RUTHFULLY YOURS

Each for its own reasons, the world’s major powers have decided to accept Iran as a regional hegemon, I wrote March 4 in Asia Times, leaving Israel and the Sunni Arabs in isolated opposition. The global consensus on behalf of Iranian hegemony is now coming clearly into focus. Although the motivations of different players are highly diverse, there is a unifying factor driving the consensus: the Obama administration’s determination to achieve a strategic rapprochement with Tehran at any cost. America’s competitors are constrained to upgrade their relations with Iran in order to compete with Washington.

The Obama administration’s assessment of Iran’s intentions is to positive that Iranian official sources quote in their own propaganda. As Jeryl Bier observed at the Weekly Standard, the just-released Threat Assessment Report of the Director of National Intelligence makes no mention of Iran’s support for terrorism, in stark contrast to the explicit citation of Iranian terrorism in the three prior annual reports. The omission of Iran’s terrorist activities is noteworthy. What the report actually says is even more disturbing. It praises Iran with faint damn:

Despite Iran’s intentions to dampen sectarianism, build responsive partners, and deescalate tensions with Saudi Arabia, Iranian leaders—particularly within the security services—are pursuing policies with negative secondary consequences for regional stability and potentially for Iran. Iran’s actions to protect and empower Shia communities are fueling growing fears and sectarian responses.

The government paid out $124.7 billion in potentially bogus payments last year, the government’s chief watchdog said Monday, blaming a controversial tax credit for the poor as well as increased bad payments in Medicare and Medicaid.

One major problem is tracking when Americans die — the Social Security Administration admitted last week that its rolls are filled with names of more than 6 million folks who are listed as 112 years of age or older.

The Government Accountability Office said Social Security has trouble maintaining the Death Master File, and other agencies have difficulties in getting the information to update their own files and halt payments to those no longer alive to collect benefits.

“I am predisposed to believe that there is no great future for the Jews in Europe, because evidence to support this belief is accumulating so quickly. But I am also predisposed to think this because I am an American Jew—which is to say, a person who exists because his ancestors made a run for it when they could.”

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews. Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

“All comes from the Jew; all returns to the Jew.”

— Édouard Drumont (1844–1917), founder of the Anti-Semitic League of France

I. The Scourge of Our Time

The French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut, the son of Holocaust survivors, is an accomplished, even gifted, pessimist. To his disciples, he is a Jewish Zola, accusing France’s bien-pensant intellectual class of complicity in its own suicide. To his foes, he is a reactionary whose nostalgia for a fairy-tale French past is induced by an irrational fear of Muslims. Finkielkraut’s cast of mind is generally dark, but when we met in Paris in early January, two days after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, he was positively grim.

“My French identity is reinforced by the very large number of people who openly declare, often now with violence, their hostility to French values and culture,” he said. “I live in a strange place. There is so much guilt and so much worry.” We were seated at a table in his apartment, near the Luxembourg Gardens. I had come to discuss with him the precarious future of French Jewry, but, as the hunt for the Charlie Hebdo killers seemed to be reaching its conclusion, we had become fixated on the television.

Perhaps it was because Jodi Rudoren had the day off on Monday that Paul Krugman took up her usual cudgel and declared that “Israel does less to lift people out of poverty than any other advanced country – yes, even less than the U.S.” (Israel’s Gilded Cage, NYT, 3/16). Here are some facts to consider before you accept Mr. Krugman’s biased tirade, designed to take a final jab at Prime Minister Netanyahu right before the election. According to the UN”s Human Development Index, Israel ranks 19th among 187 world nations – just shy of the top 10% – for standard of living, with one of the highest life expectancies at birth. Israel provides compulsory health care that is competitive with the best of first world countries and is one of the leading innovators in the fields of medicine, bio-technology and scientific research. In the 67 years since its establishment as a state by the United Nations, Israel has absorbed and assimilated over 3 million immigrants from 90 different countries spanning the globe and has managed to achieve a literacy rate of 97%. Military service is mandatory for all immigrants of the appropriate age – another guarantee that they will learn the language and achieve fluency in it.

The Truth About the Cuban ‘Embargo’ — on The Glazov Gang​

Humberto Fontova​ exposes Obama’s rescue of a fascist tyranny.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/frontpagemag-com/the-truth-about-the-cuban-embargo-on-the-glazov-gang/

I wll be on vacation and unable to post daily Ruthfully Yours.

A lady struts and worries and sleepwalks and shakes her cell phone……

Out, damn’d E-mail! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our
power to account?—

Even Democrats and union workers support RTW legislation. Governor Scott Walker (R., Wis.) is about to give every woman in his state the right to choose . . . whether or not to join a union. He will sign legislation today that will make Wisconsin America’s 25th Right to Work (RTW) state. Of course, that right also will apply equally to men. Walker’s signature will extend to private-sector employees the same protections that he and Wisconsin’s legislature provided government workers through Act 10 in 2011: Union membership will be a choice rather than a condition of employment. Dues will be paid voluntarily, not vacuumed automatically from workers’ wages, even before they see their paychecks. This news will put Walker in the national limelight as this week dawns. Heading toward 2016, this new RTW law will help Walker burnish his conservative credentials even further.
He already can point to a long list of successes beyond wholesale labor reforms. Among them: cutting $2 billion in state taxes, converting a $3.6 billion deficit into a $517 million surplus, expanding school choice, requiring voter ID cards, and terminating taxpayer subsidies for Planned Parenthood. Walker accomplished these things not in a Republican stronghold like Arkansas or Texas, but in a state that last went Republican for president in 1984, when Ronald Reagan was on the ballot. The Badger State is the birthplace of government-worker unions and the late U.S. senator “Fighting Bob” La Follette, father of what liberals now call Progressivism. As Mike Flynn observed February 28 on Breitbart.com: “Politically, Walker isn’t bringing coals to Newcastle.” A Wisconsin RTW law would be like Democrats implementing a 25 percent state income-tax rate in Alabama.

The controversy isn’t just about Iran. It’s also about America’s role in the world. ‘Even if Israel has to stand alone, Israel will stand.” So said Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the conclusion of his bitterly debated speech to Congress about the Iranian threat. He then offered a qualifier: “But I know that Israel does not stand alone. I know that America stands with Israel.” Both lines elicited standing ovations from lawmakers, but only one was categorically true: The White House, quite obviously, did not stand with Netanyahu’s Israel. And it is the reality of this divide, not merely the substantive disagreements that fill it, that ultimately lies at the heart of this controversy.
America’s policy toward Iran in part reflects a broader goal of geopolitical distancing that repudiates — at the expense of its closest allies — the nation’s historical role as the world’s indispensable superpower. In its stead, the White House has embraced a quixotic strategy of multilateral diplomacy untethered to economic or military pressure — and rooted in the assumption that the projection of American power enflames radical regimes rather than deters them. This approach poses a problem for weaker allies — such as Israel — that have long relied upon the projection of American strength as a key plank of their national-security strategies. Suddenly, for them, Pax Americana seems rather distant. Suddenly, they feel very much alone. ***** Long before Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech kindled a partisan conflagration, an Israeli prime minister ascended the dais of the U.S. House of Representatives and offered a gentle warning about future disagreements.

We are halfway there: On Friday, the state assembly of Wisconsin voted to make the state the 25th to pass right-to-work legislation, and Governor Scott Walker is expected to sign the bill with some satisfaction. That’s 25 down, 25 to go. (Our optimism is not so unanchored as to consider the sorry case of the District of Columbia.) Right-to-work laws end the practice of union bosses’ enriching their organizations through a legal variety of extortion under which all workers are required to pay the equivalent of union dues, whether they wish to be represented by a particular union or do not.
The traditional position of Democrats, toward whose campaign coffers a great deal of that money is destined, is that this practice is necessary to ensure “fairness” — that workers enjoy the unions’ protection whether they want it or not. But the correct term for an arrangement like that isn’t “fairness” — it is “protection racket,” and Governor Walker’s signature will put an end to this particular brand of racketeering. A great deal of attention is being paid, and will be paid, to what this means for the presidential aspirations of Wisconsin’s governor, who confronted and trounced entrenched public-sector interests and then trounced them again when they tried to recall him.