Free Republic

RUSH: The biggest story of the day, to me, is the official loss of United States sovereignty. And by that I mean the United Nations Security Council has endorsed the United States and the other five nations involved in this Iran nuclear deal before the United States Congress has weighed in on it. The Obama administration purposely fast tracked this deal up to the UN Security Council and our ambassadorette up there, what's her name, Samantha Power. "UN Security Council unanimously endorses the landmark nuclear deal established between Iran and six world powers in a first step toward ending UN...

In testimony last week before the House committee in charge of State Department funding, US Ambassador to the UN Samantha Power acknowledged that the Obama administration intends to abandon the US’s 50 year policy of supporting Israel at the United Nations. After going through the tired motions of pledging support for Israel, “when it matters,” Power refused to rule out the possibility that the US would support anti-Israel resolutions in the UN Security Council to limit Israeli sovereignty and control to the lands within the 1949 armistice lines – lines that are indefensible. Such a move will be taken, she...

Lockheed Martin, a recent Washington Post article notes, is getting into renewable energy, nuclear fusion, “sustainability” and even fish farming projects, to augment its reduced defense profits. The company plans to forge new ties with Defense Department and other Obama initiatives, based on a shared belief in manmade climate change as a critical security and planetary threat. It is charging ahead where other defense contractors have failed, confident that its expertise, lobbying skills and “socially responsible” commitment to preventing climate chaos will land it plentiful contracts and subsidies. As with its polar counterparts, 90% of the titanic climate funding iceberg...

RUSH: From Anne Bayefsky at Fox News: "Guess who is the number one violator of women’s rights in the world today?" I posed the question right before the end of the previous hour, and the staff on the other side of the glass, they're all guessing, "Ah, it's gotta be Saudi Arabia. It's gotta be Iran. It's gotta be, it's gotta be, it's gotta be, it's gotta be some Muslim country for crying out loud." No, no, no. According to the UN, who is the number one violator of women's rights in the world today? The answer is -- dadelut...

Nearly 200 countries may sign a modest Kyoto II climate treaty, say December 2014 media reports from Lima, Peru. But will they agree to stop using coal to generate electricity? No. Curtail their economic growth? No. Cease emitting carbon dioxide? Maybe, but only a little, sometime in the future, when it is more convenient to do so, without any binding commitments. Then why would they sign a treaty?Primarily because they expect to get free energy technology transfers, and billions of dollars a year in climate “mitigation, adaptation and reparation” money from Western nations that they blame (and which blame themselves)...

In light of the Islamic terror attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo in France today, which was carried out in revenge for the publishing of satirical cartoons about Islam, here's a reminder about what President Obama said to the United Nations back in 2012: "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam."  As Conn details, in 2012 the White House condemned Charlie Hebdo for publishing cartoons depicting the Islamic prophet Mohammed. Obama's comments about "slandering the prophet of Islam" were a direct response to Charlie Hebdo's publishing decision. "We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons...

Regime continues to torture, kill citizens in record shattering numbersIran executed a record-shattering 411 citizens in the first half of 2014 and a total of 852 people in the last 15 months, including at least eight juveniles, according to a new United Nations report that will be introduced to the organization’s General Assembly Tuesday. In addition to a surge in state-sanctioned killings that a U.N. official referred to as “shocking,” Iran continues to torture imprisoned individuals using techniques such as amputation, electroshock, flogging, and burnings, according to the report, which details human rights in the Islamic Republic. Ahmed Shaheed, the...

Detroit officials are fuming after two visiting United Nations lawyers scolded the city for cutting off water to delinquent customers and described the shut-offs as a “human rights” violation.

IÂ’m not a big fan of international bureaucracies. Regular readers know that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development is the worst institution from my perspective, followed by the International Monetary Fund.Some folks ask why the United Nations isnÂ’t higher on the list?My answer is simple. The UN has a very statist orientation and it routinely advocates bad policy, but it is too incompetent to do much damage.The OECD and IMF, by contrast, have some capacity to undermine global growth by encouraging more statism.That being said, the UN occasionally does something that is so obnoxious that I canÂ’t resist commenting....

THERE IS a transfixing passage in the High Holy Day liturgy, recited on Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, which depicts God sitting in judgment of mankind, reviewing each person's deeds and deciding who will live and who will die.Ominously, the ancient prayer enumerates the awful ways a life can end. "Who by water and who by fire; who by sword and who by beast; who of hunger and who of thirst; who by earthquake and who by plague…"Then comes a shift. Something else is at stake: "Who will rest and who will...

In his address to the UN General Assembly last week, President Obama called the conflict in the Middle East “a fight no one is winning.” I think the evidence suggests he’s wrong. I think Iran is making significant gains.That should distress us because the Islamic Republic, no less than the Islamic State (also known as ISIS and ISIL), is committed to waging jihad. Iran’s 1979 revolution was led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini -- a Persian, Shi’a, Islamist version of Lenin. His intention: to spark a global uprising against the West.Khomeini championed social justice – of a sort. “If one permits...

resident Obama's speech at the United Nations last week was "an important turning point in American foreign policy -- and in his presidency." That's the verdict of Brookings Institution scholar and former Clinton White House aide William Galston, a Democrat who has not been an unqualified admirer of this Democratic president's foreign policy. Whether Obama's decision to launch air strikes against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and Khorasan terrorists is a turning point, it was at least a move in the direction of a tradition in American foreign policy that has been conspicuously lacking in his administration....

resident Obama will attend a United Nations climate summit in New York this week where he will try to gather support for an international agreement to curb emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), which he labels as carbon pollution. This could not be further from the truth. Talk with most any biologist or botanist and you will find an opposite perspective, one in which CO2 is the elixir of life. We all learned in primary school that atmospheric CO2 is the building block of plant life, the primary raw material that they utilize during the process of photosynthesis. As demonstrated in...

It must be exhausting for Barrack Obama. I sometimes feel worn down just reading about all the events going on in the world – I can’t even imagine how tiresome it must be, trying to avoid leadership on all those issues. Lucky for our Vacationer in Chief, he’s found a way… Apparently a healthy mix of golf and swimming is exactly what is needed to distract yourself from the chaos in the Middle East. And, to be fair, this genocidal chaos in Iraq is not completely the fault of a Nobel Laureate who plays the American President on TV. The...

The United Nations plays a supporting role in every war between Hamas and Israel. U.N. spokesmen routinely issue statements, accusations and denials about everyone's conduct, including their own (most recently they had to account for why they returned rockets, discovered in a U.N. school, to Hamas). Israel was denounced worldwide for an "attack" on a U.N. school said to be housing 3,000 civilians, but it was actually an attack on particular terrorists on the adjoining street. It's time to reconsider the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. First, what UNRWA isn't. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees provides humanitarian...

Israeli jets resumed airstrikes in the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas rocket fire hours after the United Nations Security Council ratified a draft statement early Monday calling for a cease-fire in the region. Israel's military said it struck two rocket launchers and a rocket manufacturing facility in central and northern Gaza after a rocket hit southern Israel. The rocket caused no damage or injuries.

As legend has it, Groucho Marx sent the Friars Club a telegram that read, "Please accept my resignation. I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." At least the Friars Club had standards. What to make of the United Nations? It has a single criterion for membership: existence. Admittedly, this is an unattainable standard for such fictional realms as Westeros, Erewhon, Kreplakistan and numerous locales from the TV series "MacGyver" (Gnubia, Kabulstan et al.). But if you're a nation-state that actually exists, you're a shoe-in, like Kate Upton trying to get into a...

A kidnapper-diplomat is an oxymoron—words with contradictory meanings, In this case, the terms suggest that an ambassador has operated outside the rules of diplomacy. Now tack on evidence that he is linked to an assassination of another envoy; then surely there are grounds for his exclusion from the United States. Iran nominated Hamid Aboutalebi to be Ambassador to the UN, but Washington refused to issue a visa. The Committee on Relations with the Host Country refrained from making a recommendation to the General Assembly, and the case remains on the Committee agenda. On April 18, 2014, President Barack Obama signed...

CS Lewis warned us about men without chests. That is technocrats who use what Winston Churchill called “the lights of perverted science” to play God without ethics, without morality, without responsibility. And now they have a website. It's called globalchange.gov. And they have a legal mandate too, not just to investigate so-called climate change, but to investigate “global change” in general. “The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP,)” says the website, “was established by Presidential Initiative in 1989 and mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 to ‘assist the Nation and the world to understand,...

Yesterday, Ted Cruz had his first authored bill get signed into law, but the freshman Senator from Texas probably didn’t too excited by the victory. Despite unanimous support in both chambers of Congress for the new law, President Barack Obama sounded less than enthusiastic about enforcing the bill he signed yesterday that would block the proposed Iranian envoy to the UN from receiving an entry visa to the US: It’s the oddest of legislative couples: President Obama and one of his biggest critics, Ted Cruz.Obama on Friday signed a Cruz-backed bill aimed at blocking Iran’s appointed ambassador to the United...