Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud U.S. airstrikes against ISIS and Khorasan Group targets in Syria. They also shake their heads as the Iraqi Army appears to be in no shape to serve as ground forces against ISIS. And they have fun with Hillary Clinton telling the Clinton Global Initiative that “re-imagining impact” requires leaders who will re-imagine.
Obama administration officials and liberal activists are promising bold action this week through the the United Nations General Assembly and the People’s Climate March, but a climate expert says the left is desperately trying to find momentum for a movement beset by conflicting science and increasing international skepticism.
Secretary of State John Kerry repeatedly lists the confrontation of climate change at the very top of America’s diplomatic agenda. While addressing foreign ministers of the largest economic powers, Kerry stressed the climate as a priority yet again.
“While we are confronting [Isis], and we are confronting terrorism and we are confronting Ebola, this also has an immediacy that people have come to understand,” said Kerry, as reported by the UK newspaper the Guardian. “There is a long list of important issues before all of us, but the grave threat that climate change poses warrants a prominent position on that list.”
There’s a good reason for Kerry to keep stressing climate change at the UN, even as crises posed by ISIS, Ebola and Ukraine dominate most foreign headlines. Major foreign powers are getting more skeptical of the science and the agenda. The latest devastating blow comes courtesy of the second-largest nation on earth.
“The prime minister of India ordered a private commission to look into it. They basically came out and said, ‘Look, even if your very narrow possibility of a half a degree temperature rise over 50-100 years is true (we don’t think it is), we’ve got greater priorities. We’ve got people starving to death. We’ve got people that are unemployed.,'” said Dr. Tim Ball, a former professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg.
“That shifted the moral high ground, which is very significant,” he said.
Another major setback for the Obama administration and other global warming activists is the diminished role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which was designated to collect the carbon taxes. Ball says that tax was supposed to be implemented at the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009 but plans were derailed by the leaked emails from the climate institute in East Anglia.
At the same time, nations with no interest in pushing the climate agenda are creating a rival to the IMF. The BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and many smaller nations) are even bracing for the eventual collection of carbon taxes by the IMF.
“They’ve already set up a loan fund to counter the IMF,” said Ball.
Over the weekend, the People’s Climate March took to the streets of New York City. By Monday, the demonstrations had turned violent, with several arrests being made. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is the face of the UN’s climate activism. Ball says the whole operation is a charade borne out of sheer desperation.
“They’re losing every which way on this issue. That’s why when these leaders such as India said, ‘We’re not going to New York. We’re not going to be part of your silly game,’ the only choice they had left was to go to star power and appeal to celebrities. This is why they appointed Leonardo DiCaprio an ambassador of peace,” said Ball.
“What has global warming got to do with peace? ISIS is about peace, but global warming isn’t,” said Ball, noting that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore both won Nobel Peace Prizes for issues that he sees as having no connection to the quest for world peace.
“This is all part of the politics of what’s going on with the marching and what’s going on in New York,” said Ball, author of “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”
Climate change activists disagree with Ball’s contention. They argue climate change is imperiling the world’s key resources and that leads to conflict in places like Syria.
Ball doesn’t buy it.
“I’d love to know what they’re specifying as the climate change that has caused the Syrian economy to suffer. If that’s true in Syria, why isn’t it true in other countries around there? These are just specious, alarmist arguments that are absolute nonsense,” said Ball.
In addition to emerging economies like India prioritizing economic growth and job creation about emissions standards, Ball says science continues to be a major hurdle for the global warming movement. He says more and more reports on temperatures and ice levels undermine the premise that carbon dioxide levels lead to a warmer planet.
“The evidence keeps coming forward, and at some point, the public is starting to realize. The arctic ice is precisely that. It was just five years ago that NASA and Al Gore were both saying there will be no summer ice in the arctic in 2013. It’s turned out to be absolutely wrong. In fact, there’s more ice than there was two years ago, and the same with Antarctica. So this evidence cumulatively, and every single bit of it, contradicts their hypothesis,” said Ball.
Reports in recent weeks suggest the Obama administration plans to team with like-minded governments and agree to new climate measures. Knowing such policies could never get approval from two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, the administration plans to attach the new policies to a 1992 treaty and claim such amendments don’t need Senate ratification.
Ball says he hopes Congress stops it anyway.
“The ultimate control of bureaucracy is in the funding. Hopefully, Congress will get the power and the sense to cut off the funding to the UN, cut off the funding to the EPA,” he said.
Ultimately, Ball also wants to see those he believes to be fostering climate hysteria held to account for being so wrong.
“These people at the IPCC should be held accountable. These people that are saying this is the problem and that’s the problem, they’re never held to account. That’s the real frustration with the public nowadays. These people just throw a bomb in a room and walk away,” said Ball.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review appreciate former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta distancing himself from President Obama on the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq and how to approach the civil war in Syria. They also discuss reports the Department of Homeland Security is highly dysfunctional with “abysmal” morale and massive staff turnover. And they react to Lois Lerner’s bizarre interview with Politico.
Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen Tom McInerney says the U.S. has no strategy yet in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is about to arm the wrong people in Syria and that our efforts are headed for disaster if President Obama calls the shots on when and where to bomb.
In congressional hearings this week, Pentagon and State Department officials tried to make the case for the Obama vision of a fight against ISIS, from building a coalition to arming Syrian rebels to insisting no American troops would be involved in ground combat. Lawmakers in both parties expressed skepticism that the strategy was clear or likely to be effective.
“Well, we don’t have a strategy. That’s why they’re not impressed. What is the strategy? We’ve flown 176 missions in thirty-some days and we have attacked a few piddling targets. We ought to be flying 200 sorties a day and hitting 200 targets a day. So. we don’t have a strategy,” said McInerney, who rose to U.S. Air Force Assistant Vice-Chief of Staff during his distinguished career.
“The president talks about degrading and destroying ISIS. Right now we’re irritating ISIS, but we certainly don’t have a campaign to degrade them and clearly don’t have a campaign to destroy them,” he said.
McInerney’s frustration with administration is only compounded by Thursday’s Wall Street Journal report suggesting Obama plans to be personally involved in plotting any air strikes against ISIS inside Syria.
“The U.S. military campaign against Islamist militants in Syria is being designed to allow President Barack Obama to exert a high degree of personal control, going so far as to require that the military obtain presidential sign-off for strikes in Syrian territory,” reported the Journal.
“I had to fly missions into Hanoi during the Vietnam War that had that same kind of oversight by Lyndon Johnson. It is doomed to failure. The president ought to give clear guidance of what he wants to do, not how to do it,” said McInerney.
However, the general does believe U.S. air power can do 90 percent of the work needed to eviscerate ISIS.
“If you look at the lines of communication that they have, they are clearly in a very vulnerable area. There’s not a tree from the Syrian border to Mosul. It’s not much different from the Iraqi border up to Raqqa (Syria), which is the headquarters for ISIS. This is ideal for our precision strike and our air dominance,” said McInerney, who says the U.S. needs to go all out in destroying our enemy.
“I’m not saying we don’t need ground forces, but I am saying that we have the intelligence. We have weapons that we can put in the right window and the left window and we need to change the rules of engagement and have ‘shock and awe’ if you will and go violently against them and not be overly concerned about the collateral damage,” he said.
McInerney is not holding his breath. He does not expect Obama to embrace a full-out assault on ISIS anytime soon.
“The president has a campaign that is a political campaign. He does not have a campaign that destroys ISIS. The generals are talking about a campaign to destroy ISIS. Until they get in sync, until this election is over. I don’t see them doing anything that is really satisfactory,” he said.
On Thursday night, the U.S. Senate approved a continuing resolution that includes funding for the arming and training of “moderate” Syrian rebels. The House of Representatives backed the plan on Wednesday.
McInerney says experts like retired U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely tell him that the U.S. is planning to arm the wrong rebels but that there are trustworthy factions trying to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
The general says previous efforts to arm the rebels have only made ISIS stronger.
“Remember, we ended up sending weapons from Benghazi to Turkey to Syria that ended up in ISIS’ hands. we helped create ISIS and we do not want to duplicate that again, i.e. supply weapons to radical Islamists,” said McInerney.
Even if we arm reputable Syrians, McInerney sees two major problems with the plan. First, the top priority of all rebels is to depose Assad, not to confront ISIS. Second, he says the 5,000 rebels we’re trying to arm and train are no match for an ISIS army that grows by the day.
“Five thousand is not enough to do this. They’re going against somewhere between 30,000 and I’ve heard a number as high as 50,000,” said McInerney. “So 5,000 Syrian fighters, that’s going to take six months to a year to arm, are not going to have an impact on any campaign.”
“We have got to be very careful who we align with in Syria, because there are too many pitfalls. We have seen we do not understand how that part of the world works very well,” he said.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review believe Scottish voters deciding to stay in the UK is ultimately good for U.S. national security. They also shake their heads as President Obama reportedly plans to personally approve bombing targets in Syria. And they review Vice President Biden’s week of gaffes.
California Rep. Tom McClintock is ripping President Obama over reports he will personally oversee the bombing of ISIS targets in Syria and believes the bipartisan vote to arm and train Syrian rebels for the fight is a “big mistake.”
The U.S. has been conducting air strikes against ISIS in Iraq for weeks. However. according to The Wall Street Journal, Obama is planning to be directly involved in plotting air strikes across the border in Syria.
“The U.S. military campaign against Islamist militants in Syria is being designed to allow President Barack Obama to exert a high degree of personal control, going so far as to require that the military obtain presidential sign-off for strikes in Syrian territory,” reported the Journal.
“Defense officials said the strikes in Syria are more likely to look like a targeted counter-terrorism campaign than a classic military campaign, in which a combatant commander picks targets within the parameters set by the commander in chief,” it stated.
Rep. McClintock says our own history proves this is a terrible idea, citing the actions of President Lyndon Johnson a half-century ago.
“That’s exactly what LBJ did in Vietnam and it was disastrous,” said McClintock, who believes that approach will work no better with Obama calling the shots.
“This president apparently feels qualified to make every judgment for the military commanders in the field. That’s not going to end well,” he said.
In contrast, McClintock says Winston Churchill provides the example of how a leader should act in times of war.
“(Churchill) was a brilliant mind. The guy invented the modern tank. He would always argue and throw up ideas to his military commanders. As opinionated and brilliant as he was, never once during World War II did he ever override a judgment of a commander in the field,” said McClintock.
Another key aspect of Obama’s plan to defeat ISIS is to arm and train moderate Syrian rebels. On Wednesday, the GOP-led House of Representatives voted 273-156 to approve the plan. The majority of the bipartisan support came from Republicans, but they didn’t get any help from McClintock.
“I voted no. I think that this is a big mistake. I think it runs a great risk of backfiring on us. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) that the administration plans to arm is a marriage of convenience among a lot of Islamist factions that have a long history of collaborating with the Islamic State,” said McClintock.
“In fact, the single purpose of the Free Syrian Army is not to destroy the Islamic State. It’s to destroy the Syrian government that is right now actively fighting against the Islamic State,” he said.
As a result, McClintock fears this plan will only end up putting American weapons in the hands of some of the world’s worst actors.
“The equipment we’re providing to the FSA could easily be turned against the Syrian government, which would weaken regional opposition to the Islamic State or it could end up being turned over to the Islamic State . We just watched that happen,” said McClintock, pointing to ISIS capturing massive amounts of weapons the U.S. gave to Iraqi security forces.
The congressman says history not only discourages presidents from micromanaging air strikes but from forging alliances with disreputable Muslim groups in the Middle East.
“We need to be clear that alliances among Islamist Middle East factions is at best precarious, can shift overnight, and quite often we end up discovering that our allies are our enemies,” said McClintock.
The Obama administration says no American troops will be used in a ground combat role but Secretary of State John Kerry also says no other nation has been asked or volunteered to provide those forces. McClintock says this approach risks disaster because there’s only one way to fight a war.
“The president is unwilling to commit ground troops. I believe the country is unwilling to commit ground troops. That’s probably wise right now. If you’re not prepared to back our troops with the full and complete resources of our country (and) back our troops with the full might and fury of the nation, you shouldn’t go in in the first place,” said McClintock.
The current reality in the region offers no good guys. The radical Sunnis in ISIS are currently fighting to topple the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria. They are also hated and opposed by Iran, the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism that is also in hot pursuit of nuclear weapons.
So which side poses the greater threat to the U.S.?
“At the moment, the Islamic State is a great threat for two reasons. Contrary to what the president told us, it is Islamic. It is fundamentally Islamic and it has all of the elements of a state. It’s that combination of factors that make it so dangerous. They have declared their intention very clearly to insert a fifth column into the United States and wage jihad against Americans on American soil,” said McClintock, who believes we’re rolling the dice on supposedly moderate rebels while much greater vulnerabilities are ignored.
“Here we are, sitting fat, dumb and happy with a wide open southern border, a barely enforced northern border and unenforced visa laws. If there is a terrorist attack on American soil through our porous southern border, I think this administration is going to have a lot of explaining to do,” he said.
McClintock says there is a right way to take the fight to ISIS. He listed four components, including a serious approach to border security.
“We have got to secure the border. That is where the Islamic State is directly threatening the United States to wage jihad on American soil,” he said.
When it comes to air strikes, McClintock applauds the campaign that’s already underway but believes it needs to be ramped up to send ISIS a clear message.
“I think it’s appropriate to order immediate and significant and focused retaliatory strikes against the Islamic State in response to specific acts that it commits against American interests. That’s basically what Ronald Reagan did in Libya and it worked,” said McClintock, who says Washington also needs to take serious action on two fiscal issues.
The world is rapidly becoming much more dangerous and unstable and our military budget’s got to be adjusted to meet that growing danger. And we’ve got to recognize that the precarious fiscal condition of our government has now become a matter of vital national security. Before you can provide for the common defense, you’ve got to be able to pay for it,” he said.
Finally, the congressman says the U.S. must foster a much closer relationship with the one partner in the region we can rely upon in all seasons.
“We do have one reliable, time-tested and true ally in the Middle East. It’s Israel. We should make sure they have all the equipment and supplies and assistance that they need and that they have the unqualified support of the United States government when they have to take action for their own security, as they recently did in Gaza,” said McClintock.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer two new polls showing Cory Gardner ahead in the key Colorado Senate race. They also cringe as both the Foley and Sotloff families accuse the Obama administration of treating them poorly when they were trying to free their loved ones before they were beheaded by ISIS. And they react to reports that Jon Huntsman may be mulling an independent bid for president in 2016.
The Obama administration appears to be building a “paper coalition” that seems willing to do little more than cheer the U.S. on in the quest to destroy the terrorist army known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), but a leading terrorism expert also says we should be willing to try arming moderate Syrian rebels in the effort if they can be identified.
President Obama has stated repeatedly that the U.S. will lead a “broad coalition” in the fight against ISIS, and the administration now says 40 nations have promised assistance of some kind. However, in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Secretary of State John Kerry says no nations have been asked to provide ground troops and no nations have volunteered for the job.
“It troubles me. It is a paper coalition to date. I’m not sure, other than rhetorical support, what we’re actually going to get. I actually thought money would be a help from places like Saudi Arabia. I think we should look into some financing for this effort,” said Foundation for the Defense of Democracies President Clifford May.
“We also know, most distressingly, that certain of the most important actors in that region, say Turkey, a NATO ally, is refusing to help,” he said.
Turkey, long a secular Islamic state, is growing increasingly radical., most recently with it’s rhetoric towards Israel in the battle against Hamas in Gaza. May says Turkey is refusing the U.S. to use our own air base on Turkish soil to launch any sort of air strikes against ISIS. The Turkish government is also refusing to take any action to stop illicit oil sales by ISIS.
“It’s a very shaky coalition at best. We don’t want (Syrian President Bashar) Assad in it. He is a client of Iran. We don’t want Iran in it, though Iran is fighting the Islamic State. This is why we need a complex strategy. This is why it’s tough. This is why the idea of the coalition is sort of fanciful at this moment,” said May.
President Obama is asking Congress to authorize spending for the arming and training of moderate Syrian rebels, such as the Free Syrian Army, in an effort to have local forces carry out the ground combat against ISIS. Critics assert that there may be no trustworthy elements of the moderate rebels and that rebels are more concerned with deposing Assad than fighting ISIS.
May says this is a very thorny aspect of the U.S. approach to ISIS.
“This is why this game has to be seen not as checkers but as chess and maybe three-dimensional chess. It is not as simple as saying the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In most cases in the Middle East, and certainly in this case, the enemy of my enemy remains our enemy,” said May.
“We need more than tactics, more than giving weapons. We need a strategy and that strategy should be to weaken or, to use Obama’s phrase, to degrade and ultimately destroy all our enemies in this region, all of the various rival jihadi forces . The last thing we would want, for example, would be to be fighting the Islamic State as the air force of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said.
Nonetheless, May believes if there are some rebels we can trust, it makes sense to have them carry a share of the load.
“I would hope that in these past three-and-a-half years (since the Syrian revolution began) the CIA has done a lot of vetting and knows who our real friends are. If they have some, sure, give them some weapons. Be careful which weapons and monitor carefully how they utilize them,” said May.
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review discuss the record of Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and why Republican voters should take a good look at him in 2016. They also discuss the mixed messaging from the Obama administration as Gen. Martin Dempsey admits ground troops could be needed in the fight against ISIS. And they react of Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez saying he is not in favor of a stand-alone bill to secure the border against the threat of terrorism unless other aspects of immigration reform are included.
A new government study shows that the vast majority of insurance companies do not itemize abortions on medical bills and charge for them separately, meaning taxpayer dollars are paying for abortions through the Affordable Care Act.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) study found that 17 of 18 insurers it studied did not itemize elective abortions on the medical bills for Americans enrolled in plans through the health care reforms, also known as Obamacare.
The report explicitly states it did not review whether federal subsidies were used to pay for the abortions, but pro-life activists say there’s no other conclusion to reach.
“Absolutely, taxpayers are funding abortions,” said former Colorado Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, who is now vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony List. The group is dedicated to electing pro-life women to public office.
“This report is very damning. It shows that when the president said there wouldn’t be abortion coverage in this, that taxpayers wouldn’t be funding it, that’s not true,” she said.
The Associated Press reports that in response to the GAO findings, the Department of Health and Human Services issued a statement saying it “acknowledges that additional clarification may be needed” on the law. Musgrave says clarity has been elusive on this part of the law from the very beginning.
“This is the administration that said, ‘We’re going to be the most transparent administration in history.’ Here we are now. People, whether they’re pro-life or pro-abortion, can’t figure out if abortion on demand is included in their coverage,” said Musgrave.
Taxpayer funding of abortion has been hotly debated ever since the Supreme Court’s 1973 decisions legalizing abortion. In the late 1970s, then-Illinois Rep. Henry Hyde successfully pushed for a change in federal law to ban taxpayer dollars from being used to pay for abortions. It soon became known simply as the Hyde Rule.
The law remained that way until the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. The resolution’s language convinced pro-life lawmakers on both sides of the aisle that it would legalize taxpayer-funded abortions. President Obama and other Democrats insisted that wasn’t the case. The final bill only passed the House after Obama promised to sign an executive order clarifying that the Hyde Rule was still in effect.
“At the last minute, this administration cut a deal with pro-life Democrats, who said they were pro-life but they voted for Obamacare that violates the Hyde Amendment. Supposedly, this little accounting gimmick was going to take care of that. Now this report from a non-partisan government watchdog says that taxpayers are funding abortion,” said Musgrave.
According to Musgrave, no one should be surprised the executive order was meaningless and the GAO report is another reminder that the law never should have been passed in the first place.
“Obamacare could have been stopped if pro-life legislators had held. Look at where we are now. My mom told me never to say I told you so, but here we are,” she said.
Musgrave says the GAO study is not the first sign of taxpayer-funded abortions resulting from Obamacare but is simply the latest evidence. She says administration officials have ducked the question for years.
“When then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius was testifying, there were members of Congress that asked for this information on transparency and questions about the surcharge. She said she would get that information to them. Evidently, the information is still not available,” said Musgrave
In addition, she says even pro-life Democrats know the executive order didn’t stop taxpayer-funded abortions.
“It took individuals like (former Michigan Rep.) Bart Stupak a little while to be surprised that the executive order was worthless. Now, even he acknowledges that. He was the leader of the so-called pro-life Democrats that could have stopped Obamacare,” said Musgrave.
While hindsight may be instructive, what options to pro-life activists and the large majority of Americans who opposes taxpayer-funded abortions have in trying to reverse this part of the new law?
“The only way to ensure that we have a remedy for this is the immediate passage of the No Taxpayer Funding of Abortion Act. Right now, it’s being blocked in the Senate by Harry Reid. You have to realize the Obama administration has had years to deal with this problem. They’ve refused to do it,” said Musgrave, who believes the right election results could move the bill at least one step closer to becoming law.
“After November, it is very likely that we will see a Senate that will be willing to do that and take up this legislation and then give it to the president. We’ll see if he’s going to stay true to what he said years ago,” she said.
First, she says, we need a Republican majority in the Senate.
“There are key races that will determine which party controls the United States Senate and whether legislation like the Unborn Child Pain Capable Act will be heard that are really at play in this,” said Musgrave.
Susan B. Anthony List is heavily targeting incumbent Democratic Senators Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Kay Hagan of North Carolina. Musgrave says regardless of their rhetoric, all of them consciously voted for taxpayer-funded abortions.
With Louisiana being the most pro-life state in the U.S. and Arkansas second, she says abortion in the context of Obamacare could be a major issue in those races. Musgrave also says the group is targeting Colorado Sen. Mark Udall for his Obamacare vote and for even being opposed to a partial birth abortion ban.
Despite the many challenges in policy and politics, Musgrave says she is very bullish that the pro-life cause will ultimately win this debate.
“It’s a great time to be pro-life. Science is on our side. People are starting to understand issues like the unborn child being capable of feeling pain. They don’t want their tax dollars going for abortion. They recoil at the thought of sex-selection abortion. So these senators in many of these states are out of touch,” said Musgrave.
