Displaying posts published in

March 2016

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Iran Deal Has Already Put Tehran on the Path to Nuclear Weapons by Morton A. Klein and Daniel Mandel:

By on March 10th, 2016

Last week, the State Department coordinator on Iran, Stephen Mull, acknowledged that the Obama Administration has failed to monitor the transfer of Iranian uranium shipments to Russia. Mr. Mull was unable to tell the House Foreign Affairs Committee just exactly where 25,000 pounds of Iranian enriched uranium had gone.

This is only the latest development facilitating Iran’s march to nuclear weapons since the announcement of the Vienna nuclear deal between America, the West, and Iran last June. Such developments were predictable because the Vienna agreement was so comprehensively defective.

Why? Because President Obama discarded one requirement after another in order to obtain a deal.

Thus, the agreement permits Iran to retain all the components of its nuclear weapons program — uranium enrichment, thousands of centrifuges, its Arakplutonium facility, its Fordow underground nuclear facility — while shredding the international sanctions regime on Tehran, and infusing its economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in unfrozen assets and sanctions relief.

Unsurprisingly, since the agreement’s conclusion, Iran has announced a 32% increase in military spending. And that’s not all. With the deal’s massive financial windfall in the offing, Iran has significantly increased its financial support for the terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah. Previously, support for both had dropped due to pressure on the Iranian economy. Now, cash in suitcases are coming to Hamas’ military leadership in Gaza, fueling prospects of a renewed outbreak of war with Israel.

Iranian money has also enabled Hezbollah to obtain highly developed armaments previously beyond its means, and to dispatch thousands of its fighters to Syria to bolster the Assad regime in its battle with Sunni jihadists. As Syria analyst Avi Isacharoff notes, “Today, Iran is the main, and likely only, power attempting to build terror cells to fight Israel on the Syrian Golan Heights, in areas under Assad’s control.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

GEORGE SHULTZ IN ISRAEL- FEBRUARY,2016 BY DAVID HOROVITZ

By on March 10th, 2016

Visiting Israel at the wise and weathered age of 95, America’s 1980s secretary of state reaches into history to issue a call for decisive, clearheaded and credible leadership

In 1962, George Shultz, an ex-US Marine and Princeton- and MIT-educated economics high-flyer, was appointed dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he was a professor of industrial relations. Periodically, he’d hold a reception for the outstanding students who’d made the dean’s list. Every time, one of those outstanding students was a young Israeli named Joseph Levy.

Looking back over more than 50 years, Shultz — who would go on to serve in the Nixon administration as Labor and Treasury secretary, and most memorably as Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state — still remembers Joseph Levy. And still mourns him.

Speaking to The Times of Israel on a visit to Israel last week, Shultz, a gracious, wise and weathered 95, recalls that all the kids on those dean’s lists were smart. But “there was something special” about Joseph Levy. “If you’ve been in the education business, you’ve seen this in some students right away,” says Shultz. “I could see this man was going to be a great leader. He’d got all the special attributes.”

But Levy did not go on to that anticipated greatness. As Shultz tells it, “Before I even realized that the Six Day War was on, he was dead. He came back to Israel and was killed in action.”

Levy was one of the members of the Jerusalem Brigade who died battling the Jordanians around Government House in Armon Hanatziv, southern Jerusalem, on June 5, 1967. Says the secretary, “My introduction to Israel was through Joseph Levy.” Now Shultz breaks into staccato sentences, keeping his emotions checked. “High talent. Tremendous patriotism. Tough neighborhood.”

Shultz was making this current visit to Israel as honorary chair of the Israel Democracy Institute’s International Advisory Council for four days of meetings, plus a dinner addressed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and devoted to grappling with the challenges faced by Israel’s democracy. But the IDI also reconnected him with Joseph Levy. The star Israeli graduate student had a wife and a son when he was killed, and the IDI tracked them down.

“We had a nice meeting. And then we went to the battlefield where he was killed. And there is on the hill above the battlefield a beautiful big monument … commemorating what he did.”

Again, the staccato sentences: “The monument has a great view. That’s where the field of battle was. That’s where he was killed. That was a long time ago. It initiated me to Israel.”

We all marvel, understandably, at Shimon Peres’s longevity, his indefatigability, his facility to keep moving with the times, to find the aphorism for every nuanced political shift, at 92 years of age. Shultz, three years Peres’s senior, comes across more as a rock of unshifting fundamentals — looking out on a dangerous world and lamenting, most of all, the absence of clearheaded, decisive leadership.

We talked in his room at the King David Hotel, at the tail end of his visit to a country he plainly much admires and cares for. He sat calmly, almost immobile, for our conversation, spoke in carefully formulated sentences, cherry-picking from more than two centuries of American diplomacy to make his points. But at the heart of the Shultz’s recipe for guiding the world, unsurprisingly, stood Ronald Reagan, whom he served as chief US diplomat for most of the 1980s.

Want to marginalize evil, and empower good? Take a page or three, says Shultz, from the Ronald Reagan playbook.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

IT’S TIME FOR JOURNALISTS TO BE HONEST : MICHAEL CUTLER

By on March 10th, 2016

I am a graduate of Brooklyn College of the City University of New York with a degree in Communications Arts and Sciences. I considered several possible careers when I graduated, including journalism. Journalists are supposed to be “fact finders.”

As things turned out, I was given the opportunity to become a federal agent and found that this job would satisfy many of my professional goals and also bears similarity to the job of a journalist in that special agents are investigators and fact finders.

The difference between a federal agent and a journalist is that the goal for the journalist, who gathers facts and evidence, is to write a story to inform, educate and sometimes drive change. An agent also gathers facts and evidence, but the goal is possibly an indictment and an arrest warrant that leads to the conviction of a criminal and/or dismantles a criminal organization.

National security and public safety may hang in the balance where efforts of federal agents are concerned. Where journalists are concerned, the results may be no less significant. A democracy requires a well-informed electorate. Indeed, the Founding Fathers understood the extreme importance of journalism, and, consequently, the only profession specifically protected by the Bill of Rights is that of the journalists as duly noted in the First Amendment.

John Adams eloquently and irrefutably noted, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Optimizing nursing skills for better veteran care VA nurses should be authorized to practice to the full extent of their education By Alice Louise Kassens –

By on March 10th, 2016

The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) continues to face the challenge of trying to meet a growing number of increasingly complex demands with too little funding. For example, the department has seen record growth in veteran health care needs — in some large hospitals a 20 percent increase in patient needs — while facing a nearly $3 billion budget shortfall.

As an economist, I look at the most efficient way to use scarce resources. In my work on health care policy, I specifically look at health care in terms of costs, efficiencies and patient outcomes. To meet this challenge, the VA must find areas where it can increase efficiencies without lowering the quality of patient care. To put it another way, how can it better use the resources and tools that it already has? One area that stands out is how the VA is utilizing — or underutilizing, as the case may be — Advanced Practice Registered Nurses (APRN), such as certified nurse practitioners and nurse anesthetists.

APRNs are registered nurses educated at master’s or post-master’s levels and trained in specific practice areas. Although APRN education is standardized, their licensing standards are set state by state, and thus, their ability to practice to the full extent of their training varies by state. When a resource — human or otherwise — isn’t being used to its full value there is inefficiency in the system. We all know enough to recognize that inefficiencies increase costs, and in the case of the VA, the inefficiencies have also increased veterans’ wait times, among other things.

Over the last year, the VA has been conducting an exhaustive review of the rules and regulations that set forth the practice guidelines for all VA nurses. Included are proposed changes that would allow all APRNs to practice to the full extent of their education and training. Congress is also looking at this: Both H.R. 1247 and S. 2279 would permit APRNs to practice in VA facilities to the full extent of their education and training.

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

Abbas Blames Israel for Death of American in Jaffa – ignored Biden’s call to condemn the terrorist attack in which American Taylor Force was murdered. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

By on March 10th, 2016

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Israel for a two day visit on Tuesday, March 8. Shortly after Biden’s arrival in the region the day before, American graduate student Taylor Force was murdered by a Palestinian Arab terrorist in Jaffa, just blocks away from where Biden was meeting at the Peres Peace Center in Tel Aviv.

On Wednesday, Biden joined with Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu at a press conference in Jerusalem. Both politicians condemned the terrorist attacks that took place in Israel the day before, with a special emphasis on the brutal murder of Taylor Force, the Texas-born Vanderbilt business school student and U.S. Army vet and West Point graduate.

Biden called on Mahmoud Abbas and the rest of the Palestinian Arab leadership and the entire international community to denounce terrorist attacks against Israelis, including the one in which Force was murdered, his wife was badly injured, and 11 others were wounded, according to the Jerusalem Post.

“Let me say in no uncertain terms: The U.S. condemns these acts and condemns the failure to condemn these acts,” Biden said.

But when Biden met with Mahmoud Abbas, the acting head of the Palestinian Authority, later in the day, Abbas pointedly did not do what Biden had insisted he should have done: he did not condemn the murders that Biden had condemned only hours before.

Instead, Abas offered condolence over the death of the American — as if the man died of some cause having nothing to do with Abbas — and then slid into assigning blame for the outrage. Not surprisingly, the Arab leader’s blame finger pointed only at Israel.

Continue reading →