other cities will be tempted to follow. Dozens of other large urban areas have similarly massive pension and debt obligations, with commensurately denuded services and exorbitant taxes — leading to a vicious cycle of depopulation that makes everything worse. Detroit has lost more than 60% of its population since 1950.

The moral hazard increases if the federal government steps in. The administration is therefore firmly opposed to a "bailout," recognizing both the political toxicity of the word and the fiscal consequences of a precedent that invites others to line up with tin cups. Washington cannot afford a nationwide federal bailout of insolvent cities.

However, under pressure of the public-sector unions, whose retirees will necessarily be victimized, the administration will likely offer "assistance" — which implies whatever kind of non-cash payments, indirect funds from other ongoing federal programs and enterprise-zone tax subsidies that it can get away with.

But Detroit is an object lesson not just for other cities. Not even the almighty federal government is immune to Stein's Law.

Reactionary liberalism simply cannot countenance serious reform of the iconic social welfare programs of the 20th century.
Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are pledged to their inviolability.

President Obama will occasionally admit that, for example, 
Medicare cannot go on as is, but
then reverts to crude demagoguery when the GOP proposes a structural reform, such as premium support for Medicare or something as obvious as raising the retirement age to match increasing longevity.

On the contrary. Obama added one enormous new entitlement (ObamaCare) and, in his last State of the Union address, proposed yet another (universal preschool).

None of this is inevitable. In Wisconsin, the GOP showed it recognized the perils of unlimited government growth and will take on the unchecked power of public unions. Democratic Detroit, however, has for 50 years conducted a contrary experiment in myopia and the most imprudent passivity.

It doesn't take a genius to see what happens when the entitlement state outgrows the economy upon which it rests. The time of Greece, Cyprus, Portugal, Spain, the rest of insolvent social-democratic Europe — and now Detroit — is the time for conservatives to raise the banner of Stein's Law and yell "Stop." You can kick the can down the road, but at some point it falls over a cliff.

HUMA - Cover Up Continues - Diana West

Why won't the media cover Huma Abedin's ties to the global jihad movement?
By Diana West

True, the barbs of Huma's ambition -- as naked as her husband's dirty pics -- have broken through the gauzy chatter. But cut off from context, they, too, end up perpetuating what is, in fact, the great Huma Abedin cover-up
 Can we realistically claim liberty and free markets triumphed over collectivism when today there is only a thin Senate line trying to fend off Obamacare's totalitarian intrusions into citizens' lives? We see perhaps a dozen or so patriots led by conservative ace Sen. Republican Mike Lee of Utah, gallantly mustering forces to defund further enforcement of this government behemoth aborning. (Call your senators and ask them to join -- or tell you why they didn't at the next town hall.) How can we maintain that the republic endured when a centralized super-state has taken its place?

So, once more, who really won the Cold War? The question is better framed when we realize that the battleground where the Free World met Marx was also psychological. Consciously or not, we struggled against an insidious Marxist ideology that was always, at root, an assault on our nation's character.

The most recent manifestation of victory over the American character shows through the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin scandal. This scandal is a paradoxical double whammy of both exposure and cover-up. 

Everyone knows (too much) about the exposure part: Anthony Weiner, candidate for mayor of New York City, turns out to be a recidivist pervert. The fatuous conversation that has followed this "news" has turned on the decision of Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, to step forward to try to salvage her husband's bid for public office. The Wall Street Journal's response to Abedin's decision was typical: "Watching the elegant Huma Abedin stand next to her man Tuesday as he explained his latest sexually charged online exchanges was painful for a normal human being to watch."

The media want to know why the "elegant Huma" -- Hillary Clinton's longtime aide and former deputy chief of staff -- would do such an inelegant thing. Was this couple's therapy writ large? Was it for their child? Was it ... love?

True, the barbs of Huma's ambition -- as naked as her husband's dirty pics -- have broken through the gauzy chatter. But cut off from context, they, too, end up perpetuating what is, in fact, the great Huma Abedin cover-up.

King Obama's Vision for Fannie

Obama FHFA Pick Mel Watt's Radical Vision For Fannie

By Paul Sperry, INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 07/26/2013 

A pre-crisis bill written by Democratic Rep. Mel Watt — President Obama's nod to run the Federal Housing Finance Agency — reveals that his ideas for regulating Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are more radical than he lets on.

On the eve of the financial crisis, Watt actually proposed the creation of the regulatory agency he now seeks to run — only, he designed it not to reform Fannie and Freddie but to pressure them to underwrite even more affordable housing, exposing them to even more risk.

The bill he co-sponsored with then-banking panel Chairman Barney Frank — the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2007 — would have forced the federally backed mortgage giants to meet even tougher quotas for affordable lending, while contributing to an "Affordable Housing Fund" to rebuild blighted urban areas.

"The real benefit of this bill is that it will provide a big stimulus for more affordable housing," Watt said at the time, ignoring concerns the agencies already were overexposed to low-income loans.

Such affordable housing quotas, set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, led to the insolvency and $188 billion taxpayer bailout of Fannie and Freddie, now nationalized and under the control of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

As President Obama's nominee to head FHFA, Watt has dodged questions about what he would do at the helm of the powerful agency. A career politician once voted the most liberal member of Congress, Watt has gone on a charm offensive to win over Senate Republicans, who have expressed strong reservations about his pick and plan to block a floor vote on his nomination.

During a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Republicans complained Watt offered few specifics in response to questions about his plans for Fannie and Freddie.

At one point, while probing his position on mortgage principal forgiveness, they questioned his sincerity. Watt implied he would follow FHFA's current stance against loan write-downs, even though he's publicly argued in favor of them.

If Senate Republicans want to know what he might actually do, they only need to read his proposed legislation, H.R. 1427. It's at least a partial blueprint of his agenda.

In March 2007, Watt said he co-authored the bill to create a new regulatory apparatus that "will provide a means to achieve our ultimate goal of expanding the supply of affordable mortgage credit across the country."

At the time, Watt was a senior member of the House Financial Services Committee and had just stepped down as chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, where he'd pushed the government to boost minority homeownership.

His bill proposed enhancing existing federal goals boosting Fannie's and Freddie's low-income mortgage portfolios by adding "a new affordable housing sub-goal for re-financing transactions."

The proposed regulator, dubbed "the Federal Housing Finance Agency," also would direct Fannie and Freddie to make contributions to an Affordable Housing Fund for "very and extremely low-income families" in amounts equal to 1.2 basis points on each of their total outstanding mortgages — including those held in portfolio and those securitized.

The bill, which failed to become law, authorized the new agency to set "housing goals and an annual home purchase goal for" Fannie and Freddie, and to "take enforcement action against an enterprise for failure to meet the housing goals."

Proposed enforcement actions included issuing fines, cease and desist orders and even criminal penalties against Fannie and Freddie if they fell short of the social lending goals. "The agency," moreover, "has the authority to remove management."

House members who are more familiar with Watt and his bill are more outspoken against him. GOP Rep. Scott Garrett, who's served with Watt on the House banking panel for the past decade, says that while his colleague pays lip service to "safety and soundness," he really only cares about "affordable housing" and "flexible underwriting," and would use Fannie and Freddie to carry out a risky social agenda.

"Watt voted time and time again against measures to make Fannie and Freddie more safe and sound," Garrett said. "He should not be put in charge of regulating and ensuring their safety and soundness."

The National Community Reinvestment Coalition, however, enthusiastically endorses Watt for the post. "Watt is highly qualified," asserted NCRC President John Taylor.

More on Huma

Senator calls for further investigation into Huma’s money

by Josh Rogin Jul 25, 2013 5:14 PM EDT

Huma Abedin, the wife of New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner, AKA Carlos Danger, is facing an ongoing Senate investigation into the consulting fees she earned while also working as a State Department employee for then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has been investigating Abedin’s activities as a paid consultant while she was still working for Clinton toward the end of her tenure. In June, 2012, Abedin changed her employment status at the State Department from being a full time employee with the title of deputy chief of staff to being a “special government employee,” a type of contractor that allowed her to take on private clients in addition to her government job that included Hillary Clinton’s post-State Department transition team, the William J. Clinton Foundation, and Teneo Holdings, a firm run by Clinton confidante Doug Band.

Abedin’s change in employment status was exposed in a June article in Politico, which reported that Abedin and Weiner reported income of $490,000 in calendar year 2012, $360,000 of which represented a combination of both of their consulting incomes.

Grassley has been pressing the State Department and Abedin to answer a slew of questions over the arrangement ever since.

“It appears that Teneo may have been compensating Ms. Abedin for gathering information from government sources for the purpose of informing investment decisions of her clients - or in other words, political intelligence,” Grassley wrote in a June 13 letter. “This raises important questions about whether her dual role was adequately disclosed to government officials who may have provided her information without realizing that she was being paid by private investors to gather information.”

Late night comedians poked fun at Weiner and Abedin following their press conference.

Today, Grassley released responses that the State Department and Abedin provided on July 17 to his inquiries.

The State Department confirmed that Abedin served as a “special government employee” from June 3, 2012 until Feb. 1, 2013, which seems to violate the statutory limit of 130 days that one person is allowed to serve with that status. Abedin’s duties during that time included “advising and participating in planning for the secretary’s schedule and travel.”

In a letter from Abedin to the State Department dated July 5, Abedin said she chose to become a consultant so that she could spend more time in New York with her family following the birth of her son in December, 2011.

Abedin also denied that there was any conflict of interest between her work with Teneo and her work at the State Department during her time a “special government employee.”

“I was not asked, nor did I undertake, any work on Teneo’s behalf before the department (and I should note that it is my understanding that Teneo does not conduct business with the Department of State),” she wrote. “I also was not asked, nor did I provide, insights about the department, my work with the secretary, or any government information to which I may have had access.”

Grassley was not satisfied by the State Department and Abedin’s responses. Thursday, he pledged in a statement to continue to look into the arrangement, demanded more thorough answers, and said that the use of “special government employees” needed a full review.

“The purpose of my inquiry is to shed light on whether the program is being used as intended, not just by Ms. Abedin, but more broadly, as well.  The State Department and Ms. Abedin should be willing to show the documents involved in administering the program to demonstrate good stewardship of tax dollars and the public interest,” he said. “So far, the State Department and Ms. Abedin haven’t provided a single document that I requested. Putting up a stone wall raises a lot more questions about how the program is being used than it answers.  I intend to pursue more complete answers to my questions.”

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Josh Rogin is senior correspondent for national security and politics for Newsweek and The Daily Beast. He previously worked at Foreign Policy magazine, Congressional Quarterly, Federal Computer Week magazine, and Japan’s leading daily newspaper, The Asahi Shimbun. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C.

King Barach and Global Warming Folly

Obama’s Global-Warming Folly

No, Mr. President, we don’t need a war on coal.

 

               By  Charles Krauthammer

The economy stagnates. Syria burns. Scandals lap at his feet. China and Russia mock him, even as a “29-year-old hacker” revealed his nation’s spy secrets to the world. How does President Obama respond? With a grandiloquent speech on climate change.

Climate change? It lies at the very bottom of a list of Americans’ concerns (last of 21 — Pew poll). Which means that Obama’s declaration of unilateral American war on global warming, whatever the cost — and it will be heavy — is either highly visionary or hopelessly solipsistic.

 You decide:

Global temperatures have been flat for 16 years — a curious time to unveil a grand, hugely costly, socially disruptive anti-warming program.

Now, this inconvenient finding is not dispositive. It doesn’t mean there is no global warming. But it is something that the very complex global-warming models that Obama naïvely claims represent settled science have trouble explaining. It therefore highlights the president’s presumption in dismissing skeptics as flat-earth know-nothings.

On the contrary. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who refuse to acknowledge the problematic nature of contradictory data. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite a recent Alaskan heat wave — a freak event in one place at one time — as presumptive evidence of planetary climate change. It’s flat-earthers like Obama who cite perennial phenomena such as droughts as cosmic retribution for environmental sinfulness.

For the sake of argument, nonetheless, let’s concede that global warming is precisely what Obama thinks it is. Then answer this: What in God’s name is his massive new regulatory and spending program — which begins with a war on coal and ends with billions in more subsidies for new Solyndras — going to do about it?

The U.S. has already radically cut CO₂ emissions — more than any country on earth since 2006, according to the International EnergyAgency. Emissions today are back down to 1992 levels.

And yet, at the same time, global emissions have gone up. That’s because — surprise! — we don’t control the energy use of the other 96 percent of humankind.

At the heart of Obama’s program are EPA regulations that will make it impossible to open any new coal plant and will systematically shut down existing plants. “Politically, the White House is hesitant to say they’re having a war on coal,” explained one of Obama’s climate advisers. “On the other hand, a war on coal is exactly what’s needed.”

Net effect: tens of thousands of jobs killed, entire states impoverished. This at a time of chronically and crushingly high unemployment, slow growth, jittery markets, and deep economic uncertainty.

But that’s not the worst of it. This massive self-sacrifice might be worthwhile if it did actually stop global warming and save the planet.

What makes the whole idea nuts is that it won’t. This massive self-inflicted economic wound will have no effect on climate change.

The have-nots are rapidly industrializing. As we speak, China and India together are opening one new coal plant every week. We can kill U.S. coal and devastate coal country all we want, but the industrializing third world will more than make up for it. The net effect of the Obama plan will simply be dismantling the U.S. coal industry for shipping abroad.

To think we will get these countries to cooperate is sheer fantasy. We’ve been negotiating climate treaties for 20 years and gotten exactly nowhere. China, India, and the other rising and modernizing countries point out that the West had a 150-year industrial head start that made it rich. They are still poor. And now, just as they are beginning to get rich, we’re telling them to stop dead in their tracks?

Fat chance. Obama imagines he’s going to cajole China into a greenhouse-gas-emissions reduction that will slow its economy, increase energy costs, derail industrialization, and risk enormous social unrest. This from a president who couldn’t even get China to turn over one Edward Snowden to U.S. custody.

I’m not against a global pact to reduce CO₂ emissions. Indeed, I favor it. But in the absence of one — and there is no chance of getting one in the foreseeable future — there is no point in America’s committing economic suicide to no effect on climate change, the reversing of which, after all, is the alleged point of the exercise.

For a president to propose this with such aggressive certainty is incomprehensible. It is the starkest of examples of belief that is impervious to evidence. And the word for that is faith, not science.

— Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2013 the Washington Post Writers Group

Huma Unmentionables - Andrew McCarthy

The Huma Unmentionables

           By  Andrew C. McCarthy

Charlotte’s revulsion over Huma Abedin’s calculated “stand by your man” routine is surely right. Still, it is amazing, as we speculate about Ms. Abedin’s political future, that the elephant in the room goes unnoticed, or at least studiously unmentioned.

Sorry to interrupt the Best Enabler of a Sociopath Award ceremony but, to recap, Ms. Abedin worked for many years at a journal that promotes Islamic-supremacist ideology that was founded by a top al-Qaeda financier, Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef ran the Rabita
Trust, a formally designated foreign terrorist organization under American law. Ms. Abedin and Naseef overlapped at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs (JMMA) for at least seven years. Throughout that time (1996–2003), Ms. Abdein worked for Hillary Clinton in various capacities.

Ms. Abedin’s late father, Dr. Zyed Abedin, was recruited by Naseef to run the JMMA in Saudi Arabia. The journal was operated under the management of the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, a virulently anti-Semitic and sharia-supremacist organization. When Dr. Abedin died, editorial control of the journal passed to his wife, Dr. Saleha Mahmood Abedin — Huma’s mother.

Saleha Abedin is closely tied to the Muslim Brotherhood and to supporters of violent jihad. Among other things, she directs an organization – the International Islamic Committee for Woman and Child. The IICWC, through its parent entity (the International Islamic Council for Dawa and Relief), is a component of the Union for Good (also known as the Union of Good), another formally designated terrorist organization. The Union for Good is led by Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the notorious Muslim Brotherhood jurist who has issued fatwas calling for the killing of American military and support personnel in Iraq as well as suicide bombings in Israel. (As detailed here, the Obama White House recently hosted Qaradawi’s principal deputy, Sheikh Abdulla bin Bayyah, who also endorsed the fatwa calling for the killing of U.S. troops and personnel in Iraq.)

Like Sheikh Qaradawi, who helped write the charter for the IICWC, Saleha Abedin is an influential sharia activist who has, for example, published a book called Women in Islam that claims man-made laws enslave women. It reportedly provides sharia justifications for such practices as female-genital mutilation, the death penalty for apostates from Islam, the legal subordination of women, and the participation of women in violent jihad. Dr. Abedin has nevertheless been hailed in the progressive press as a “leading voice on women’s rights in the Muslim world” (to quote Foreign Policy). What they never quite get around to telling you is that this means “women’s rights” in the repressive sharia context.

Back to daughter Huma. In the late mid to late Nineties, while she was an intern at the Clinton White House and an assistant editor at JMMA, Ms. Abedin was a member of the executive board of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) at George Washington University, heading its “Social Committee.” The MSA, which has a vast network of chapters at universities across North America, is the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood’s infrastructure in the United States. Obviously, not every Muslim student who joins the MSA graduates to the Brotherhood — many join for the same social and networking reasons that cause college students in general to join campus organizations. But the MSA does have an indoctrination program, which Sam Tadros describes as a lengthy process of study and service that leads to Brotherhood membership — a process “designed to ensure with absolute certainty that there is conformity to the movement’s ideology and a clear adherence to its leadership’s authority.” The MSA gave birth to the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), the largest Islamist organization in the U.S. Indeed the MSA and ISNA consider themselves the same organization. Because of its support for Hamas (a designated terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), ISNA was named an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation case, in which several Hamas operatives were convicted of providing the terrorist organization with lavish financing.

As I’ve recounted before, the MSA chapter to which Ms. Abedin belonged at George Washington University

has an intriguing history. In 2001 [to be clear, that is after Ms. Abedin had graduated from GWU], its spiritual guide was . . . Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaeda operative who was then ministering to some of the eventual 9/11 suicide-hijackers. Awlaki himself had led the MSA chapter at Colorado State University in the early nineties. As Patrick Poole has demonstrated, Awlaki is far from the only jihadist to hone his supremacist ideology in the MSA’s friendly confines. In the eighties, Wael Jalaidan ran the MSA at the University of Arizona. He would soon go on to help Osama bin Laden found al-Qaeda; he also partnered with the Abedin family’s patron, Abdullah Omar Naseef, to establish the [aforementioned] Rabita Trust — formally designated as a terrorist organization under U.S. law due to its funding of al-Qaeda.

Ms. Abedin served as one of Secretary of State Clinton’s top staffers and advisers at the State Department. As I’ve previously detailed, during that time, the State Department strongly supported abandoning the federal government’s prior policy against official dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. State, furthermore, embraced a number of Muslim Brotherhood positions that undermine both American constitutional rights and our alliance with Israel. To name just a few manifestations of this policy sea change:

• The State Department had an emissary in Egypt who trained operatives of the Brotherhood and other Islamist organizations in democracy procedures.
• The State Department announced that the Obama administration would be “satisfied” with the election of a Muslim Brotherhood–dominated government in Egypt.
• Secretary Clinton personally intervened to reverse a Bush-administration ruling that barred Tariq Ramadan, grandson of the Brotherhood’s founder and son of one of its most influential early leaders, from entering the United States.
• The State Department collaborated with the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of governments heavily influenced by the Brotherhood, in seeking to restrict American free-speech rights in deference to sharia proscriptions against negative criticism of Islam.
• The State Department excluded Israel, the world’s leading target of terrorism, from its “Global Counterterrorism Forum,” a group that brings the United States together with several Islamist governments, prominently including its co-chair, Turkey — which now finances Hamas and avidly supports the flotillas that seek to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas. At the forum’s kickoff, Secretary Clinton decried various terrorist attacks and groups; but she did not mention Hamas or attacks against Israel — in transparent deference to the Islamist governments, which echo the Brotherhood’s position that Hamas is not a terrorist organization and that attacks against Israel are not terrorism.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer $1.5 billion dollars in aid to Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood’s victory in the parliamentary elections.
• The State Department and the Obama administration waived congressional restrictions in order to transfer millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinian territories notwithstanding that Gaza is ruled by the terrorist organization Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
• The State Department and the administration hosted a contingent from Egypt’s newly elected parliament that included not only Muslim Brotherhood members but a member of the Islamic Group (Gamaa al-Islamiyya), which is formally designated as a foreign terrorist organization. The State Department refused to provide Americans with information about the process by which it issued a visa to a member of a designated terrorist organization, about how the members of the Egyptian delegation were selected, or about what security procedures were followed before the delegation was allowed to enter our country.
• On a trip to Egypt, Secretary Clinton pressured General Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, head of the military junta then governing the country, to surrender power to the parliament dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood, and the then–newly elected president, Mohamed Morsi, a top Brotherhood official. She also visited with Morsi; immediately after his victory, Morsi had proclaimed that his top priorities included pressuring the United States to release the Blind Sheikh. Quite apart from the Brotherhood’s self-proclaimed “grand jihad” to destroy the United States . . . the group’s supreme guide, Mohammed Badie, publicly called for jihad against the United States in an October 2010 speech. After it became clear the Brotherhood would win the parliamentary election, Badie said the victory was a stepping stone to “the establishment of a just Islamic caliphate.”

As more recent events remind us, this is not an exhaustive account of Obama-administration coziness with the Muslim Brotherhood. It is just some of the lowlights.

When a handful of House conservatives tried to draw the attention of the State Department’s inspector general to some of these matters – wondering how on earth someone with Ms. Abdein’s background could have qualified for a top-secret security clearance – they were castigated by the Obama White House and the Beltway Republican establishment. As reaffirmed in the last 24 hours, Ms. Abedin’s connections to prominent Islamic-supremacist figures and groups are deemed unsuitable for public discussion – Egyptians may be able to eject the Muslim Brotherhood, but in today’s Washington it is raising questions about the Muslim Brotherhood that gets you run out of town.

Naturally, what did get Washington chattering was a scandal far more typical in Clinton circles — the lucrative arrangement Ms. Abedin struck with Mrs. Clinton’s State Department that allowed her, after returning from maternity leave, to draw a $135,000 State Department salary while remaining in New York, not actually working at Foggy Bottom, and moonlighting as a “strategic consultant” for an outfit called Teneo – founded by Bill Clinton’s chum Doug Band.

What a racket. The marriage to Huma Abedin, a Clinton insider, enables Anthony Weiner to resurrect a debased career and deflect attention from his psychotic antics even as he continues them. The marriage to Anthony Weiner, a prominent Jewish progressive, enables Huma Abedin to deflect attention from her associations with various Islamic supremacists even as, during her tenure as a top State Department official, American policy embraces Islamic supremacists.

But let’s not discuss that.

IRSBoomshell (Peggy Noonan)

Noonan: A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal

No, it wasn't confined to a few rogue workers in Cincinnati.

By
• PEGGY NOONAN

The IRS scandal was connected this week not just to the Washington office—that had been established—but to the office of the chief counsel.

That is a bombshell—such a big one that it managed to emerge in spite of an unfocused, frequently off-point congressional hearing in which some members seemed to have accidentally woken up in the middle of a committee room, some seemed unaware of the implications of what their investigators had uncovered, one pretended that the investigation should end if IRS workers couldn't say the president had personally called and told them to harass his foes, and one seemed to be holding a filibuster on Pakistan.

Still, what landed was a bombshell. And Democrats know it. Which is why they are so desperate to make the investigation go away.

They know, as Republicans do, that the chief counsel of the IRS is one of only two Obama political appointees in the entire agency.

To quickly review why the new information, which came most succinctly in a nine-page congressional letter to IRS Commissioner Daniel Werfel, is big news:
 

IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division revenue agent Elizabeth Hofacre, left, and retired IRS tax law specialist Carter Hull testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

When the scandal broke two months ago, in May, IRS leadership in Washington claimed the harassment of tea-party and other conservative groups requesting tax-exempt status was confined to the Cincinnati office, where a few rogue workers bungled the application process. Lois Lerner, then the head of the exempt organizations unit in Washington, said "line people in Cincinnati" did work that was "not so fine." They asked questions that "weren't really necessary," she claimed, and operated without "the appropriate level of sensitivity." But the targeting was "not intentional." Ousted acting commissioner Steven Miller also put it off on "people in Cincinnati." They provided "horrible customer service."

House investigators soon talked to workers in the Cincinnati office, who said everything they did came from Washington. Elizabeth Hofacre, in charge of processing tea-party applications in Cincinnati, told investigators that her work was overseen and directed by a lawyer in the IRS Washington office named Carter Hull.

Now comes Mr. Hull's testimony. And like Ms. Hofacre, he pointed his finger upward. Mr. Hull—a 48-year IRS veteran and an expert on tax exemption law—told investigators that tea-party applications under his review were sent upstairs within the Washington office, at the direction of Lois Lerner.

In April 2010, Hull was assigned to scrutinize certain tea-party applications. He requested more information from the groups. After he received responses, he felt he knew enough to determine whether the applications should be approved or denied.

But his recommendations were not carried out.

Michael Seto, head of Mr. Hull's unit, also spoke to investigators. He told them Lois Lerner made an unusual decision: Tea-party applications would undergo additional scrutiny—a multilayered review.

Mr. Hull told House investigators that at some point in the winter of 2010-11, Ms. Lerner's senior adviser, whose name is withheld in the publicly released partial interview transcript, told him the applications would require further review:

Q: "Did [the senior adviser to Ms. Lerner] indicate to you whether she agreed with your recommendations?"

A: "She did not say whether she agreed or not. She said it should go to chief counsel."

Q: "The IRS chief counsel?"

A: "The IRS chief counsel."

The IRS chief counsel is named William Wilkins. And again, he is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

What was the chief counsel's office looking for? The letter to Mr. Werfel says Mr. Hull's supervisor, Ronald Shoemaker, provided insight: The counsel's office wanted, in the words of the congressional committees, "information about the applicants' political activities leading up to the 2010 election." Mr. Shoemaker told investigators he didn't find that kind of question unreasonable, but he found the counsel's office to be "not very forthcoming": "We discussed it to some extent and they indicated that they wanted more development of possible political activity or political intervention right before the election period."

It's almost as if—my words—the conservative organizations in question were, during two major election cycles, deliberately held in a holding pattern.

So: What the IRS originally claimed was a rogue operation now reaches up not only to the Washington office, but into the office of the

IRS chief counsel himself.

At the generally lacking House Oversight Committee Hearings on Thursday, some big things still got said.

Ms. Hofacre of the Cincinnati office testified that when she was given tea-party applications, she had to kick them upstairs. When she was given non-tea-party applications, they were sent on for normal treatment. Was she told to send liberal or progressive groups for special scrutiny? No, she did not scrutinize the applications of liberal or progressive groups. "I would send those to general inventory."

Who got extra scrutiny? "They were all tea-party and patriot cases." She became "very frustrated" by the "micromanagement" from Washington. "It was like working in lost luggage." She applied to be transferred.

For his part, Mr. Hull backed up what he'd told House investigators. He described what was, essentially, a big, lengthy runaround in the Washington office in which no one was clear as to their reasons but everything was delayed. The multitiered scrutiny of the targeted groups was, he said, "unusual."

It was Maryland's Rep. Elijah Cummings, the panel's ranking Democrat, who, absurdly, asked Ms. Hofacre if the White House called the Cincinnati office to tell them what to do and whether she has knowledge of the president of the United States digging through the tax returns of citizens. Ms. Hofacre looked surprised. No, she replied.

It wasn't hard to imagine her thought bubble: Do congressmen think presidents call people like me and say, "Don't forget to harass my enemies"? Are congressmen that stupid?

Mr. Cummings is not, and his seeming desperation is telling. Recent congressional information leads to Washington—and now to very high up at the IRS. Meaning this is the point at which a scandal goes nowhere or, maybe, everywhere.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a South Carolina Republican, finally woke the proceedings up with what he called "the evolution of the defense" since the scandal began. First, Ms. Lerner planted a question at a conference. Then she said the Cincinnati office did it—a narrative that was advanced by the president's spokesman, Jay Carney. Then came the suggestion the IRS was too badly managed to pull off a sophisticated conspiracy. Then the charge that liberal groups were targeted too—"we did it against both ends of the political spectrum."

When the inspector general of the IRS said no, it was conservative groups that were targeted, he came under attack. Now the defense is that the White House wasn't involved, so case closed.

This is one Republican who is right about evolution.

Those trying to get to the bottom of the scandal have to dig in, pay attention. The administration's defenders, and their friends in the press, have made some progress in confusing the issue through misdirection and misstatement.

This is the moment things go forward or stall. Republicans need to find out how high the scandal went and why, exactly, it went there. To do that they'll have to up their game.

A version of this article appeared July 19, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Bombshell in the IRS Scandal.