WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Russia: No One Knows Anything: Steven Hayword

Posted By on June 28th, 2023

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/russia-no-one-knows-anything.php

Screenwriter William Goldman’s famous line about Hollywood—”No one knows anything”—applies fully to the confusing scene in Russia right now. And let’s not go further without also bringing up for the millionth time Churchill’s description of Russia as “a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.”

There’s a sentence in one of the Wall Street Journal‘s many articles about the matter today that reminds of this: “The full story behind why Prigozhin launched—then stunningly halted—his revolt isn’t yet known.” One reason for this is the scarcity of western European or American reporters inside Russia who have developed good sources and understand the country. In this regard one must wonder whether it is a mere coincidence that the American reporter most fluent in Russian and with intimate knowledge of the country—Evan Gershkovich—was arrested and jailed several weeks ago. (If you have a long Cold War memory, re-run the Nick Danilov arrest in Moscow in 1986, just weeks before the climactic Reagan-Gorbachev summit in Iceland.) Joe Biden has been strangely quiet about the matter, and while there is one obvious explanation for that, it is also possible that our intelligence agencies didn’t have any hint it was going to happen, or did know it, and Biden’s team didn’t know just what, if anything, to do or say about it.

Lots of aspects of this “coup” or “insurrection” don’t make a lot of sense, unless . . . it was an exercise from the old Communist playbook going back to the Stalinist purges of the 1930s of setting up a “controlled opposition” as a means of smoking out dissidents and disloyal party members so they could be eliminated before a threat grew. And even legitimate protest groups, like Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s or Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, were always quickly infiltrated (kind of like the FBI and the Proud Boys, Weather Underground, etc), and divided, disrupted, or rolled up.

MEDICINE AND HEALTH Comments turned off

Senate Democrats Take One More Step Toward Socialized Medicine Sally C. Pipes

Posted By on June 28th, 2023

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/06/28/senate-democrats-take-one-more-step-toward-socialized-medicine/

It’s been less than a year since Democrats enacted the Inflation Reduction Act, which gives Medicare the power to set the prices of certain medicines. 

Those price controls have yet to go into effect. But Democrats already want more. They’ve introduced new legislation that would amp up those price controls — and even permit the government to refuse to cover drugs in order to drive a harder bargain with pharmaceutical companies.

As for the patients who would benefit from those drugs — or may even need them to stay alive? They may end up being collateral damage.

The Democrats’ new price control gambit is the SMART Prices Act, introduced by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Peter Welch, D-Vt., and 23 of their colleagues. They say their bill would “build on” the IRA. 

That law, which President Biden signed last August, subjects 10 medicines to price controls under Medicare in January 2026. The government will set the prices for 15 more in 2027, another 15 in 2028, and 20 more per year in 2029 and beyond.

The SMART Prices Act would take things even further. It would empower Medicare to set prices for 20 drugs in 2026, instead of the current 10 under the IRA. In 2027, that number would jump to 40 — many more than the IRA stipulated.

The new bill would also subject medicines to price controls five years after approval by the Food and Drug Administration. That’s up to eight years quicker than under the IRA and significantly sooner than when generic or biosimilar competitors can enter the market.  

This provision would gut the generics industry. Generic firms face substantial upfront costs. They must create medicines that are bioequivalent to the innovative branded drugs they’re copying. And they have to build facilities in which to manufacture them. 

They recapture those investments by underpricing their wares relative to branded drugs and capturing a small margin on each sale. Patients, of course, benefit from those lower prices. 

But if Washington sets a rock-bottom price on a brand-name drug, there will be no incentive for a generics manufacturer to enter the market.

That’s problematic for several reasons. For starters, the government’s mandated price may not be as low as a competitive market could generate. So patients may end up paying more than they should. 

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

India’s True Liberals Should Reconsider Their Icons Salvatore Babones

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/india/2023/06/an-indian-idol-well-worth-junking/

“Postcolonial history is chock-full of Third World dictators revered as great reformers: Ho Chi Minh, Kwame Nkrumah, Fidel Castro — and in India there is Jawaharlal Nehru. The first and longest-serving prime minister, he was an enemy of free speech, a persecutor of political opponents and, in regard to legislative legerdemain, a masterclass practitioner. Yet knowing all this, India’s intellectual class continues to approach his memory on bended knee.”

The First Amendment to the United States Constitution famously guarantees Americans near-absolute freedom of speech. It was foisted on an unwilling political class by anti-federalists who were wary of despotic rule by the newly-created national government.

The First Amendment to the Indian Constitution, by contrast, limited Indians’ freedom of speech by explicitly granting the government the authority to impose “reasonable restrictions … in the interests of the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence”.

It was foisted on a mostly-illiterate population in 1951 by a political class that was wary of the growing power of the people in India’s newly-independent democracy.

Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first and longest-serving prime minister, was the chief architect of the first amendment, and he did not hesitate to say why he wanted it. In the formal statement of objectives for amendment, he personally wrote that “certain difficulties have been brought to light by judicial decisions and pronouncements specially in regard to the chapter on fundamental rights”.

What were those difficulties? The Supreme Court had ordered the release of political opponents who had been indefinitely detained by the government and invalidated the censorship of publications that had been critical of the government. In other words, Nehru did an end-run around the judiciary by changing the Constitution to suit his political needs.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Obama Rings the Reparations Bell By Eileen F. Toplansky

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

As Black Lives Matters and their allies rev up the call for reparations, it is time to revisit what Milton R. Konvitz wrote in 1976 for the celebration of the Bicentennial of American Independence[1]:

In the late 1960s, when militant blacks staged demonstrations in various churches demanding a half-billion dollars in ‘reparations’ for three hundred years of subjugation and discrimination, a writer in an Anglo-Jewish journal formulated a demand for ‘reparations from various nations on behalf of the Jewish people, including demands to the Vatican for the harm done by teaching that the Jewish people were guilty of deicide and for the  promotion of the blood libel; on Spain for the Inquisition and for the expulsion of Jews in 1492; on Germany France, Austria, and Italy, as successors of the Holy Roman Empire, for imprisoning Jews in ghettos; on Arab governments for oppression of the Jews for hundreds of years; on Russia for forcing Jews to live in the Pale of Settlement, for prohibiting them from owning land, for imposing on Jews a quota system that severely restricted their admission to high school and to the universities.  

As far as Italian-Americans, should they too demand reparations?  How many people are aware of the worst lynching in America — the mass murder of Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891?  Moreover, “Sicilians were viewed by many Americans as culturally backward and racially suspect,” writes historian Manfred Berg.  Because of their dark skin, they were often treated with the same contempt as black people.  In fact,  “many Southerners looked down on these Italians as ‘white Negroes.'”

Then there are the Chinese, who had to deal with “the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.  Although the Chinese composed only 0.002 percent of the nation’s population, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to placate worker demands and assuage concerns about maintaining white ‘racial purity.'”

Moreover, “[f]rom the burning of Boston’s Charlestown Convent in 1834 and the rise of the single-issue, anti-immigrant Know Nothing party in the 1850s … to the No Irish Need Apply signs of the 1890s — immigrant Catholics faced the brunt of Protestant America’s rage.”

Yet Obama, our first black Caucasian president, demands reparations for black Americans.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Liz Peek: Nothing to see here: Democrats ignore alleged Biden corruption

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/nothing-see-here-democrats-ignore-alleged-biden-corruption

Every single Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee voted to keep hidden from the public whistleblower testimony that the Department of Justice blocked the investigation into Hunter Biden. Every single one.

Is there not one Democrat legislator concerned about the wrongdoing of the FBI or the Department of Justice, or maybe curious about the source of Hunter Biden’s millions? Won’t any Democrat who has sworn to uphold our Constitution feel obligated to support the investigations into alleged corruption by Hunter Biden and more importantly, the president?  Are there no honest Democrats?

Where is the left’s Tulsi Gabbard or Jeff Van Drew? Gabbard, former Democrat representative from Hawaii, broke with her party in their first effort to impeach Donald Trump, voting “present.” Van Drew also defied his party, voting “no” on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, subsequently switching parties and becoming a Republican. Standing in the way of Democrats’ rush to judgment on Donald Trump cannot have been easy; it was costly to both representatives – and a few others — to vote their conscience.

So far, Biden’s colleagues on the Hill have glommed together like silly putty in their defense of Joe and his son Hunter. Can the solidarity hold up? It’s hard to imagine.

After all, the walls are closing in on Joe Biden. Republicans in the House are doggedly and carefully pursuing leads, beginning with 150 suspicious activity reports, that reveal more each week about Biden, Inc. The House Oversight Committee, led by James Comer, has obtained bank records that show millions – possibly tens of millions – of dollars flowing not only to Hunter Biden himself but also to many members of the Biden family from countries like China and Ukraine through obscure LLCs. Someone needs to ask Joe Biden why these complicated financial transactions were necessary. If everything is above board, why funnel funds through hard-to-trace intermediaries?

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Part II: At High School Debates, Watch What You Say Kids are losing high school debates because of their personal tweets, reveals James Fishback in a new exposé. By James Fishback

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/personal-tweets-lose-high-school-debates

One month ago, James Fishback, a former debate champion, wrote a piece for us exposing how high school debate has been hijacked by political and ideological judges. The article went viral. Politicians on both sides of the aisle tweeted their shock at Fishback’s findings. Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna and Republican Sen. Ted Cruz invited him to meet with them to discuss the problem.

Most importantly, more than a hundred coaches, debate parents, and debaters (both current and former) reached out to Fishback to share their own experiences, confirming that in high school debate, debate is no longer allowed. That number included people from inside the National Speech & Debate Association, the key institution Fishback investigated, who told him he didn’t know the half of it.

So we asked Fishback to dig deeper. Here’s what he found. — BW

Once upon a time, the National Speech & Debate Association, or NSDA, was the country’s premier debating organization, touching the lives of two million high school students across its nearly hundred-year history. Its famous alumni include Oprah Winfrey, and Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch and Ketanji Brown Jackson. The NSDA, formerly known as the National Forensics League, currently has 140,000 young debaters on its roster—but now, rather than teaching them to debate, it is teaching them to self-censor and conform their arguments to a new politically correct standard.

The NSDA has allowed hundreds of judges with explicit left-wing bias to infiltrate the organization. These judges proudly display their ideological leanings in statements—or “paradigms”—on a public database maintained by the NSDA called Tabroom, where they declare that debaters who argue in favor of capitalism, or Israel, or the police, will lose the rounds they’re judging.

This has fundamentally changed the culture of high school debate—or so scores of students are telling me. One of them is former high school debater Matthew Adelstein, a rising sophomore studying philosophy at the University of Michigan, who was a member of the NSDA in high school.

Adelstein told me that, in April 2022, he competed at the prestigious Tournament of Champions in Lexington, Kentucky, where he debated in favor of the federal government increasing its protection of water resources.

In his final round of the two-day tournament, Matthew was shocked to hear the opposing team levy a personal attack against him as their central argument. The opposing team argued: “This debate is more than just about the debate—it’s about protecting the individuals in the community from people who proliferate hatred and make this community unsafe.”

EDUCATION Comments turned off

What Happens After the End of Affirmative Action? The Supreme Court is expected to rule that colleges can no longer rig for racial diversity. Some say ‘that’s dangerous and cruel.’ Others say it’s about time. By Rupa Subramanya

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

https://www.thefp.com/p/what-happens-after-the-end-of-affirmative

When he was growing up outside San Francisco in the seventies and eighties, David Malcolm Carson almost never thought about race or affirmative action.

Carson’s mother is Jewish; his father, black. His friends were a racial and ethnic smorgasbord.

In high school he started to cast about for an identity, and became more aware of his blackness.

“I began to understand that in societal terms I would be considered ‘black,’ that America had had a ‘one-drop rule’ for centuries,” Carson told me.

He read Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X, and matriculated at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. He stopped going by David, and started going by Malcolm: “Part of it was that it referenced Malcolm X and all that he represented, part of it was just wanting to declare some independence.” He got into “old-school hip-hop, Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul.” He wrote his senior thesis on the FBI’s counterintelligence program targeting the Black Panthers.

After college, Carson applied to Stanford Law School and got in. At the end of his second year, he transferred to the University of California at Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, because he wanted to do a joint degree in city planning. Berkeley said yes.

“It’s likely that I benefited from affirmative action in applying to Stanford and Berkeley,” Carson said, but he noted that he had straight As at Howard and that, when he took the LSAT, he was in the top 1 percent. At a time of growing skepticism around race-based admissions—President Bill Clinton called to “mend, not end” the policy—Carson demonstrated in defense of it. He also joined the staff of the Black Law Journal.

But in 1995, policy at the University of California—the biggest public university system in the country—changed when the Board of Regents barred race-based admissions on its nine campuses.

In response, Boalt convened an Admissions Policy Task Force, and Carson was invited to take part. Berkeley, like many universities, had embraced diversity, and it wasn’t about to give that up.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Feehery: Is Democrats’ Mr. Perfectly Fine a reelection disaster? by John Feehery

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

https://thehill.com/opinion/4069137-feehery-is-democrats-mr-perfectly-fine-a-reelection-disaster/

When Democrats settled on Joe Biden as their candidate in 2020, they seemed to think he would be perfectly fine. He wasn’t completely crazy, he seemed moderate, he was happy enough to hide away in his basement to make the campaign all about President Trump, and he had enough experience in Washington to go along the established order that the nabobs of the capital city prefer.

But like Taylor Swift pointed out in her 2008 hit song, sometimes Mr. Perfectly Fine turns out to be a disaster. Or as one friend of mine likes to put it, everything is fine until it is not fine.

Biden has had some bad breaks in his life, and we should acknowledge the tragedy that he has had to endure up front. But when it comes to politics, Biden has been far luckier than good.

He is prone to wide exaggerations about his own life experiences and has a penchant for at times stealing the words of another. He often says things that have no possibility of being true. Because voters seemingly grade on a curve, Biden’s gift for gab and Irish charm has carried him to a position of power that just about nobody saw in his future. That includes his former boss, President Obama, who talked him out of running in 2016 and who made clear to anybody who would listen that he didn’t think Biden was up to the job.

Biden has a habit of making exactly the wrong decisions. On international issues, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said of Biden, “he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.”

From his vaccine mandates to his mask mandates, from his reckless spending plans that helped to spur inflation to his embrace of the defund the police crowd, from his doubling down on the climate change hysteria to his confusing rhetoric on Ukraine before the conflict started, Biden has consistently made bad situations immeasurably worse.

Three things are now confronting Biden as he seeks reelection, outside his less than stellar performance. First, his age. Second, very real questions about how he got elected in the first place. Third, his corrupt business deals with his son, Hunter.

Biden’s geriatric bearing has long concerned voters, and it frequently is one of most cited reasons why voters voice discomfort with his reelection. He was old when he ran for vice president. He will be the oldest president by close to a decade should he win reelection and serve out his second term. And despite the aviator sunglasses and cool sports car, Biden is not a young old man. The voters notice and they don’t like it.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

US-Israel relations: deterioration or enhancement? Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

http://bit.ly/3XrrDUV

Notwithstanding the current tension between the Administrations of the US and Israel, and while there is an erosion in Israel’s high favorability among Americans (according to Gallup: Israel’s favorability – 68% compared to 71% in 2022; Palestinian Authority’s – 26%), the US-Israel defense and commercial cooperation keeps expanding.

This expansion responds to mutual threats and challenges, such as Iran’s Ayatollahs, Sunni Islamic terrorism, the vulnerability of all pro-US Arab regimes, and the need to bolster the US’ global, technological competitive edge. Facing these threats and challenges, the US is leveraging Israel’s unique defense and commercial capabilities, which have contributed to the US economy and defense – in dollar terms – more than the annual US “foreign aid” to Israel.
The mutually-beneficial US-Israel partnership has been a derivative of the following factors:

1. US-Israel relations transcend the reality of international relations, in general, and US foreign relations, in particular.  US foreign relations are usually determined by the State Department establishment and the “elite” media, streaming in an up-bottom manner to the public.

However, in the case of the US policy towards Israel, the direction of the policy has been determined by the general public’s state-of-mind – which has prevailed since the Early Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers – streaming in a bottom-up manner to elected officials in the House, Senate and White House.  Moreover, US elected officials are accountable to their constituents, who expect them to faithfully represent their worldview (including their pro-Israel sentiments), or “we shall remember in November.”

2. While the White House tends to adopt the State Department’s worldview – which opposed the establishment of Israel in 1948, and has criticized Israel since then – both chambers of Congress (which are the most authentic representatives of the US constituency in the 435 Districts and 50 States) welcomed the newly-established Jewish State in 1948, and have always favored enhanced US-Israel cooperation. Furthermore, the US Congress is the world’s strongest Legislature, co-equal and co-determining to the President, capable of blocking, altering and initiating policy, as demonstrated by a litany of precedents, such as:

*Congress overruled Nixon and Reagan, ending the US military involvement in Southeast Asia (1973), Angola (1976) and Nicaragua (1984);
*Congress prevailed over Nixon (1974), forcing the USSR/Russia to allow free emigration;
*Congress overrode Clinton, Obama and Trump (1996-97, 2011, 2013, 2017), imposing sanctions on Iran, Egypt and Russia;
*The Senate did not ratify the 2015 nuclear accord with Iran (JCPOA), which enabled Trump to withdraw from the accord;
*Congress substantially expanded US-Israel strategic cooperation, in defiance of the Bush/Baker opposition (1990-1992);
*Etc.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Dr. Anthony Fauci joins Georgetown University as ‘distinguished’ professor By Victor Nava

Posted By on June 27th, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/06/26/dr-anthony-fauci-joins-georgetown-university-as-distinguished-professor/

Dr. Anthony Fauci has landed a job at Georgetown University where he will serve as a “distinguished university professor” in the school’s infectious disease division.

“We are deeply honored to welcome Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, a dedicated public servant, humanitarian and visionary global health leader, to Georgetown,” Georgetown President John J. DeGioia said on Monday.

“Dr. Fauci has embodied the Jesuit value of being in service to others throughout his career, and we are grateful to have his expertise, strong leadership and commitment to guiding the next generation of leaders to meet the pressing issues of our time.”

Fauci, 82, stepped down as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and as President Biden’s chief medical adviser late last year after more than 50 years working in the federal government.

“I think what I have to offer is experience and inspiration to the younger generation of students,” Fauci said of his decision to take the job at Georgetown. 
Georgetown University

As distinguished university professor – Georgetown’s highest professional honor – Fauci will work in the Washington, D.C., university’s medical school, in a division that “provides clinical care, conducts research and trains future physicians in infectious diseases.”

Fauci will also hold an appointment in the university’s school of public policy.