RUTHFULLY YOURS

A President who refuses to acknowledge that Islamist terror has anything to do with Islam is a poor prospect to resist Russian ambitions in the Baltic, should Moscow next target those nations in its campaign to re-claim the former Soviet empire. As Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia understand, they are on their own.
Two weeks from now, March 11, 2015, will mark 25 years since Lithuania declared its independence from the crumbling Soviet Empire, the “evil empire”, as President Ronald Reagan so eloquently and accurately described it. Similar declarations followed from Latvia and Estonia. This milestone should be an occasion for celebration. Instead, there is growing fear about the future.

My Lithuanian-born wife is in frequent contact with family and friends in her former homeland. All have expressed fear about Russian intentions. My Brother’s-in-Law daughter is now in her third year of medicine. In her spare time she has written poetry and short stories. She has read the classics in English. The youngest son is shortly to leave school. Both were born after independence. Will they be condemned to face a loss of personal freedom in the future? I do not pretend to be a disinterested observer.

During our visit to Russia back in 2012, I noted in my travel diary the Russian ambivalence towards its Soviet past. At the Moscow River Port on July 5, 2012, just before our departure on our River Cruise to St Petersburg, I wrote: “Amused to see a cruise vessel named Felix Dzerzhinsky (founder of the Cheka). This reflects a typical Russian ambivalence about its past. Could you imagine a German cruise vessel on the Rhine being called the Heinrich Himmler?”

The problem is about the conservative culture in which the Turks take much pride. Child brides and buying brides (mostly in return for gold or cattle), are fine. Killing your daughter because she was raped is from a tradition to protect family honor. Killing your daughter because she fell in love with a boy is also normal. Covering up such horrible crimes is fine, too. But a boy putting on an earring would be unacceptable.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was angry because feminists had objected to his remark that, “in Islam, women are entrusted to men.”

Murders of women in Turkey, between 2002 and 2009, have risen by 1,400%. — BBC report, 2013.

As details leak out of the very bad deal the world powers are about to make with Iran, Bibi’s speech and position appear increasingly justified.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, in a public statement, referred to the threatened deal between Iran and the west, as a “bad deal,” a “very, very bad deal”

Iran looks to be the big winner in the high stakes negotiation game that the world powers, led by U.S. President Barack Obama’s team, have played like amateurs.

The biggest news is that, whereas ten years ago Iran was not permitted to have even one centrifuge, the “deal” the P5+1 will be offering, according to senior Israeli and other officials, allows Iran about 6,500 centrifuges.

Carrie Sheffield is a Warren T. Brookes Journalism Fellow for the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a former researcher for American Enterprise Institute scholar Edward Conard. She is author of editorials for The Washington Times, covered Congress for POLITICO and The Hill.

A push to “boycott, divest and sanction” (BDS) Israeli companies has limited impact on the credit profile of Israel, yet it directly harms its intended beneficiaries, the Palestinians. The BDS movement, including universities, pension funds and leaders of some Christian denominations (to the chagrin of many congregants), ignores economic data. And it coincides with a disturbing rise of violent anti-Semitism across Europe.

“The impact of BDS is more psychological than real so far and has had no discernible impact on Israeli trade or the broader economy,” Kristin Lindow, senior vice president at Moody’s Investors Service and Moody’s lead analyst for Israel (in full disclosure, a former Moody’s colleague) told Forbes. “That said, the sanctions do run the risk of hurting the Palestinian economy, which is much smaller and poorer than that of Israel, as seen in the case of SodaStream.”

If Eric Greitens sent you his résumé, you wouldn’t believe it. But maybe you have some time to kill and figure why not call him up, go to his home in Missouri, and catch him in a lie. “Very impressive resume, Mr. Greitens. A Navy SEAL and a Rhodes Scholar? Sure buddy, and I’m Mother Teresa … oh, so now you’ve worked with Mother Teresa …”

The conversation could go on like this for hours. You’d hear how This Navy SEAL who works to help veterans is entering politics. And he’s a Republicanhe spent his Duke University years tending to victims of poverty and genocide from Calcutta to Rwanda, that after Oxford he turned down his ticket to the One Percent to become a SEAL to live out his humanitarianism-through-strength dissertation thesis, that he lived off an air mattress to start a non-profit helping wounded veterans. He’d tell you that Fortune Magazine named him one of the 50 greatest leaders in the world, that Time Magazine said he’s one of the 100 most influential, that he’s only 40 years old. By the end of the conversation, you’d fly down to St. Louis to see if he’s lying when he says he’s a golden gloves champ, too.

A report from a committee of Britain’s House of Lords released Friday offers a scathing indictment of British and European policy toward Russia. Europe went “sleep-walking” into the crisis in Ukraine, says Lord Christopher Tugendhat, the committee chairman. “The lack of robust analytical capability” in Western foreign ministries “effectively led to a catastrophic misreading of the mood in the run-up to the crisis.” Matters were made worse by an “optimistic premise” in Britain and the European Union that Russia was moving in the right direction when it came to democracy and the rule of law.

It’s a bald and brutal judgment. But the truth about U.K. policy toward Russia is so much worse.

That truth is buried with the remains of the late Alexander Litvinenko. The one-time KGB agent defected to Britain after credibly accusing his former masters of orchestrating the 1999 bombings of Russian apartment buildings—death toll: 293—as a pretext to restart the war in Chechnya and bring Vladimir Putin to power. In November 2006, Litvinenko ingested a fatal dose of polonium-210. He died three weeks later, naming Mr. Putin as the man who ordered his murder.

““Tales From Both Sides of the Brain” will be cataloged as scientific autobiography, and that it surely is. But it is as much a book about gratitude—for the chance to study a subject as endlessly fascinating as the brain, for the author’s brilliant colleagues and, mostly, for the patients who taught him, and the world, so much.”

The brain is organized as modules and circuits for specialized actions. The scientist who figured that out reflects on his discovery.

In the early 1960s, Michael S. Gazzaniga, then a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, was one of a team of researchers who opened the minds of fellow scientists to a new view of how the brain functions. In “Tales From Both Sides of the Brain,” he tells the story of the seminal discoveries in which he was involved and chronicles the lifetime of exploration that has flowed from them.

Mr. Gazzaniga’s signature area of research is called “split brain” studies. They were pioneered by his Caltech mentor, Roger W. Sperry, who won a Nobel Prize in 1981. Surgically separating the two cerebral hemispheres by cutting the sheath of nerves that connects them—as was once done to treat intractable epilepsy or remove certain tumors—permitted researchers to observe “two mental systems,” as the author puts it, “each with its own sense of purpose and quite independent of the other.”

Congress has every right, and even an obligation, to hear the Israeli leader speak about the Iranian threat.

As a liberal Democrat who twice campaigned for President Barack Obama , I am appalled that some Democratic members of Congress are planning to boycott the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on March 3 to a joint session of Congress. At bottom, this controversy is not mainly about protocol and politics—it is about the constitutional system of checks and balances and the separation of powers.

Under the Constitution, the executive and legislative branches share responsibility for making and implementing important foreign-policy decisions. Congress has a critical role to play in scrutinizing the decisions of the president when these decisions involve national security, relationships with allies and the threat of nuclear proliferation.

Mr. Gramm, a former Republican senator from Texas, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

The GOP needs a politically defensible alternative if the Supreme Court overturns federal-exchange subsidies.

On March 4 the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell, with a decision expected in late June. If the court strikes down the payment of government subsidies to those who bought health insurance on the federal exchange, Republicans will at last have a real opportunity to amend ObamaCare. Doing so, however, will be politically perilous.

The language of the Affordable Care Act states that subsidies should only be paid through state exchanges. The bill’s authors perhaps believed that pressure from citizens and the health-care providers who would benefit would entice states to set up exchanges. But, faced with mounting technical problems in setting up the exchanges, the Obama administration decided—legally or illegally—to allow subsidies to be paid through a federally run exchange. Therefore, political pressure that might have convinced states to set up exchanges never developed.

At a Republican dinner event last week, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani spoke the bold truth, something to which the progressive media and politicians of all stripes are unaccustomed, and the media pushback was swift and harsh. “I do not believe that the president loves America,” said Giuliani, something that has been obvious to many of us ever since Barack Obama hit the campaign trail prior to his first election. But this kind of blunt speech about the leftist Messiah simply isn’t tolerated, and so the media pounced.

Giuliani was expressing his frustration that Obama doesn’t praise America like even other Democrat presidents like Kennedy and Clinton have done; instead, he constantly criticizes, constantly apologizes. Giuliani blamed this partly on Obama’s unusual upbringing, echoing Dinesh D’Souza’s view of Obama as a man suffused with anti-colonialist animus.