RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama stepped out at the White House daily briefing today to again berate Republicans for challenging Obamacare — in what appeared to be an attempt to get politicians to stop talking about the law’s negative effects before midterm elections.

Obama announced “as more data comes in, we now know that the number of Americans who’ve signed up for private insurance in the marketplaces has grown to 8 million people.”

“Before this law added new transparency and competition to the individual market, folks who’ve bought insurance on their own regularly saw double-digit increases in their premiums. That was the norm. And while we suspect that premiums will keep rising, as they have for decades, we also know that, since the law took effect, health care spending has risen more slowly than at any time in the past 50 years,” he said.

“…And this thing is working. I’ve said before, this law won’t solve all the problems in our healthcare system. We know we’ve got more work to do. But we now know for a fact that repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit, raise premiums for millions of Americans, and take insurance away from millions more, which is why, as I’ve said before, I find it strange that the Republican position on this law is still stuck in the same place that it has always been.”

Republicans, he charged, “still can’t bring themselves to admit that the Affordable Care Act is working. They said nobody would sign up; they were wrong about that. They said it would be unaffordable for the country; they were wrong about that. They were wrong to keep trying to repeal a law that is working when they have no alternative answer for millions of Americans with pre-existing conditions who’d be denied coverage again or every woman who’d be charged more for just being a woman again.”

“I know every American isn’t going to agree with this law, but I think we can agree that it’s well past time to move on as a country and refocus our energy on the issues that the American people are most concerned about, and that continues to be the economy, because these endless, fruitless repeal efforts come at a cost.”

Vladimir Putin happily allowed the Kiev authorities to shoot a few pro-Russian demonstrators while keeping his military forces on ice across the border. I predicted (and am sticking to my story) that Russia will not seize more territory in Eastern Ukraine–not for the time being, in any case. Russia will stand back and watch Ukraine implode, the way Egypt did during the two years following the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Before the Maidan coup, Putin was willing to sit on $15 billion in arrears to Gazprom and put up $18 billion in new money. Now he wants $35 billion in back gas bills, on top of Ukraine’s $15 billion a year current account deficit. The IMF wants massive cuts in subsidies, which will make the Kiev government an object of hatred without putting a dent into the problem. Western taxpayers won’t cough up $50 billion for Ukraine, not even a small fraction of it.

Yankee Doodle went to Maidan, stuck a feather in his hat and called it democracy. Our foreign policy ideologues are like UFO cultists who are so convinced that space aliens are invading the earth that they see moon men in every glare of swamp gas. In this case, it isn’t moon men, but aspiring republicans. First Tahrir Square, then Maidan, were glorious proof of the Manifest Destiny of Western democracy.

A Google search with the terms “Putin” and “genius” yields over 10 million hits. If I hear another pundit’s panegyric to Putin’s great intellect, I’ll lose my lunch. Putin is not that smart; the trouble is that we are complete idiots. When Ukraine imploded, our leaders–from Victoria Nuland at the State Department to the neo-conservatives–rather assumed that we would reverse Ukraine’s polarity to the West, and humiliate Russia with the loss of Crimea. Putin called our bluff, and we had no viable military options.

Putin doesn’t need to send the Red Army into Ukraine. Every Ukrainian officer above the rank of major came up through the ranks in the Red Army. Ukrainian commanders won’t fight the Russians. They are the Russians. Yesterday we watched Ukrainian paratroopers turn their armored vehicles over to Russian separatists. Maybe John McCain can send them more weapons to hand over to Moscow.

Universal public health care means the average Swede with ‘high risk’ prostate cancer waits 220 days for treatment.

President Obama has declared the Affordable Care Act a success—a reform that is “here to stay.” The question remains, however: What should we expect to come out of it, and do we want the effects to stay? If the experiences of Sweden and other countries with universal health care are any indication, patients will soon start to see very long wait times and difficulty getting access to care.

Sweden is praised as a rare example of a socialist country that works. A closer look at its health-care system tells a different story.

The overall quality of medical services delivered by Sweden’s universal public health care consistently ranks among the world’s very best. That quality can be achieved by regulating treatments to follow specific diagnoses as well as by standardizing procedures. If ObamaCare regulations do this, the quality of American health care may not go down either.

Sweden’s problem is access to care. According to the Euro Health Consumer Index 2013, Swedish patients suffer from inordinately long wait times to get an appointment with a doctor, specialist treatment or even emergency care. Wait times are Europe’s longest, and Swedes dependent on the public-health system have to wait months or even years for certain procedures, or are denied treatment.

For example, Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare reports that as of 2013, the average wait time (from referral to start of treatment) for “intermediary and high risk” prostate cancer is 220 days. In the case of lung cancer, the wait between an appointment with a specialist and a treatment decision is 37 days.

This waiting is what economists call rationing—the delay or even failure to provide care due to government budgetary decisions. So the number of people seeking care far outweighs the capabilities of providers, translating into insurance in name but not in practice. This is likely to be a result of ObamaCare as well.

New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has an interesting sense of timing. Tuesday was the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing, in which two Muslim brothers from Cambridge murdered four people and injured nearly 300. The same day, Mr. de Blasio’s new police commissioner, William Bratton, announced that his department is formally disbanding an antiterror surveillance unit started in the wake of 9/11.

This is being hailed by the usual suspects as a triumph for civil liberties, but it’s really a bow to political correctness that removes an important defense for a city that has stopped at least 16 terror plots since 9/11. It’s also more fallout from a series of sensationalist Associated Press stories from 2011 that were riddled with distortions and have since been rebuked by a federal judge.

Some background: After the attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001, the NYPD concluded that it couldn’t rely on the FBI and CIA to do its antiterror work. New York was the target of choice for Islamist terrorists and sometimes also their home. “Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was a spiritual leader to the 1993 bombers, preached from three mosques in New York. Several of the 9/11 hijackers lived in Paterson, N.J., only miles from the George Washington bridge.

The result was a strikingly successful effort, under former police commissioner Ray Kelly, to keep all New Yorkers safe. Part of that effort involved a small “Demographics Unit” (later renamed the “Zone Assessment Unit”) to keep an eye on “hot spots” and “venues of radicalization,” including mosques, bookstores, barbershops and other public places. The point wasn’t to spy on entire communities, which the unit—with never more than 16 officers—lacked the resources to do in any case. It was to keep an eye on places where terrorists would seek to blend in.

Such police work might seem like ordinary prudence, but critics alleged the program was unconstitutional and ineffective. The first claim stems from ignorance of the “Handschu” rules on police surveillance, overseen by a federal judge, which note that to prevent terrorist acts “the NYPD must, at times, initiate investigations in advance of unlawful conduct” and permits officer “to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public.”

We have barely begun and I have already had enough. We are talking college tours here. The season has commenced, my daughter is a high-school junior and, well, here we go again—lacing up for another amble around another campus, members of an endless string of silent, sullen parades seen across America these days, all led by a backward-walking guide who’s making rehearsed gestures to the left and right.

The campuses are all beautiful, if a bit more barren than leafy in this early spring season. The students—both on the tours and already in college, scurrying along the paths, spilling coffee on their way to class—are appealing too, brimming with the promise of fresh concepts and untested theories and the hope of a better collective future.

The problem is the tours themselves, which have degenerated into such boilerplate that it is difficult, and sometimes almost impossible, to distinguish one school from another. No matter the campus or state, the tour guides seem to be playing musical chairs with clichés:

“We have a really ambitious plan to be carbon neutral by 2030.”

“Our ethos here tends to be work hard and play hard.”

“There is the dining hall, where each week farmers come in to talk to us in detail about where our local food comes from.”

“That’s the library! It’s open 24 hours during study days!”

There is nothing theoretical about the European Union’s plans to eradicate the nation-states of Europe as sovereign states. These plans are becoming “reality,” as the London Telegraph story below explains, and despite all assurances provided by any so-called “opt-out” clause. Meanhile, the emerging shape of federal Europe also shows Western concerns over Russian violations of Ukrainian “sovereignty” to be camouflage for something else. The last thing the EU empire wants to do is safeguard any state’s “sovereignty,” thus preserving its independence of Brussels. This is not to put a gloss on Putin’s opportunism, however, or to recast his motives. It should, on the other hand, bring Brussels’ motives in Ukraine under more informed scrutiny.

From The Telegraph:

An EU Bill of Rights that overrides British laws is becoming a “reality”, the vice-president of the European Commission has said.

Viviane Reding said that people in European member states will in future be able to “rely” on the EU charter of “fundamental rights”.

The European Commission wants to enforce the charter, which enshrines 54 basic rights in EU law, in all member states.

Senior British judges have warned that the EU charter has already taken hold in Britain by stealth and Chris Grayling, the Justice Secretary, has said he is prepared to go to court in an attempt to halt the spread of European human rights laws.

Mr Grayling reacted furiously to Mrs Reding’s comments and said they show “why we need a major re-think of our future relationship with the EU”.

Visiting Chinese air force headquarters on Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping reportedly told officers “… to speed up air and space integration and sharpen their offensive and defensive capabilities.” He urged them to develop an “integrated air and space defense capability” in response to what he called an increasing military use of space by America and other nations.

Xi’s statement was historic. Since the Soviet Union launched the first earth satellite in 1957, the major powers have been wrestling with the question of whether space should be used for military purposes.
During the Cold War, there were several treaties and agreements on the peaceful use of space. The so-called “Outer Space Treaty” of 1967 provided that nations would not place weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons, in Earth orbit, on the moon or elsewhere in outer space. China signed that treaty but wasn’t party to a number of other agreements such as the U.S.-Soviet Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, which provided that neither party would interfere with the other’s means of verification of compliance. For the U.S., that method was primarily through satellite reconnaissance.

Congress, listening to those who thought anti-satellite weapons would provoke the Soviets, banned testing of them from 1981-1985 and again from 1991-1995. Now China has decided that space should be a primary focus of its offensive and defensive military capabilities and is moving quickly to effectuate that decision.

To answer China’s stated intention and developing capabilities, America should be developing an integrated land, sea, air and space strategy and a military operational doctrine to effectuate it. The demand for it is entirely clear given the fact that our armed forces are almost entirely dependent on satellites for navigation, reconnaissance, communications and espionage.

There are about 1,100 satellites in orbit around the Earth, which probably doesn’t include some classified satellites that are operated by the U.S. and other nations. About 50 percent of the 1,100 were launched by the United States. Some of our newer satellites are resistant to cyber attack but not completely defended from them because nothing can be. And all have an enormous problem. They are all 100 percent vulnerable to kinetic weapons that can intercept them in orbit and to directed-energy weapons such as high-powered lasers.

Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General for New York State Department of Corrections and author of The Fertile Soil of Jihad. He currently teaches a class on terrorism for the United States Military Special Operations School.

In a move designed to placate a small minority of New York City residents, the NYPD announced that it was disbanding its Demographics Unit.

The unit, which was a small segment of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, came under fire following a series of articles published by the Associated Press using leaked documents showed widespread surveillance of Muslim communities in New York and elsewhere. Following the articles, several Muslim activist groups protested against the NYPD’s Counter Terrorism strategies. What came next was a series of lawsuits filed by “victims” of the Department anti-terrorism policies.

The “victims” claimed that the NYPD program had “caused a series of spiritual, stigmatic, and pecuniary losses.” The last being better translated as monetary losses.

But what had the unit actually done to deserve such castigation? It collected open source information of various neighborhoods in the greater New York area – i.e. “demographics” – where it was believed the greatest likelihood of Islamic terrorists would seek to assimilate themselves while plotting terrorist acts.

This belief was not based on conjecture but on solid precedent. In the late 1980s and early 90s, a small group of Islamic terrorists congregated in several area neighborhoods and frequented a select group of mosques that were in alignment with their radical theology.

The result was the first World Trade Center bombing on Feb. 23, 1993. The investigation into that attack uncovered an additional plot to blow up several national landmarks in the New York area, including the Statute of Liberty. John Miller, the new Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence for NYPD knows these facts. He wrote about them (in part) in his book, The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It.

Monday night was the start of Passover, the period when Jews celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from slavery into freedom.

This is the part of the Exodus story that sits most easily with modern culture. We like stories of people who shake off the yoke of oppression and taste the first bliss of liberty. We like it when masses of freedom-yearning people gather in city squares in Beijing, Tehran, Cairo or Kiev.

But that’s not all the Exodus story is, or not even mainly what it is. When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted to put Moses as a central figure on the Great Seal of the United States, they were not celebrating him as a liberator, but as a re-binder. It wasn’t just that he led the Israelites out of one set of unjust laws. It was that he re-bound them with another set of laws. Liberating to freedom is the easy part. Re-binding with just order and accepted compulsion is the hard part.

America’s founders understood that when you are creating a social order, the first people who need to be bound down are the leaders themselves.

The Moses of Exodus is not some majestic, charismatic, Charlton Heston-type hero who can be trusted to run things. He’s a deeply flawed person like the rest of us. He’s passive. He’s afraid of snakes. He’s a poor speaker. He whines, and he’s sometimes angry and depressed. He’s meek.

The first time Moses tries to strike out against Egyptian oppression, he does it rashly and on his own, and he totally messes it up. He sees an Egyptian soldier cruelly mistreating a Hebrew slave. He looks this way and that, to make sure nobody is watching. Then he kills the Egyptian and hides his body in the sand.

The most renowned Jewish architects in the world are coming out to protest a motion to suspend Israeli architects from the International Architects Union, the UK’s Architect’s Journal reported on Thursday.

The sector magazine featured statements from Daniel Libeskind, who designed both the Berlin and Copenhagen Jewish Museums; Richard Meier, who created the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center and the Getty Center, both in Los Angeles; and Rick Bell, executive director of AIA New York who worked in the public sector before heading the AIA national staff association, CACE, and representing it on the AIA national board.

The architects were protesting a motion approved by the Royal Institute of British Architects, and condemned last month by Jewish human rights group The Simon Wiesenthal Center for allowing “itself to become the victim of an extremist group of spoilers that use tactics redolent of the Nazis’ 1930s boycott campaign, ‘Kaufen Nicht bei Juden‘ – ‘Do Not Buy from Jews.’”

The motion, proposed by Angela Brady, RIBA’s former head, is against the Israeli Association of United Architects — comprising over 7,000 Jewish and Arab Israeli members — because members of the association work as architects in Judea and Samaria, known as the West Bank. The RIBA motion is being criticized for punishing architects who have no say in the outcome of Israel’s political affairs.

On Thursday, Architect’s Journal quoted Libeskind as saying, “I am disappointed to learn of this action, especially from such a well-regarded institution as the RIBA. This decision seems to be completely counter to the mission of the RIBA; these actions are short-sighted and appear to be an attempt to simplify a very complex issue.”

Bell, executive director of AIA New York, which has 5,200 members, described the motion as “absurd,” and said, “I wish this had not happened and, on behalf of the AIA New York, I wish it would go away.”