RUTHFULLY YOURS

The United States is on a steady skid downward. The latest milestone in America’s decline is especially demoralizing: The U.S. has slouched from among the world’s Top 10 freest economies. In fact, we’re No. 12 — down two spots from No. 10 last year.

This bad news emerges from the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released this morning by the Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal.

“Now considered only a ‘mostly free’ economy, the U.S. has earned the dubious distinction of having recorded one of the longest sustained declines in economic freedom, second only to Argentina, of any country in the [20-year] history of the Index,” observe the report’s editors, Ambassador Terry Miller, Anthony B. Kim, and Kim Holmes, Ph.D., all Heritage Foundation scholars. “The U.S. is the only country to have recorded a loss of economic freedom each of the past seven years.” This sad, maddening interval began in 2007 with Republican George W. Bush’s reckless expenditures, brand-new regulations (including the unforgivable federal destruction of Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb), and the post-crisis nationalization of American enterprises. This folly continues with President Obama’s trillion-dollar annual deficits, his 24/7 red-tape factory, and the triumph of Obamacare, now blossoming in its entire splendor.

The former Israeli ambassador to the U.S. thinks that if the U.S. is unsuccessful in forcing Israel to give up land for nothing, Israel should do it all on its own.

Have you seen the cartoon of a man holding a gun to his own head, with the caption, “Stop or I’ll shoot!”?

If so, you know where this column is going. Recently retired Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren left his post after what must have seemed to him like four and a half very long years. Now that Oren is no longer representing what the media he must love incessantly refers to as the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu, the newly former ambassador is no longer diplomatically bound to have his mouth buttoned shut. And with the new Israeli Ambassador to the U.S. firmly ensconced and actually comfortable with the positions of Israeli Prime Minister Netanayahu, Oren is once again speaking out of the side of his mouth connected to his inner Disengager. Oren told an audience at Georgetown University in February of 2009, that he was amongst a minority of Israelis and was an outlier at the foundation where he then hung his hat: “I am one of the last remaining unilateralists.” It was Oren’s belief in 2009, as it appears to remain so today, that in order for Israel to remain a Jewish state it would have to withdraw from the disputed territories popularly known as the West Bank.

What he said then was that in order for Israel to remain a Jewish State it had to maintain a Jewish majority and that in order for that to happen it would have to “redraw its borders and withdraw from its settlements in the West Bank.” (What Oren actually said was that Israel would have to withdraw its borders and withdraw from its settlements, but that only makes sense if what he meant to say was that the borders would have to be redrawn, not withdrawn.) This past Saturday, Jan. 11, the day former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon died, a eulogy for Sharon penned by Michael Oren appeared on the CNN website.

The eulogy is relatively short, only 802 words, but Oren managed to get in some beautiful oratory. It opens with: “Written on every page of Israel’s history, in ink and in blood, is the name Ariel Sharon.” Oren is a masterful writer, a lovely speaker and appears to be a very decent man. But. Oren also managed to weave in to his presentatio of Sharon’s legacy the message that the former ambassador is still clinging to his earlier view that in order to save itself, tiny Israel must constrict still further. Along the way Oren revealed that where he saw Sharon acting to protect Israel’s security, Oren saw those acts then and described those actions now as ones taken without considerations about peace. But when Sharon pulled out the Israelis he himself had placed in communities in Gaza, Oren described Sharon as “pivoting toward peace.”

It took a while, but the media seem to have finally noticed Senate majority leader Harry Reid’s unprecedented obstructionism.

The New York Times reported last week on Reid’s “brutish style” and “uncompromising control” over the amendments process in the Senate. Why are more people finally catching on to Reid’s flagrant disregard for Senate customs? In part because conservatives aren’t the only ones complaining.

Democrats such as Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota — who wants to repeal Obamacare’s medical-device tax — and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York — who has waged a highly publicized campaign to reform the way the military handles sexual-assault cases — have been denied votes on their proposed amendments to various bills. Gillibrand had hoped to attach her sexual-assault amendment to the defense-appropriations bill that passed in December, but no amendments were allowed. Klobuchar has called for “a more open amendment process” because she’d like a vote on repealing the medical-device tax.

Moderate Republicans who occasionally vote with Democrats and help broker bipartisan compromise are annoyed as well. Senator Lisa Murkowki of Alaska told the New York Times she was “kind of fed up” with Reid’s obstructionism. “He’s a leader. Why is he not leading this Senate? Why is he choosing to ignore the fact that he has a minority party that he needs to work with, that actually has some decent ideas? Why is he bringing down the institution of the Senate?”

Undercover agents were able to vote as dead people, but election officials are attacking the agents.

Liberals who oppose efforts to prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any that involves voting in person at the polls.

But New York City’s watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test” so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax procedures.

The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country during and after the 2008 election.

It is with deep melancholy that one reads about the ongoing suffering of Cubans under communism. January 1, 2014 marked the 55th anniversary of Cuba’s communist revolution. In fact, Cuba is “the only full-blown dictatorship in the Western hemisphere” and “no other country in Latin America is ruled by a regime that ‘represses virtually all forms of political dissent.'” In Freedom House’s annual index of political and civil liberties worldwide, Cuba is “consistently rated ‘Not Free.'”

The “Future of Freedom in Cuba” was a March 2013 Cato Institute event that highlighted the continuing repression in Cuba. Cuban dissidents Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo and Yoani Sanchez spoke. The 24-minute event can be heard here. If you cannot hear the entire program, begin at 35:07. In essence, Sanchez asserts that in order for true democratic transition, “Cubans must lose their fear” and “the great majority of Cubans must realize that the country belongs to them and changing [Cuba] is their struggle. As long as opportunism, wearing a mask of doublespeak and silence are the ways that Cubans survive under a repressive regime we cannot expect a great change in the country.”

Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo asserts that because the regime has successfully repressed the population over the years, there are too many people who are not interested in politics and change. He fears the “great sense of apathy — of not belonging.” Thus, “the idea of emigration as an end in itself is a sad commentary but it is a realistic one.” Nonetheless, Lazo declares to the Cuban government that he “is not going to stay in another country nor will he fear the cowardly acts of repudiation against him by the Cuban regime” even though he is fully aware about the overwhelming number of “car accidents” against many who speak out against the repression.

Recently the University of Colorado noted that political affiliation and orientation would be a protected category in the university’s nondiscrimination policy. What prompted this action were reports from conservative faculty members that their viewpoints have been stifled.

While the proposal was approved, it is remarkable that this policy had to be introduced in the first place. What it suggests is that the faculty political outlook is homogeneous allowing little room for different points of view. Yet, to state the obvious, the essence of education is the exploration of different opinions.

Some faculty members contend that anti-bias policies is a waste of time. After all, the exclusionary position of most faculty members will not change because of university reform. In fact, if diversity of views is the goal that is more likely to come outside the Academy than inside the faculty.

Faculty members who share this left wing orthodoxy, in my experience, are accustomed to the present academic environment. Their self righteousness is mutually reinforcing. They are the virtuous ones and their position must not be challenged.

Hameed Ghuriafi is a senior writer at the Kuwaiti daily As Siyasa and a former editor of several publications in Lebanon, Cyprus and London.

As soon as Israel announced the death of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Arab and international web-based news agencies rushed to unveil the “bloody record” of the Israeli leader and how he came to be known allegedly as the “butcher of Sabra and Chatila” Palestinian camps in September 1982. While it is hard to dispute Sharon’s rough military history, many questions remain surrounding his involvement in the Sabra and Chatila massacres.

Notable Lebanese-American historians who have researched the tragic events that occurred at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila in 1982, flatly dismissed allegations of Ariel Sharon’s direct involvement in the killings. Dr. Franck Salameh, Professor of Near Eastern studies at Boston College, revealed in his article titled “Syrian Responsibility for The Sabra and Chatila Massacres”(http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/id.11159/pub_detail.asp) that the troops who conducted the massacres were selected by a Kataeb (Lebanese Forces) military commander Elie Hobeika who had established secret contacts with the Syrian Baathist regime of Hafez al-Assad.

Hobeika’s henchmen were reportedly instructed to kill indiscriminately men, women, infants and elderly Palestinians and place the blame for the horrific massacres on late-President-elect Bashir Gemayel and then-Israeli Defence Minister Ariel Sharon. It certainly was not a pure coincidence that the killings took place 48 hours after the Syrian-engineered assassination of Gemayel. Salameh’s startling revelation was eerily reminiscent of the allegations made in 1999 by Elie Hobeika’s former bodyguard, Robert Hatem.

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/ariel-sharon-1928-2014?f=puball

Bravest in battles, whether at war or at peace….

A giant passes on, who looms especially large compared to the pygmy who sits in the White House. Readings well worth it:

Times of Israel obituary: Israel’s indomitable protector.

How Sharon narrowly escaped near-certain death in the 1948 war.

Elliott Abrams, who worked closely with Sharon for five years, “His Eye Was Not Dim”; Abrams recounts how Sharon encompassed the security dilemmas of Israel in two contexts, geography and the Palestinian Arabs:

He saw himself as a Jew whose job it was to protect the Jewish state. In early 2003, President George W. Bush sent deputy national security advisor Steve Hadley and me (I was the senior Mideast official on the NSC) to meet with him, hear him out, and see what he thought of the various peace plans. Was he open to compromises? What he told us, according to my notes of the meeting, was this:

I took risks personally but never took any risks with the security of the State of Israel. I appreciate Arab promises but will take seriously only tangible performance. For tangible performance I will take tangible steps. Israel is a tiny small country. From the Jordan River to Jerusalem is only 17.5 miles. Before 1967, the Knesset was in range of machine guns south of Jerusalem. From the Green Line to Tel Aviv is 11 miles. From the sea at Netanya to Tulkarm is 9 miles. Two-thirds of the Jewish population lives is a narrow strip on the coastal plain. Between Haifa and Ashdod, which is 80 miles, is two-thirds of the Jewish population, our only international airport, and most of our infrastructure. All of that is overlooked by the hills of Judea and Samaria.

World economic freedom has reached record levels, according to the 2014 Index of Economic Freedom, released Tuesday by the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal. But after seven straight years of decline, the U.S. has dropped out of the top 10 most economically free countries.

For 20 years, the index has measured a nation’s commitment to free enterprise on a scale of 0 to 100 by evaluating 10 categories, including fiscal soundness, government size and property rights. These commitments have powerful effects: Countries achieving higher levels of economic freedom consistently and measurably outperform others in economic growth, long-term prosperity and social progress. Botswana, for example, has made gains through low tax rates and political stability.

Those losing freedom, on the other hand, risk economic stagnation, high unemployment and deteriorating social conditions. For instance, heavy-handed government intervention in Brazil’s economy continues to limit mobility and fuel a sense of injustice.

Obama’s ‘nonenforcement’ approach to the law invites the next president to undo the ACA piece by piece.

The Obama administration is in the habit of selectively enforcing the law. It has justified this practice as an expedient to bypass congressional “dysfunction” and preserve the president’s signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act. Yet that strategy may backfire on both counts. The administration’s nonenforcement gambit promises only to prolong the current legislative stalemate while preparing the way for a broader rollback of the ACA.
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Chad Crowe

The major improvisations with the ACA began with a one-year suspension of the employer mandate in July 2013, based on a vague theory of executive “transitional authority.” Next, the administration granted some existing health plans a temporary dispensation from minimum-coverage requirements in a belated attempt to accommodate Americans who liked their health insurance but, due to new regulations, couldn’t keep it. Most recently, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced that those same Americans can claim a “hardship” exemption from the ACA’s individual mandate, like victims of fire, flood and other misfortunes.

These nonenforcement decisions follow a pattern that the administration marked out in other areas of law. In 2012, for example, the White House exempted a sympathetic class of undocumented residents from provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act and waived federal welfare-to-work requirements for several states.