In the US We Call It a Stimulus

>Saudi King gives away billions to buy off angry subjects.

Off their nut

Christopher Booker laments the planet-saving madness exhibited by politicians.

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his "first major speech on climate change", airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 - which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria's reign trying to commit Winston Churchill's government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.

Ah well, politicians believe in a lot of improbable things, like the efficacy of holding Arab-Israeli peace talks.

Israeli neo-Nazis

Just what Israel needs.

MK Zevulun Orlev (NU-NRP) is expected to present the Knesset plenum with a bill calling to revoke the suspects' citizenship. MK Effi Eitam (NU-NRP) said he would present the plenum with a recommendation to amend the Law of Return.

According to Eitam, people who harbored a hatred of Jews and a hatred of Israel in their hearts find a safe haven in Israel by taking advantage of a loophole in the Law of Return.

In the past, NU-NRP members have tried to advance bills that would revoke parts of the Law of Return but have failed.

The Law of Return, which states that one only has to have one Jewish grandparent to immigrate as a Jew, has allowed thousands of non-halachicly Jewish descendants of Jews to immigrate to Israel with the same benefits as Jewish immigrants.

Cabinet members on Sunday viewed videos presented by police that showed the alleged gang members, faces covered, kicking and punching helpless citizens, as well as posing with IDF-issued weapons and displaying "heil Hitler"-style salutes.

Via Gabriel Malor.

Like a game of telephone

Emmanuel Sivan looks at how a story in The New Yorker by Seymour Hersh came into being. And it's not pretty.

Meant well? I don't think so

Claudia Rosett:

In visiting Syria this week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi no doubt meant well. She wants dialogue. As a woman, mother, and now the third-highest-ranking elected official in American politics, she has achieved a great deal in life by talking with people. On this trip she made a point of showing how easy it is to interact with Syrians, with an itinerary that included a visit to a souk in Damascus - where she was photographed holding out her hand while a cheerful vendor gave her some nuts.

What a crock! Pelosi is a grown woman, a veteran member of Congress who knows that foreign policy is the province of the President. As such, she knew exactly what her trip meant: It meant she was shoving a sharp stick into the President's eye. It meant that she was legitimizing a dictatorial, terror-supporting state to score cheap political points against George W. Bush.

This search for a reason to justify Pelosi's behavior reminds one of the mental gymnastics I've seen people perform to mitigate Jimmy Carter's freelance diplomacy. He's a good man, they say, pointing to his work with Habitat for Humanity and his conspicuous church going. As it happens, Carter's most recent book and his petulant behavior since GWB took office pretty much puts paid to that notion, but his motives don't matter. Carter is a former President who knows better. He has no right to go jetting off to foreign capitals on unauthorized diplomatic junkets. He knows that such behavior undermines the president, whoever that may be, and damages America's reputation abroad.

The same goes for Nancy Pelosi. She isn't some naif who just landed in Congress; she was elected in 1987. She knows--or should know--how the Syrians operate.

The Assad regime knows a thing or two about manipulating world opinion at America's expense. Eleven years ago, Bashar Assad's father made a point of humiliating us by making Bill Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, cool his heels for four hours before refusing to meet with him. There was widespread outrage about Christopher's servile kowtowing to Assad. But the GOP didn't send in its own diplomats to negotiate a ceasefire in Lebanon.

And that's how it should be.

Carter praises Pelosi's Syria trip

Of course, he's never met a dictator with whom he can't come to terms. But I was pleased to see this bit at the bottom of the article:

Carter said he recently wanted to visit Syria, in connection with a Palestinian election, but "for the only time in my life, as a former president, I was ordered by the White House not to go."

Heh. It's about time somebody put the brakes on his freelance dimplomacy.

'Political clowning in the shadow of a mushroom cloud'

Thomas Sowell on Nancy Pelosi's trip to Syria. And the Republicans on that trip ought to be ashamed of themselves.

The Arab knowledge gap

Joshua Muravchik visits Saudi Arabia.

Many of the Saudis whom I am meeting are sophisticated and friendly to America, albeit critical of current policies. But here, as elsewhere in the region, even smart people are capable of believing far-fetched things and often seem deficient in the skills of reality-testing.

On my first day, an accomplished editor, publisher, and newspaper columnist complained to me that the United States had just doubled aid to Israel. I had been without news sources for a couple of days in travel, but this seemed unlikely to me, as I tried to explain. My interlocutor insisted: he had followed the reports carefully. When I got access to the Internet, I found the story. The State Department had begun formal conversations with Israel about Israel’s request for an increase in military aid of 2 to 2.5 percent.

His feelings are hurt

Jimmy Carter goes to Brandeis.

"This is the first time that I've ever been called a liar and a bigot and an anti-Semite and a coward and a plagiarist." Carter paused and squinted at the audience. "This has hurt me."

At the same time, he acknowledged, with a flash of his trademark smile, that he did not simply stumble into the title of his new book. "I can see it would precipitate some harsh feelings. I chose that title knowing that it would be provocative."

Brandeis wasn't particularly impressed.

There he goes again

Jimmy Carter: Attacks upon Israeli civilians aren't terrorism.

Former President Jimmy Carter told the Arab news network Al- Jazeera that he does not consider Palestinian missile attacks on Israeli civilians -- a war crime and breach of human rights, according to the UN -- to be acts of terror.

In an interview to defend his book, Carter, apparently in an effort to not offend pro-Palestinian Muslim viewers of the program, stated that "I don't consider... I wasn't equating the Palestinian missiles with terrorism."

Carter went on to explain that other acts of Palestinian violence, like targeting civilians in bus bombings or children at schools, should not be committed because they make Palestinians look bad. Such acts, Carter explained, "create a rejection of the Palestinians among those who care about them. It turns the world away from sympathy and support for the Palestinian people."

Hoist by his own petard

Fourteen resign from Carter center over book.

Board member Steve] Berman, who emerged as the resignation campaign spokesman, answered one question before it was asked. "It's fair to say," he said in an interview, that "most" of the people he contacted about the book were Jewish, as were the signatories of the resignation letter. "But that wasn't a subject that came up in our discussion."

He and the others who signed Thursday's letter say Carter went too far. "The thing that really disenchanted all of us--it broke our hearts--was to see the president abandon his traditional position of mediator, promoter of peace and honest broker [to become] an advocate for one side of the conflict."

I hate to break it to you, Steve, but Carter abandoned "his traditional position of mediator, promoter of peace and honest broker" a long time ago. In fact, it could be argued that he's always been an advocate for one side of the conflict. Still, better late than never.

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