Ted Cruz Nukes the Obama-Kerry ‘Radical Anti-Israel Agenda’

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Senator Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 97%) warned that history would remember President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry as “relentless enemies of Israel” in a statement issued in response to a speech Conservaitve Review Editor-in-Chief Mark Levin called “outrageous.”

“Like bitter clingers, President Obama and Secretary Kerry are spending every last minute of this administration wreaking havoc domestically and abroad,” Cruz wrote in a press release. “With their last breath in office, they have struck at Israel, through the United Nations and through today’s disgraceful speech.”

“Kerry’s speech drew a stunning moral equivalence between our great ally Israel and the Palestinian Authority, currently formed in a ‘unity’ government with the vicious terrorists of Hamas,” said Cruz. “Kerry’s central conclusion, that ‘Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both’ is an inanity that passes as profound only in Ivory Tower faculty lounges.”

“It is a sign of their radicalism and refusal to defend American interests, that Obama and Kerry choose to attack the only inclusive democracy in the Middle East — a strong, steadfast ally of America — while turning a blind eye to the Islamic terrorism that grows daily.” (For more from the author of “Ted Cruz Nukes the Obama-Kerry ‘Radical Anti-Israel Agenda'” please click HERE)

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Deported Immigrants Get Taxpayer-Funded Grants From Obama Administration

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The Obama administration is using a taxpayer-funded program to award business grants to Salvadoran migrants deported from the United States.

Run by the nonprofit Instituto Salvadorno Del Migrante and funded through a $50,000 grant from the taxpayer-backed Inter-American Foundation, the program “facilitates [deportees’] reintegration into their communities and supports their enterprises by offering financial education, technical advice, and assistance with business plans.”

“So, if you break the rules and get deported, we’ll help you start a business back in your home country. How absurd,” said Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

The program was included in a report on government waste by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Spending Oversight and Emergency Management, chaired by Paul.

The Inter-American Foundation sought to clarify that the Salvadoran grants are not “intended” for criminal deportees, but the subcommittee had no confirmation that criminal deportees are prohibited from receiving funds. No specific award criteria were provided.

“What we do know is that about 30 percent of the returning deportees were deported due to violent or other crimes beyond undocumented presence,” Paul stated.

Program supporters argue that negative impressions about deportees hamper their chances to get loans in El Salvador. That’s unfair, they said, given that most criminal deportees’ crimes involve “assault, drunk driving, and drug possession.”

To which Paul responded: “So while banks justifiably hesitate to take on such a risk, it is apparently perfectly reasonable to pass that risk on to the American taxpayer.”

Jessica Vaughn, policy analyst at the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies, said that while many things could go wrong, “It’s in our interest to ensure that people who are deported don’t turn around and come back again.”

“In concept, it may not be that bad of an idea,” she told Watchdog in an interview.

While asserting that border deterrence is “the only thing that will work in the long run,” Vaughn added, “People have to have a reason to stay in their country.”

But she shared Paul’s concerns about rewarding criminal immigrants, noting that the bulk of deportees in the Obama era were convicted of crimes in the U.S.

If and when border security is tightened, Vaughn said, “I can see a program like this when we get back to deporting people who are caught working and not necessarily criminals.” (For more from the author of “Deported Immigrants Get Taxpayer-Funded Grants From Obama Administration” please click HERE)

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The California Gathering That Hatched Plan to Prosecute Skeptics of Climate Change

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Just before joining climate change activist and former Vice President Al Gore for a press conference in New York City, seven state-level attorneys general huddled with a representative of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The political activist, Peter Frumhoff, called for them and other elected officials to move decisively against major corporations and institutions for “denying” climate change.

The seeds of that call to action in March were planted four years earlier at a gathering of environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics across the country in San Diego.

The Daily Signal found this and other revealing bits of information among material produced in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against Virginia’s George Mason University, home to six academics who urged the Obama administration to prosecute individuals and organizations for not agreeing that man has caused climate change.

The detail is important because Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, demanded that 17 state attorneys general who call themselves “AGs United for Clean Energy” provide documents on interactions among their offices—and with various environmental organizations.

Such details obtained through the lawsuit “reveal the incestuous relationship between climate change activists and partisan state attorneys general,” Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal. He added:

They are subverting our democratic system by using the courts to silence the opposition to their economically costly, unneeded policy solutions for an unproven scientific theory. Americans should be outraged by this abuse of governmental powers by the chief law enforcement officials of these states.

Smith’s letters to the attorneys general refer to the meeting held in June 2012 in California and billed as a Workshop on Climate Accountability, Public Opinion, and Legal Strategies.

A total of 23 environmental activists, trial lawyers, and academics came together in the seaside San Diego neighborhood of La Jolla to devise a “strategy to fight industry in the courts” over climate change, the House committee chairman says in the letters.

Another goal of the meeting was to find ways to confront what attendees described as a “network of public relations firms and nonprofit front groups that have been actively sowing disinformation about global warming for years.”

According to a summary of the La Jolla gathering, the activists came up with the idea of using the federal law known as RICO—the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—against the fossil fuel industry.

Congress passed RICO in 1978 for the purpose of prosecuting mob crimes. In recent months, though, climate change activists have sought to use it against organizations, corporations, and scientists that aren’t convinced human activity is responsible for catastrophic climate change.

Early on in the workshop, Richard Ayres, a Washington lawyer who is a co-founder and trustee of the Natural Resources Defense Council, first mentioned the RICO tactic as a possible weapon against fossil fuel.

Ayres’ environmental organization is a well-endowed, tax-exempt advocacy group headquartered in New York City. Public records show it had financial assets of $268.1 million as of 2013.

Reached by telephone Tuesday by The Daily Signal, Ayres said the meeting “was a long time ago” and declined comment.

Other workshop attendees included Frumhoff, director of science and policy for the Union of Concerned Scientists, who met with the attorneys general in New York in March, and Matthew Pawa, an environmental activist and trial attorney who founded the Global Warming Legal Action project.

The Big Tobacco Analogy

A 36-page document, “Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages,” outlines the business of the workshop held June 14 and 15, 2012, in La Jolla.

Those attending took inspiration from successful litigation efforts directed against the tobacco industry in the 1990s. But, according to the summary, they acknowledged that a similar legal strategy against fossil fuel companies “would present a number of different obstacles and opportunities.”

By opportunities, they meant litigation. The summary notes “widespread agreement among workshop participants” that some form of “cancer analog” for global warming, such as rising sea levels, must be established.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of the history of science at Harvard University who played a key role in organizing the workshop, is quoted in the workshop summary as saying: “When I talk to my students I always say tobacco causes lung cancer, esophageal cancer, mouth cancer. … My question is: What is the ‘cancer’ of climate change that we need to focus on?”

The documents on tobacco litigation are collected in a searchable, online repository called the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, the summary notes. Workshop attendee Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine and director of the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education at the University of California, San Francisco, runs the project.

In response to an email from The Daily Signal requesting comment, Glantz said he was “struck by the parallels” between the public relations tactics of the oil industry and the tobacco companies. He said:

The pattern of quietly financing public relations efforts and small ‘independent’ groups of scientists in order to confuse the public about the overwhelming scientific evidence linking human activities—including energy consumption using Exxon Mobil—while privately using high-quality, accurate science that recognizes global warming to make internal business decisions is precisely the behavior pattern that got the tobacco companies into so much trouble for defrauding the public. The oil industry also uses a lot of the same individuals and organizations as the tobacco industry. Such manipulation of science to defraud the public was a central element of the RICO case [against the tobacco industry].

Contrary to what some environmentalists tell the public, however, skeptics of man-made climate change argue that the analogy between tobacco use and climate change does not hold.

Theories linking human activity with global warming, they say, are in dispute.

In fact, hundreds of climate scientists from across the globe have contributed to reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which calls itself an “international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars, who have come together to present a comprehensive, authoritative, and realistic assessment of the science and economics of global warming.”

The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change was set up as a rejoinder to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, also known as the IPCC, which has produced reports promoting the idea that human activity drives catastrophic climate change.

In contrast, the nongovernmental group of scientists finds no consensus, no basis for predictions of future climate conditions, and no case for forcing a transition away from fossil fuels.

The organization’s reports demonstrate that an increasing number of scientists say natural variability, not human activity, is the primary driver of warming and cooling trends. In 2008, it joined with the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank based in Illinois, to produce a report entitled “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate.”

‘It’s All About the Money’

Four years after the meeting in La Jolla, Frumhoff gave a presentation in New York to the seven state attorneys general on the “imperative of taking action now on climate change” just before they held their March 29 press conference with Gore. That same morning, Pawa’s law office briefed the attorneys general on climate change litigation.

Chris Horner, a lawyer and senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian and free-market think tank based in Washington, late last year filed the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against George Mason University that produced email records highlighting coordination among environmental activists and the 17 state attorneys general.

As reported previously by The Daily Signal, 20 academics from across the country who specialize in climate change, including the six from George Mason University, signed a letter dated Sept. 1, 2015, asking the Obama administration to consider pursuing a federal racketeering investigation against “the fossil fuel industry and their supporters.”

They addressed the letter to President Barack Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and John Holdren, director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

The “RICO 20,” as the academics came to be known, argued that “corporations and other organizations … knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”

The writers credited Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., for proposing use of the racketeering law against such climate skeptics. But in reality, the idea originated with the La Jolla workshop more than three years earlier.

The Union of Concerned Scientists played a critical role in organizing the 2012 meeting, notes Ron Arnold, executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise, a conservative educational group.

“The Union of Concerned Scientists has a long history of left-wing activism,” Arnold said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “It was informally founded but not incorporated in 1969 as an anti-Vietnam War protest group by students and faculty members at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

The organization, which incorporated in 1973, had assets of $46.5 million as of 2014.

The 2012 meeting on climate change was simply an extension of the scientists’ involvement in “numerous far-left causes,” Arnold said:

When you take a hard look at this workshop, you will find it really has nothing to do with global warming. Instead, it’s all about the money, it’s all about big legal settlements.

A Threat to Free Speech

The coalition called AGs United for Clean Energy, also dubbed the “Green 20,” made its official debut during the press conference with Gore. All the original members are Democrats except Claude E. Walker of the Virgin Islands, an independent.

The stated objective of the coalition of attorneys general is to “defend climate change progress made under President Obama.”

To this end, some of the prosecutors subpoenaed documents, communications, and research aimed at acquiring the work material of more than 100 academic institutions, nonprofit organizations, and individual scientists, according to Smith’s House committee.

In his correspondence with the state officials, the Texas congressman expressed concern that their tactics undermined free speech and stifled meaningful scientific debate at the expense of the public interest, which, he noted, government attorneys should work to uphold.

Smith also sent letters to eight environmental activist groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists, asking for “documents related to the groups’ coordinated efforts to deprive companies, nonprofit organizations, scientists, and scholars of their First Amendment rights and their ability to fund and conduct scientific research free from intimidation and threats of prosecution.”

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey continue to press ahead with investigations of Exxon Mobil Corp. But not everyone else in the coalition seems to be on board with the tactics congressional critics view as a violation of free speech.

In fact, not every prosecutor who initially identified himself or herself with the coalition in March appears to be part of it today. The Energy and Environment Legal Institute, a Washington-based nonprofit also known as E&E Legal, recently released a batch of emails suggesting the “Green 20” was beginning to fray around the edges.

Delaware’s attorney general, Matthew Denn, has withdrawn from the coalition. The attorneys general of Virginia, Vermont, and Iowa—Mark Herring, William Sorrell, and Tom Miller—all expressed reservations in one form or another.

Walker, the Virgin Islands attorney general, decided to withdraw his subpoena against the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the libertarian think tank in Washington.

Walker had asked for CEI to turn over its work on climate change over the past decade. In turn, CEI asked the District of Columbia Superior Court to fine Walker for violating its First Amendment rights under the District’s law against bullying lawsuits, as well as for attorneys’ fees and other sanctions.

Resisting Congressional Subpoenas

E&E Legal describes itself as devoted to strategic litigation, policy research, and public education. Chaim Mandelbaum, a Virginia lawyer representing the organization, told The Daily Signal that he suspects that the negative media attention on the relationship between the state attorneys general and green pressure groups prompted some of the elected officials to rethink their position.

Continued congressional scrutiny has backed the “Green 20” into a defensive position, Mandelbaum said.

Smith issued subpoenas to New York’s Schneiderman, Massachusetts’ Healey, and the eight environmental groups: the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Climate Accountability Institute, Rockefeller Family Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Pawa Law Group, Greenpeace, the Climate Reality Project, and 350.org.

So far, all have resisted the congressional subpoenas.

E&E Legal is pursuing Freedom of Information Act lawsuits against Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Kilmartin as well as Schneiderman over their use of a “secrecy pact” describing how they intended to silence climate change skeptics and conceal their actions from the public.

In related developments, E&E Legal joined several New York citizens groups in an effort to shake loose records detailing any coordination between the New York attorney general and Tom Steyer, a billionaire environmental activist and major donor to the Democratic Party.

Most recently, E&E Legal filed an open records suit against Herring, Virginia’s attorney general, asking for “portions of correspondence with and about ringleader New York AG Eric Schneiderman’s office.” The suit also seeks information from Herring about “outside advisers.”

A federal judge in Texas ordered Healey to appear Dec. 13 in a Dallas court to answer questions about her investigation of Exxon Mobil. But the day before, U.S. District Judge Ed Kinkeade canceled his order, which Healey had vowed to resist.

Kinkeade instead gave Healey and lawyers for Exxon Mobil until Jan. 4 to submit briefs on why or why not the deposition should take place in Texas, the Boston Herald reported.

>>> Democrat AGs, Green Groups Defy Subpoenas on Coordinated Climate Efforts

“We see a substantial amount of collusion going on,” E&E Legal’s Mandelbaum told The Daily Signal, citing meetings between the state attorneys general and the Union of Concerned Scientists prior to the press conference with Gore.

Mandelbaum also said calendar entries indicate Pawa, the trial lawyer who founded Global Warming Legal Action, met with the attorneys general and gave them information suggesting Exxon Mobil has concealed facts about climate change. Mandelbaum said:

There’s a lot of evidence showing these outside groups are presenting the [attorneys general] with information that says Exxon Mobil is hiding information, when there is no evidence that this is true. It’s clear these outside [environmental] groups have been driving this agenda and trying to get the attorneys general to take some kind of action. We are talking about extremely open-ended investigations that are political and not really legal.

‘Alarmists Have Never Succeeded’

Bonner Cohen, a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, told The Daily Signal that he sees vast differences between what occurred with the tobacco industry years ago and the scientific realities of climate change—what activists used to call global warming.

“The 1963 surgeon general’s report linking cigarette smoking to a higher risk of lung cancer was a scientific finding, plain and simple, one which has withstood the test of time,” Cohen said, adding:

Unlike ‘climate change,’ originally labeled ‘global warming,’ the surgeon general’s report was never a part of a larger political agenda. From the moment man-made global warming was elevated to a problem requiring ‘urgent’ action at a well-orchestrated Senate hearing in 1988, the political class in the U.S. and elsewhere has used the issue to increase its power and wealth.

Yet despite numerous international conferences, congressional hearings, untold billions of taxpayer dollars spent on climate ‘research,’ the blatant manipulation of data, and a vast PR campaign, alarmists have never succeeded in establishing a cause-and-effect relationship between man-made greenhouse gases and a warming of the planet.

Cohen continued:

Such a relationship was established—and never seriously disputed—regarding the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Alarmists have tacitly acknowledged this by claiming that the ‘science is settled on climate change.’ It isn’t, and they know it, but they want to snuff out all debate on the subject so we can get on to the important business of eliminating fossil fuels and replacing them with renewable energy. The ultimate goal is to have a self-appointed mandarin class of transnational bureaucrats dictate how energy is to be rationed globally. This is a far cry from warning people about the dangers of smoking.

The Daily Signal repeatedly sought comment from Oreskes by phone and email, but she has not responded.

The summary of the 2012 workshop proceedings makes it clear she was among key organizers. For example, Page 2 says:

The workshop was conceived by Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego [since removed to Harvard University], Peter C. Frumhoff and Angela Ledford Anderson of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Richard Heede of the Climate Accountability Institute, and Lewis M. Branscomb of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Oreskes also is a co-founder of the Climate Accountability Institute, where she and Frumhoff serve on an advisory board. The tax-exempt organization, incorporated in 2011 in Snowmass, Colorado, reported assets of $31,579 as of 2014.

The Daily Signal sought comment from spokesmen for the Union of Concerned Scientists by phone and email, but the organization has not responded. Heede, a co-founder and director of the Climate Accountability Institute, was reached briefly by telephone but declined to comment.

Branscomb, professor emeritus of public policy and corporate management at Harvard and research associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, declined comment. Neither Frumhoff nor Anderson, director of the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, could be reached for comment.

In June, Oreskes delivered testimony before a panel of the Congressional Democratic Progressive Caucus, a group of the most liberal lawmakers in Congress, underscoring the Harvard professor’s leading role in the campaign of the attorneys general targeting skeptics of man-made climate change.

Arnold, the Center for Defense of Freedom vice president, said:

The testimony from Oreskes revealed that Schneiderman had been conducting his inquisition against Exxon Mobil long before reports surfaced alleging the company hid information related to global warming. Ironically, Exxon Mobil sent the [New York] attorney general mountains of material and showed that all its science had been published in peer review journals, thus had been available to the public all the time. That didn’t stop Schneiderman, who was obviously operating a political crusade, not a criminal investigation.

Donors behind the 2012 workshop on climate change accountability also were acknowledged on Page 2 of the summary: “This workshop was made possible by the V. Kann Rasmussen Foundation, the Mertz Gilmore Foundation, the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and the Martin Johnson House at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.”

The Johnson House, where the activists gathered, is an oceanfront cottage used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a department of University of California, San Diego.

The assets propelling the three named foundations amount to more than half a billion dollars—$608.5 million—according to tax documents for 2013: $89.3 million for the Rasmussen Foundation; $125.1 million for the Gilmore Foundation; and $394.1 million for the Grantham Foundation.

“Combined with the assets behind the many funders of all the workshop’s participants, the financial clout represented here is many billions of influential dollars,” Arnold said.

‘Your Source Has It Wrong’

Arnold questioned the motivations of the workshop organizers, in particular Glantz, co-author of the 2012 book “Bad Acts: The Racketeering Case Against the Tobacco Industry,” and Oreskes, whose 2011 book “Merchants of Doubt” he called a “fossil fuel smear.” Arnold said:

[Oreskes] knew of the huge payoff from the tobacco case settlement [in 1998] that gave University of California professor Stanton Glantz his own institute within the university, the Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education. Glantz was a participant in the La Jolla meeting, [and] talked about his involvement in the tobacco cases.

Subsequently, Oreskes was a participant in New York Attorney General Schneiderman’s RICO campaign where she informed the coalition members of the content of her book and her book’s research into the tobacco cases.

The Daily Signal specified Arnold’s remarks about her in seeking comment from Oreske, but the Harvard professor has not responded.

Glantz did offer a rejoinder to Arnold, saying in an email to The Daily Signal that he didn’t have “formal involvement in the tobacco cases” and was not a witness. He said he did “from time to time provide information and answer questions from some of the lawyers.”

“So, your source has it wrong,” he told The Daily Signal, “which is not surprising since ‘climate skeptics’ either don’t understand or ignore the science on global warming.” (For more from the author of “The California Gathering That Hatched Plan to Prosecute Skeptics of Climate Change” please click HERE)

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Kerry Takes a Parting Shot at Israel in Middle East Speech

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Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a detailed speech Wednesday defending the Obama administration’s recent abstention on a U.N. Security Council vote condemning Israeli settlements.

Kerry claimed that the decision to permit the passage of the one-sided resolution was aimed at “preserving the two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which “is now in serious jeopardy.”

The 70-minute long lamentation amounted to a passionate defense of his own failed diplomatic efforts to renew Israeli-Palestinian negotiations.

Kerry proposed six principles that should guide future negotiations, including secure borders for both Israeli and a Palestinian state, a “fair and realistic” solution to the question of Palestinian refugees, and designating Jerusalem as an “internationally recognized capital of the two states.”

Billed as a “comprehensive vision” of Arab-Israeli peace, Kerry’s speech boiled down to a jeremiad against Israeli settlers, whose “agenda is defining the future in Israel.”

Kerry assumed a high-minded moralistic tone that was detached from reality. He focused obsessively on settlements as impediments to peace while glossing over the harmful role played by Palestinian terrorism, the continuing incitement of the Palestinian Authority, and the failure of Palestinians to abide by their commitments under the Oslo peace accords.

Kerry’s tunnel vision regarding the settlements, and his paying only lip service to Israeli security needs, were major reasons for the failure of his diplomatic efforts to jump-start the long-stalled peace talks.

Kerry failed to mention that when Israel did freeze settlement expansion for 10 months during the Obama administration’s first term, no progress was made on peace negotiations because the Palestinians ruled out any concessions.

Moreover, settlements can be dismantled if necessary to reach a peace agreement.

Israel removed all of its settlers in Gaza and turned over the territory to the Palestinian Authority in 2005. The move backfired when Hamas staged a bloody coup to expel the Palestinian Authority in 2007 and transformed Gaza into a terrorist base for destroying Israel.

As long as Hamas retains a stranglehold on Gaza, there is no realistic chance for a stable Israeli-Palestinian peace. Yet rather than focus on defeating Hamas militants who reject peace negotiations and even Israel’s right to exist, the Obama administration has chosen to chastise Israel at the U.N.

Kerry’s speech comes during a historic low point in U.S.-Israeli bilateral relations. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused the U.S. of colluding with the Palestinians by allowing last week’s resolution to be adopted by the U.N. Security Council.

Kerry denied that “somehow the United States was the driving force behind this resolution.”

Israel is concerned that the Security Council resolution is a harbinger of more anti-Israeli actions at the United Nations, which has a long history of siding against Israel.

France plans to host an international conference attended by 70 countries next month to endorse an international framework for Mideast peace. Israeli officials worry that the conference’s recommendations may then be enshrined in another U.N. Security Council resolution before Obama leaves office on Jan. 20.

At a time when Russia and Iran are slaughtering thousands of civilians in Syria and ISIS continues to inflict carnage, it is unseemly that the Obama administration has gone out of its way to censure, isolate, and undermine Israel, a longtime ally.

Kerry’s speech is one more reminder that the Obama administration, even in its waning days, remains much more concerned about engaging adversaries than it is about alienating allies.

Its self-righteous tendency to lecture and berate friends while accommodating adversaries, such as Iran and Cuba, is a major reason that its foreign policy has been such a disaster. (For more from the author of “Kerry Takes a Parting Shot at Israel in Middle East Speech” please click HERE)

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Are Crummy Airports Ruining Your Holiday Travel? Here’s How to Fix Them

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The nation’s bustling airports are in the midst of accommodating the more than 6 million people who were expected to take to the skies this holiday season. That surge can be hard on weary travelers who get bogged down by delays, overcrowding, and cancellations only made worse by many airports that feel like they were last renovated during the Cold War.

Although America’s airports serve more travelers than anywhere else in the world, many are handling far more passengers than their original designs intended.

Not a single U.S. airport was ranked in the top 25 airports in the world, and worse still, our largest and most important airports in cities like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles scrape the very bottom in terms of customer satisfaction.

As I recently detailed in an extensive report, these miseries are exacted on travelers because airports are prohibited from running like normal businesses due to burdensome government involvement.

Nearly every major airport in the United States is owned by a local government or authority, such as a port authority. The result is that many airports are run like a government bureaucracy instead of an efficient, competitive business.

This stands in stark contrast to Europe, where airports under partial or wholly private ownership handle nearly three-quarters of passengers.

An even greater impediment airports face is the inefficient and inequitable way airports are funded in the U.S. Every time a traveler flies, a large portion of their ticket price—about 14 percent on average—is eaten up by taxes and government fees.

A big chunk of those taxes goes to fund the federal Airport Improvement Program, which provides grants for capital projects at U.S. airports to the tune of $3.4 billion every year.

The huge issue with this program is that it unfairly transfers ticket tax dollars from the airports that people use most to those that are used least.

The top 60 airports in the U.S. carry 88 percent of the nation’s passengers, but receive only 27 percent of grants from the Airport Improvement Program. Noncommercial airports, whose fliers contribute nearly nothing to the program, receive 30 percent of the grants.

The sad reality is that most fliers’ ticket taxes are funding airports that they will never use. This shortchanges the most significant airports that require the most capital investment.

On top of the lopsided funding regime, the federal government fastidiously micromanages airports’ business practices. The most harmful rule stipulates that airports cannot charge their customers a fee for using the airport, with the exception of a price-controlled and highly regulated Passenger Facility Charge.

What other business is prohibited from charging its customers for its services? This forces airports to rely on highly regulated sources of government revenue and deals they cut with airlines, which have an interest in restricting access from competitors that might provide better or cheaper services for fliers.

The mountain of regulations further stipulate that the federal government must approve of changes in the layout of the airport, what retailers the airport must allow, and even how the airport is allowed to present itself in advertisements. All these regulations smother airports’ ability to operate as effective businesses and provide fliers with the services they want.

Though these misguided policies have put a stranglehold on our nation’s most important airports, it doesn’t have to be this way. Several simple reforms would drastically improve the funding and regulatory regime for U.S. airports, with benefits and potential savings for the vast majority of fliers:

Eliminate burdensome regulations that restrict how airports can raise and spend revenues;

Reduce costly passenger taxes and eliminate inefficient federal grants; and

Allow self-sufficiency and privatization to move U.S. airports toward a modernized, free-market funding system.

These reforms would drastically improve the efficacy of the nation’s most vital hubs of commerce and travel. They should be on every flier’s wish list this holiday season. (For more from the author of “Are Crummy Airports Ruining Your Holiday Travel? Here’s How to Fix Them” please click HERE)

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Harry Reid Admits Unspoken Truth: Democrats Are Getting Old

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Retirement or the presidential campaign trail in 2020? Oddly enough, that’s a choice some 2020 presidential prospects for the Democratic Party may have to consider.

he conundrum was pointed out by none other than the 77-year-old outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev. (F, 2%) Washington fixture for the last three decades who retired this month.
During a practice question and answer session with aides before appearing at his last luncheon with Senate Democrats, Reid made some pointed comments about the elderliness of his party’s potential 2020 presidential prospects.

New York Magazine reported:

Another aide brought up Joe Biden’s recent remark that he was thinking about running for president in 2020. “Would you support him?” she inquired.

“It depends on who’s running,” Reid replied. “It appears we’re going to have an old-folks’ home. We’ve got [Elizabeth] Warren; she’ll be 71. Biden will be 78. Bernie [Sanders] will be 79.”

Come to think of it, it might be kind of fun to watch Biden host bingo in the Villages as a 2020 fundraiser. (Warren and Sanders would probably complain the system is rigged.)

Putting that aside, it’s a wonderful thing that Leader Reid said this now, so Republicans don’t have to later.

If anyone with an “R” behind their name had said it, they’d be called “ageist.” Now it’s a bit of common ground Republicans finally may have found with Reid during his final days in Washington. Ha. (For more from the author of “Harry Reid Admits Unspoken Truth: Democrats Are Getting Old” please click HERE)

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Trump’s Pick for Attorney General Prosecuted These Civil Rights Cases

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Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., spent a considerable amount of his time as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Alabama pressing civil rights lawsuits. He also assisted local prosecutors in a case that helped wipe out the Ku Klux Klan in the state.

Yet accusations about the Alabama senator’s past on racial issues have become a focal point for those opposing his confirmation to be the next attorney general after President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

NAACP President Cornell Brooks, in a written statement, accused Sessions of having “disdain for our nation’s civil rights laws.” Brooks said:

Senator Sessions’ record suggests that he will carry on an old, ugly legacy in this country’s history when civil rights for African-Americans, women, and minorities were not regarded as core American values. While Lady Justice may be said to be blind, we need an attorney general with 20/20 vision in seeing racial injustice. Whether Senator Sessions, with decades of failing grades on the NAACP’s report card, possesses a racial vision and commitment to justice is in serious question.

A letter to Senate leaders from member organizations of the Leadership Conference, a coalition of civil rights groups, asserted: “Sessions has a 30-year record of racial insensitivity, bias against immigrants, disregard for the rule of law, and hostility to the protection of civil rights that makes him unfit to serve as the attorney general of the United States.”

But the same letter goes on to say:

Senator Sessions’ record does include some positive actions. For example, the Southern Poverty Law Center … acknowledged that he was helpful in the center’s successful effort to sue and bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan following its role in the 1981 lynching death of Michael Donald.

The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to hold a confirmation hearing for Sessions in the new year even before Trump, who picked him to run the Justice Department, is sworn in as president Jan. 20.

The old accusations against Sessions played a key role in stopping his 1986 nomination to serve as U.S. district judge for the Southern District of Alabama.

Sessions is no racist and such attacks are a means of personalizing policy differences, said Horace Cooper, co-chairman of Project 21, a black conservative group, and adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research.

“All I’ve seen from Jeff Sessions is that he has followed the law as the Supreme Court has defined it and has not attempted to make law,” Cooper told The Daily Signal. “It’s proper for a U.S. attorney general or a state attorney general to make decisions based on the law, whether the law is popular or not.”

Responding to a question from the Judiciary Committee asking him to describe the 10 most significant cases he litigated, Sessions wrote that five regarded racial matters, such as voting rights, desegregation, and prosecution of a Klan-motivated murder. He also explained his role in a fraud case against a civil rights activist, who was acquitted.

Paul A. Hancock, a former Civil Rights Division lawyer now in private practice in Miami, said in an interview with The Daily Signal that Sessions worked with the division and never against it. Still, Hancock delivered negative testimony to the Judiciary Committee about Sessions in 1986.

“Civil rights cases are mostly handled out of D.C. but the U.S. attorney’s views are sought,” Hancock told The Daily Signal. “It’s not unheard of for the U.S. attorney to take credit for a lawsuit, just as it’s not unheard of for an attorney general to take credit. But we never had any difficulty with him as a U.S. attorney.”

In decades past, federal prosecutors in Southern states resisted Justice’s Civil Rights Division, a Trump transition source said, adding that Sessions never claimed to have prepared the cases or taken the lead. Instead, he was the public face of the cases when DOJ lawyers returned to Washington.

‘First Voter Suppression Lawsuit’: US v. Conecuh County

Sessions said in response to the Judiciary Committee’s questionnaire that he understood a case out of Conecuh County “was the first voter suppression lawsuit ever instituted by the United States Department of Justice.”

He added: “I am honored to have been part of it.”

Sessions worked with Justice’s Civil Rights Division in a suit first brought in October 1983 against Conecuh County, after allegations the county hired only white poll workers.

Some of those poll workers made racist comments to turn away black voters, allowed white voters to cast ballots when their names were not on the rolls at a polling place, and put limits on how many blacks could vote, according to the suit.

In March 1984, Sessions and the voting section of the Civil Rights Division filed a pleading. Sessions was also part of discovery motions.

In June 1984, the case was resolved with a consent decree that ensured election workers would stop harassing and intimidating black voters. The decree encouraged political parties to recruit black poll workers.

Voting Rights: US v. Dallas County Commission

In July 1982, Sessions co-filed an 80-page brief with the voting section of the Civil Rights Division that was a “finding of fact” stating that at-large districts used to elect county commissioners and school board members denied blacks full participation in the voting process.

The case dragged on until 1988, when a court ordered the county to have five districts for electing board members, with three containing majority black populations.

“Along with the [American Civil Liberties Union], my office continued to support extensive litigation,” Sessions wrote in reply to the questionnaire.

Prosecuting an Activist: US v. Turner

This is the case Sessions’ critics eagerly point to, largely because it involved bringing charges against Albert Turner, a former adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and mostly because Turner was acquitted.

The matter began in 1982, when Perry County District Attorney Roy Johnson urged a federal investigation after concluding the matter was too large for his office.

An Alabama grand jury, which was majority black and led by a black foreman, issued a report saying they were convinced “a fair election is being denied the citizens of Perry County, both black and white.”

The grand jury report asked the Justice Department for “vigorous prosecutions” and a federal monitor for elections.

However, the Civil Rights Division declined to investigate, and so did Sessions.

“We expected the local investigation would have caused all campaigners to re-evaluate their activities and conform to the law,” Sessions wrote in the Judiciary Committee questionnaire.

In 1984, when nearly every candidate for Perry County public office was black, several black candidates told Johnson, the district attorney, that they thought the election was being stolen.

Johnson, Sessions wrote, told him “extremely large numbers of absentee ballots were being taken to a central headquarters where the ballots were being altered to ensure that they were being marked by candidates endorsed by Turner.”

Sessions said he didn’t want to be involved, but reluctantly asked an FBI special agent to observe the post office where the activity allegedly was occurring.

Sessions said the FBI saw Turner and his wife Evelyn drop off more than 300 ballots for mailing at the post office, and also saw Turner associate Spencer Hogue Jr. deposit another 170 ballots on the same night. These ballots made up the majority of the 729 absentee ballots cast in the county.

The FBI’s investigation determined that at least 75 of the 729 ballots had erasures or alterations, and 25 individuals said they hadn’t authorized changes that the Turners and Hogue allegedly made.

Sessions’ office charged the Turners and Hogue with 29 counts, including mail and election fraud. The defense argued that the practice was legal and voters gave permission to make changes. A jury acquitted all three on all charges.

Taking Down the Klan: Hays v. Alabama

Henry F. Hays was the son of Ku Klux Klan leader Bennie Jack Hays. In 1981, the younger Hays and an accomplice slit the throat of Michael Donald, a 19-year-old black man, and hanged his body from a tree.

Sessions said his office worked with state prosecutors to bring the case and to ensure a death sentence.

“Because the federal government did not have an effective death penalty, I insisted Hays be prosecuted by the local district attorney, Chris Galanos,” Sessions wrote.

After Hays’ conviction, in an unusual move, the state judge overrode the jury’s life sentence and sentenced Hays to death.

Later, while Sessions served as Alabama’s state attorney general, his office defended the verdict when it was appealed to the federal 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Donald’s family won a $7 million civil judgment against the Klan, which essentially bankrupted the organization in the state.

Sessions worked on the case with Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Figures. In 1986, Figures, who is black, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Sessions had said the Ku Klux Klan was “OK until I found out they smoked pot.”

This allegation was part of what sunk the Sessions’ nomination for the judgeship.

Sessions, before asking that his 1986 nomination be withdrawn, said the comment was meant as a joke to ridicule the Klan. He added, “I detest the Klan.”

Desegregation in Mobile County

In a case that began in 1963, parents filed a class action lawsuit against the Mobile County Commission, asserting that it continued to unconstitutionally segregate public schools. After numerous court rulings, the parties entered a consent decree.

“More than a decade after the district court approved the consent decree on behalf of the United States, and with the support of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, papers were filed with the court contesting the legally binding effect of the consent decree and alleging the school district had yet to fully integrate,” Sessions wrote.

The objections came after the county continued to allow several single-race schools.

As U.S. attorney, Sessions co-filed briefs in 1981, 1983, and 1985 with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division contending the school system was not fully integrated and challenging the validity of some of the consent decree.

The federal district court rejected part of the argument by Sessions and the agency, but still found the schools were not properly integrated.

Other Voting Rights Enforcement

In addition to cases Sessions highlighted in the Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Trump’s presidential transition team notes other cases.

In the case of the United States v. Marengo County Commission, a group of citizens in 1977 brought a class action lawsuit regarding the county’s at-large system of electing members to the county commission and board of education.

After Sessions became U.S. attorney in 1981, his office worked on setting up a redistricting plan. After the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1987 that the system diluted the impact of blacks’ votes, the county adopted a district plan.

In 1974, Alabama’s Hale County changed its district system to at-large races, which prompted federal litigation in 1976 that dragged over into Sessions’ time as U.S. attorney. Playing only a limited role, in October 1981, Sessions and the Civil Rights Division co-filed a response to the county’s district selection plan, and the court adopted the final alternative that December.

Another case, United States v. City of Demopolis, was similar in that Sessions worked with the Civil Rights Division to press a lawsuit against the city’s at-large system for electing members of the city council.

In March 1986, the case was settled after less than two months when the city agreed to enact racially fair, single-member districts. (For more from the author of “Trump’s Pick for Attorney General Prosecuted These Civil Rights Cases” please click HERE)

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Be Vigilant: These Trump Cabinet Picks Don’t Bode Well for Privacy

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It may be premature to sound the alarm on future actions that Trump may or may not take as president. His public statements and Cabinet picks, however, certainly do give hints of trends and attitudes that may turn into policy over the next four years. And from that perspective, those of us who worry about protecting the 4th Amendment against the overreach of government mass surveillance may be in for a bumpy ride.

To begin with, the president-elect himself said during his campaign that he would be “fine” with reestablishing bulk collection and storage of phone metadata. You may recall that mass collection of this data was specifically outlawed under the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015 after Edward Snowden revealed the extent to which the government was collecting — unconstitutionally — telephone metadata without a warrant.

Trump’s pick for National Security Advisor, retired general Mike Flynn, is hard to pin down on the specific issue of surveillance. His defense intelligence background and his unabashed support for other extralegal practices such as torture do not inspire confidence that he would be a principled defender of due process. Senator Sessions, R-Ala. (C, 78%) too, Trump’s pick for the nation’s chief law enforcement post, has a record of supporting the expansion of the government’s ability to spy on Americans en masse.

But most concerning so far is Trump’s pick of Mike Pompeo, R-Kan. (C, 76%) to head the CIA. Pompeo made pretty explicit what he thought of constitutional restrictions on government surveillance in an article he co-wrote early in 2016. The article stated that:

“Congress should pass a law re-establishing collection of all metadata, and combining it with publicly available financial and lifestyle information into a comprehensive, searchable database. Legal and bureaucratic impediments to surveillance should be removed.

While I like and respect Pompeo on many other issues, on due process and privacy he’s as wrongheaded as it’s possible to get. The right to not be subjected to government surveillance unless justified by a specific court order follows directly from the protection against undue search and seizure found in the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. That’s no mere “legal and bureaucratic impediment.”

As Rare’s Jack Hunter notes about Pompeo, he appears not to “understand that the purpose of the Constitution and our Bill of Rights isn’t to protect terrorists, but innocent civilians from rogue, unlimited government power.”

It’s worth noting that we don’t know who Trump will tap for the crucial roles of director of national intelligence or director of the National Security Agency. But early indications don’t point towards a good outcome there either.

Though the CIA and NSA are supposed to focus their intelligence gathering overseas, the never-ending War on Terror has provided them (and the FBI) with ample opportunity and motive to turn the defense surveillance apparatus upon U.S. citizens. In doing so, these agencies frequently ignore the 4th Amendment’s demands that such an invasion of privacy should at least be accompanied by a judge’s warrant.

This turn towards domestic surveillance isn’t necessarily malicious in intent. The intelligence community has a natural interest in constantly expanding their ability to spy on our information — it’s their job (though they do swear oaths to defend the Constitution as well). That’s why it’s crucial that someone be watching the watchmen to tell them “no” when they’ve overstepped their bounds.

We stand at a critical juncture in policy as it relates to digital surveillance. The rapid advance of technology leads us to create ever larger quantities of personal electronic data for the government to harvest, often in cooperation (sometimes indistinguishable from coercion) with the private sector. From access to bulk phone data, to collection of our actual communications and browsing habits, to the security of strong encryption, to the use of mobile data collection like license plate scanners and cell tower simulators, it is becoming increasingly possible for the government to know everything we do in real time.

That intimate level of knowledge can be used to protect us by identifying potential terrorists, but can just as easily be used against innocent citizens in the hands of less-than-benevolent stewards. This realization has led to the recent formation of a bi-partisan Fourth Amendment Caucus in Congress dedicated to providing legal boundaries against the expansion of government mass surveillance.

Judging by the early signs coming from the Trump administration, we will need this vanguard against the further erosion of our constitutional civil liberties. (For more from the author of “Be Vigilant: These Trump Cabinet Picks Don’t Bode Well for Privacy” please click HERE)

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Official: ‘Rather Ironclad’ Intel Shows Obama Behind UN Vote

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A spokesperson for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said Israel has “rather ironclad information” that US President Barack Obama played an active role in both formulating and pushing for the UN Security Council resolution lambasting settlement construction, which passed on Friday after Washington decided not to exercise its veto and abstained.

Speaking to Fox News on Sunday, David Keyes said Arab sources, among others, had informed Jerusalem of Obama’s alleged involvement in advancing the resolution.

“We have rather ironclad information from sources in both the Arab world and internationally that this was a deliberate push by the United States and in fact they helped create the resolution in the first place,” Keyes told the US media outlet.

The White House has adamantly denied “cooking up” the resolution, rejecting accusations by Netanyahu to that effect.

“We did not draft this resolution; we did not introduce this resolution. We made this decision when it came up for a vote,” said Obama’s deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes on Friday. But because of its opposition to settlement activity and concern for what it could mean for the region, the US “could not in good conscience veto,” he added. (Read more from “Official: ‘Rather Ironclad’ Intel Shows Obama Behind UN Vote” HERE)

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This Privately Run NYC Shelter Offers the Homeless Something Big Government Programs Can’t

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This Christmas, 60,000 homeless New Yorkers are feeling the sting of failed Big Government policies that were instated to help them.

New York City’s (Marxist) Mayor Bill de Blasio recently expanded his administration’s 2016 budget for homeless services to $1.6 billion, an historic high and a 60 percent increase from when he took office in 2014. An even more damning commentary on the mayor’s hopeless governance, is the source of de Blasio’s record budget.

“Funding from city funds seems to be flat,” Doug Turetsky, of the city’s Independent Budget Office, told The New York Times. “Any increase in the overall budget seems to be driven by state and federal aid.”

Improving the city’s homelessness problem was a key platform of de Blasio’s 2013 campaign, but as a new election year draws near, New York’s homeless population has risen by close to 20 percent — including nearly 24,000 in the city’s shelters.

“They keep creating new programs because they still believe that they will find a magic bullet,” Lilliam Barrios-Paoli, a former New York City deputy mayor who oversaw homelessness until she resigned last year, recently told The Wall Street Journal. “Sometimes it is easy to get caught up in the immediate crisis and to forget that you need to step back and create more permanent solutions.”

What sort of solution would it take to eliminate a problem as pervasive and complicated as homelessness? On whom or on which group should this responsibility fall? In other words, whose job is it to care for these individuals? The federal government? The city? Churches and nonprofits? Local residents?

James Winans, chief development officer at The Bowery Mission, a faith-based homeless shelter located on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, told Conservative Review that he believes all of these groups have an important and irreplaceable role to play in combatting homelessness.

“Homelessness is a crisis in our entire community, and so it takes the entire community to respond,” Winans said. “We actually feel like government, nonprofit organizations, churches, individuals all have a role to play. It actually takes all of us together, working together, to effect this problem. It’s not something any one sector of our society is going to solve on its own.”

The Bowery embodies the economic principle of subsidiarity, which holds that what can be accomplished by smaller bodies should not be usurped by larger, more complex institutions. The idea is that local organizations are best equipped to handle local issues, because they are more intimately tied to these issues than a larger, faceless government entity.

Aside from one city partnership serving 77 program participants at a time, the Bowery is privately funded. Since its founding in 1879, the shelter has relied on the generosity of individuals, businesses, and other local institutions to keep its doors open.

CDO James Winans, who first began serving in one of the Bowery’s men’s recovery programs 17 years ago, told CR that high-dollar government programs are often unsuccessful because they only focus on immediate, material needs like food and shelter. A complex problem like homelessness requires a personal, human response that addresses the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of these individuals.

“The city of New York is going to invest $1.6 billion this year in the problem of homelessness,” he said. “And we feel like their response is not holistic enough — that, in fact, it’s a community-based organization like the Bowery Mission that can actually offer a holistic response.”

According to Winans, when it comes to long-term recovery, community is key. The Bowery provides the same services as many shelters — meals, lodging, showers, clothing, and medical care — all in a “community of care.” And what sets this mission apart is its dedicated community of staff, volunteers, Christian church leaders, and donors that is truly invested in the personal wellbeing of its individuals.

“We want to invite people to change the direction of their life,” Winans said.

The Bowery’s residential recovery program was created with this major goal in mind. The one-year program offers counseling, the mission’s daily chapel services, job-training classes, and assistance in reconnecting with family, all while living in that community of care.

Winans noted that, for all of the stereotypes, for some homeless people, all it took was a health crisis, the loss of a job, or a dissolving marriage for them to find themselves on the street.

More than money, he said that the homeless people he meets are longing for something many people take for granted: a support system. In order to meet this crucial need, the Bowery staff relies on thousands of volunteers who are willing to invest their time in someone else’s future.

“People giving generously of their time creates a community where life transformation happens,” Winans said.

The Bowery, once referred to as New York’s “Skid Row,” is now a bustling cosmopolitan district with high-end stores, restaurants, and museums. And though some may assume that a homeless shelter would offer a deterrence to urban renewal, the Bowery Mission’s Winans has found that many of these businesses are eager to partner and share their prosperity with the less fortunate in New York City.

For example, this holiday season, a designer shoe store across the street from the mission is running a shoe drive, encouraging customers to donate their old pairs of shoes to the shelter. The store has even offered to repair badly worn shoes for free.

The Bowery staff has been able to witness the power of private charity and the spontaneous order that emerges in the absence of notoriously inefficient Big Government programs. And while gigantic bureaucracies with an endless flow of cash can’t help but continue getting in their own way, the effectiveness of the mission community approach speaks for itself. Subsidiarity works, and it can be applied in any community — big or small.

“Make no mistake about it: There is homelessness in every community,” Winans told CR. “Be it urban, rural, suburban communities, there are people experiencing life without a home. Life without a support system. Life without a support structure.”

James Winans understands that human problems require human solutions. Flourishing occurs when individuals acknowledge their duties as not merely compulsory taxpayers, but neighbors, leaders, mentors, caretakers, and friends.

The Christmas season is always among the busiest times of year for the Lower East Side Bowery. And while this is to be expected, Winans believes that these people are looking for more than just physical warmth:

“The holidays [are] a time when people are seeking community. They’re seeking to not be isolated and lonely. They’re seeking to be … connected with others”

It is this type of insight that has helped restore hope to so many people who have come to the Bowery Mission in a desperate state. It is something money simply can’t solve and simply can’t buy. (For more from the author of “This Privately Run NYC Shelter Offers the Homeless Something Big Government Programs Can’t” please click HERE)

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