ActRight

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…

As the election recount push in three states progresses, news from Wisconsin says that the state may not be able to certify its electoral college votes in time.

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

“Why do you have to be like this @JustinTrudeau”

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.

Hillary Clinton, now a private citizen after conceding the election to Donald Trump, wants in on the recount effort Green Party nominee Jill Stein launched Friday, even though she previously called su

Two decades of “Castro-is-dead” rumors are finally at an end. And the race is on to see which world leader can most fulsomely praise Fidel Castro’s legacy, while delicately averting their eyes from his less savory characteristics. Two dul -elected leaders of democracies who should know better, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and American president Barack Obama, are leading the way. Mr. Trudeau praised Castro as a “legendary revolutionary and orator” who “made significant improvements to the education and health care of his island nation.” Mr. Obama offered his “condolences” to the Cuban people, and blandly suggested that “history will record and judge the enormous impact of this singular figure.” Now, he added, we can “look to the future.” With all due respect to Mr. Obama, the 60 years Fidel Castro spent systematically exploiting and oppressing the people of Cuba provide more than enough history to pass judgment on both Fidel and, now more importantly, his brother Raul. My own family’s experience is a case in point. My father, Rafael, had been an early supporter of the revolution against Fulgencio Batista — and spent a time in prison getting his teeth kicked in for his efforts. He fled the island, only to return to what he hoped would be a liberated Cuba. Instead, he found a new, even more brutal, form of repression had taken hold. In 1960, he left again, never to return. His sister, my Tia Sonia, bravely joined the resistance to Castro and was jailed and tortured in her turn. The betrayal and violence experienced by my father and aunt were all too typical of the millions of Cubans who have suffered under the Castro regime over the last six decades. This is not the stuff of Cold War history that can be swept under the rug simply because Fidel is dead. Consider, for example, the dissidents Guillermo Fariñas and Elizardo Sanchez, who warned me in the summer of 2013 that the Castros, then on the ropes because of the reduction of Venezuelan patronage, were plotting to cement their hold on power by pretending to liberalize in order to get the American economic embargo lifted. Their model was Vladimir Putin’s consolidation of power in Russia (Sanchez called it “Putinismo”), and their plan was to get the United States to pay for it. It worked. The year after I met with Fariñas and Sanchez, Mr. Obama announced his famous “thaw” with the Castros, and the American dollars started flowing. As we now know, there was no corresponding political liberalization. Last September, Mr. Fariñas concluded his 25th hunger strike against the Castros’ oppression. Then there is the case of the prominent dissident Oswaldo Paya, who in 2012 died in a car crash that is widely believed to have been orchestrated by the Castro regime. His daughter, Rosa Maria, has pressed relentlessly for answers, and thus become a target herself. When, just three years after her father’s death, the United States honored the Castros with a new embassy in Washington, D.C., Rosa Maria tried to attend the related State Department press conference as an accredited journalist. But she was spotted by the Cuban delegation, who demanded that she be removed if she dared ask any questions. The Americans complied, in an act of thuggery more typical of Havana than Washington. Finally, I had the honor last summer to meet with Dr. Oscar Biscet, an early truth-teller about the disgusting practice of post-birth abortions in Cuba who has been repeatedly jailed and tortured for his fearless opposition to the Castros. I asked him, as I had asked Senores Farinas and Sanchez, whether his ability to travel signaled growing freedom on the island. He answered just as they had three years earlier: “No.” In fact, he said, the repression had grown worse since the “thaw” with America. Didn’t we realize, he wondered, that all those American dollars were flowing into the Castros’ pockets, and funding the next generation of their police state? That is the true legacy of Fidel Castro — that he was able to institutionalize his dictatorship so it would survive him. There is a real danger that we will now fall into the trap of thinking Fidel’s death represents material change in Cuba. It does not. The moment to exert maximum pressure would have been eight years ago, when his failing health forced him to pass control to his brother Raul. But, rather than leverage the transition in our favor, the Obama administration decided to start negotiations with Raul in the mistaken belief that he would prove more reasonable than his brother (an unfortunate pattern they repeated with Kim Jong-un, Hassan Rouhani, and Nicolas Maduro). Efforts to be diplomatically polite about Fidel’s death suggest the administration still hopes Raul can be brought round. #related#All historical evidence points to the opposite conclusion. Raul is not a “different” Castro. He is his brother’s chosen successor who has spent the last eight years implementing his dynastic plan. Unlike Cuba, however, the United States has an actual democracy, and our recent elections suggest there is significant resistance among the American people to the Obama administration’s policy of appeasement towards hostile dictators. We can — and should — send clear signals that that policy is at an end. Among other things, we should halt the dangerous “security cooperation” we have begun with the Castro regime, which extends to military exercises, counter-narcotics efforts, communications, and navigation — all of which places our sensitive information in the hands of a hostile government that would not hesitate to share it with other enemies from Tehran to Pyongyang. And we should insist that no United States government official attend Castro’s funeral unless and until Raul releases his political prisoners, first and foremost those who have been detained since Fidel’s death. I hope all my colleagues will join me in calling for these alterations. A dictator is dead. But his dark, repressive legacy will not automatically follow him to the grave. Change can come to Cuba, but only if America learns from history and prevents Fidel’s successor from playing the same old tricks. — Ted Cruz represents Texas in the United States Senate.

music credit: YouTube.com/Pogo

Both an economy and a weather system are chaotic systems, where local interactions between their components dominate their behavior.

From the very first day, the man who has become one of the most controversial advisers to Donald Trump, made an impression.

A very nice liberal broadcaster asked me earlier this week whether I am worried about the future of the Republican party. Funny question. There are 25 states in which the state legislatures and governorships are controlled by Republicans, and two states with executive/legislative divides in which there are Republican legislative majorities large enough to override a veto from the Democratic governor. Sixty-eight of the country’s 98 partisan state legislative chambers are Republican-run. There are only four states with Democratic governors and legislatures; it is true that these include one of our most populous states (California), but the majority of Americans live in states in which there are Republican trifectas or veto-proof legislative majorities. Two-thirds of the nation’s governors are Republicans; more than two-thirds of our state legislative houses are under Republican control. Republicans control both houses of Congress and have just won the presidency. Democrats control the dean of students’ office at Oberlin. And Democrats have responded to their recent electoral defeat with riots, arson, and Alex Jones–level conspiracy theories. Progressives have just raised $5 million to press for a recount in several states. Clinton sycophant Paul Krugman, sounding exactly like every well-mannered conspiracy nut you’ve ever known, says the election “probably wasn’t hacked,” but “conspiracies do happen” and “now that it’s out there” — (who put it out there?) — “an independent investigation is called for.” Maybe it isn’t the Republican party whose future needs worrying about. In one sense, what is happening in American politics is a convergence of partisan styles. Beginning with the nomination of Barry Goldwater, and thanks in no small part to the efforts of many men associated with this magazine, the Republican party spent half a century as a highly ideological enterprise. But highly ideological political parties are not the norm in the English-speaking world, especially not in the United States, and the conservative fusion of American libertarianism, social traditionalism, and national-security assertiveness probably is not stable enough to cohere, having now long outlived the Cold War, in which it was forged. Trump’s lack of conservative principle is unwelcome, but it points to an ideological looseness that is arguably more normal, a return to the model of party as loose coalition of interest groups. As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation. The Democrats, on the other hand, are becoming more ideological, or at least more openly and self-consciously ideological, as the party’s progressivism becomes more and more a catechism. This has the effect of making the Democratic party less democratic. American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative, but they also have a long and genuine commitment to frustrating democracy when it gets in the way of the progressive agenda, which is why they have spent the better part of a century working to politicize the courts, the bureaucracies, and the non-governmental institutions they control in order to ensure they get their way even when they lose at the ballot box. Democrats did not pay much attention when they started suffering losses at the state level, because they were working against federalism and toward a unitary national government controlled from Washington. And they did not fight as hard as they might to recover from their losses in Congress while Barack Obama sat in the White House, obstructing Republican legislative initiatives and attempting to govern through executive fiat — an innovation that the Democrats surely are about to regret in the direst way. For the moment, the stylistic convergence — the Republicans becoming a little more like the selfish-coalition Democratic party, and the Democrats becoming a little more like the ideological Republican party — works to the Republicans’ advantage, though there is no reason to believe that always will be the case. The GOP had a very good run of it as a highly ideological enterprise. The longer-term problem for the Democrats is that they are finding out that they have to play by their own rules, which are the rules of identity politics. This is a larger problem for the Democratic party than is generally appreciated. The Democratic party is an odd apparatus in which most of the power is held by sanctimonious little old liberal white ladies with graduate degrees and very high incomes — Hillary Rodham Clinton, Elizabeth Warren, Randi Weingarten — while the manpower, the vote-power, and the money-power (often in the form of union dues) comes from a disproportionately young and non-white base made up of people who, if they are doing well, might earn one-tenth of the half-million dollars a year Weingarten was paid as the boss of the teachers’ union. They are more likely to be cutting the grass in front of Elizabeth Warren’s multi-million-dollar mansion than moving into one of their own. They roll their eyes at Hillary Rodham Clinton’s risible “abuela” act, having actual abuelas of their own. #related#As in the Republican party, the Democrats have a restive base that is more radical than its leadership, more aggressive, and in search of signs of tribal affiliation. The Democratic base is not made up of little old liberal white ladies with seven-, eight-, and nine-figure bank balances, but the party’s leadership is. It is worth noting that in a year in which the Republican candidate painted Mexican immigrants with a rather broad and ugly brush, Mrs. Clinton got a smaller share of the Hispanic vote than Barack Obama did in 2012. She got a significantly smaller share of the black vote, too. Interestingly, Mrs. Clinton’s drop in the black vote came exclusively from black men. Many black Americans had very high hopes that an Obama administration would mean significant changes in their lives and in the state of their communities, but that has not come to pass. There is nothing about Mrs. Clinton that inspired similar hopes. “She’s not right, and we all know it,” the comedian Dave Chappelle said. It is far from obvious that Senator Cherokee Cheekbones or anyone standing alongside Debbie Wasserman Schultz will feel more “right” to Democratic voters who have almost nothing in common with them. A coalition in which elderly rich white faculty-lounge liberals have all the power and enjoy all the perks while the work and money come from younger and browner people is not going to be very stable. Especially when it has been stripped of the one thing that has held that coalition together so far: power. — Kevin D. Williamson is National Review’s roving correspondent. Editor’s Note: This piece has been emended since its publication.