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October 2017

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Purporting to be a biopic of the unconventional Dr. William Moulton Marston, professor of psychology at Radcliffe, inventor of the lie detector, polygamous husband, afficionado of bondage and creator of Wonder Woman, this movie would seem to have all its bases loaded for box office success Add to this the photogenic quality of the cast – Luke Evans, Rebecca Hall and Bella Heathcote – stunners who don’t age a minute during a 20 year time span – and you can only scratch your head at how seriously this movie loses its mark.

The first problem is a confusing script that doesn’t clarify the time frame of the ongoing investigation of Professor Marston’s comic book and its suitability for young readers. It appears to be simultaneous with his professorial career but we find out later that it only began after he was fired from that position. The second is our incredulity at how the professor, his wife and their considerably younger lover, three very intelligent people, ever imagined that they would fit seamlessly into a conventional 40’s suburban family community. After their involvement with sado-masochistic bondage is discovered by a shocked neighbor, they become personae non grata and the threesome dissolves for “the good of the children” with two mothers and one father. How the children react to their parents’ open self-indulgence never makes it to the screen but we have witnessed the three adults in the family bed at a time when such behavior was not considered normal so presumably there was some fallout for the younger generation. It’s also never clear how an unemployed professor and a wife working as a secretary are supporting all of them prior to Wonder Woman’s success Knowing what we do about how little the creators of other comics earned, it’s still not clear what kept them going.

What begins as a look at a serious academic, his brilliant wife and an intuitive student whose mother was a leading suffragist and Margaret Sanger’s sister, intermittently turns into a Hollywood production with a pop vocal score reminiscent of a Bobby Darin movie. The bondage scenes are more embarrassing than erotic as is the attempt to justify Wonder Woman’s scanty costume , frequent entanglements with a rope and talented handcuffs as symbols of power for young American girls. The cast is compromised by the silliness of too much of this and alternatively, the ludicrous grandiosity of what Wonder Woman is meant to represent. We are left with a portrait of a charismatic man who finagled two women into a lifelong relationship that served him well and outlasted him for a long time after his death. But given the temper of today’s times, where is the authorial cynicism concerning the imbalance of power when a professor convinces his student to have sex with him and his wife? And where is the obvious question about how much his “philosophy” conveniently allowed the manipulation of a girl who had been raised by Catholic nuns and a wife reduced to sitting on a window-sill at her husband’s lectures?

The story of the professor is a fascinating one but given the fact that he was a psychologist, the film’s subject and audience merit at least a modicum of skepticism concerning his motivation and rationalization of submission to bondage. Though Wonder Woman eventually morphed into a fighter for truth and justice, she seems to have begun as a controlling man’s sexual fantasies come true.

Trump’s Iran speech finally sets facts of sham nuclear deal straight By Claudia Rosett,

President Trump has not yet pulled America out of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But he just took a vital step toward doing so, in a landmark speech on Friday that in plain language dismantled the dangerous fictions on which the deal was built.

Chief among these fictions is the notion that a nuclear program in the hands of Iran’s predatory, terror-sponsoring Islamist regime could ever be “exclusively peaceful.” This was a phrase repeated endlessly by President Obama’s diplomatic team during the negotiating of the Iran nuclear deal, and it is enshrined in the final text, as if saying could make it so.
Iran has already given the lie to this fantasy, most prominently by continuing to test ballistic missiles. These are delivery vehicles that are only likely to be of use if Iran employs its “exclusively peaceful” nuclear program as cover to acquire nuclear warheads.

Citing the case of Iran’s longtime partner in missile proliferation, North Korea, Trump warned that it is folly to downplay Iran’s ambitions: “As we have seen in North Korea, the longer we ignore a threat, the more dangerous that threat becomes.”

Ensuring that Washington will now pay attention, Trump announced in his speech that he will not recertify that Iran is in compliance with the agreement. Under the Corker-Cardin law, passed in 2015 and officially dubbed the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, this decertification kicks the problem to Congress, where lawmakers will have 60 days to come up with solutions.

It should help focus their minds that Trump stipulated: “In the event we are not able to reach a solution working with Congress and our allies, then the agreement will be terminated.” He noted that, as president, it is his prerogative to cancel America’s participation in this deal “at any time.”

Pulling America out of the deal would be the best course by far, and that is where any honest debate ought to end up. This signature foreign-policy agreement of President Obama, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, is a bargain so flawed that there is realistically no way to fix it. Haggled out with Iran by six world powers — Russia, China, France, Britain, Germany and the U.S. under Obama (in this instance leading from in front) — the JCPOA is thick with complexities that obscure the basic tradeoffs with which Obama enticed Iran to agree to this deal.

But there’s a simple bottom line. President Obama promised that on his watch Iran would not get nuclear weapons. Obama achieved this by cutting a deal that effectively paid off Iran upfront to delay a nuclear breakout until after he left office. He did this at the cost of greatly fortifying Iran’s predatory, Islamist regime, without ending its nuclear program. That is what Trump has inherited. As he accurately summed it up: “We got weak inspections in exchange for no more than a purely short-term and temporary delay in Iran’s path to nuclear weapons.”

The terms of this deal virtually ensure an Iranian nuclear breakout, on a scale and with a reach that will be even more dangerous when it comes. Without requiring any change in the nature of Iran’s terror-sponsoring regime, the deal dignified Tehran on the world stage, greatly eased global sanctions, allowed Iran access to more than $100 billion in frozen oil revenues, and topped that off with the related settlement from the U.S. of $1.7 billion, shipped secretly to Iran in cash.

Betsy McCaughey Trump strikes a blow for health-care freedom

Free at last! That’s the message for millions who don’t get health coverage at work and, until now, faced two dismal options: going without insurance or paying Obama­Care’s soaring premiums. On Thursday, President Trump announced changes that will allow consumers to choose coverage options costing half of what ObamaCare’s cheapest bronze plans cost.

Democrats are already accusing the president of kneecapping ObamaCare, but these changes will reduce the number of uninsured — something Democrats claim is their goal.

The Affordable Care Act requires everyone to buy the one-size-fits-all package. You have to pay for maternity care, even if you’re too old to give birth. You’re also on the hook for pediatric dental care, even if you’re childless. It’s like passing a law that the only car you can buy is a fully loaded, four-door sedan. No more hatchbacks or two-seaters.

Trump’s taking the opposite approach, allowing consumers choice. His new regulation will free people to again buy “short-term” health plans that exclude many costly services, such as inpatient drug rehab. These plans aren’t guaranteed to be renewable year to year; the upside is they cost much less.

Short-term plans have been around for years. But after ObamaCare premiums began soaring, these plans became very attractive to people who were ineligible for an ObamaCare subsidy and balked at paying full freight.

Hundreds of thousands of customers signed up for them — until the Obama administration slammed the door shut. A year ago, President Barack Obama slapped a 90-day limit on the plans, as a way to force people into ObamaCare no matter how unaffordable.

Trump is removing Obama’s 90-day limit, reopening that low-cost option. That’s good news for 8 million people currently getting whacked with an ObamaCare tax penalty for not having insurance, and another 11 million uninsured who avoided the penalty by pleading hardship. Count on many of them to buy coverage when they have an affordable option. That will reduce the number of uninsured.

Yet Democrats are ranting that Trump’s regulatory changes are sabotaging the Affordable Care Act. They warn that healthy people will abandon the ObamaCare exchanges to buy these lower-cost plans, destabilizing the system. It’s a wild overstatement.