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Writing in the WSJ, Simon Hier and Abraham Cooper discuss irrational political stances made by the World Council of Churches, and most specifically, the Presbyterian Church
…In 2009, on the first day of Chanukah (which Jews again celebrate this week), a group of Christian Palestinians issued the Kairos Palestine Document, which was immediately published on the World Council of Churches website. The document calls for a general boycott of Israel and argues that Christians’ faith requires them to side with the “oppressed,” meaning the Palestinians. It speaks of the evils of the Israeli “occupation,” yet is silent on any evils committed by Palestinians, including the Hamas terrorists who now govern the Gaza Strip.
The Kairos document also describes the Jewish connection to Israel only in terms of the Holocaust, denying 3,000 years of Jewish domicile. “Our presence in this land, as Christian and Muslim Palestinians, is not accidental but rather deeply rooted in the history and geography of this land,” it states. “The West sought to make amends for what Jews had endured in the countries of Europe, but it made amends on our account and in our land.”
…The Kairos document quickly won accolades from religious groups including from the Presbyterian Church (USA), which has 2.3 million American members and in 2004 was the first mainline American Protestant group to call for divestment from Israel.
…The Simon Wiesenthal Center will soon meet with the president of the World Council of Churches to urge an end to its campaign against Israel and the Jewish people. Like anti-Israel diplomatic and academic campaigns, such religious calls and writings won’t improve the life of a single Palestinian. But they will certainly embolden terrorists and anti-Semites, and cast carefully nurtured interfaith relations into darkness and disarray.
In the Washington Examiner, Diana Furchtgott-Roth reports that there is noise being made by Tea Partiers to keep Congressman Fred Upton (R-Mich) from being appointed chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
…More than 30,600 people have signed an online petition against Upton organized by FreedomWorks, chaired by former Republican House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
…One reason that Upton received so few votes is his voting record. It’s hard to make the case that he can be a strong chairman when his votes clearly label him as against smaller government and in favor of more regulation. He has consistently voted against tax cuts and in favor of more government spending and regulation.
Consider that in 2004, he was one of 11 Republicans who voted with Democrats to make tax cuts subject to a 60-vote standard in the Senate, so it’s harder to cut taxes. And in 2005, he voted against extending the Bush tax cuts on capital gains and dividends.
…In 2009, Upton voted to block millions of acres from new oil and gas leasing, logging, and mining, eliminating 1.2 million acres from leasing and exploration in Wyoming, and designating 2 million more acres as wilderness.
Later that year, Upton voted against cutting fiscal 2010 funding for the Environmental Protection Agency to 2008 levels. If he wanted to expand the scope of the EPA just last year, how can he be serious about reining the EPA in as chairman? …
Nile Gardiner, in the Telegraph Blogs, UK, posts on the infighting among Liberals.
While US conservatives are focusing on cutting the budget deficit, creating jobs, winning the War on Terror, and protecting the United States from dangerous treaties such as New START, America’s liberal elites are investing a great deal of energy fighting each other, and blaming the White House for, incredibly, not being Left-wing enough. In the wake of their crushing defeat in midterm elections, some on the Left have upped the stakes in the increasingly brutal liberal civil war, with open talk in some quarters of a challenge to Barack Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2012.
There have been some scathing attacks on the president from high-profile traditional supporters. Recently New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd wrote of “a spineless spiral” in reference to the Obama White House, while over at The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson spoke of an “uninspired and uninspiring president”. But it is today’s piece in The New York Times by Paul Krugman which is by far the most damning.
…Paul Krugman has set his sights on the White House, sharply condemning Barack Obama’s decision this week to freeze federal pay for two million government employees over two years, which will save taxpayers $5 billion, or “chump change” as Krugman puts it. The Princeton and LSE professor also accused Obama today of “gestures of appeasement to the GOP”. …
In Pajamas Media, Marlo Lewis tells us about the possible end of the ethanol racket.
The lame-duck Congress has a rare opportunity to avoid $25-30 billion in new deficit spending over the next five years, ease consumers’ pain at the pump, and scale back political manipulation of energy markets by literally doing nothing.
At the stroke of midnight on December 31 of this year, the 45¢ per gallon Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit (VEETC), commonly known as the blender’s credit, and the 54¢ per gallon tariff on imported ethanol, will expire.
A bipartisan group of 17 senators, led by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), say it’s time for these special-interest giveaways to go gently into the night. A broad coalition of environmental, taxpayer, hunger, free market, and food industry organizations are urging House and Senate leaders to let the VEETC meet its statutorily appointed fate.
An exciting prospect — for the first time ever, Congress may decide to put the general welfare of consumers and taxpayers ahead of the corporate welfare of the ethanol lobby. …
John Steele Gordon blogs about the unemployment numbers.
The recession officially ended 17 months ago. But the economy added only a net of 39,000 jobs last month, when 100,000 jobs a month is needed just to keep pace with population growth.
Indeed, the unemployment rate ticked up to 9.8 percent from 9.6 percent in October. That, counterintuitively, is probably a good sign, the result of more people, encouraged by their prospects, now actively looking for work. The number of people who are unemployed, have settled for a part-time job, or are discouraged and not currently looking for a job remained unchanged (at a dismal 17 million).
A particularly nasty surprise was the loss of 28,000 retail jobs, which most economists, responding to fairly good news about holiday sales, etc., expected to increase. But more and more of those sales are happening online, which is a much less labor-intensive means of selling goods. Online sales on the Monday after Thanksgiving were up a whopping 20 percent from last year.
This, of course, is just more evidence that the on-rolling digital revolution is causing unemployment to recover from recession much more slowly than the economy as a whole. After each of the four recessions since 1980, the number of months needed to bring unemployment back down to normal levels has been longer. …
Linda Chavez comments on extending unemployment benefits.
…It’s hard not to sound like Scrooge to suggest that extending benefits is a bad idea — but it is. Most economists agree that extending benefits can actually increase the time workers remain unemployed, which is reason enough to resist the pleas for yet another extension. Extending benefits also means higher UI taxes for employers. There have been steep increases in UI taxes over the past couple of years in many states, as state trust funds for benefits have been depleted. Employers who might want to hire new employees end up instead paying more for workers who’ve been let go. Once again, the Democrats demonstrate that they don’t have a clue about how to create jobs. But the politics of this one are probably too difficult for Republicans to resist.
Jennifer Rubin highlights some Republican responses to the November unemployment report.
…As you might imagine, congressional Republicans are not missing the chance to highlight the Democrats’ failure to hold down unemployment. Rep. Tom Price (Ga.) sends out a release:
“Nationwide, the unemployment rate has stayed at 9.4 percent or higher for 19 straight months,” said Chairman Price. “Yet instead of sensible policies to encourage private sector job creation, Democrats have pushed one job-killing idea after another. Just yesterday, Speaker Pelosi’s lame duck majority voted for higher taxes on small businesses all across the country. Well, higher taxes don’t hire Americans. Small businesses do.
“Washington has built up some daunting barriers to job creation in recent years. Breaking down those barriers will be Republicans’ number one goal next year.” …
Since the 1960′s, Republicans and Democrats have both been increasing government spending, notes David Boaz, in Reason.
…But it’s hard to find the differences on this chart of the upward march of government spending, handily provided by the Heritage Foundation…
To the naked eye, it looks like a pretty steady climb through the Johnson-Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, with a bit of acceleration under Bush II and then a sharp jump in 2008 and 2009. Heritage’s color-coding refers to Congress only, so you can’t see that the slight slowdown in the Clinton years occurred under divided government. And of course the TARP and other 2008 spending was proposed and forced through by the Republican White House, even though Congress was indeed Democratic at the time.
But the bottom line is: If we have two parties for a reason, because they believe in different things, why don’t we some real differences in the growth of federal spending?
Abe Greenwald is invoking the wrath of the gods of climatology.
..the talks began as follows:
Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, invoked the ancient jaguar goddess Ixchel in her opening statement to delegates gathered in Cancun, Mexico, noting that Ixchel was not only goddess of the moon, but also “the goddess of reason, creativity and weaving. May she inspire you — because today, you are gathered in Cancun to weave together the elements of a solid response to climate change, using both reason and creativity as your tools.”
She called for “a balanced outcome” which would marry financial and emissions commitments from industrialized countries aimed at combating climate change with “the understanding of fairness that will guide long-term mitigation efforts.”
“Excellencies, the goddess Ixchel would probably tell you that a tapestry is the result of the skilful interlacing of many threads,” said Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica and started her greetings in Spanish before switching to English. “I am convinced that 20 years from now, we will admire the policy tapestry that you have woven together and think back fondly to Cancun and the inspiration of Ixchel.”
And to think some people doubt global warming.