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I recant every last word of my slander against you, and applaud your wise choice to require this public humiliation.

A graduate of a Christian university has been awarded $8,500 by a British Columbia human-rights tribunal that found a company refused to hire her in part because of her religion.

Congress has increasingly abdicated its lawmaking responsibility, delegating its power through vague laws and mandates to executive agencies

The Trump administration will pressure its ambassadors to bring up the foundation with foreign governments — and suggest they probe its ­financial shenanigans.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission's report sides with Nadia Eweida, a Christian check-in staff member at British Airways who was suspended for refusing to remove a cross on a chain.

Justin Trudeau's controversial eulogy for the late Cuban President Fidel Castro continues to draw criticism in Canada and the US. Jason Kenney, former federa

*I want to thank everyone who pitches in with guest posts, so that I can finish this book, particularly younger son and right-hand-wench Kate Paulk.* Three-Fifths of a Lie ? Kate Paulk We’ve …

If you've been befuddled about Obama's entirely inexplicable win in 2012 and Trump's victory this year, here's a tongue-in-check theory to explain it all.

President-elect Donald Trump and President Barack Obama have been in regular communication, a top Trump aide said Sunday.

Bill de Blasio sets himself up as the heir of John C. Calhoun.

On the stump, Donald Trump promised to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. Now obstacles are emerging on the left and right. Democrats are sowing panic, falsely predicting that more than 20…

Guest essay by Ari Halperin This article is intended mostly for American audiences. Today, it seems almost normal that the IPCC, UNFCCC and CAN (Climate Action Network International) interfere in A…

His 57-year-old “revolution” has left Cubans muzzled and impoverished.

President-elect Donald Trump said Saturday that the death of Cuba’s Fidel Castro “marks the passing of brutal dictator,” while President Obama argued that ‘history’ will be Castro’s final ‘judge.’

November 15, 1999: Donald Trump spoke about U.S.-Cuba relations, saying that continued isolation of Cuba would eventually topple the Castro government.

Thirteen facts about Fidel Castro’s cruelty should be etched on his tombstone.

Michael Moore has made another piece of pure propaganda. This film, called Sicko, attacks the American health-care system. You will agree that there is a lot to attack. But Moore glorifies socialist systems, which have problems all their own. And perhaps his worst offense is to glorify Fidel Castro’s system, as has been done endlessly for as long as most people can remember. Moore hit on an inspired idea: He took a group of sick Amer¬icans to Cuba, to seek health care. Not only are these unfortunate people Americans: They are 9/11 rescue workers, heroes. They have been denied the care they need in America (or so the film alleges), and must get it elsewhere. As the group is heading to Havana, we hear a song: “I’m on my way to Cuba . . . where all is happy; Cuba, where all is gay.” And it appears exactly this way in Moore’s film. You may remember that, in his previous film, Fahrenheit 9/11, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was portrayed as a nation of happy kite-fliers. The same artistry is applied to Sicko. The Left has always had a deep psychological need to believe in the myth of Cuban health care. On that island, as everywhere else, Communism has turned out to be a disaster: economic, physical, and moral. Not only have persecution, torture, and murder been routine, there is nothing material to show for it. The Leninist rationalization was, “You have to break some eggs to make an omelet.” Orwell memorably replied, “Where’s the omelet?” There is never an omelet. But Castro’s apologists have tried to create one. Their hopes rest on three lies, principally: that Castro cares for the sick; that he is responsible for almost universal literacy; and that he has been a boon to blacks. Castroite propaganda has been extraordinarily effective, reaching even to people who should know better. Among the most disgraceful words ever uttered by a secretary of state were uttered by Colin Powell in 2001, when he said, “He’s done some good things for his people.” The “he,” of course, was Cuba’s dictator. It was hard to know which was worse: the “his people,” which is certainly how Castro thinks of Cubans. Or the imagined omelet, the “good things.” The myth of Cuban health care has been debunked in article after article, for the last several decades. (Remember that Castro took power in 1959.) But Michael Moore has given the myth fresh legs, necessitating another round of such articles. If I had a nickel for every article I’ve read entitled “The Myth of Cuban Health Care” . . . But here is another one. SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL To be sure, there is excellent health care on Cuba — just not for ordinary Cubans. Dr. Jaime Suchlicki of the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies explains that there is not just one system, or even two: There are three. The first is for foreigners who come to Cuba specifically for medical care. This is known as “medical tourism.” The tourists pay in hard currency, which provides oxygen to the regime. And the facilities in which they are treated are First World: clean, well supplied, state-of-the-art. The foreigners-only facilities do a big business in what you might call vanity treatments: Botox, liposuction, and breast implants. Remember, too, that there are many separate, or segregated, facilities on Cuba. People speak of “tourism apartheid.” For example, there are separate hotels, separate beaches, separate restaurants — separate everything. As you can well imagine, this causes widespread resentment in the general population. The second health-care system is for Cuban elites — the Party, the military, official artists and writers, and so on. In the Soviet Union, these people were called the “nomenklatura.” And their system, like the one for medical tourists, is top-notch. Then there is the real Cuban system, the one that ordinary people must use — and it is wretched. Testimony and documentation on the subject are vast. Hospitals and clinics are crumbling. Conditions are so unsanitary, patients may be better off at home, whatever home is. If they do have to go to the hospital, they must bring their own bedsheets, soap, towels, food, light bulbs — even toilet paper. And basic medications are scarce. In Sicko, even sophisticated medications are plentiful and cheap. In the real Cuba, finding an aspirin can be a chore. And an antibiotic will fetch a fortune on the black market. A nurse spoke to Isabel Vincent of Canada’s National Post. “We have nothing,” said the nurse. “I haven’t seen aspirin in a Cuban store here for more than a year. If you have any pills in your purse, I’ll take them. Even if they have passed their expiry date.” The equipment that doctors have to work with is either antiquated or nonexistent. Doctors have been known to reuse latex gloves — there is no choice. When they travel to the island, on errands of mercy, American doctors make sure to take as much equipment and as many supplies as they can carry. One told the Associated Press, “The [Cuban] doctors are pretty well trained, but they have nothing to work with. It’s like operating with knives and spoons.” And doctors are not necessarily privileged citizens in Cuba. A doctor in exile told the Miami Herald that, in 2003, he earned what most doctors did: 575 pesos a month, or about 25 dollars. He had to sell pork out of his home to get by. And the chief of medical services for the whole of the Cuban military had to rent out his car as a taxi on weekends. “Everyone tries to survive,” he explained. (Of course, you can call a Cuban with a car privileged, whatever he does with it.) So deplorable is the state of health care in Cuba that old-fashioned diseases are back with a vengeance. These include tuberculosis, leprosy, and typhoid fever. And dengue, another fever, is a particular menace. Indeed, an exiled doctor named Dessy Mendoza Rivero — a former political prisoner and a spectacularly brave man — wrote a book called ¡Dengue! La Epidemia Secreta de Fidel Castro. INFANT MORTALITY When Castro seized power, almost 50 years ago, Cuba was one of the most advanced countries in Latin America. Its infant-mortality rate was the 13th-lowest in all the world, ahead of even France, Belgium, and West Germany. Statistics in Castro’s Cuba are hard to come by, because honest statistics in any totalitarian society are hard to come by. Some kind of accounting is possible, however: Cuba has slipped in infant mortality, as it has in every other area (except repression). But its infant-mortality rate remains respectable. You might suspect a story behind this respectability — and you are right. The regime is very keen on keeping infant mortality down, knowing that the world looks to this statistic as an indicator of the general health of a country. Cuban doctors are instructed to pay particular attention to prenatal and infant care. A woman’s pregnancy is closely monitored. (The regime manages to make the necessary equipment available.) And if there is any sign of abnormality, any reason for concern — the pregnancy is “interrupted.” That is the going euphemism for abortion. The abortion rate in Cuba is sky-high, perversely keeping the infant-mortality rate down. Many doctors, of course, recoil at this state of affairs. And there is much doctor dissidence on the island. Some physicians have opened their own clinics, caring for the poor and desperate according to medical standards, not according to ideology or governmental dictates. The authorities have warned that, in the words of one report, “new dissidences in the public-health sector will not be tolerated.” Anyone trying to work outside of approved channels is labeled a counterrevolutionary or enemy agent. Furthermore, the shortage of doctors on the island is acute — which is strange, because there are abundant Cuban doctors. Where are they? They’re abroad. In fact, a standard joke is that, in order to see a Cuban doctor, a Cuban must contrive to leave the island. In his film, Michael Moore speaks of the “generosity” of Castro’s health programs. What he means, in part, is that Castro has long sent doctors overseas on “humanitarian medical missions.” These missions are an important part of the dictator’s self-image, and of his image at large. Cuban doctors go to such “revolutionary” countries as Chávez’s Venezuela, Morales’s Bolivia, and Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. The missions are lucrative for Castro, bringing him about $2.5 billion a year. Yet they are somewhat risky for him, too. The Cubans abroad are vigilantly watched, and the regime seldom sends unmarried doctors: They want wives and families back home, as hostages. Still, the Cuban doctors defect, and do so by the hundreds. They make a run for it in every country in which they serve, in any way they can. For example, doctors in Venezuela flee into Colombia; others try a friendly embassy, or start yelling in some international airport, during a transfer. Many of the doctors’ stories are heart-stoppingly dramatic. And when they have secured asylum, they tell the truth, about Cuban medicine both at home and abroad. One of the things that sicken them, about their foreign service, is that they see what Cuba can provide: in equipment, in medications, in personnel. And yet this bounty is not available to Cubans (ordinary Cubans). It is sold to foreigners, to keep Castro’s regime in business. And this brings up a point concerning Castro’s apologists: If they must concede that Cuban health care is a shambles, their fallback position is that it’s all the fault of the American “embargo.” And yet Cuba has no problem taking care of people in other countries, for show and profit. Moreover, American trade with Cuba in medical goods is virtually unfettered, and American humanitar¬ian aid is considerable. THE PRESENCE OF HEROES Above, I spoke of doctor dissidence — and a particularly painful aspect of Moore-like myth-making is that some of the most courageous, most admirable, and most persecuted people on the island are doctors: men and women who have rebelled against health-care injustices and injustices in general. Oscar Elías Biscet is possibly the most noted of such people. He is in one of Castro’s most wretched dungeons. Michael Moore would not even think of taking his cameras to it (and, in any case, he would not be allowed). Biscet, like so many of the human-rights figures, happens to be “Afro-Cuban.” And, as Mary Anastasia O’Grady of the Wall Street Journal has pointed out, the regime is especially vicious toward such figures, because they are supposed to be grateful for all the Revolution has done for them. Dr. Mendoza, who wrote about dengue, is also Afro-Cuban. So is Dr. Dariel “Darsi” Ferrer. He has managed to stay out of prison, somewhat miraculously — perhaps because there has been a fair amount of international attention on him. Ferrer operates the Center for Health and Human Rights. In 2005, he penned a statement called “Health Authorities and the Complicity of Silence.” Though he has avoided prison, the regime has subjected him to terrible abuses, including actos de repudio, or acts of repudiation. These are those lovely episodes in which mobs are unleashed on your home, family, and friends. Hilda Molina Morejón is another doctor-dissident — a stunning case. She was the country’s chief neurosurgeon, the founder of the International Center for Neurological Restoration. She was also a deputy in the National Assembly. In the early 1990s, however, the regime informed her that the neurological center would start concentrating on foreigners, who would bring their hard currency. She objected, resigning her positions and returning the medals that Castro had awarded her. Then came actos de repudio and all the rest of it (but not prison). She has been forbidden to leave the island, and is banned from practicing medicine. She manages, despite the circumstances, to speak out. “Live not by lies!” said Solzhenitsyn. “Live not by lies!” And yet Cuban Communism and its enablers have lived by them for a half-century. Totalitarians always depend on these lies. Robert Conquest, the great scholar of the Soviet Union, remembers a health official telling him, in private, that many hospitals lacked even running water. Yet public assertions were much different. And there have always been Potemkin-style visits, such as Moore’s. He is simply more talented than most of the others. Once Communism collapses in Cuba — or if it does — will there be a reckoning? When I was growing up, East Germany was presented to me, by misguided teachers and professors, as a fine social democracy. Earlier this year, a movie called The Lives of Others won an Academy Award. It told some of the truth about East Germany. What will future generations make of Sicko, particularly its portrait of Cuba? In the meantime, the movie will do a lot of harm, cementing the myth of Cuban health care, among other myths. Castro’s health minister, José Ramón Balaguer, is well pleased. “There’s no doubt that a documentary by someone of Michael Moore’s stature will help the world see the deeply humane principles of Cuban society,” he said. You wonder, sometimes — in the face of constant and powerful myth-making — whether articles in magazines, and the daring and anguished testimonies of Hilda Molina et al., and the cries of an entire society, can make a dent. I have an indelible memory, from the mid-1980s. Armando Valladares was at Harvard, speaking to students. He had emerged from 22 years in the Cuban gulag, and had written the memoir Against All Hope. (Valladares is often called the Cuban Sol¬zhenitsyn.) In the Q&A, the kids spouted at him the usual line about Cuba: health care, literacy, and blacks. They had been carefully taught it by their teachers. And Valladares answered, in essence, “It’s all untrue — a pack of lies. But even if it were true: Can’t a country have those things without dictatorship, without tyranny, without gulags, without torture — with freedom?” There is no omelet. There never is. But even if there were — so what? – This article appeared in the July 30, 2007, issue of National Review. 

Donald Trump will keep his campaign promise of void a 2014 deal that improves diplomacy and commerce between the U.S. and Cuba, incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said Sunday, a day after the announcement of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s death.

Hillary Clinton should probably tell her supporters and butt-hurt liberals what she said on the presidential campaign trail when she was railing against President-Elect Donald Trump. Remember a couple months ago, Hillary attacked Trump for failing to say whether or not he would accept the...

Just a week ago, a white nationalist named Richard Spencer gave a speech at an Alt-Right conference, at one point exclaiming "Hail Trump!" Men across the ro

Jill Stein is asking for recounts in an effort to nullify the electoral votes of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Federal ...

As Cuban dissidents flood the streets of Miami with tears of joy, recalling their painful experiences as victims of the Castro regime, world leaders, buckling under the weight of their own moral cowardice, continue to heap praise on a savage dictator who censored, abused, tortured, imprisoned, and killed his people mercilessly for six decades. From President Obama’s diplomatic appeasement to Prime Minister Trudeau’s fawning eulogy, Fidel Castro’s tyranny has been swept under the rug in service of crude historical revisionism.  

Your kids will thank you later.

You Can Go Home Again - Derek Hunter: There was a time, I promise, when people had to .11/27/2016 10:57:38AM EST.

With the end of Fidel Castro’s nasty life Friday night, we can hope, if not reasonably expect, to have seen the last of charismatic totalitarians worshiped by political pilgrims from open societies. Experience suggests there will always be tyranny tourists in flight from what they consider the boring banality of bourgeois society and eager for the excitement of sojourns in “progressive” despotisms that they are free to admire and then leave. During the 1930s, there were many apologists for Josef Stalin’s brutalities, which he committed in the name of building a workers’ paradise fit for an improved humanity. The apologists complacently said, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To which George Orwell acidly replied: “Where’s the omelet?” With Castro, the problem was lemonade. Soon after Castro seized power in 1959, Jean-Paul Sartre, the French intellectual whose Stalinist politics were as grotesque as his philosophy was opaque, left Les Deux Magots cafe in Paris to visit Cuba. During a drive, he and Castro stopped at a roadside stand. They were served warm lemonade, which Castro heatedly said “reveals a lack of revolutionary consciousness.” The waitress shrugged, saying the refrigerator was broken. Castro “growled” (Sartre’s approving description): “Tell your people in charge that if they don’t take care of their problems, they will have problems with me.” Sartre swooned: “This was the first time I understood — still quite vaguely — what I called ‘direct democracy.’ Between the waitress and Castro, an immediate secret understanding was established. She let it be seen by her tone, her smiles, by a shrug of the shoulders, that she was without illusion. And the prime minister . . . in expressing himself before her without circumlocution, calmly invited her to join the rebellion.” Another political innovator, Benito Mussolini, called his regime “ennobled democracy,” and as the American columnist Murray Kempton mordantly noted in 1982, photographs of Castro “cutting sugar cane evoke the bare-chested Mussolini plunged into the battle for wheat.” Castro’s direct democracy was parsimonious regarding elections but permissive of shrugs. It did, however, forbid “acts of public destruction,” meaning criticism of Communism. This charge condemned Armando Valladares, then 23, to 22 years in Castro’s prisons. Stalin’s terror was too high a price to pay for a great novel, but at least the world got from it Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. And although Castro’s regime, saturated with sadism, should never have existed, because of it the world got Valladares’s testament to human endurance, his prison memoir Against All Hope. Prison food was watery soup laced with glass, or dead rats, or cows’ intestines filled with feces, and Castro’s agents had special uses for the ditch filled with the sewage from 8,000 people. Castro ruled Cuba during eleven U.S. presidencies and longer than the Soviet Union ruled Eastern Europe. On April 15, 1959, 15 weeks after capturing Havana, Castro, then 32, landed in Washington at what is now Reagan National Airport. He had been in America in 1948, when he studied English and bought a Lincoln. This time, on April 16, in a concession to bourgeois expectations, he dispatched an aide to buy a comb and toothbrush. His connections to Communism? “None,” he said. He endorsed a free press as “the first enemy of dictatorship,” and said free elections were coming soon. Then he was off to a Princeton seminar and a lecture in the chapel at Lawrenceville prep school, well received at both places. By July red stars were being painted on Cuban military vehicles. Three years later, Soviet ballistic missiles were arriving. A year after that, a Castro admirer murdered the U.S. president whose administration had been interested in, indeed almost obsessed with, removing Castro.     #related#U.S. flings at “regime change” in distant lands have had, to say no more, uneven results, but the most spectacular futility has been 90 miles from Florida. Castro was the object of various and sometimes unhinged U.S. attempts to remove him. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the Kennedy administration doubled down with Operation Mongoose, which included harebrained assassination plots and a plan skeptics called “elimination by illumination” — having a U.S. submarine surface in Havana harbor and fire star shells into the night sky to convince Catholic Cubans that the Second Coming had come, causing them to rebel against Castro the anti-Christ. Nevertheless, Castro ruled Cuba during eleven U.S. presidencies and longer than the Soviet Union ruled Eastern Europe. Socialism is bountiful only of slogans, and a Castro favorite was “socialism or death.” The latter came to him decades after the former had made Cuba into a gray museum for a dead utopianism.       — George Will is a Pulitzer Prize–winning syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is [email protected]. © 2016 Washington Post Writers Group