RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Ladies in White (‘Las damas en blanco”) are an amazing story. They would be big Hollywood favorites if only their target were some pro-U.S. right-wing dictator like Pinochet in Chile. These ladies march every Sunday calling for the release of their husbands, their sons, and other men from the political prisons.

This is how Berta Soler, one of their leaders, welcomed the story of the U.S. flag going up in Havana, as reported by Belen Marty:

“With or without the embassy, the Cuban government will continue to do whatever they want.” These words from Berta Soler, leader of the Ladies in White democratic opposition, have been echoed by dissidents across the island and abroad. As she and others have documented, the Cuban flag may now fly over the embassy in Washington, DC, but the regime has continued with heavy-handed arrests against peaceful human-rights activists.

The most compelling argument the Obama administration is offering to boost what it acknowledges is a compromise nuclear deal with Iran is this: it’s better than the alternatives. That sort of pragmatic point is appealing to members of Congress, particularly skeptical Democrats who are searching for ways to support their president and who are accustomed to voting for the lesser of evils in a realpolitik world where the options are often bad, worse, even worse, and worst of all.

But the question remains: How did we get ourselves into the situation where there are no good options?

A discussion reveals how Obama purposefully broke the historic US-Israel alliance.Below is an interview that Daniel Pipes conducted with Michael Oren at the Free Library of Philadelphia on June 24, 2015. We are posting the video and transcript below because it reveals how Obama purposefully broke the historic US-Israel alliance.

Daniel Pipes: I am delighted to be here with Michael Oren.

I’ll admit that when I began reading his book, Ally: My Journey Across the American-Israeli Divide, a very well-written account of his four-plus years as Israeli ambassador to the United States, I started at the beginning, as one tends to do with books, so I had no idea of the news bombshells that lay ahead. (Laughter)

The first inkling came to me when I read a column by John Podhoretz, who suggested that “the annals of diplomatic history” had never witnessed “anything quite like this astonishing account” that “makes news on almost every page.” Indeed, the next few days saw a furor over the book and its related three articles. “Borderline hysteria” is how one Israeli journalist, Ben Caspit, summarized the Obama administration’s response.

Recently, two articles gave me pause. The first by Alana Semuels, “How Chicago is Trying to Integrate its Suburbs” caught my attention because I spent many formative years in Glenview, the suburb highlighted in the article. Reading about the new low income housing there, a collaboration between the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA) and Regional Housing Initiative (RHI), I recalled a conversation with a long term resident and respected member of the community (prior to the shut-down of the naval air base and subsequent redevelopment), one in which she explained that Glenview, a Chicago suburb, got around a previous Section 8 requirement by building low income senior housing. She had no qualms about the community’s position in this matter. Many middle class communities felt this way about Section 8 moving into their neighborhoods. In a SPOA article called The Great Housing Experiment That Failed, the author writes:

Hillary Clinton returned to the scene of the original crime Saturday night, telling the surviving Democrats in Arkansas why they should love her like she and Bill love themselves.

Bubba returns to the old home place occasionally, even if Arkansas is not really home, and Hillary’s visits are rare. Old times there are not exactly forgotten, but seeing old friends is difficult because many old friends are gone with the wind.

The last time she was in Arkansas as a presidential candidate the Democrats owned everything. They held every statewide elected office and the Republicans didn’t bother to put up candidates in three of the four congressional districts. Both U.S. senators were Democrats. In the state House of Representatives, Democrats held 72 of the 100 seats, and 27 of the 35 state senators were Democrats. Now everything — everything — is reversed.

“How could we have done something so stupid,” asked University of Texas professor Alan J. Kuperman at the Charles Koch Institute’s (CKI) July 14 panel “What are the Lessons of Libya?” For answers to this question, over 100 audience members filled a conference hall in Washington, DC’s Mayflower Hotel for an insightful discussion over the American-led 2011 Libyan regime change.
For answers to this question, over 100 audience members filled a conference hall in Washington, DC’s Mayflower Hotel for an insightful discussion over the American-led 2011 Libyan regime change.

Kuperman examined what CKI vice president William Ruger called a “number of quite negative unintended consequences” from an intended humanitarian intervention. “Most people would agree now that this intervention was a disaster,” Kuperman assessed, “both for the Libyans and for our interests.” Libya’s dictator Muammar Ghaddafi most likely would have won a civil war in a few weeks when NATO intervened after a month’s fighting and 1,000 deaths. Instead, continuing conflict after NATO’s intervention has now claimed 10,000 lives in Libya.

This article appeared on The Federalist on January 22, 2015.Scott Lincicome is an international trade attorney, adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and Visiting Lecturer at Duke University.

Lost in the never-ending debate about the KeystoneXL pipeline is great news for anyone who opposes cronyism and supports free markets and lower prices for essential goods like food and energy. Sen. John McCain has offered an amendment to repeal the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, which requires, among other things, that all goods shipped between U.S. ports be transported by American-built, owned, flagged, and crewed vessels.

By restricting the supply of qualified interstate ships and crews, this protectionist 94-year-old law has dramatically inflated the cost of shipping goods, particularly essentials like food and energy, between U.S. ports—costs ultimately born by U.S. consumers. Thus, the Jones Act is a subsidy American businesses and families pay to the powerful, well-connected U.S. shipping industry and a few related unions. For this reason alone, the law should die, but it turns out that the Jones Act also harms the very industry it’s designed to protect and, in the process, U.S. national security.

People who have heard of the Jones Act (Merchant Marine Act of 1920) generally are aware that its stated purpose is to maintain a strong U.S. merchant marine industry. Drafters of the legislation hoped that the merchant fleet would remain healthy and robust if all shipments from one U.S. port to another were required to be carried on U.S.-built and U.S.-flagged vessels. Unfortunately, things haven’t worked out very well.

The protectionism of the Jones Act has given the United States the type of merchant marine that would be expected from a sector that has been cut off from market forces for close to a century. Instead of being a global powerhouse, the U.S. merchant fleet has become a minor player. In 1955 the 1,072 ships in the fleet accounted for 25 percent of global tonnage. Today the 191 vessels account for 2 percent of the world total. Those vessels primarily carry cargoes from one U.S. port to another, along with government-generated exports, such as military equipment and food aid.

We’ve seen the demolition of free speech on college campuses where concern for student sensitivity is so great that in addition to speech codes, we now have trigger warnings to give students time to prepare for the trauma of the words that are about to appear in their readings. (Think nigger in Huckleberry Finn) We’ve seen free speech die the death of politically correct sanctimony as one public figure after another has been forced to apologize for uttering a remark hurtful to some group under the liberal protectorate.

Now, with Donald Trump’s offensive comments about Mexican illegals and John McCain, we are seeing the voluntary, pre-emptive surrender of large companies and corporations such as Macy’s and various network and cable channels to media-generated pressure. What connection could Macy’s possibly have with Trump’s remarks? Does it even sell the hair-product that keeps his comb-forward from toppling into his eyes?

The deal lifts sanctions on two atomic scientists and a proliferator.

Debate over President Obama’s Iran deal has focused on such bold-face provisions as sanctions relief and inspections. But as we inspect the fine print, we are also learning more about Iran’s real nuclear priorities—along with the Administration’s willingness to accept them.

Start with Fereidoun Abbasi-Davani and Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, both Iranian nuclear scientists.

Mr. Abbasi was previously head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization after surviving an assassination attempt in Tehran. Mr. Abbasi, who is also a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, had been under U.N. sanctions for his suspected role in Iran’s “nuclear or ballistic missile activities.” In 2012 Mr. Abbasi admitted to lying about Iran’s nuclear program. “Sometimes we pretended to be weaker than we really were,” he told the Al-Hayat newspaper, “and sometimes we showed strength that was not really in our hands.”