RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372980/print

In a state by state election survey that I am doing for Family Security Matters (see http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/,http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/texas-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand)it is astonishing what a hot button issue repealing Obamacare has become among incumbents and challengers….RSK

The American people realize that Obamacare is a very bad policy. But more and more conservatives agree that we need to offer a solid alternative before voters reject Obamacare root and branch. Recently, three prominent Republican senators — Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) — unveiled an alternative proposal. In this article, I would like to outline my own.

The proposal I suggest would achieve four remarkable things: It would be more progressive than Obamacare, because it would involve more distribution from higher- to lower-income households. It would provide genuine protection for people who have a preexisting condition, as opposed to the bait-and-switch promises of Obamacare. It would provide genuine access to care for everyone, as opposed to leaving 30 million uninsured, as Obamacare does. And it would work in practice, primarily because it would confine the role of government to setting a few simple rules of the game, leaving individual choice and the marketplace to do the heavy lifting.

I call this reform a “consensus reform” because it draws not just on such right-of-center think tanks as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute but also on such left-of-center think tanks as the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, and various scholars including President Obama’s former and current economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman. It takes the best ideas these folks have offered and combines them with an important principle: No plan designed by those at the top can ever work unless people at the bottom have an economic incentive to make it work.

Further, the ideas presented here are consistent with the health-care plan John McCain endorsed when he ran for president and with health-care-reform legislation introduced by Senator Tom Coburn, Representative Paul Ryan (Wis.), and other Republican members of Congress. So it could easily be adopted as the Republican alternative to Obamacare.

Here are the essential elements.

Choice. People should be able to choose a health-care plan that fits their individual and family needs, rather than a plan designed by bureaucrats in Washington. This means no mandate. Men shouldn’t have to buy maternity coverage; women shouldn’t have to buy coverage for prostate-cancer tests; teetotalers shouldn’t have to buy substance-abuse insurance; etc. And no one should have to buy coverage for preventive procedures that health researchers have known for years are not cost-effective.

It is commonly believed that, without a mandate, people will game the system — waiting until they get sick to enroll. But we have found a way to handle this problem in Medicare Part B, Medicare Part C, and Medigap insurance without any mandate. In all three cases, the insurance is guaranteed-issue (no one can be turned down) and community-rated (no one can be charged a higher premium because of a health condition). But people are not permitted to game the system. If you don’t enroll when you are first eligible, you will be charged a penalty, and, in the Medigap market, you may be charged a premium that does reflect your health status.

Had we accepted the principle of choice in designing a health-care reform, we would not face the prospect of up to 10 million individual policyholders’ losing insurance they were promised they could keep. We would also not face the prospect of millions of additional people’s fearing the loss of their employer plans.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372988/print

PULEEZ! BECK WAS GREAT AT POLITICS…EVEN EDGY…BUT CULTURE? ….RSK

Glenn Beck is tired of politics.

“I think politics is a game, and I think people watch politics as a game, like they watch the NFL,” he tells me, leaning back in his chair. He once thought Washington politicians “actually believed in something.” Now, he says, “I don’t think they do.”

Beck hasn’t lost respect for all politicians, just most of them. On the right, he likes Utah’s Mike Lee, Texas’s Ted Cruz, and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. He respects anybody who goes to Washington and sticks to his principles — even the socialist senator Bernie Sanders. “I’m sure Bernie would disagree, but Bernie and I could be fast friends because he’s doing what he said he’d do,” he says. “ Same with Dennis Kucinich, aliens and all.”

Beck’s disenchantment with news and politics aren’t just for show. Though best known for his flame-throwing political commentary, he is turning his attention to cultural projects like plays and movies. His years in TV, he says, have taught him that news is secondary to culture. “News,” he says, is simply “what the culture allows.”

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7629

When U.S. President Barack Obama wants the Jewish community to sit up and listen to what he thinks about Israel and the Middle East, he regularly does two things. One is to call in Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for Bloomberg View and The Atlantic, to interview him on the subject. The second is to let The New York Times know what’s fit to print in their news stories and especially their op-eds and editorials about the subject. Of course, the White House need not issue directives to writers or editors at The Times, though for all I know it might. An interview with Jeffrey Goldberg will convey the message and do the trick. So too will comments the president makes in public. One thing you will never find is any space between Barack Obama’s stated views on Israel and those of the staff of The New York Times opinion pages in the days and weeks that follow.

Last week, just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was flying to the United States to meet with Obama, and speak at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, the White House invited Goldberg back in to set the stage before Netanyahu might seize it from him. The text of the conversation was released as the AIPAC conference was starting up.

Even Goldberg, a fan of the president, and a journalist more than happy to see and present the president in the best light as a true friend of Israel (one who knows better than Israel’s elected leaders and the Israeli voters what is really best for them), seemed to think the president stepped over the line this time.

http://yeoldecrabb.com/

The real “red line”

Recorded history is generally a straight-line narrative, often written with prejudice, and as the cliché has it, by the victors.

Only those involved in writing it, or more importantly, living through it, know the many cross-currents that because they do not present a clear picture of events defy immediate balanced analysis. These truths apply to any moment in history but particularly to those when violent events or revolutionary technology changes the pattern of life for everyone.

We are obviously in one of those periods on several scores by any calculation.

But while history may or may not repeat itself, there are permanent aspects of the relationships among nations. And we live with contemporary manifestations of the intricate nature of those liaisons.

Among those which is of ultimate importance is the integrity of the national state as a cornerstone of international law.

With the expansion of the concept of the European nation-state after the NapoleonicWars, its further consolidation in the 19th century, and Woodrow Wilson’s blessing – if failure of implementation — after World War I, conquest, international acceptance and treaty obligations have made national boundaries sacrosanct.

When they have been violated deliberately by a rogue power, it has led to even more bloodletting on the Old Continent where they had been enshrined to prevent just that very catastrophe, and now expanded however unfittingly to a vast new world in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/the-glick-plan/88613/Please read at the site

President Obama will meet a week hence with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Israel’s premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, says he is prepared to make a “historic peace.” The White House reckons his choice is limited. “What is his long-term answer for Israel,” asks the New York Times in an editorial, “if not a two-state solution?”

How about the Glick Plan?

No one is calling it that — yet. It is being advanced by one of Israel’s most brilliant journalists, Caroline Glick, in a new book, “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.” It sketches an alternative to America’s pursuit of a two-state plan in a region where only one state has managed a real democracy.

Ms. Glick’s idea is for Israel formally to incorporate the West Bank into its sovereign territory and govern it as part of a single state. It’s a radical proposal advanced in time’s nick for those who doubt the framework Secretary of State Kerry is seeking for talks about a two-state solution. She lays the arguments out beautifully, and her plan deserves attention on Capitol Hill.

No doubt it will be attacked as a flirtation with bi-nationalism, a movement that would end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and establish a secular state that, in theory, has no religious identity. Bi-nationalism in recent decades has been embraced by scores of foes of Zionism, including Edward Said, John Mearsheimer, and Tony Judt.

Ms. Glick’s vision is different. She is for a single Jewish state. She calls the two-state solution — the idea of a Palestinian Arab state beside Israel — “among the most irrational, unsuccessful policies the United States has ever adopted.” She counts more than a dozen efforts to advance it over the past 90 years. Between 1970 and 2013, she reckons, America alone presented nine two-state peace plans.

One part of Ms. Glick’s book reprises how the movement for Palestinian Arab statehood was poisoned by the collaboration of the Jerusalem mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, and Hitler. I’ve long thought this element of the story is too little appreciated. Why should the Palestinian Arabs be the only ally of Hitler to be shielded from the consequences of the Nazi defeat?

Another part of Ms. Glick’s book focuses on the demographic argument for a two-state compromise. Caviling about population trends has always struck me as a pernicious line, presupposing, as it does, that the Jewish people, so ingenious at so many things, cannot compete in going forth and multiplying.

This assumption is even eating at Mr. Obama’s confidence in the Jews. That jumps out from Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest — and now famous — interview with the President. Mr. Obama pointedly warned of what Mr. Goldberg characterizes as a “demographic disaster,” in which Israel could lose its Jewish majority……READ AT THE SI

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/CEN-01-100314.html

American foreign policy is more sitcom than CENTCOM. That in a way is the good news. Our failures are comic while those of other nations are tragic. Americans do not understand the tragic impulses of other peoples because they are exceptional. The Europeans failed as nationalists, and are failing as post-nationalists.

Because Americans are not an ethnicity but a union of immigrants committed to a concept, our nationalism discloses a universal impulse. We blunder when we forget how exceptional we are, and ignore the tragic impulses that impinge on other peoples.

Only once in the past century have we read the world aright. We got it wrong when Woodrow Wilson proposed a utopian postwar vision in 1919, when the isolationists tried to stay out of the European conflict in the late 1930s, when Roosevelt and Truman let Stalin absorb Eastern Europe, when we overextended and then turned tail in Vietnam, and when we undertook to turn Iraq and Afghanistan into Western-style democracies. Ronald Reagan got it right when he decided that it was time to roll back communism – but he also understood that we would have to live with Russia as a nation.

We have stumbled into the world’s troubles like incongruous clowns in a tragedy: we observe the anguished faces of the other characters and conclude that everyone else on stage is insane. That is how Americans view Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Time magazine reported last week:

An Obama administration official leaked to the New York Times on Sunday the fact that German Chancellor Angela Merkel told President Obama she wasn’t sure if Putin was in touch with reality. “In another world,” Merkel reportedly said, according to the leak. Then in a conference call with reporters later in the day, three administration officials took turns firing rhetorical shots: “[B]eing inside Putin’s head is not someplace anyone wants to be.”

I doubt that Merkel ever said it, but that’s a different question. Russia, as Colonel Ralph Peters (retired) told Sean Hannity last week, “believes in Russia”; to the Obamoids, belief in one’s country is prima facie evidence of mental defect. Hillary Clinton, Senator John McCain and Senator Marco Rubio meanwhile compare Putin to Hitler, an example of what the late Leo Strauss derided as “reduction ad Hitlerium”.

The Black Hitler of Harlem

http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/
The Black Hitler was a Chicago community organizer who moved to New York. Somewhere along the way he picked up a gold lined cape, a purple turban and a stepladder on which he used to stand while giving speeches outside the stores of Harlem’s dwindling Jewish community.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-nwIpXoJIR98/UNo1mrDzh-I/AAAAAAAAKhg/RC8dYT7sQWw/s1600/sufi+abdul+hamid.jpg
The cape and the turban were combined with Nazi style military shirt and jackboots, for the quixotic uniform of a man who is remembered today as a pioneering labor leader– but was known back then as the Black Hitler.

A dagger thrust through his belt completed the ensemble.

In his stepladder speeches, Black Hitler declared that he was the only man who could stop the Jews, accusing them of spreading filth and disease, and called on his followers to tear out the tongues of any Jew they met.

He vowed an “an open bloody war against the Jews who are much worse than all other whites.”

Speeches like these earned him the title, ‘Black Hitler’ and intimidated local businesses into hiring workers from his own private labor union.

The enterprising community organizer dubbed himself Sufi Abdul Hamid, and when he opened his mosque, he expanded his name to His Holiness Bishop Amiru Al-Mu-Minin Sufi A. Hamid. His press man claimed that he had been born in Egypt beneath the shadow of a pyramid. In reality he had been born Eugene Brown in Lowell, Massachusetts and in Chicago had briefly claimed to be Bishop Conshankin, a Buddhist cleric. Like the Nation of Islam, which was finding its feet at around the same time, his theology was a hodgepodge of Islam and anything else he picked up along the way.

It is unknown what connection Sufi Abdul Hamid had to the burgeoning Nation of Islam, which took the same mix of racism, anti-semitism, black nationalism and Islam and became a major movement, but in the year before he moved to Harlem, Nation of Islam founder Fard Muhammad disappeared, and his successor Elijah Muhammad moved to Chicago after conflicts with the state government and rival NOI leaders. Hamid was probably never part of the Nation of Islam, but he had almost certainly seen it in action and his New York operation was guided by similar methods.

Is there a whiff of nostalgia eliciting a renewed interest in Menachem Begin…and now, a forthcoming biography of Zeev Jabotinsky by Hillel Halkin?

Neither Daniel Gordis, author of the splendid biography of Menachem Begin or Hillel Halkin are men of the right. In fact, the Gordis book has blurbs by Avi Shavit and Dennis Ross, more Israel’s antagonists than protagonists. And, you know it must be good because Al Ha’Aretz has alredy panned it.

What accounts for this? I would suggest that there is such a paucity of real heroes in politics today….such a dearth of principles and guts and courage to buck prevailing trends, that one must visit dead heroes. I just read a biography of General Douglas MacArthur – the last American patriot and general who fought for total surrender of an enemy and then was instrumental in the recovery of the enemy which became a modern, successful democracy. The present “nation builders” in the military should read this book as a primer on how to do it.

But back to Menachem Begin. Who were his heroes? They were the settlers of Judea and Samaria who have reclaimed Israel’s patrimony and built the lovely towns in the hills and valleys that look over Israel’s cities and present a bulwark to the ambitions of Israel’s enemies.

I was so happy to read an acknowledgement to my e-pal Yisrael Medad, journalist, commentator and patriotic resident of Shiloh in the Gordis book: Page 251

” Particular thanks go to my friend and now my teacher Yisrael Medad, Director of Information and Educational Research at the Begin Center. I have known Yisrael Medad for years, but this project afforded me an opportunity to work with him musch more closely than I ever had. He was unflagging in his support, generous with his prodigious knowledge about Begin, clear about his perspective but understanding that sometimes we did not agree, and was kind enough to read a rough draft of this manuscript and to point out mistakes where he saw them. For his extraordinary friendship I am grateful.” rsk

www.verygoodnewsisrael.blogspot.com

http://blogs.jpost.com/users/just-look-us-now

ISRAEL’S MEDICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Israel prize for developer of Alzheimer’s treatment. The Israel Prize for Medicine goes to Professor Marta Weinstock-Rosin of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Weinstock-Rosin developed Exelon, for treating dementia related to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Exelon is currently undergoing Phase II trials.

http://www.jpost.com/Health-and-Science/Israel-Prize-in-Medicine-goes-to-Marta-Weinstock-Rosin-for-Alzheimers-Parkinsons-drugs-344017

US approval for Leukemia treatment. The US FDA has approved SYNRIBO from Israel’s Teva for the treatment of patients with Chronic Myeloid Leukemia who failed therapy using tyrosine kinase inhibitors.

http://www.tevapharm.com/Media/News/Pages/2014/1899845.aspx?year=2014

Positive results in Leukemia trials. (Thanks to Atid-EDI) Israel’s BioLineRX announced that its BL-8040 treatment for Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML) stopped growth of cancer cells in-vitro and caused them to self-destruct. It also reversed any protection given to the CML cancer cells from a bone marrow transplant.

http://www.biolinerx.com/default.asp?pageid=16&itemid=259

Promoting bone cancer research. Scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem have received a $62,500 grant for promising research into osteosarcoma metastasis – a bone cancer commonly found in children and young adults. Dr Rami Aqeilan and his team will explore microRNA biomarkers and responsiveness to therapy.

http://sarcomahelp.org/research/osteosarcoma-miR-27a.html?tpm=2_2#tpm2_1

Stroke treatment shows promise. Israel’s D-Pharm has announced successful interim results in the Phase IIa clinical trial of its drug THR-18 taken in conjunction with tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) for the treatment of cerebral stroke. D-Pharm’s share price rose 117%, despite the trials taking place in the Ukraine.

http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-d-pharm-doubles-on-good-interim-stroke-study-results-1000921631

Elderly and infirm can stay at home. Israeli life-science company Essence has launched Care@Home – an in-home care monitoring solution for the elderly and chronic disease sufferers. The system learns a person’s everyday routine and detects any deviations, such as skipped meals, reduced activity or unusual events.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/essence-introduces-first-ever-self-learning-eldercare-solution-to-facilitate-senior-independence-245177011.html

http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-Fray-The-Zionist-Organization-of-America-a-personal-postscript-344610
ZOA’s current condition reflects the accumulative result of the incumbent president’s best efforts over the past 20 years. His reelection is unlikely to induce the change that even his proponents admit is needed.

the ZOA is in crisis today… the ZOA’s crisis isn’t about its direction. It is about its leadership…right now, the most important thing for the ZOA and the American Jewish community as a whole is for Klein to be reelected.

– Caroline B. Glick, “The ZOA’s leadership challenge,” The Jerusalem Post, March 3

This is not the topic I was hoping to deal with in this week’s column.

I had intended to devote it to a critical analysis of the (borderline anti-Semitic) interview Barack Obama gave to Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Goldberg on March 2.

I even had a title for it: “The bitter fruits of Bibi’s Bar-Ilan blunder.” In it I planned to show how the causal chain of events that led to the predicament in which Israel finds itself with the US administration can be traced back – link by unfortunate link – to Binyamin Netanyahu’s regrettable June 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University, when, reneging on his electoral commitments, he endorsed Israeli acceptance of Palestinian statehood.

Or perhaps, given breaking news on the spectacularly successful IDF marine interception of the Iranian rockets bound for Gaza, I would have composed a piece pointing out that — for all our unmitigated admiration for the astounding feat – the only reason such risk-fraught operations are necessary is that Israel abandoned Gaza in 2005.

But the fallout from last week’s column on the upcoming Zionist Organization of America elections in Philadelphia on March 9-10 dictates otherwise.

Compelled to respond

As readers will recall, last week I suggested that after Mort Klein’s 20-year stint as president of ZOA, it might be time for a change in leadership – particularly in light of the less-than-spectacular growth of the organization in recent years, and of what appear to be serious lapses in management and misallocation of resources.