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2016

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White House: more time needed for new Iran missile sanctions

By on January 3rd, 2016

The White House expects Iran to finish work needed to trigger implementation of an international nuclear deal in the coming weeks, but Washington needs more time to prepare sanctions over its ballistic missile program, a U.S. official said on Saturday.
The administration had additional diplomatic and technical work to complete before announcing any new sanctions related to the missile program, but the delay was not a result of pressure from Tehran, said deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes.

“We have additional work that needs to be done before we would announce additional designations, but this is not something that we would negotiate with the Iranian government,” Rhodes told reporters in Hawaii, where President Barack Obama is on vacation.

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Never Enough Abortions in California By Wesley J. Smith

By on January 2nd, 2016

California is such a pro-abortion state that:

1. It allows non-doctor nurse practitioners to terminate fetal life.

2. Its voters have twice refused to vote in a “parent notification” law, requiring that parents of underage girls be told–not approve, just notified–that their daughter had an abortion.

And now:

3. Crisis pregnancy centers–that help women choose to give birth by providing counseling and material support–will be required to post notices of where abortions can be obtained with phone numbers, as well as that they might be obtained for free.

A federal judge earlier ruled that such forced speech is peachy keen because the communication is simply “factual.” Now, a Court of Appeals is allowing the law to go into effect. From the San Francisco Chronicle story:

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Rahm Emanuel’s Cuban Vacation A mayor so bad he makes de Blasio look good By Matthew Continetti — January 2, 2016

By on January 2nd, 2016

No doubt you, too, spent the holidays relishing the humiliation of Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, the overrated and obnoxious Democratic party hack who, finally, is teetering on the brink of political oblivion. How the former ballet dancer and Sarah Lawrence alumnus parlayed ambition and drive and the ability to scream like a lunatic into high office and a fortune of more than $10 million is one of the remarkable political stories of our time. “Emanuel has succeeded in almost every professional endeavor he has undertaken,” Ryan Lizza wrote approvingly in 2009. Spoke too soon.

How bad is Rahm Emanuel? He makes Bill de Blasio look good. He was forced into an unprecedented runoff before winning a second term last spring. In early December his approval rating was 18 percent. Protesters, including Democratic powerbroker Al Sharpton, want him to resign for the city’s withholding of video in the case of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager killed by a police officer in 2014. Gang violence is pervasive. Municipal finances are a wreck.

Normally one might be inclined to sympathize, however faintly, with a city manager out of his depth and at the mercy of events. Not in this case. And I suspect my reluctance to commiserate is widely shared among the very large class of people in Chicago, in D.C., in Los Angeles, and in New York who have been at the receiving end of one of Emanuel’s tantrums, or had to put up with his B.S., or pretended to excuse his loutishness and misplaced self-confidence as a funny, even endearing, quirk of personality. Emanuel has been wise to limit his screaming of obscenities to “private” interactions with colleagues or employees, so that this revolting side of him is discussed typically in profiles, giving the reader the feeling of being an “insider” who understands what it means to say, “That’s just Rahm being Rahm.”

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What Israel Does Wrong Israel needs to make the case for its own survival. Here’s how. By Josh Gelernter See note please

By on January 2nd, 2016

I admire Josh Gelernter, but his prescription is shallow…when the world calls those who commit jihads against Israel “militants” and when headlines bruit senseless killings of civilians as Islamic jihad everywhere, but always omit those words when describing atrocities in Israel, and when they link barbaric attacks against Jews with “root causes and the occupation” and call every act of self defense by Israel “disproportionate”- it is hard to argue with words against vile anti-Antisemitism disguised as moral indignation…..rsk
Since last September, Israel has been suffering a wave of terrorist attacks that the press is calling the “Knife Intifada.” Palestinian terrorists have been murdering Israelis (and one teenage American tourist), mostly with knives, at a higher-than-normal rate — and the international consensus is that the murdered Israelis had it coming. Why? Because Israel is terrible at making its own case. Israel’s PR experts are as incompetent as its army is effective. Israel has allowed itself to become the bad guy in its daily struggle for survival.

Israel is losing the argument for its own existence.

Ezra Schwartz — the murdered American teenager — was shot to death while his car sat in traffic. He was from Massachusetts, and the New England Patriots wanted to memorialize him before a game, a week after every team in the NFL had memorialized the victims of the attacks in Paris. Evidently, the league’s front office had to approve the in memoriam statement, and someone decided the Patriots could say only that Ezra had been “gunned down nearly 5,500 miles from home, while studying abroad” — because saying he had been killed by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel would have been too controversial. It’s safe to say that if supporting Israel has become controversial among American football fans, something has gone very wrong.

The fact is, the case for Israel is simple. It could easily be made in a 90-second commercial, which Israel should be paying to air all over the civilized world.

The 90-second ad should start with a question: “Why do you hate Israel?”

“Because of the occupation of Palestinian Territories?”

“But in 2008,” it should say, “Israel offered Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas a deal in which a Palestinian State would be formed in the Gaza Strip and 93.7 percent of the West Bank. The missing 6.3 percent would be replaced by land swaps from Israel. Abbas turned the deal down, telling a reporter, ‘I did not agree. I rejected it out of hand.’

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Why ‘Draw Mohammed’? The Artist Explains By Andrew C. McCarthy —

By on January 2nd, 2016

‘Mohammed cartoons don’t inspire Islamic violence. Islamic violence inspires Mohammed cartoons.” That is what Bosch Fawstin tells me. And he knows whereof he speaks.

Fawstin is the award-winning cartoonist thrust into international notoriety in May when he won a “Draw Muhammad” contest in Garland, Texas — a contest that became the first terrorist target of the Islamic State on American soil.

The event was intended to be less a competition than a celebration of free-expression principles. Because those principles undergird Western civilization, they have become the prime target of Islamic supremacists. And when we talk about Islamic supremacists, we are not talking only about violent jihadists, such as the two ISIS-inspired terrorists who were killed in a firefight with police while attempting a mass murder of Fawstin and his fellow contestants.

There are also the “moderates” who specialize in exploiting the atmosphere of intimidation created by jihadist organizations: the Muslim Brotherhood’s international web of Islamic activist groups and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the 57-government bloc that claims to represent Muslim interests globally.

The methods of the “moderates” might differ from those of ISIS and al-Qaeda — and given the extensive promotion of jihadist violence by the Brotherhood and several OIC member states, we say “might” with tongue firmly in cheek. The “moderate” goal, however, is the same: the imposition of sharia, which is Islam’s societal framework and legal code. As Fawstin explains it: “Devout Muslims want their laws to be our laws. In essence, they want us to be de facto Muslims.”

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Hillary Wants You to Know She Binge-Drinks on the Job By Scott Ott

By on January 2nd, 2016

Hillary Clinton wants you to know that she’s just regular folk. That’s right, she’s like any other adult who, while representing her state and her country on government business, during a taxpayer-funded trip, engages in an alcoholic binge-drinking competition. Who hasn’t?

I’m not unearthing dirt to smear the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, who hopes to command the world’s most powerful military, tickle the nuclear trigger, and become the global face of these United States of America.

I’m merely passing along Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign video [see below], in which an off-camera woman asks if Madame Secretary has “ever won a drinking competition.”

She laughs, with that endearing husky tone so familiar to hard-drinking chain-smokers, as she brags of her vodka-shots showdown with fellow Sen. John McCain. Furthermore, Mrs. Clinton assures an American public concerned about a stagnant economy and the threat of terrorism that the McCain-Rodham throwdown was not the only time she chugged copious quantities of non-prescription ethanol depressants to see who could knock back the most before blacking out or puking.

It is, however, in her words, the “most famous” episode.

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Razeen Sally Capitalism’s Halting Progress in Asia

By on January 2nd, 2016

Razeen Sally is Associate Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore.

China’s “market Leninism” graphically illustrates the tension between a static political system and a fast-changing, globally integrated market economy. Will China’s party-state adapt, or will it stagnate and get stuck in the middle-income trap? The auguries are not good.
Without innovations, no entrepreneurs; without entrepreneurial achievement, no capitalist returns and no capitalist propulsion. The atmosphere of industrial revolutions—of “progress”—is the only one in which capitalism can survive. —Joseph Schumpeter, Business Cycles, 1939

My last Quadrant essay (November 2015) was on economic liberalism in Asia. Here I switch focus to capitalism in Asia. I say “capitalism” deliberately. What does it mean?

A capitalist economy is, of course, a market economy: the exchange of goods and services at freely forming prices in a system that unites production and consumption. This was what Adam Smith meant by a market economy; he also emphasised property rights and “natural liberty”, or what we now call economic freedom—the individual’s freedom to produce and consume, and to use his property rights, as he sees fit. But capitalism suggests more than “market economy”. I use it in the Schumpeterian sense. For hovering above this essay is Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great twentieth-century economists; he was also perhaps the greatest historian of economic thought of all time, and surely one of social science’s most colourful and dazzling performing artists.

Karl Marx wrote about “capital”—the stock of wealth around which production and class relations are structured. Werner Sombart, from the last generation of Germany’s Historical School of economics, was the first to refer to “capitalism”. But Schumpeter had a different vision of capitalism. Vision was one of his favourite words. Today the word is debased, for everyone has a “vision”, just as everyone has a “philosophy”. But Schumpeter meant something precise: a vision is a personal conception of how a whole system works, before filling in its compartments and its nuts and bolts. He laid out his vision of capitalism first in The Theory of Economic Development, and later, encompassingly, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.

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A Smorgasbord of Swedish Anti-Semitism by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

By on January 2nd, 2016

Sweden is a country where using the word “mass immigration” usually gets criticized just for sounding racist. Only anti-Semitism does not get criticized. In Sweden, all other forms of racism — even things that some say could be classified as racism — are criticized, and ruthlessly.

TV4, one of the most important Swedish media outlets, in 2015 described anti-Semitism as simply a “different opinion.”

“What is history for us is not the history of others. … When we have other students who have studied other history books, there is no point in discussing facts against facts.” — The administration of an adult-education school, in a reprimand to a teacher who said the Holocaust actually took place.

“The Jews are campaigning against me.” — Swedish Foreign Minister Margot Wallström.

There are fewer than 20,000 Jews in Sweden; more than 20,000 Syrians received asylum in 2014 alone. That is why so few politicians — who are eager to win the votes of immigrants — talk about Arab anti-Semitism.

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We Need Incentives for New Anticancer Drugs We need to address incentives that will lead to new anticancer drugs for rare cancers. The human stakes are about a million person years lost in the U.S. for lack of effective chemotherapy agents.

By on January 2nd, 2016

Marty Makary’s “One Pharm Fix: Limit the ‘Orphan Drug’ Incentives” (op-ed, Dec. 21) addresses shortcomings of the Orphan Drug Act that lead to increased costs to consumers and insurers. While better controls of financial oversight of orphan drugs might lead to lower medical costs and reduce patient expectations for some of the unsupported off-label claims, I would argue that the Orphan Drug Act does not provide enough incentive for the development of drugs to treat low- and mid-grade cancers such as primary brain gliomas and medulloblastoma tumors that I have treated for 43 years.

The drugs needed may take many preclinical years to develop and 12 years to do the clinical trial required by the FDA. In addition, one drug is likely to be insufficient for tumor control and two to three drugs targeted to specific pathways may be needed. Complicating this is the likelihood that one drug may provide limited antitumor efficacy and two to three drugs together may be needed to control tumor growth and future transformation to a more malignant glioblastoma. In this case, Orphan Drug 7-year exclusivity is an inadequate incentive as the drugs may easily take 15-17 years to develop and test and hundreds of millions of dollars in cost, leaving insufficient time to recover costs associated with this risky undertaking to develop chemotherapy for these rare tumors. This argument is also true for many other low- and mid-grade solid cancers.

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U.S. Lawmakers Blast Delay on Iran Sanctions Critics say White House U-turn on missile-test penalties hurts nuclear deal’s enforcement By Jay Solomon

By on January 2nd, 2016

WASHINGTON—Leading lawmakers, including supporters of President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, rapped the White House for delaying fresh sanctions on Tehran over its missile program, warning that the move would embolden it to further destabilize the Middle East.

The abrupt reversal by the administration came as Iranian President Hassan Rouhani publicly ordered his military to dramatically scale up the country’s missile program if the sanctions went ahead.

Senior U.S. officials have told lawmakers the sanctions were delayed because of “evolving diplomatic work” between the White House and the Iranian government.
The administration had notified Congress on Wednesday that it would impose new financial penalties on nearly a dozen companies and individuals for their alleged role in developing Iran’s ballistic missile program, but pulled back later that day.

Top U.S. lawmakers, including White House allies, said they believed failing to respond to Tehran’s two recent ballistic missile tests would diminish the West’s ability to enforce the nuclear agreement reached between global powers and Tehran in July.

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