RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shortly after former Tory MP Mark Reckless had defected to UKIP and triggered a by-election (special election) in his Rochester and Strood constituency, David Cameron vowed that the Conservatives would stop Reckless from getting “his fat arse back onto the green benches” of the House of Commons. Well, the Tories did what they could, but there was no bum’s rush for the fat arse. On November 20, Reckless regained his seat with a lead of roughly 7 percent over his Conservative rival, a result rather better than generally expected at the time he announced his defection. Rochester and Strood was not thought to be natural UKIP territory. In preparing Revolt on the Right, an indispensable guide to the rise of UKIP, British academics Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin ranked every constituency in Britain for its likely receptiveness to UKIP. Writing in the Financial Times after the vote, Goodwin noted that Rochester and Strood sat quite some way down on the list, in 271st place to be precise.

Yet Reckless won. British by-elections are notorious for generating freak results. Turnout is low, and electors feel freer to cast a protest vote than they do at a general election, when the stakes are viewed as far higher. Reckless might find it tough to hang on to the seat when the whole nation goes to the polls in May next year.

But UKIP is not going away. Barring schism or major scandal, the party will be a serious player at the general election. First-past-the-post is cruel to outsiders, and UKIP may not win many seats (five or so, if I had to guess) in the 650-strong House of Commons, but it will grab a large number of votes across England, if not in Britain’s Celtic periphery. Opinion polls have been all over the place, with some even showing UKIP running north of 20 percent, but the party appears to have a solid core of support in the mid teens. The traditional assumption, based on UKIP’s historical failure to repeat at home the success it’s had in EU elections, has been that most UKIP voters will return to one of the establishment parties in a general election. In the 2009 elections to the EU parliament, UKIP took 16.5 percent of the British vote. In the general election the next year, that shrank to a little over 3 percent, a sliver, but still enough to cost the Conservatives some 20 seats and, with that, any chance of a clean parliamentary majority.

— Henry I. Miller, a physician and molecular biologist, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology.

High-level officials of the United Nations are not known for their perspicacity, competence, or scientific acumen, but the head of the World Health Organization (WHO), Margaret Chan, is a particular embarrassment. With so much attention focused on the Ebola-virus outbreak in Africa, her exaggerations and petty scolding have made her a high-profile liability.

In a speech at a regional conference in Benin last month, she warned that the Ebola outbreak “is the most severe acute public-health emergency seen in modern times” and bashed pharmaceutical companies for not developing Ebola vaccines — products that could not possibly be profitable. “A profit-driven industry does not invest in products for markets that cannot pay,” she said — a truism if there ever was one. “WHO has been trying to make this issue visible for ages. Now people can see for themselves.”

Perhaps Dr. Chan is unaware of the U.N.’s own data on the infectious and other public-health scourges that afflict the developing world, Africa in particular.

Let’s consider first how Ebola stacks up against other public-health emergencies in developing countries. As the United Nations’ own data make clear, infectious diseases, many of them preventable and treatable, remain the scourge of poorer populations. In 2008, about 250 million cases of malaria caused almost a million deaths, mostly of children younger than five. In virtually all poor, malaria-endemic countries, there is inadequate access to antimalarial medicines (especially artemisinin-based combination therapy).

The incidence of malaria could be reduced dramatically by the judicious application of the mosquito-killing chemical DDT, but the U.N. and national regulators have curtailed its availability, owing to misguided notions about its toxicity (and no small measure of political correctness). Hundreds of millions suffer from other neglected tropical diseases, including lymphatic filariasis and cholera.

Although new HIV infections worldwide declined slightly during the past decade, 2.7 million people contracted the virus in 2008, and there were 2 million HIV/AIDS-related deaths. By the end of that year, more than 4 million people in low- and middle-income countries were receiving anti-retroviral therapy, but more than 5 million who were HIV-positive remained untreated. The number of new cases of tuberculosis worldwide is increasing, and the growing emergence of multi-drug-resistant strains of the bacteria is especially worrisome.

Vermont’s incumbent governor, Peter Shumlin, wants his state to become the first to launch a government takeover of its health-care system. But the results of last month’s election could give him pause. He was unable to secure a majority of votes this November — after winning 58 percent of the vote two years ago. Now the state legislature will determine whether to send Shumlin back for another term.

What happened in between? Vermont botched the launch of its state-run insurance exchange. By 2017, the exchange is supposed to serve as the “infrastructure” for a single-payer system, with the state picking up the tab for just about every resident’s health care. That exchange hasn’t even gotten off the ground, and state officials have no idea how to raise the $2 billion a year they’ll need to operate a single-payer system.

Vermont’s struggle to implement single-payer health care shouldn’t be a surprise. Such systems are failing to deliver affordable, quality care all over the world. And ordinary citizens are starting to notice.

Shumlin’s administration announced last month that it would shut down the state’s Green Mountain Care exchange for repairs that could take weeks. One state senator said its rollout “has been pretty much a disaster” and “has shaken a lot of people’s faith in the ability of state government to put together something that would work.”

Even if the state could figure out how to operate a single-payer system, it wouldn’t be able to afford it. A 2013 University of Massachusetts study commissioned by the state concluded that Vermont would have to come up with $1.6 billion in new revenue every year to pay for the plan. Now the state estimates that single payer will take $1.7 billion to $2.2 billion in additional annual revenue.

Vermont collects $2.7 billion a year in taxes. How does it expect to boost its tax take by 80 percent to pay for single payer?

Vermonters should be thrilled that single payer has false-started in their state. For evidence that single payer doesn’t work, look no further than the United Kingdom and Canada.

The then-impending Republican takeover of the Senate “is excellent news for Democrats,” Bill Scher of the Campaign for America’s Future opined in a Politico piece two months ago. His prediction—with which we had some fun at the time—was that the new majority, combined with the prospect of a wide-open race for the presidential nomination, would heighten Republican divisions: “Instead of another two years of the same old gridlock that has turned voters off of both parties, Democrats will get to kick back with a large tub of buttery popcorn and watch the Republican soap opera hit peak suds.”

The New Congress won’t take office until January, so Scher’s forecast has yet to be tested. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank holds out hope that Scher will be proved correct: “There will be many . . . tensions within the new GOP majority—and Democrats should be exploiting those.” But for now, he observes, it is the Democrats who are “having an intraparty food fight.”

Or as The Wall Street Journal puts it in a news story today: “Long-muted tensions within the Democratic Party over policy and strategy are beginning to surface publicly, a sign of leaders looking beyond President Barack Obama ’s tenure in the aftermath of the party’s midterm election defeat.”

One point of disagreement arose Tuesday, when “the White House surprised Democratic leaders in the Senate by threatening to veto a tax package negotiated by both parties. The White House said the deal would help’“well-connected corporations while neglecting working families.’ ’’

Another “flashpoint,” according to the Journal, is immigration: “Some House Democrats believe it was a mistake for Mr. Obama to wait until after the midterm elections to take executive action limiting deportations, a delay that the president agreed to at the behest of Senate Democratic leaders trying to protect vulnerable incumbents.” As we noted in September, administration officials touted the delay as a way of deceiving red-state voters into re-electing Democratic senators. It didn’t work: Four red-state Democrats were defeated on Election Day; the fifth, Louisiana’s Mary Landrieu, isn’t expected to make it past a Dec. 6 runoff.

The New York Times has now pronounced on the “meaning of the Ferguson riots.” A more perfect example of what the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviancy down” would be hard to find. The Times’ editorial encapsulates the elite narrative around the fatal police shooting of unarmed Michael Brown last August, and the mayhem that twice followed that shooting. Unfortunately, the editorial is also a harbinger of the poisonous anti-police ideology that will drive law-enforcement policy under the remainder of the Obama administration.

The Times cannot bring itself to say one word of condemnation against the savages who self-indulgently destroyed the livelihoods of struggling Ferguson, Mo., entrepreneurs and their employees last week. The real culprit behind the riots, in the Times’ view, is not the actual arsonists and looters but county prosecutor Robert McCulloch. McCulloch presented the shooting of 18-year-old Brown by Officer Darren Wilson to a St. Louis county grand jury; after hearing three months of testimony, the grand jury decided last Monday not to bring criminal charges against Wilson. The Times trots out the by now de rigueur and entirely ad hoc list of McCulloch’s alleged improprieties, turning the virtues of this grand jury — such as its thoroughness — into flaws. If the jurors had indicted Wilson, none of the riot apologists would have complained about the length of the process or the range of evidence presented.

To be sure, most grand-jury proceedings are pro forma and brief, because the evidence of the defendant’s guilt is so overwhelming, as Andrew McCarthy has explained. Here, however, McCulloch faced a dilemma. His own review of the case would have shown the unlikelihood of a conviction. Physical evidence discredited the initial inflammatory claims about Wilson attacking Brown and shooting him in the back, and Missouri law accords wide deference to police officers who use deadly force against a dangerous suspect. Not initiating any formal criminal inquiry against Wilson was politically impossible, however, especially since the eyewitness accounts that corroborated Wilson’s version of events would have remained unknown. (Not surprisingly, the six black witnesses who supported Wilson’s story did not go to the press or social media, unlike the witnesses who spread the early lies about Wilson’s behavior.) So McCulloch used the grand-jury proceeding as a way to get the entire dossier about the case into the public domain by bringing a broad range of evidence before the grand jury and then releasing it to the public after the proceeding ended — a legal arrangement.

All politics is local, and Saturday’s midterm elections in Taiwan mostly turned on local issues such as food safety, stagnant wages, education and infrastructure. But one factor behind the landslide victory of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party is rising fear that Taiwan’s de facto independence is threatened by the island’s increasing economic ties to China. As Taiwan moves toward presidential elections in January 2016, expect tensions to rise across the Taiwan Strait.

Saturday’s results give the DPP control of some two-thirds of Taiwan’s 22 cities and counties, including four of its six special municipalities. Taipei’s mayor-elect is a DPP-backed independent, so for the first time in 16 years the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), won’t govern the island’s capital and largest city. Taiwan’s last three presidents previously served as mayor of Taipei.

The KMT was quick to admit defeat. “I have heard [voters’] voices and I will not evade my responsibility to start reform,” said President Ma Ying-jeou, who may resign as KMT chairman at a party meeting Wednesday.

Though the scale of its losses is a surprise, the KMT has recently earned a reputation for bungling. A series of scandals over tainted food, including hundreds of tons contaminated with “gutter oil” made from waste and animal feed, led Mr. Ma’s health minister to resign in October. The economic affairs minister resigned in August after gas explosions killed 32 people in the southern city of Kaohsiung. The education minister quit amid a scandal over research fraud.

This year’s major political event, however, was the Sunflower Movement, which culminated in a 24-day student-led occupation of the legislature to block ratification of a trade deal signed with China. The cross-strait agreement, covering trade in services, would have been the 22nd enacted since 2008, when Mr. Ma initiated economic detente with China. Freer trade and travel have helped Taiwan’s economy, but in ways that could make the island dependent on Beijing. Cross-strait trade has nearly doubled since 2008, with some 40% of Taiwanese exports and 80% of outbound investment now going to China.

The Gangs of New York A union scam helps explain why Gotham hotels cost so much.

Tourists converging on New York City for the holidays are often stunned by how expensive the hotels are. Much of that is real estate and seasonal demand, but what may be less apparent to travellers is a shakedown engineered by Big Labor and assorted corporate cronies to force non-union accommodations to organize or leave Gotham.

In 2001 the major city hotels bought labor peace through a multi-employer collective-bargaining agreement known as the Industry Wide Agreement, or IWA. The New York Hotel Trades Council (AFL-CIO) and the Hotel Association of New York City, the trade group for the five boroughs, agreed that association members would be neutral when the union tries to organize a property and abide by “card check.” That’s the gambit that denies workers their right to secret ballots in labor elections.

Businesses tend to get the unions they deserve, and three of every four New York hotel employees now belong to a workplace with contracts governed by the IWA. More notable is that the agreement contains an unusual “accretion clause” that foists the IWA’s terms on every hotel that is directly or indirectly owned or managed by any party to the IWA.

Hotel owners in New York often engage third-party managers to run the business or as contractors to provide discrete services such as guest amenities or back-office due diligence. Under the accretion clause, a non-union hotel that hires one of these agents becomes a “joint employer” that must obey the IWA even if its proprietors never consented to the agreement, bargained with the AFL-CIO or joined the Hotel Association.

Recent violence in Israel, and the subsequent coverage in mainstream media, on the web and especially in a British medical journal, triggered a 5-day educational physicians’ medical mission to Israel in late October and early November. This grassroots trip was planned in conjunction with the Israel Medical Association, with additional programing support from Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting In America (CAMERA), Media-Central, NGO-Monitor, Magen David Adom, The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), and the IDF Spokespersons Office through the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories.

The goal was to enable physicians to see directly Israel’s medical actions, beyond the filter of biased news media and international NGO’s. Eleven physicians signed up, most from the USA, but also from Canada and as far away as Sydney, Australia.

Particularly troubling to physicians has been the abuse of civilian populations on both sides by Hamas and other extremist groups. During the summer’s war, Israelis were direct Hamas targets and Gazans were human shields, mutually linked in danger by Palestinian Arab political leaders who had squandered vast amounts of humanitarian aid on weapons, attack tunnels, fortifications and personal aggrandizement.

Palestinian authority figures, including PA president Mahmoud Abbas, now in the ninth year of a four year term, have encouraged violence by exaggerating perceived threats to Islamic holy sites. Those sites, which have been a focus of Palestinian incitement, were holy to Jews centuries before the birth of Islam.

Physicians, who are used to dealing with pain, suffering and death, have been particularly bothered by the use of hospitals as military command posts and rocket-launching sites as occurred in Gaza. This conflict is the embodiment of “needless suffering”, not unlike, for example, cigarette induced lung cancer. Smokers need to quit their cigarettes. Arabs need to cease the hatred.

Perhaps worst of all for physicians, dedicated to evidence based practice, has been the politicization of medical science, by NGOs, academic organizations, and even medical journals, not to convey knowledge or help the sick, but as a form of warfare.

No gratitude expected — but scorn, contempt, derision and backstabbing, this I did not expect.

Bigotry has no bounds. We hear that rioters in Ferguson, USA have found the enemy and it is…the Jews!

Yes the Jews.

Name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.
Protesters have been marching with signs equating the “suffering” of blacks with the “suffering” of “Palestinians.”

How Israel got into the picture, six thousand miles away, nobody knows. Reggie Bush ought to know. The football star was up there with the rest of them denouncing the police and while he was at it, denouncing Israel. Maybe someone ought to inform this millionaire athlete that, going back to the 1960s, Jews were front and center for the Civil Rights movement.

They marched with Martin Luther King Jr. The first name (among many) that comes to mind is Rabbi Abraham Heschel.

Many risked their lives and some even lost their lives for the sake of equality. Two (among many) come to mind. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner.

These Jewish Civil Rights activists were murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi for their participation in the Freedom Summer of 1964.

This is the thanks for all that sacrifice– and please, Reggie, name your “Palestinians” who risked their lives for Civil Rights.

Likewise, I also marched so that Blacks can share with Whites equality and harmony. I expected no gratitude. I did it in the name of justice. I would do it again.

Charley J. Levine, who passed away on November 16, has been eulogized for his work in pro-Israel public relations and information campaigns. But he also played a pioneering and little-known role in researching America’s response to the Holocaust.

Levine was a communications major at the University of Texas-Austin in the early 1970s. He also had a keen interest in Jewish history. He combined these two areas by choosing to write his master’s thesis on “Propaganda Techniques of the Bergson Group, 1939-1948.”

During the Holocaust years, the Bergson Group’s rallies, newspaper ads, and Capitol Hill lobbying played a major role in forcing the Roosevelt administration to take steps, however belated, to rescue some Jewish refugees. Yet when it came time to write the history of the period, Bergson was left out in the cold.

Part of the reason was that while mainstream Jewish leaders were writing autobiographies giving their version of events, the Bergson activists made no real effort to make their case. Political bias was also a factor. Bergson’s roots were in the Jabotinsky movement, and those who saw him as a political rival were not anxious to give him credit for his Holocaust protests.

The Bergson Group received only passing mention in the first books about America’s response to the Holocaust, such as Arthur Morse’s While Six Million Died (1968) and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970). It was not mentioned at all in early Holocaust-related museum exhibits and films.

Charley Levine helped rescue the Bergson activists from the dustbin of history. To complete what would be one of the first master’s theses ever written on the topic, the industrious graduate student scoured old microfilms, visited archives in various cities, and conducted interviews with Bergson veterans and others who were involved in the events of the 1940s.